The Coldest Case, Martin Walker [famous ebook reader txt] 📗

the new police scientific laboratory. But this was little compensation for J-J, who then embarked on a long and fruitless attempt to identify his corpse, even though the Mayor had persuaded the local hospital to let him use the X-ray machine to document an unusual double break in the body’s left leg, made some years before death. J-J had been confident that medical records would eventually enable him to confirm the name of the most celebrated corpus delicti in the history of the Périgord police.

There had been no local report of a missing young male with fair hair and no such missing person reported in France in the twelve months that the medical examiner estimated had been the maximum time since death. J-J went through Interpol to ask other European countries whether they had any candidates on their lists of missing persons, and even tried the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all without success. As the Berlin Wall came down and relationships improved with the police of Russia and Eastern Europe, J-J widened his search. Through French embassies, he made contact with the medical associations and the health ministries across Europe, seeking a doctor who might recall treating the unusual leg break. He turned his attention to the T-shirt on the body and tracked down the Austrian rock band that had enjoyed a brief success and sold several thousand T-shirts in Germany and Switzerland on the strength of it. Months passed and then years, but J-J’s labours, to which he devoted much of his spare time, were all in vain.

He had a body, or at least a skeleton. He had a murder and had identified the murder weapon as a collapsible spade, produced in large numbers by the US army and widely available at army surplus and camping stores around the world. What he did not have was an identity, only the photograph of Oscar’s skull that covered the back of his office door as a memento mori of the case he’d never solved.

And so Bruno, studying the artist’s reconstruction of a Neanderthal face from the original skull, had the first glimmerings of an idea. The face did not look primitive. It was almost entirely human but with elements of our primate ancestors, with the same heavy jaw and prominent bone ridges above the eyes. The reconstruction seemed more real because the artist had also produced not simply a face, but the whole body from the ancient skeleton of La Ferrassie. The man was sitting, a thick and brawny arm outstretched as he made some point to a small child sitting rapt with attention before him. The child’s face had also been reconstructed from another Neanderthal skull and the scene was to Bruno’s eyes wholly convincing.

He paused at the next display case, startled at the sight of a young woman with a defiant or perhaps proud pose of her head. She was clad in furs with beads around her neck, her eyes looking sidelong at some scene that made her gaze watchful, even suspicious. She had a high forehead, full lips and prominent cheekbones. She had been reconstructed from a partial skeleton found at the Abri Pataud rock shelter in Les Eyzies, just along the main street from this national museum of prehistory. The skeleton of the body, a young woman of roughly eighteen years, had been discovered with the skeleton of a newborn child; her skull had been found four metres away, protected by some stones that appeared to have been deliberately placed. She was a Cro-Magnon, or early modern human, who had lived some twenty thousand years ago, nearly twenty thousand years after her people had replaced the Neanderthals.

Bruno shook his head in awe rather than in disbelief at the sight of this woman whose face had moved him. There was a lively intelligence in her features and a self-reliance in her stance that made him realize with a start of surprise that this was a woman who attracted him. He could imagine seeing her in a crowd on the street outside or gazing out from the window of a passing train or even sitting at another table in some outdoor café. He let the fantasy run on, imagining sharing glances with her across the crowded café, perhaps arranging to meet. This was a woman that stirred thoughts of might-have-beens; a woman with whom he could even imagine, across the millennia, falling in love.

The next face he recognized, but not her adornment. The reconstructed head wore a skull cap of dozens of tiny shells, carefully pierced and then sewn together. He had seen it before at the famous rock shelter of Cap Blanc, just a few kilometres up the road towards Sarlat, where prehistoric people had crafted a massive bas-relief of horses, deer and bison. They were so lifelike that they might almost be emerging from the rock into which they had been carved.

In 1911, archaeologists had found an almost complete human skeleton buried beneath the hooves of the central horse of the sculpture, the bones protected by rocks at the feet and more rocks balanced above the head. It was presumed at first to be male, but then the local landowner sold it to the Field Museum in Chicago for the equivalent in francs of one thousand dollars in 1926. Henry Field, who collected the skeleton in New York and wrapped it in cotton wool to be taken back to Chicago, noted at once that the pelvic girdle was female and arranged such a blaze of publicity that on the first day it was shown to the public, more than twenty thousand people crowded into the museum to see the first prehistoric skeleton ever displayed in the United States.

Five years later, by which time it had been seen by more than a million visitors, the skull was withdrawn from exhibition to be fully reconstructed. A detailed examination found it to be a young woman of around twenty years, 5ft 1in tall, and that she had