Martin Walker: The Crowded Grave

“When was the body found?” Bruno peered down into the trench to see a skull, two shoulder blades and what he assumed were arm bones. The hips and legs were covered in dirt. The skeleton seemed to be lying stretched out and facedown. Scraps of what might have been a leather jacket were mingled with loose earth and stones on the body’s back. Some strands of hair were still attached to the skull, and there was a glint of gold from what had been the neck, the St. Christopher medal that Horst had mentioned. The bones of the wrists and hands were intact, but twisted together behind the back and tied with some faded red electrical wire. A Swatch was attached to the long bone of a forearm.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Bruno. “With his hands bound like that, do you think he was buried alive?”

“That’s what got to me,” said Clothilde. “I know I’m going to have nightmares about this grave, just thinking of that. I suppose this makes it murder.”

“Certainly it’s a matter for the Police Nationale as well as for the medics. I’ll have to inform them, and they’ll be sealing off this place as a crime scene. They’ll want to know exactly when and how the body was found.”

“Teddy found him soon after we started, so not long after seven-thirty. Before eight, certainly, which was when I called you,” said Horst.

“Bonjour, Teddy,” Bruno said to the young man. “Do you speak French?”

“Yes, but not too well,” said Teddy haltingly. He looked up and Bruno saw a pair of very bright blue eyes and a pronounced, almost-jutting chin. “I called the professor immediately after I found him.” He had a very deep voice and a strong accent that Bruno could not identify, too melodic to be English or German.

“Do people usually dig alone? I thought you worked in teams,” Bruno said, recalling previous digs he had seen.

“That’s true, but Teddy had an interesting idea he wanted to pursue,” said Horst. “He was looking for the midden, the latrine, the place where people threw their rubbish, and he assumed it would be away from the water supply. It makes sense-if that stream was running in the same course thirty thousand years ago, which I doubt.”

“We always look for the midden because it can tell us a lot about the food they ate from the bones and seeds,” said Clothilde. “Teddy is a careful worker, so we let him follow his idea. He’s been digging that trench for three days now.”

“I’d better call in the doctor. The death may be obvious, but we need a medical certificate.” Bruno turned away and pulled his phone from the pouch at his belt to call Fabiola at the clinic. Not only was she a friend, she also knew a lot about forensics.

As he waited for her to answer, Bruno looked up at the high cliff that loomed over the site and the way it sloped inward toward the ground, creating a narrow space that offered some shelter. A stream ran down the wooded slope, passing perhaps forty-five feet in front of the sheltered space. Beyond the stream was a stand of trees and then another cliff, but this one descended without an overhang. The stream ran for roughly three hundred feet, alongside the track the archaeologists had made with Horst’s 4?4, before it reached the narrow back road that led to Les Eyzies. Despite the narrowness of the sheltered space and the height of the cliffs on either side, this place that the prehistoric people had chosen was sited to catch the sun for most of the day. Idly, he wondered how much the landscape had changed over thirty thousand years and whether the ground at the site had risen with the generations of silt the stream must have brought down. He wasn’t convinced that Horst was right to think the route of the stream might have changed; the gap between the cliffs looked like a natural water course.

When Fabiola answered, Bruno explained the reason for his call and gave her careful instructions on how to find them. Then he turned back to Horst and Clothilde.

“You’ve seen a lot of digs over the years, both of you. Any idea how long the body has been dead?”

Clothilde shrugged. “We deal with the very long dead, and I don’t know much about the rate of decomposition. Different soils can affect the speed of the process, but it must have been there at least ten years or more, but not before 1983.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The Swatch.” She held up an advanced cell phone and gave a sly and lively grin that took ten years off her age and made Bruno understand Horst’s love for her. “I just used my phone to check the Internet. Those watches weren’t introduced until 1983.”

“What about the soil over the body? Did that look undisturbed?”

Horst shook his head. “It was just like the rest of the site, as though nothing had been touched since Peyrony’s day.”

Bruno raised his eyebrows. “Somebody dug here before?”

“Denis Peyrony, eighty, ninety years ago. He was a local teacher who became the father of French archaeology,” said Clothilde. “He discovered a lot of the main sites like Les Combarelles and Font de Gaume back before the Great War, and he founded the museum where I work. He drew up a catalog of all the known and likely sites, including this one. But he only had time to make a brief exploratory dig, found nothing and moved on. Horst and I thought this one deserved another look.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Informed instinct,” said Horst. “Plus the fact that the site and location are very similar to La Ferrassie.”

The nearest national monument to Bruno’s home, La Ferrassie was less a cave than another shallow shelter formed by an overhang of rock. But it was famous as a graveyard of Neanderthal man. The bodies of eight people-men, women and children-and two fetuses had been buried there some seventy thousand years ago. The skulls and skeletons were supposed to have been important, but Bruno couldn’t remember why. With the overhanging cliffs forming a shelter and a stream running nearby, the similarity between that site and this new one was obvious. He cast an envious glance at Clothilde’s phone, thinking how useful it would be to look up La Ferrassie on the Net without having to go back to his office computer. But he couldn’t see the mayor dipping into the town budget to provide one.

“When did you start digging here?” Bruno asked.

“Just over ten days ago when the students got here,” Horst said. “But you remember we did a preliminary dig at the end of the season last year, which was what made us come back. Word must have gotten around that we were on to something because we were flooded with applications for this year’s dig.”

“You can’t keep secrets in this business,” said Clothilde. “Even the smallest hint, and the buzz goes around the world.”

“Sounds interesting.” Bruno wondered how to ask an informed question when he had so little idea of what these experts might think important. “I presume those really old bones down in the pit are quite a find. It’s been a while since you’ve come across any burials. You said over thirty thousand years-would they be Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon?”

Horst and Clothilde exchanged looks.

“It’s a little early to be definite,” Clothilde said carefully. “We’ll say more at the lecture Horst is giving at the museum.”

“You are coming, I hope,” Horst added.

“It sounds like you’ve found something important,” said Bruno. “But I was coming anyway. By the way, what’s the winch for?” He pointed at the tripod structure.

“It’s to lift that big flat stone at the bottom of the pit,” Horst said. “It has the same little hollows carved into it as the one at La Ferrassie, although that was forty thousand years earlier.”

Bruno wondered briefly how Horst kept all these dates in his head. “Fascinating,” he said politely. “But today my main interest is this new body.”