details of date and place of birth that Bruno had taken down from Jan’s carte de sejour. When he returned to her room, Bruno sifted through the reports that had come in from other national police units on the background of the various archaeology students.
Nothing seemed to stand out, except for young Kasimir, who was supposed to have been fulfilling his duties as a conscript at an army camp for his Easter vacation, rather than digging in the soil of Perigord. Bruno grinned. He could imagine Kasimir talking his way out of that problem.
Bruno read the report from the British police saying that nothing was known on Teddy, no arrests or driving offenses, not even a parking ticket. There was a photocopy of the passport, however, and that grabbed Bruno’s attention. “Teddy” was short for “Edward,” the name on his credit card and passport. But the British police record listed him as Todor (Edward) Gareth Lloyd. But “Todor” was not a name Bruno recognized, which made him curious. What did the British mean when they put the name “Edward” in parentheses? Why did the passport give his name as Edward? Could he have changed his name?
Bruno asked Isabelle for the use of her laptop. He went into Google. fr and typed in the name “Todor.” A blizzard of Bulgarian and Hungarian names came up, variations on “Theodor,” which left him scratching his head. Then on a hunch he added the word “Basque,” and again a flurry of names emerged, but this time full of Basque connections. “Todor” was a Basque name. Bruno opened his notebook and looked up the brief remarks he had scribbled after visiting Jan at the smithy. The name of Juanita’s taciturn relative was Galder. He typed that into Google and again up came a blizzard of Basque references.
Coincidence was piling improbably upon coincidence, and he needed more data. He showed Isabelle the British police report and the Google pages. She moved her chair alongside his and took over the computer, going into her own database and picking out the file of documents marked “Campagne” and then a subfolder marked “Etudiants.” As he moved aside to make room for her, he could not help but see a large card attached to the bouquet of flowers on her desk. It said, “In thanks and admiration, Carlos.”
What could that mean? Bruno felt the sly curl of jealousy start to unfurl in his mind and tried to stamp on it. Isabelle had no obligation to him. She was a free woman with her own life to lead. Perhaps he was being more sensitive after recently saying good-bye to Pamela, he told himself. Putain, he had to stop this. He was going around in circles while there was a job to do. Come on, Bruno, focus.
“I asked the various police forces for more detail on the students and dumped it all into this file,” Isabelle said, unaware that he had noticed the card. She began searching through the assorted PDF files until she came to a further subfile marked “RU,” for Royaume-Uni, United Kingdom. Two more clicks and she brought up Teddy’s birth certificate. He had been born in Swansea on March 26, 1986. His mother was listed as Mary Morgan Lloyd, and her occupation as student. The father was listed as Todor Felipe Garcia, occupation mechanic. Teddy had been born in Swansea maternity hospital.
“ ‘Felipe Garcia’ is a Spanish name, but not Basque,” said Bruno.
“I know,” Isabelle replied. “Let’s do some more checking.”
She went into her own secure Ministry of the Interior database and put in the name “Todor Felipe Garcia” with a date range from 1984 to 1986. Three items came up. The first was a carte de sejour issued in Biarritz in September 1984 for a Spanish citizen of that name, employed as a mechanic at a local garage. The second was a speeding ticket issued in Bordeaux in April 1985. The third was the report of a missing person, filed on August 30, 1985, by a British citizen, Mary Morgan Lloyd, employed as an au pair with a French family in Talence, Bordeaux. She reported that Todor Felipe Garcia had disappeared from his rented apartment and from his workplace a week earlier.
“She would have known by then that she was pregnant,” said Isabelle, counting on her fingers. “Poor girl, she must have been frantic with worry about him.”
She double-clicked on the fourth line on her screen that contained only three asterisks, and a pop-up window appeared.
“Turn around, Bruno,” she said. “This is an Intel database and I need to punch in my own password.”
He looked away until she told him to turn back, and the screen was filled with lists of raw surveillance reports, the name of “Todor” highlighted in yellow.
