The Templars' Last Secret Read online

  It was signed with the single initial I, which meant “Isabelle,” the woman who got away. No, Bruno thought, that wasn’t right. When she left the Périgord for a high-powered job on the staff of the minister of the interior in Paris, she had wanted him to join her. But Bruno could never see himself in some cramped apartment in Paris with no garden, where it would not be fair to keep a dog, let alone his chickens. He knew he’d lose touch with all his friends and the hunting and tennis and rugby clubs and would miss the training sessions for the schoolkids that made up so much of his life. Now Isabelle had an even-bigger job coordinating French and European antiterrorist efforts. Balzac had been her gift to him when his previous dog had been killed, and these occasional postcards from foreign capitals always seemed more about Balzac than about him. Or perhaps it was just Isabelle’s way of reminding him of what he was missing, not that he needed reminding. He sniffed the card, wondering if it were his imagination or if he really detected just a hint of her perfume. He offered the card to Balzac, who sniffed and gave a discreet but plaintive howl. Balzac missed her, too.

  Chapter 2

  Installing Balzac in his preferred place on the passenger seat, Bruno set off for Les Eyzies. He gave his usual wave of salute to the statue of prehistoric man on the rocky ledge above the town’s main street. The statue symbolized the town’s role as the center of prehistoric studies. After the first find of such remains during the construction of a railway, skeletons of people with much more modern skulls than those of the first Neanderthals were then unearthed in 1868. Called Cro-Magnon people after a local place-name, the skeletons emerged just as the arguments over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were raging across Europe. So many visitors began to descend on the region that a new hotel, inevitably called the Cro-Magnon, was built to receive them. A flurry of archaeological investigations nearby soon established that the valley of the River Vézère was an extraordinary repository of human and prehuman remains.

  Close to the first Cro-Magnon find was the Abri Pataud, a hundred-meter-long balcony in a great cliff where modern archaeologists had found traces of forty separate camps of nomadic reindeer hunters. These early humans had used local stone to build a rough wall on the rim of the balcony to form a sheltered room, and the animal bones left behind suggested it had been used for a prolonged period. The skeletons of a young woman and a newborn baby were found there, some twenty thousand years old. These bones were used as a model to construct a life-size statue of the woman, on display in the attached museum. Bruno had a great affection for this young mother, and it had been enhanced when he learned from Horst’s article that another figurine, the Venus of Abri Pataud, had also been found nearby. She represented so much of what Bruno loved about this valley, the sense of history being so close that across two hundred centuries there had lived a girl here he might have loved. So he blew her a kiss as he drove past, heading toward another of his favorite sites, the medieval fortress of Commarque.

  Perched on a rocky outcrop in the hills between the rivers Dordogne and Vézère, the half-ruined château was for Bruno one of the most impressive in the region. Unlike the famous medieval fortresses of Beynac and Castelnaud that glowered at each other across the Dordogne as they had during the Hundred Years’ War between the English and French, Commarque was not on the standard tourist route. Its remoteness somehow added to its grandeur. The outer walls enclosed a large village that contained the remains of six grand houses, each inhabited in the Middle Ages by a different noble dynasty, while the Commarque family held the main keep with its high tower. Bruno had heard the ensemble described as a kind of holiday camp for the feudal elite, a place where they would gather for celebrations and feast days to scheme and plot and arrange marriages while enjoying the magnificent view over the valley of the River Beune.

  Standing atop the tower one day, the Count of Commarque had told Bruno that its height had enabled his ancestors to see and signal to the town of Sarlat, twenty kilometers up the valley. In the Middle Ages, the trees, which later would cover much of the region, had been cut down to produce charcoal to feed the hungry furnaces of dozens of smithies and ironworks. The hills of the Périgord during that period had been covered with sheep rather than timber.

  Bruno navigated the rough track down to the château entrance and parked. He let Balzac jump down from the police van, where the dog started sniffing his way around the area, as if recalling his previous visits and checking for any changes. The young man at the entrance kiosk looked startled to see a policeman arrive with a basset hound. He shook hands, introduced himself as Jean-Philippe and asked, “Sniffer dog?”

  “The best,” said Bruno, and followed him to the base of a forbidding cliff, where his friend Fabiola, a doctor, was waiting beside the corpse. Her examination seemed to be complete, for she was gazing upward, as though admiring the high walls and tower. At her feet lay the body of a middle-aged woman wearing a blue nylon tracksuit, one leg of which was almost ripped away to reveal a leg bent unnaturally in three places. Through the tear a broken bone poked through the skin, although there was little blood. Her heart must have stopped pumping when she hit the ground, Bruno thought.

  He felt a wave of sadness, the sudden fall of silence and solemnity that always came upon him in the presence of death. Despite his years in the military and the nature of his work as a policeman, his duty to attend to traffic accidents and the natural deaths to which he was called, he never became accustomed to it. If he ever did, Bruno suspected that he would feel compelled to resign.

