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

Rosenholz dossier in return for immunity makes me wonder if Henri might be behind this, hoping to get away with murder. He must have some credible evidence from the orphanage. What about your German colleagues? Can you get them to launch their own probe into the Clara Zetkin orphanage and the Leforts? There must be some records: when they arrived in East Germany, under what conditions they were given asylum, or residence permits and what their status was.’

‘I’ll do that as soon as I’ve had a chance to brief Lannes. He needs to know about this orphanage. Then I’ll ask DIS to look in their old files for this Lefort couple. When do you say they moved to East Germany?’

‘Some time in the fifties, according to Rosa Luxemburg.’

‘Right. Leave that with me. And what are you doing now?’

‘Heading for Périgueux for a meeting with Prunier about whether it makes sense to arrest Henri Bazaine on the false identity charge.’

‘The Elysée won’t like that. If Henri has documentary evidence he might not be able to deliver it if he’s sitting in a cell in Périgueux. But could such evidence be?’ Isabelle demanded. ‘How might he have got hold of the Rosenholz dossier? The whole thing was too bulky to smuggle out before the Wall came down. Maybe he got just the French section, but how would he have obtained it from some country orphanage far from Stasi HQ in East Berlin?’

‘Maybe what Henri has is nothing to do with Rosenholz,’ Bruno mused, thinking aloud. ‘Maybe it’s something different, like a register of the kids at the Clara Zetkin orphanage with their French names. Rosa, this woman from the Belleville Mairie, said the French couple were so devoted to the kids that they kept a scrapbook of them all growing up.’

‘Putain!’ Isabelle almost spat out the word. ‘Is that possible? Keeping something like that must have broken every security rule in the Stasi’s book.’

‘Rosa said she saw it at the orphanage.’

‘Hold on. I’m online, checking the timetable of the collapse of East Germany,’ she said and went on to describe the process.

‘May 2, 1989, Hungary started to dismantle the border fence with Austria. Some ten thousand fled from East Germany through Hungary in May and another twelve thousand in June. That’s the number that got out and applied to West Germany for citizenship.’

‘So, let’s imagine it’s May or June. Max and Henri are smart boys, they see the place is collapsing and there’s a way out,’ Bruno said. ‘They get to Hungary and then to Austria but unlike the other East Germans, they already have their French ID cards, their French names and they’re bilingual. They decide to come to France rather than West Germany where they’d probably be tainted as Stasi kids.’

‘What if they stole the scrapbook and brought it with them as insurance?’ Isabelle asked.

‘There’s only one scrapbook and Henri kills Max to get it. Does that make sense?’

‘It’s plausible as a working hypothesis,’ Isabelle replied, cautiously. ‘But if the Stasi knew Max and Henri had the scrapbook, they would have moved heaven and earth to track them down and get it back.’

‘Only if the Stasi knew it was missing. What if Jacques and Sylvie never reported that it had gone? After all, they’d have been in trouble if they admitted to having kept the scrapbook in the first place.’

‘I suppose you’re right. Let me take this to Lannes. It’s certainly possible that this offer comes from Henri. I’ll do some checking into this lawyer, Vautan.’

Bruno explained about Henri’s own lawyer, the People’s Pierre.

‘I’ll look into him, too. You’ll be with J-J after this?’

‘Yes, but wait – how much of all this can I share with J-J?’

‘All of it,’ she replied firmly. ‘He’s a professional. We can trust him.’

‘Even if he’s robbed of a murder conviction because the Elysée agrees to the deal and hushes up the murder?’

‘Yes, even then,’ she replied. ‘It could be useful that J-J knows. It might help to persuade the Elysée that this might not be a sensible deal. The more people who know about it, the greater the chance of a leak. Any government found hushing up a murder would face a political storm. I should go. By the way, I emailed my Canadian contact at SCRS, their Service Canadien des Renseignements de Sécurité, about Loriot. We’ll talk later. Je t’embrasse.’

The phone conversation had taken Bruno halfway to Périgueux and he saw he’d missed an incoming call from his contact at army records. He was making good time so he pulled off the road to return the call. Loriot, he learned, had served his twelve months in the army in 1987, mostly in a signals regiment based in Agen because he’d listed his civilian job as an apprentice electrician.

Once in Périgueux, Bruno had a few minutes to spare before his meeting, so he called in to see Virginie in the police lab. J-J had said her work on the skull was close to being finished. He was looking forward to seeing it, partly out of curiosity, but also to compare it with the composite photo of Max that he’d helped to assemble. However reassuring Rosa’s decisive recognition of Max had been from the photo, Bruno suspected any able defence lawyer would be able to challenge its authenticity.

He parked in the cool underground garage at the police building and left Balzac in his van. He walked across the courtyard leading to the separate building where the lab had been installed. The entrance, office and storeroom were on the ground floor. In the basement were the lab, a small morgue and pathology room along with the shielded X-ray section.

As he trotted down the stairs he heard what sounded like a scream, and then a woman’s voice shrieking at someone to stop, followed instantly by a grunted male curse, the sound of a slap and another cry for help. Bruno found the door locked. He stood back and slammed the sole of his boot as hard as