Then he drew three more boxes. He wrote down Horst’s name in one, with an arrow to another where he wrote Jan’s name, and an arrow to yet another in which he wrote Juanita’s name. Could Juanita, with her Basque background, have a connection to Todor? He drew a dotted line between them. That might even connect Horst’s disappearance to the Basques. He put a question mark over his dotted line.
And who was Jan, if he wasn’t Danish? Harald had said he sounded as if he came from Hamburg, just like Horst. Horst had a brother, but he was dead. Bruno tried to remember exactly what the brigadier had said during the video connection. The brother had been reported dead, but by whom? By the East Germans, in the days when their so-called Democratic Republic had been giving sanctuary to some of the Baader-Meinhof Group. Could it be that the boxes all connected, Horst leading to Jan who led to the Basques through Juanita?
Isabelle came back into the room with a phone at her waist starting to buzz. She answered it, listened and said, “But surely they checked them all onto the bus?”
She listened again, and said crisply, “So you mean to say that your gendarme miscounted when they boarded the bus. I was hoping you might assign someone with a minimal level of efficiency, at least sufficient to count.”
She paused once more. “We’ll send you a full description,” she said. “Passport details with photograph and credit card numbers and we’ll get the British to put a stop on his card. With any luck, he won’t get far.”
She closed the phone and looked at Bruno.
“They lost Teddy. He never got on the bus.”
22
Like any large, hierarchical organization, the gendarmes were pleased to be given a simple and familiar task. They had a procedure for a manhunt, and the routine deployments clicked smoothly into place. Patrols were assigned to each rail station, and pairs of motorcycle cops were dispatched to the main roundabouts and the ramps onto the autoroutes. Gas stations and rental car firms were visited and banks, ferries and airlines alerted to Teddy’s credit card number. Faxes of Teddy’s description and details, particularly his distinctive height, went out to the municipal police of every town in the departement and to the immigration posts at every airport and frontier. Europol was alerted, and the staff of the liaison office with the British police were told to expect to stay around the clock.
“What sort of manpower does that leave us for searching for Horst?” Bruno asked Isabelle, once the flurry of phone calls died down. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of empty vacation homes and gites out there and he could be in any one.”
“Let me worry about that,” she said. “You know the gendarmes, they can only do one thing at a time. I agree with you that Horst’s disappearance is probably connected, but so far it’s more hunch than evidence.”
Bruno left Isabelle to her conference calls and drove from the chateau back to the municipal campground where Monique seemed to be doing the same crossword puzzle and listening to the same radio station as when he’d last seen her. Again, he was offered coffee, but this time he refused.
“Still looking for that Kajte girl?” Monique asked “They say she’s gone back to Holland. Can’t say I blame the girl with half the gendarmerie hanging around here waiting to arrest her. I almost ran out of coffee.”
“It’s Teddy’s tent I need to get into this time,” Bruno told her. “He’s on the run and I need to know what he left behind.”
Monique stubbed out her Royale filter and led the way to the tent, where the two sleeping bags zipped together had been replaced by a single sack, left open to air. Teddy’s rucksack was still there. Donning a pair of evidence gloves, Bruno opened it, found a toilet bag and saw with satisfaction that although the toothbrush was missing the hairbrush was still there.
“Do you want a receipt for this?” he asked Monique. “I’ll have to take the whole rucksack.”
“You’d better,” she said. “Just so I’m covered if there’s any problem. And do you want the envelope he left in the safe? They usually leave valuables with us.”
“Yes, please.” He was angry with himself that he hadn’t asked her if there was anything else.
Teddy had left a large manila envelope that seemed to contain only papers. Bruno put it into the rucksack, thanked Monique and headed back to the mobile police unit parked at the chateau. From a previous case he recognized Yves, one of the forensic experts, and showed him the rucksack. Yves took fingerprints from the hairbrush handle and then used tweezers to take some hairs from the brush itself. Bruno checked that Yves had the DNA data on the unidentified corpse for comparison, and then lugged the rucksack up to Isabelle’s stately room.
He handed her Teddy’s big envelope-her English was better than his-and started to unpack the rucksack. “They’ve already taken Teddy’s fingerprints from the hairbrush,” he said as she slipped on some evidence gloves.
“Routine.” She shrugged, and began shuffling through the papers, and Bruno went through the pockets of the rucksack and of every item of clothing inside it. He unrolled pairs of socks, looked at name tags and labels and smoothed out scraps of paper, candy wrappers and old bills that had found their way to the bottom of the sack.
Isabelle leafed through Teddy’s papers and found his university transcripts, letters of recommendation from his professor and teachers, certificates from other archaeology digs where he’d worked-all the stuff he’d need if the museum wanted to check his credentials.
“All as you’d expect, but what’s this?” she said, looking up. “This isn’t his handwriting, at least it’s not like the handwriting on these other papers.”
She held up what seemed like a crudely drawn map, which looked much older than the rest of the papers in the envelope. She took it to the desk by the window, pushed aside the huge vase of flowers and beckoned Bruno to come over.
“Get rid of those damn flowers,” she said. He smiled to himself as he took the vase to the corner of the room and then joined her, bending over the map. It was a photocopy of an older document, but something on one of the corners had been covered when the photocopy was made, and the paper was much whiter there.
The map showed a river, joined by a stream, and then some lines that could have signified contours and a small track leading from a road. The main feature was a cross, with some thin lines drawn as if to measure its distance from the road, the stream and the start of the contoured slope. Each line had some scrawled numbers beside it and arrows led off the page to other locations, identified only by initials.
“If those letters on the edge are SD, they could stand for ‘St. Denis,’ ” said Isabelle.
“That would make these letters look like LE, which could be Les Eyzies, so this is the river,” said Bruno, drawing on his mental map of the district. Suddenly the location jumped into place.
“It’s the archaeological dig,” he said. “And those scrawls beside the lines are distances in meters. The track runs a hundred and twenty meters from the river, and then this cross here is fifteen meters from the stream, eight meters from the start of the contours. I’ll need to go back and pace out the distances, but I think this is a map that shows where the unidentified corpse was buried.”
“So this is how Teddy knew exactly where to dig,” said Isabelle. “And the map must have been drawn by somebody who knew where the body was buried, probably by somebody who took part in the killing. So how did Teddy get hold of it?”
“What’s this blank patch?” Bruno asked. “Why would they want to cover something when they made the copy?”
“That’s simple,” she said, and reached into her briefcase to pull out a file with a sheaf of documents inside. “All bureaucracies work the same way,” she went on, pointing to the stamp of the French Ministry of the Interior at the top right-hand corner of her own papers, with spaces for a date and different departmental codes to be written in.
“This is a document that has been filed in some kind of registry, possibly official or state controlled. Then somebody took it out of the files and photocopied it while concealing the registry mark that could identify it, and maybe identify whoever had taken it out.”
She turned the paper over and looked at a small scrawl of numbers on the back, in a different
