sloped inward toward the ground, creating a narrow space that offered some shelter. A stream ran down the wooded slope, passing perhaps forty-five feet in front of the sheltered space. Beyond the stream was a stand of trees and then another cliff, but this one descended without an overhang. The stream ran for roughly three hundred feet, alongside the track the archaeologists had made with Horst’s 4?4, before it reached the narrow back road that led to Les Eyzies. Despite the narrowness of the sheltered space and the height of the cliffs on either side, this place that the prehistoric people had chosen was sited to catch the sun for most of the day. Idly, he wondered how much the landscape had changed over thirty thousand years and whether the ground at the site had risen with the generations of silt the stream must have brought down. He wasn’t convinced that Horst was right to think the route of the stream might have changed; the gap between the cliffs looked like a natural water course.
When Fabiola answered, Bruno explained the reason for his call and gave her careful instructions on how to find them. Then he turned back to Horst and Clothilde.
“You’ve seen a lot of digs over the years, both of you. Any idea how long the body has been dead?”
Clothilde shrugged. “We deal with the very long dead, and I don’t know much about the rate of decomposition. Different soils can affect the speed of the process, but it must have been there at least ten years or more, but not before 1983.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The Swatch.” She held up an advanced cell phone and gave a sly and lively grin that took ten years off her age and made Bruno understand Horst’s love for her. “I just used my phone to check the Internet. Those watches weren’t introduced until 1983.”
“What about the soil over the body? Did that look undisturbed?”
Horst shook his head. “It was just like the rest of the site, as though nothing had been touched since Peyrony’s day.”
Bruno raised his eyebrows. “Somebody dug here before?”
“Denis Peyrony, eighty, ninety years ago. He was a local teacher who became the father of French archaeology,” said Clothilde. “He discovered a lot of the main sites like Les Combarelles and Font de Gaume back before the Great War, and he founded the museum where I work. He drew up a catalog of all the known and likely sites, including this one. But he only had time to make a brief exploratory dig, found nothing and moved on. Horst and I thought this one deserved another look.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Informed instinct,” said Horst. “Plus the fact that the site and location are very similar to La Ferrassie.”
The nearest national monument to Bruno’s home, La Ferrassie was less a cave than another shallow shelter formed by an overhang of rock. But it was famous as a graveyard of Neanderthal man. The bodies of eight people- men, women and children-and two fetuses had been buried there some seventy thousand years ago. The skulls and skeletons were supposed to have been important, but Bruno couldn’t remember why. With the overhanging cliffs forming a shelter and a stream running nearby, the similarity between that site and this new one was obvious. He cast an envious glance at Clothilde’s phone, thinking how useful it would be to look up La Ferrassie on the Net without having to go back to his office computer. But he couldn’t see the mayor dipping into the town budget to provide one.
“When did you start digging here?” Bruno asked.
“Just over ten days ago when the students got here,” Horst said. “But you remember we did a preliminary dig at the end of the season last year, which was what made us come back. Word must have gotten around that we were on to something because we were flooded with applications for this year’s dig.”
“You can’t keep secrets in this business,” said Clothilde. “Even the smallest hint, and the buzz goes around the world.”
“Sounds interesting.” Bruno wondered how to ask an informed question when he had so little idea of what these experts might think important. “I presume those really old bones down in the pit are quite a find. It’s been a while since you’ve come across any burials. You said over thirty thousand years-would they be Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon?”
Horst and Clothilde exchanged looks.
“It’s a little early to be definite,” Clothilde said carefully. “We’ll say more at the lecture Horst is giving at the museum.”
“You are coming, I hope,” Horst added.
“It sounds like you’ve found something important,” said Bruno. “But I was coming anyway. By the way, what’s the winch for?” He pointed at the tripod structure.
“It’s to lift that big flat stone at the bottom of the pit,” Horst said. “It has the same little hollows carved into it as the one at La Ferrassie, although that was forty thousand years earlier.”
Bruno wondered briefly how Horst kept all these dates in his head. “Fascinating,” he said politely. “But today my main interest is this new body.”
“I think we can safely say that it has no connection with our archaeology,” Horst said, with a smile. “Except, of course, that it was one of our diggers who found it.”
Teddy heaved himself onto his feet, towering over the rest of the group. He must be more than six feet tall, thought Bruno, with shoulders to match. The Dutch girl barely came up to his chest. His nose had been broken, and looking at his imposing figure, Bruno felt a sudden curiosity.
“Do you play rugby?”
Teddy smiled for the first time. “Of course. I grew up in Wales, Pays de Galles, you call it. We all play rugby. I played at school and university.”
“Gareth Edwards, Ieuan Evans,” said Bruno, naming the two recent greats of Welsh rugby. In this region, the cradle of French rugby, the two players were esteemed almost as highly as they were in Wales. And Wales explained Teddy’s unusual accent. “I saw Evans play, but Edwards only on TV. If you want a game while you’re here, we can bring you into a practice session at the club.”
Teddy nodded eagerly. “That would be great.”
A horn tooted from the road, and Bruno headed down the track to direct Fabiola. Parking her car on the road rather than risk the bumpy route to the dig, she handed Bruno her medical bag to carry before kissing him on both cheeks.
“Is this your day off?” he asked, noting her jeans and sweatshirt rather than the neat trouser suits she invariably wore to work.
She shook her head and explained she was helping clean out the cupboard at the clinic and ditching pills and lotions that had been there for a decade and more.
“I’m glad for the break,” she said, “even if it is a body. There were things in that cupboard growing mold. They’d been there since I was a schoolgirl and planning to be a ballerina rather than a doctor.”
Bruno raised his eyebrows; he’d never heard that before. He introduced Fabiola to the group around the trench, observing the way their eyes first noted and then carefully avoided the long scar on Fabiola’s cheek, the legacy of a mountaineering accident. Bruno was no longer aware of it, and Fabiola simply ignored it. Her dress and demeanor boldly asserted that this was a self-confident and attractive woman who knew her own worth.
Fabiola peered into the trench at the body. She pulled a small digital camera from the pocket of her jeans and photographed the scene from all aides. Then she looked at the narrow steps cut into each side of the trench.
“Can I stand on those ledges to examine it?” she asked.
“That’s why we cut them,” said Horst. “We had to brush away some of the soil. Here, take my arm.” He leaned forward to help Fabiola clamber carefully into the grave. Bruno placed her medical bag on the lip of the trench.
“Can I have someone else down here, an archaeologist, to help clear away some of this earth?” Fabiola called. “I want a good look at that skull.”
“You might see if there’s a wallet or anything that might identify the body,” Bruno suggested. He knew of no missing persons in St. Denis in the ten years since his own arrival, and there were no unsolved cases of missing persons in the files.
Horst stepped down, and Teddy handed him a brush, a trowel and a plastic bag for the dirt. While Fabiola took more photos, Horst carefully exposed the top half of the skull. He handed the filled plastic bag to Teddy who handed him a fresh one. As Horst began to clear away more soil, Fabiola told him to stop and clambered down into the pit. She looked intently at the base of the skull, then took the brush and worked gently at the soil.
