Also by Martin Walker
The Dordogne Mysteries
Death in the Dordogne
(previously published as Bruno, Chief of Police)
The Dark Vineyard
Black Diamond
The Crowded Grave
The Devil’s Cave
The Resistance Man
Death Undercover
(previously published as Children of War)
The Dying Season
Fatal Pursuit
The Templars’ Last Secret
A Taste for Vengeance
The Body in the Castle Well
A Shooting at Chateau Rock
This ebook published in 2021 by
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Copyright © 2021 Walker & Watson Limited
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication
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HB ISBN 978 1 78747 774 2
TPB ISBN 978 1 78747 775 9
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78747 778 0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
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To the volunteer firefighters, the pompiers of the Périgord
Contents
The Coldest Case
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
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Acknowledgements
1
The three skulls transfixed him. The first, the original that had been unearthed after seventy thousand years, was not quite complete. Beside it stood a reconstruction, an exact copy but artificially filled in with the missing parts of the jaw and cranium. Behind them, glowing eerily in the museum’s carefully crafted lighting, was an artist’s attempt at reconstructing the face that had once covered the skull. Maybe it was a trick of the light that made it seem larger than the others. Reluctantly, Bruno Courrèges shifted his gaze back to the original, whose caption said it was the closest to a perfect Neanderthal skull ever found. It came from the rock shelter of La Ferrassie, a place he passed each day as he drove from his home to his office at the Mairie of St Denis, where for the past decade or more he had carried out his duties as the local chief of police in the Périgord region of France.
The region boasted an extraordinary wealth of prehistoric remains, from painted caves to carvings from the tusks of mammoths, and Bruno had become an enthusiast who had now visited all the known caves and was a regular visitor to the museum of prehistory in Les Eyzies, close to his home and where he now stood. The reconstructed face set him thinking. It made him recall the curious obsession of his friend Jean-Jacques, known to the region’s police as J-J, with another and more recent skull. Bruno knew this skull well since its enlarged photograph had for three decades accompanied J-J’s rise to become the chief of detectives for the department of the Dordogne. For as long as Bruno had known him, and for years before that, the photograph had gone with J-J to every office he had occupied. These days, it was fixed to the back of J-J’s door, where he could see the skull from his place at the imposing desk that was standard issue for such a senior official. His visitors couldn’t miss it as they left his room. His fellow cops often speculated why J-J submitted himself willingly to this constant reminder of his first big case, the one he had failed to solve as a young detective some three decades earlier.
J-J claimed not to remember why he had called the skull ‘Oscar’ but every policeman in south-western France knew the story. A truffle hunter out with his dog in the woods near St Denis had found a tree downed by a storm. The fallen trunk had blocked a small stream tumbling down the slope and forced it into a new channel. The rushing water had then eroded a bank and exposed something that had attracted the hunter’s dog: a human foot, partly decomposed and partly nibbled by woodland creatures. The hunter had called Joe, Bruno’s predecessor as the municipal policeman in St Denis. Joe had visited the site and in turn had informed the Police Nationale in Périgueux and they had sent J-J, their newest young detective, to investigate.
Determined to make his name with this unexpected case, J-J had rushed to the scene, established a security cordon, demanded spades and a local photographer from the Mairie and help from the local gendarmes. With their support he had carefully unearthed the remains of a healthy young male with long blond hair, perfect teeth and dressed in a T-shirt which still bore the faded logo of some forgotten rock band. The body’s own bacteria and the insect life and soil microbes had done their work in the year or so since the death, as estimated by the medical examiner. Too little flesh remained for any cause of death to be evident. The fact that the corpse had been deliberately hidden persuaded J-J that the man had been murdered.
To the horror of the watching gendarmes, J-J had donned medical gloves and carefully removed the remaining earth that still covered much of the body. He’d then commandeered a steel sheet about two metres long and a metre wide, along with a forklift truck from a nearby builders’ depot and had them both manhandled up through the woods. He had then slid the steel sheet into the ground a few centimetres beneath the deliquescent remains and inserted the prongs of the forklift to raise and remove the body. Using four staves of wood beneath this steel plate, he’d ordered eight gendarmes to carry it like some heavy military stretcher, down to the flat land adjoining the campsite below. It was then taken by truck to the morgue in Périgueux for a
