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

‘The police looked through the ones we had but they were mainly family snapshots, when we were building the site, the children growing up, that kind of thing.’

‘Do have some cake,’ Mathilde said, pressing the plate on the visitors. Bruno and Joe each took a slice of walnut cake. She turned to her husband. ‘Had we started that camper-of-the-week business back then?’

‘What was that?’ Bruno asked.

‘It was something we put up on the noticeboard every week; a photo I took of one the campers doing something,’ her husband said. ‘There was a guy who caught a big fish in the river, another one who was a bodybuilder and used to lift weights, kids playing with animals or some guy playing a guitar – that kind of thing. It was a friendly gesture, something to give a sense of community and to get the campers to pay attention to the noticeboard.’

‘And you’d make a few francs selling prints to people,’ said Mathilde. ‘Being you, you’d always take a snap of a pretty girl.’

Bruno’s ears picked up. ‘Did you keep any copies of these pictures?’

‘I did,’ said Mathilde. ‘Nostalgia. I kept them all in a box and then when we retired I started sticking them into a couple of scrapbooks. Would you like to see them? They’re all dated. I put the week they were taken on the back of each print.’

‘I’d be grateful to see the ones for ’89,’ said Bruno. ‘You remember the time of the félibrée? That was when we think the murder took place.’

Mathilde said she’d just be a moment. She went into another room and came back with a large scrapbook, about the size of a tabloid newspaper.

‘This is the first year we did these photos of our camper of the week.’ She leafed through a few pages. ‘Here, that’s the week of the félibrée, with some pictures Antoine took of the town. You know how they covered the streets with paper flowers, or maybe plastic. It looked so pretty and it gave a bit of shade. It was a hot summer. And Hilaire was starting to use the camera so there are some of his photos in there as well.’

She handed the scrapbook to Bruno, who was sitting alongside Joe on the sofa. Joe immediately found a photo of his much younger self looking rather sour as he stood beside a stage where a woman seemed to be singing.

‘I remember that,’ Joe said, smiling. ‘She was singing some old Occitan song and she had a terrible voice.’

He leafed through photos of people in traditional local dress, surprisingly puritan to Bruno’s eye, mainly black and white with the odd scarf or sash to add a touch of colour. There were more photos of peasant dances, and then the campers of the week, each with a tiny pin hole at each corner where they must have been tacked to the noticeboard. There was a young man playing a recorder, a toddler trying to ride on a patient-looking dog, and then a pretty girl whom Bruno recognized.

It was a close-up of the head and shoulders of a tanned, slim and very attractive young woman in a bathing suit, or perhaps the top half of a bikini. She was standing by the side of the swimming pool, some of the bathers visible as they stood in the shallow end, watching her being photographed. Her head was turned a little to one side and she was giving a broad smile or she might have been laughing.

Bruno pulled out his phone, called up the wedding photo J-J had sent him, and showed it to Mathilde.

‘Would you say this was the same woman?’ he asked her, pointing to the image of Dominique.

‘Yes, I think it is. I’m almost sure of it and I think I remember her, always very cheerful, always on the dance floor. I think she was a hairdresser because I remember her showing different styles to some of the other girls. And we nearly used another photo of her, cutting some young man’s hair. He was blond but his skin hadn’t gone red – he was tanned. A good-looking boy.’

‘Would you have any more photos of her, like the one with the young man, or did you keep just this one?’

‘Just that one, I think. We didn’t keep the ones we didn’t use.’

Bruno turned to the next few pages. There was an old man fast asleep in a deckchair, an empty bottle of wine beside him; a toddler looking intently at a hedgehog that had rolled into a ball; a boy juggling oranges. He leafed through to the end of the book but there was nothing else that caught his eye. He turned back to the image of Dominique.

You say you recall her being cheerful. Do you remember anything about her friends, the people she was with?’

‘She had a girlfriend she was always with, I think they shared a tent.’

‘Do you have a magnifying glass I might use?’ he asked, turning back to Dominique’s photo.

Mathilde left the room again and came back with a small magnifying glass. ‘Here you are. My eyesight isn’t what it was.’

Bruno studied the bathers in the pool behind Dominique. There was a young woman who looked like Sabine’s mother standing in front of a young man, his muscular arms wrapped around her and his face half-buried in her neck. He had blond hair and was very tanned. He examined the other bathers but none of them looked at all relevant, mainly families with their children.

‘Would you mind if I borrowed this to make some copies and blow them up? I’ll make sure you get it back but the detective needs to see this. I think this might be the murdered man.’

‘Not very good of him, is it?’ Mathilde said, taking the scrapbook and the glass. ‘You can’t see much of his face.’

‘It’s more than we’ve found so far,’ said Bruno.

‘I stuck it down so you’d have to take the