the valley over a hundred years earlier, and the famous cave paintings of Lascaux were farther up the river. It was a source of pride to Bruno that he lived in this valley that could claim the longest continuous human habitation of anywhere on earth.
Bruno had attended a couple of Horst’s lectures, delivered in excellent if strongly accented French. He had visited his digs and read a couple of articles Horst had published in the popular monthly Dossiers d’Archeologie. Normally a quiet man, Horst became passionate when he talked of his subject, the great mystery of the replacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro-Magnons some thirty thousand years ago. Had it been violent? Did they interbreed? Were the Neanderthals wiped out by some plague or disease? It was, said Horst, the crucial question regarding our human origins. Whenever Horst spoke, Bruno caught a sense of the excitement that gripped the scholar.
“Horst,” he answered. “How are you? I was just on my way to see you at the dig.”
“Good, we need you here right away. And you had better bring a doctor with you. We’ve found a body.”
“Congratulations. Isn’t that what you wanted to find?”
“Yes, yes, but I want skeletons from the distant past. This one is wearing a St. Christopher medal around his neck and I think he’s also wearing a Swatch. This is your department, Bruno, not mine.”
2
As Horst led Bruno past the parallel trenches and the chessboard pattern of white string that defined the work of the site, Bruno was struck as always by the careful dedication of the archaeological team. Using fine brushes to tease away the soil from a possible find and sifting each handful of earth through a sieve, they barely looked up as he passed. Some of them were in trenches so deep that he had to peer down to see them, provoking them to look up as his body blocked what little sunlight they had.
He heard a shout. “Bruno!” He turned to see a pretty girl with fair hair and a slim build jumping across the trenches toward him.
“Dominique,” he exclaimed, as he received the embrace of a young woman he had known since she was a child. Her father, Stephane, was one of Bruno’s regular hunting partners. He ran a small dairy farm in the hills and made the Tomme d’Audrix cheese that Bruno loved. Each winter since Bruno had arrived in St. Denis he had been invited to the killing of the family pig, and he and Dominique always had the job of rinsing out the intestines in the freezing water of the nearest stream. Now at the university in Grenoble, she was a militant but very realistic member of the Green Party. “I was coming up to the farm to see you. Your dad invited me to Sunday lunch.”
“You’re here for the body?” she said, hanging on to his arm.
“Right. I’d better get a look at it, but I’ll probably see you Sunday.”
“No, I’ll see you tonight at the museum. You have to come to the professor’s lecture. It’s a big announcement, but we’re all sworn to secrecy.”
She darted off, leaving Bruno to cast his eyes over the site. Close to the overhang of rock, the trenches gave way to a large pit, at least twelve feet square and nine feet deep, with metal ladders propped against the sides. At the bottom, a large flat rock with curious cup-shaped holes in its surface was being worked on by three archaeologists. They were using brushes so fine they could have belonged to portrait painters. Even from this height, Bruno could see the brown smoothness of newly exposed bones. He looked inquiringly at Horst, assuming this was the skeleton that had prompted the call. The people working with the brushes did not look up. Their continued concentration struck him as even more remarkable, given the ghoulish nature of the discovery. Maybe archaeologists were accustomed to bones and death.
“Sorry this grave is so crowded, but your body is this way, to the side of the main dig,” said Horst. His beard was a little whiter than the previous year, his hair more sparse, and he was still wearing the English tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches that Bruno remembered from last year and many years before. “Those bones down there are from three bodies over thirty thousand years old. Your skeleton is over here.”
Steering Bruno past a small winch with a system of pulleys attached to a tripod, Horst led Bruno across to a long, narrow trench, perhaps six feet deep. Beside it an attractive girl and an older woman with red hair, wearing what Bruno thought was a man’s shirt in green and white stripes, were standing to watch their approach.
The girl, her glossy dark hair tied in a loose bun held together by what looked like an antique TV antenna, had a hand on the shoulder of a burly young man with long hair. He was kneeling, head bowed over the trench. A small trowel lay beside him. The red-haired woman smiled politely as Bruno approached. It was one of those delicate moments of French meetings; he wasn’t sure he knew her well enough for the bise, the kissing of cheeks.
“Bonjour, Clothilde,” said Bruno, opting for the handshake. She was director of one of the departments of the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies. She used his outstretched hand to pull him forward to exchange kisses in a determined way, as if to declare that no mere corpse was going to deter her from the social niceties. One of the most eminent archaeologists in France, Clothilde Daunier was friend and colleague to Horst and they had once been lovers. Over a bottle of German wine he had brought as a gift to Bruno, Horst had once confided that Clothilde had been the love of his life, though their affair was said to be long over. Bruno wasn’t so sure; he distinctly remembered seeing Horst in the green and white shirt Clothilde was wearing.
“Bruno, this young lady is Kajte, from Holland, and I hope I pronounced that correctly,” Clothilde said. The girl gave her a cool smile and proffered a hand for Bruno to shake. She looked like a self-confident young woman, her gray eyes appraising him with a raking glance. Even though she wore the khaki slacks and denim shirt that was almost a uniform among the students on the dig, hers looked expensive. Maybe it was the way she wore them. “And this is Teddy who found the body. He’s British, and he’s understandably somewhat upset.”
“When was the body found?” Bruno peered down into the trench to see a skull, two shoulder blades and what he assumed were arm bones. The hips and legs were covered in dirt. The skeleton seemed to be lying stretched out and facedown. Scraps of what might have been a leather jacket were mingled with loose earth and stones on the body’s back. Some strands of hair were still attached to the skull, and there was a glint of gold from what had been the neck, the St. Christopher medal that Horst had mentioned. The bones of the wrists and hands were intact, but twisted together behind the back and tied with some faded red electrical wire. A Swatch was attached to the long bone of a forearm.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Bruno. “With his hands bound like that, do you think he was buried alive?”
“That’s what got to me,” said Clothilde. “I know I’m going to have nightmares about this grave, just thinking of that. I suppose this makes it murder.”
“Certainly it’s a matter for the Police Nationale as well as for the medics. I’ll have to inform them, and they’ll be sealing off this place as a crime scene. They’ll want to know exactly when and how the body was found.”
“Teddy found him soon after we started, so not long after seven-thirty. Before eight, certainly, which was when I called you,” said Horst.
“Bonjour, Teddy,” Bruno said to the young man. “Do you speak French?”
“Yes, but not too well,” said Teddy haltingly. He looked up and Bruno saw a pair of very bright blue eyes and a pronounced, almost-jutting chin. “I called the professor immediately after I found him.” He had a very deep voice and a strong accent that Bruno could not identify, too melodic to be English or German.
“Do people usually dig alone? I thought you worked in teams,” Bruno said, recalling previous digs he had seen.
“That’s true, but Teddy had an interesting idea he wanted to pursue,” said Horst. “He was looking for the midden, the latrine, the place where people threw their rubbish, and he assumed it would be away from the water supply. It makes sense-if that stream was running in the same course thirty thousand years ago, which I doubt.”
“We always look for the midden because it can tell us a lot about the food they ate from the bones and seeds,” said Clothilde. “Teddy is a careful worker, so we let him follow his idea. He’s been digging that trench for three days now.”
“I’d better call in the doctor. The death may be obvious, but we need a medical certificate.” Bruno turned away and pulled his phone from the pouch at his belt to call Fabiola at the clinic. Not only was she a friend, she also knew a lot about forensics.
As he waited for her to answer, Bruno looked up at the high cliff that loomed over the site and the way it
