The Coldest Case by Martin Walker (mobi reader android txt) 📕

Meanwhile, J-J had spent an hour foraging for any sign of a bullet in the soil beneath where the body had been discovered. Nothing useful had been found, even when the gendarmes with metal detectors and volunteers from the local hunting club had made a careful fingertip search of the vicinity. They had found the sites of two small fires, remnants of charred wood ringed with stones, and some disturbed soil which, on examination, turned out to be a latrine. The burial site was but a short walk through the woods from a popular commercial campsite. It seemed to have been a regular place for what the French called le camping sauvage, where people squatted on a temporary and unofficial campsite in the woods without paying the fees required for a formal campground.

In those days before DNA had transformed the forensic profession, J-J had challenged himself to discover how the man had been killed. In the morgue, when the remaining flesh and organs had been painstakingly removed in the hope of finding a bullet or perhaps some evidence of poisoning, J-J had peered at every rib in search of a scratch that could have been made by a knife. Finally, in desperation, he persuaded the investigating magistrate assigned to the case to let him try one last, desperate measure. He’d used his own money to buy a large metal pot, removed the body’s head and went to the kitchens in police headquarters to demand the use of a mobile cooking stove. He moved it into the courtyard and proceeded to boil the head until all the flesh had fallen away.

This took some time and the aroma at first intrigued and then horrified the other policemen in the building, along with those members of the public with businesses close by and the two local news reporters who had a small office near the entrance. The stench itself was unforgettable but at least its reach was confined at first to a limited area around the police building. Soon, however, local shopkeepers began to complain and then the Mayor and the Prefect arrived to demand an explanation, each of them wearing masks that had been soaked in some mentholated liquid. By the time they arrived, the local radio reporter had already broadcast the news that the local police were cooking a corpse.

When the policemen began to grumble, J-J had been summoned to the Commissioner’s office, where he showed his letter of authorization to boil the skull. It had been signed by the magistrate who had by then departed on a long-planned weekend trip to visit his parents in Brittany and in those days before mobile phones, there was no immediate way to reach him. The Commissioner then announced that he had some urgent business at the Bergerac police station, almost an hour away, that required his personal attention. The Mayor and Prefect found themselves met by the Deputy Commissioner, who had been told of the magistrate’s authorization and pleaded to his visitors that there was nothing he could do. His youngest detective was leaving no stone unturned in his pursuit of a murder case.

‘You might at least have insisted that this unpleasant procedure take place in some remote location rather than in the centre of the city,’ the Mayor had said, the force of his protest somewhat diminished by his mask, which made the Deputy Commissioner ask for every statement to be repeated. Finally, he led the two distinguished visitors, one representing the city of Périgueux and the other the Republic of France, to the small courtyard where they found J-J, oblivious to the stench, stirring the pot amidst clouds of pungent steam.

The Mayor strode forward and turned off the bottle of gas beneath the mobile stove. At the same moment, J-J had hauled the now fleshless skull from the pot with a pair of heavy tongs and waved it at his visitors in a manner that made them back away nervously. He then announced, his face beaming with pride, ‘It worked. See for yourselves, messieurs. He was bludgeoned to death! We couldn’t see that from the decomposed flesh.’

The Mayor, Prefect and Deputy Commissioner each looked at the tell-tale cracks between the eye and ear sockets of the gleaming white skull as the two local news reporters entered the courtyard, notebooks at the ready.

‘We are looking for a left-handed killer, gentlemen,’ J-J went on, who had become a policeman after a boyhood devotion to the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes. ‘You will see the wound is on the right side of the victim’s head, and from the shape of the cracks it was evidently delviered from in front.’

‘Could this not have been established more simply, perhaps by an X-ray of the skull?’ asked the Prefect.

‘Indeed, sir,’ replied the Deputy Commissioner. ‘But you will doubtless recall that you refused to endorse our proposed budget for modernizing our police laboratory and installing an X-ray facility.’

J-J, intent only on the skull and the clues it offered, did not notice the reporters scribbling in their notebooks. The Mayor, who had an eye for such things, and who vaguely recalled having told the local hospital to refuse police requests to use their X-ray machine on the grounds that the public health came first, was already regretting his decision to demand an explanation from the police. Regretting even more his suggestion that the Prefect should accompany him, he said, ‘Well, the cooking is now over, the smell will soon disperse and the vital clue has been found. It only remains to congratulate the police on their ingenuity in difficult circumstances and perhaps we might adjourn, my dear Deputy Commissioner, to the open air, and leave this enterprising young detective to his duties.’

It was the event that made J-J’s reputation with the press, the public and above all with his colleagues in the police. Even the Commissioner forgave him when the Prefect reconsidered his earlier verdict and approved the budget for a state-of-the-art facility, including an X-ray machine, for