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

said excitedly. ‘I was working at Le Thot, the park that’s attached to the Lascaux cave. They asked me to reconstruct a mammoth and a group of human hunters. That was part of my earliest work in this field. I’d been working in the theatre on costumes and then on masks for the national theatre in Lille and I really became interested in ancient humans when I was making models for the prehistory museum at Tautavel in the Pyrenees. So I have a personal connection to this region at the time this young man died. Give me your card and I’ll talk to some colleagues and see what might be done. Now I’d better circulate but thank you for your interest and your kind words.’

They exchanged business cards and she scribbled a personal mobile phone number onto the one she gave him.

‘Au revoir, Elisabeth, and thank you for your exhibition and also for your help.’

2

Bruno put his idea to the back of his mind until he heard from Elisabeth that she had a possible candidate, a young student at a design school in Paris who was looking for a project she could submit to complete her diploma. Her name was Virginie. Her mother was Spanish and her father French and she had been raised in Madrid and Toulon. She had spent the previous summer vacation on an internship in Elisabeth’s studio.

‘Virginie is good. She knows my techniques and her work is meticulous,’ Elisabeth said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her progress with you and if this works out I’ll probably offer her a job in my studio when she graduates. She can continue to live on her student grant but she may need help with rent unless you can find her a place in a student hostel. And she’ll need a workshop. By the way, don’t be alarmed by the tattoos and the piercings! She’s good.’

‘Ha! It takes more than a few piercings to shock St Denis. She sounds excellent, Elisabeth, thank you. I’ll discuss this with J-J and get back to you.’

As soon as he’d cut the call, Bruno contacted J-J to invite him to dinner, but warned him they’d be visiting the Les Eyzies museum first.

‘By the way,’ he asked J-J, ‘do you still have access to Oscar’s skull?’

‘It occupies pride of place in our evidence room here. Why?’

‘I’ll tell you later. And do you still have that budget for cold cases?’

‘Certainly. It’s part of the training budget. We assign new candidates to unsolved cases to see how they shape up. What are you up to, Bruno?’

‘I’ll let you know over dinner, J-J. But I think you’ll like the idea.’

Bruno prepared a simple meal before he left to meet J-J at the museum. They’d begin with some smoked salmon he’d been curing for the past three days. The marinade was made of peppercorns, dill, salt, pepper, crushed juniper berries and lemon zest, with a shot glass of eau de vie drizzled over the mixture before it went into the fridge. The sauce to accompany the gravlax was made of Dijon mustard, cider vinegar, honey and sunflower oil. He had cooked a casserole of venison in advance and had made an apple pie that he would serve cold with ice cream.

Knowing that Fabiola, the local doctor, was on duty at the medical centre that evening, he invited her partner Gilles, a journalist, suspecting he would be intrigued by the prospect of reopening an investigation into Oscar’s death. He also invited the Mayor of St Denis, whose political skills might come in useful if J-J met some official resistance to reviving his old obsession with Oscar. They met at the museum shortly before it closed, each relieved to be in an air-conditioned space and escape from the brutal July heatwave that had gripped south-west France for the past week. Clothilde showed them around Elisabeth Daynès’s exhibition while Bruno explained what he’d learned from his talk with her.

‘Normally, a project like this would cost a fortune, but Elisabeth has a young student who’s keen to reconstruct Oscar’s face from his skull as part of her diploma,’ Bruno explained. ‘I’m assured she’s very good.’

‘You’re proposing that we could get something close enough to Oscar’s real face that we could use it to identify him?’ J-J asked. ‘But how do we go about making sure enough people see it?’

‘Publicity,’ said Gilles. ‘This is a great story and it’s very visual, just made for TV and social media. You have the skull and the reconstructed face and a long-ago murder. I’m sure my old editor at Paris Match would want a two-page spread on that, and so would Sud-Ouest and TV news magazines. It’s just the kind of quirky, off-beat story they love to wrap up a news bulletin.’ Gilles leaned back, made a mock-solemn face and adopted the half sonorous, half-folksy diction of a newsreader. ‘And now, from Périgord, how the archaeologists are helping police investigate a thirty-year-old murder that has never been solved.’

‘I see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure I can persuade the powers that be to give me a budget for this,’ J-J objected, but his eyes were bright as he kept looking at the reconstructed faces of the women in the display case. ‘Still, I’d certainly like to give it a try. Nobody could deny that these faces are amazingly lifelike.’

‘You don’t need a budget,’ said the Mayor. ‘It seems to me that the artist will be working for free, or for not much more than pocket money. I’ll have a word with the Mayor of Périgueux and I’m sure we can get her a place in a student hostel. You’ll have plenty of room for her to work in that police science lab of yours, J-J. And since the original murder took place in St Denis, I imagine we can find some modest funds in our tourism promotion budget if required, so long as we can eventually put the reconstruction of the face