“Todor, the father, was a Basque militant, sure enough, and we were keeping an eye on him,” she said, clicking on. “Here is young Mademoiselle Lloyd, with whom he began a relationship that summer; she was checked out but nothing known. We even checked on her with the British police, but she was clean.”
She clicked back again and followed Todor’s trail further. “Known associates,” she said, and sat back in surprise at the length and detail of the list that appeared on her screen. Pedro Jose Pikabea, injured in an attack on the Les Pyrenees tavern in Bayonne on March 29, 1985. Pikabea allegedly was a member of ETA. Another associate had been assassinated the next day in St.-Jean-de-Luz, a photojournalist called Xabier Galdeano. Another assassination had taken place in Bayonne on June 26, of yet one more of Todor’s known associates, Santos Blanco Gonzales, and he was also an alleged ETA member.
“ Mon Dieu, Bruno, everyone Todor knew was being bumped off that spring and summer, and all of them we suspected were carried out by GAL. You were right to talk about the dirty war, all these killings by Spanish agents, all on French soil. And here’s one more, on September 2, Juan Manuel Otegi, again a suspected ETA militant, killed in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port.”
Isabelle sat back again and looked at Bruno. “We’ll have to pick up Teddy and interrogate him, find out just how much he knew about his father. And it looks to me as if his father could have been killed by GAL when Teddy was still in the womb, so we’ll have to get the British to go and have a talk with Teddy’s mother.”
“Teddy should be at Bergerac by now with the rest of the students,” said Bruno. “You’d better get onto the gendarmes, find out who went with them in the bus and get some more gendarmes to the airport to make sure they hold him.”
Isabelle picked up her phone and made the call.
“And he was the one who found the unidentified corpse,” she said, turning back to Bruno after asking the general in Perigueux to arrange for gendarmes to meet Teddy at Bergerac and bring him directly back to the chateau after the explosives check.
“So the question is, how did Teddy know where to look?” said Bruno. “Somebody must have told him where the body was buried, and that somebody must have known about the killing of Teddy’s father. So when did Teddy become an archaeologist and get himself onto the team going to exactly that site? Could Horst have been involved in that?”
“Who apart from Horst and Clothilde knew where they were going to dig?” asked Isabelle.
“Remember they did a preliminary dig last year, late in the summer. We can find out from Clothilde if Teddy was in that group,” Bruno said. He picked up his phone and called her, keeping his eyes on Isabelle, and then nodding excitedly at Clothilde’s reply before he hung up.
“Teddy was indeed on the dig last summer, and he knew they’d be digging again,” said Bruno. “But we still don’t know how he knew where to look for the corpse.”
“Do you think it could be his father’s corpse?” she asked. “The dates would seem to fit.”
“We aren’t sure of that yet. We’ll need a DNA check on Teddy, but I bet it will be positive.”
A small buzz came from Isabelle’s laptop, and she clicked into her secure mail window, again asking Bruno to turn away while she entered yet another password to open the message.
“It’s a reply from the Danish police,” she said. “There is no record of any Danish citizen by the name of Jan Olaf Pedersen being born in 1942, and no record of anyone of that name being born in Kolding. The Danish passport number that Jan had filed for his carte de sejour is a false one. And the Danes would be grateful for any more information since they might want to file an extradition request.”
“You could send them the fingerprints your mobile team took from the candlestick,” said Bruno.
“Good idea,” she said. “I’ll send them along with a copy to Interpol for a search request.” She looked at him apologetically and closed the special database on her computer, saying, “Sorry, Bruno. You understand.” She picked up her cane and limped out to arrange for a room, a security guard and a DNA test kit for use on Teddy.
Bruno was trying to make sense of all this information and not doing well. So he pulled a piece of paper toward him and drew a box, writing inside it the name of Teddy’s father with the date that Mary had notified the police of his disappearance and then drew an arrow to another box in which he wrote Teddy’s name and his date of birth. If the gestation period had been the usual nine months, Teddy had been conceived in June of 1985, and Mary should have known she was pregnant sometime in August. Todor had disappeared the week before August 30.
