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

on his memory, to allow for the increased girth of the nearest big trees and mentally to erase the new growth around the scene. He knew it was hopeless but he kept trying to force his imagination to see the place as it had been. It was a calm but brooding spot, only a few scattered rays of sunlight coming through the thick and multi-layered canopy of the trees.

Usually in a place like this he’d expect the air to be heavy with the smell of moist earth and vegetation. Instead, the air seemed almost dusty. As Bruno moved to one side his foot caught on something and he bent down to find an old stake buried in the ground, the kind that might have been used to secure a tent rope. He pulled it out and it came with a short length of dirty plastic ribbon. He could still make out the stripes of white and red that had been used to mark off a crime scene.

‘Where you’re standing is where J-J set up his base,’ Joe said. He was casting round, poking at the low undergrowth with a stick.

‘What are you looking for?’ Bruno asked.

‘I’m trying to find the tracks. J-J persuaded the gendarmes to let him use a forklift truck. That’s how they got the body out. It’s hard to find anything after all this time. Thirty years of leaf fall and rotting branches have put a whole new layer of soil over everything.’

‘J-J said he found a couple of fireplaces and a latrine. Do you recall where they were?’

‘The latrine was off to the side of the campsite and a bit downhill. They found it with the metal detector because they’d put their empty cans of food down there before filling it in. One of the fireplaces was pretty much where you saw the current one but I forget where the other one was.’

‘Anything else you recall, anything that strikes you, jogs your memory? It must have been a big moment for you, a lot of press interest, tourists coming to watch all the police activity.’

‘Yes, we set up a perimeter at the bottom of the hill for crowd control but the gendarmes did that. After the first day J-J sent me round asking the local hunters and mushroom and truffle pickers if any of them knew the area, if they’d seen anything.’

‘I don’t see any green oaks or hazelnuts so I wouldn’t expect truffles around here,’ said Bruno.

‘There’s the odd hornbeam and you can find truffles around them. I saw one or two on the way up here with the blackened ground around the trunks. I might come up here with the dog, see if there are any estivales here. They don’t mind the earth being dry.’

Estivales, or summer truffles, were not greatly prized but they could flavour a mild olive oil or make truffle butter. Bruno sometimes used very thin slices on top of a salad or pasta, or to help give some taste to the usually flavourless white mushrooms sold by supermarkets, the champignons de Paris.

‘Thanks for showing this to me,’ Bruno said. ‘Let’s go back and visit Hilaire’s parents. They may have something.’

The old couple, who greeted Joe with affection, had prepared their living room for the arrival of guests. Coffee cups, side plates and small glasses were lined up on a coffee table in the middle of a square formed by the fireplace, a sofa, two armchairs and a big TV set that was screening some daytime soap opera. Hilaire’s dad, Antoine, used his remote control to lower the sound and his wife brought in a plate of gâteau aux noix and coffee.

‘Usually we’d go outside but it’s too hot today, even with the parasol,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s this global warming they go on about.’

‘You’re very kind,’ said Bruno, as Antoine filled the tiny glasses from a bottle of Vieille Prune, a plum brandy that Bruno recognized from Hubert’s wine cave.

‘I don’t know how we can help,’ Antoine said. ‘We spent hours being questioned by that young detective at the time but we really couldn’t help him. He went through the list of our bookings for that week but there weren’t many credit cards in those days. It was a cash business and the people who bothered to book would call up and often just used their first names. The police tried tracking them down but got nowhere. It wasn’t like these days where you have to give a credit card number when you book and give identity cards and passport numbers. It all has to be accounted for and documented now.’

‘You can’t get away with anything on the taxes any more,’ Joe said with a chuckle. ‘It’s the same with that cottage we rent out to tourists. It all has to be registered with the Mairie.’

Bruno ignored Joe’s comment and spoke to Antoine. ‘I’ve read the statement you gave the police at the time. You said you knew that people who were camping sauvage would often come in to use your bathrooms and the bar but you never kept track of them. Why was that?’

‘It was just me and Mathilde and our peak time was the school holidays so she had her hands full with our children. I couldn’t afford extra staff,’ Antoine said. ‘And the bathrooms were coin operated, a one franc piece to use the toilets, another franc for the communal showers so it wasn’t as though it was free. It wasn’t just the sauvage campers but other tourists would come in to spend money at the bar and buy snacks, and they used the little shop we had for bread and milk and basic foodstuffs. There was no way of keeping track of them all. You didn’t have to back then. I think the government was behind all the credit card business so they could track everything to tax it, as if they don’t take enough.’

‘Did you bring any souvenirs with you when you left?’ Bruno