  Standing there beside Fabiola, Bruno recalled that she’d once told him that at medical school she’d attended a compulsory lecture on death and its impact on doctors. Doctors in hospitals would attend hundreds, probably thousands, of deaths, but most of them would be strangers. Doctors in general practice would attend far fewer deaths, but the majority of them would be familiar, patients of many years, perhaps. Either way, the lecturer had said, the emotional toll would grow and weigh more heavily over time. Bruno closed his eyes briefly and then forced himself to look at the corpse.

  The dead woman had dark hair cut short, a plump face that was markedly suntanned although it was early in the year and a livid scrape along one cheek. She was lying on her back, her head bent so badly to the right that her neck must have been broken. Her right arm was upraised and bent at the elbow, an old cow’s horn close to her hand. Her other hand was resting on her stomach, which seemed an oddly peaceful pose for someone who had presumably fallen to her death. The foot attached to the broken leg was bare while on the other foot was a cheap running shoe rather than the specialized footwear used by rock climbers. Bruno looked around but couldn’t see the missing shoe.

  “She’s certainly dead, so I sent the pompiers away. There was nothing for them to do,” said Fabiola, after greeting him and then bending to caress Balzac, whose tail wagged furiously to express his pleasure at seeing her. The dog then took one cautious sniff at the dead woman’s bare foot and then backed away and sat, looking at Bruno and waiting for instructions.

  “She has a broken neck and broken leg, so it looks like a fall,” Fabiola went on, her voice without emotion. “She has no identification that I could see, and you’ll have trouble getting good fingerprints. Her fingers are scraped raw from the climb, but there’s no obvious sign of foul play. I’d say she’s around forty years old and considerably overweight, so I’m surprised that she was climbing a cliff like that.”

  “Would you have climbed it?” he asked, knowing that in her days as a student Fabiola had been a keen mountaineer.

  “Not in the dark, I wouldn’t,” she replied, shaking her head firmly. “Even in daylight I’d want ropes and pitons before I tackled a climb like that. From her footwear, it looks like she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  Bruno looked up at the sheer wall of rock face above the overhang. It soared some twenty meters before giving way to the stone wall and tower, which rose another twenty meters farther. The lower stretch of cliff cont
ained a number of openings that Bruno remembered were troglodyte chambers. One of them had been a kitchen, and the others were storerooms and places where the families of château servants had lived. After the place was ruined and abandoned during the religious wars of the seventeenth century, people had still lived in the caves, and the Resistance had used them for shelter during the war. The caves were dry, and there was water nearby.

  The count had told him that the entire rock on which the château had been built was honeycombed with caves and fissures, some of them containing evidence of human habitation dating back millennia. A famous stone engraving of a horse’s head had been found in one of them, reckoned to be fifteen thousand years old. But what made Bruno step back in surprise was the sight of freshly scrawled letters high on the tower, in luminous paint of a reddish-orange color.

  “I-F-T-I,” he spelled out the letters. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “I’ve been puzzling over it,” said Fabiola. “See where the paint fades down and away just after the final I, as though she was starting a new letter, and that was when she fell. It could be an L or a K, a Y or even an R. I’ve no idea what she was trying to write. I was never much good at crossword puzzles.”

  “I can’t think of any words in French that begin with I-F but I suppose it could be English,” said Bruno. “And that looks like the same color paint on her hand. It’s very distinctive.”

  “Yes, mixed with blood from her fingers. That cow horn beside her right hand is odd. Quite a coincidence for her to have fallen and landed right beside it, so the horn may have fallen from her pocket or it could have been placed there later. If so, someone else must have been involved. I had a quick look around, but I saw no sign of the spray paint she seems to have used. If you can’t find the can, somebody must have taken it away.”

  “How long has she been dead?” Bruno asked.

  “Not long, around three to four hours I’d guess. Certainly not more than eight, which means she was climbing at night. No sign of a flashlight; in fact, there’s nothing in her pockets.”

  “Maybe she was climbing by moonlight. It’s close to a full moon.” Bruno kept a careful watch on the lunar calendar for his gardening. “I’ll have to find out if it was cloudy. Anything from her dentistry?”

  “Not that I could see, just a few standard fillings that could have been done anywhere in Europe, but you might want to ask a dentist. I’m almost done, just one or two more final checks, and then I’d better get back to the clinic.”

  “Anything about this that strikes you as odd, apart from the cow horn?” Bruno asked. He trusted Fabiola’s expertise and her instincts.

  “There are a couple of marks on her wrist and neck that aren’t clear to me. They could be rope burns if she was climbing with one. But there’s no sign of any rope or harness, and they could be marks from her fall. I know the police will take a good look at them, but I won’t forgive myself if I miss something.”

  “Could I use your magnifying glass?” Bruno took it and bent to peer closely at the mark on the woman’s neck and the ones on her wrist and forearm. He saw something glinting, two or three shreds of greenish-blue material.

  “Could those be strands of nylon, perhaps from a rope?” he asked, passing her the glass.

  She squinted. “Looks like that to me.”

  “That means she was almost certainly climbing with a partner who’s disappeared along with the rope and the paint. Your death certificate had better say that she died in a fall, in possibly suspicious circumstances.”

  Fabiola nodded. “Other than confirming the nylon threads, I don’t see the point of going to the expense of an autopsy.”

  “That will be up to J-J,” said Bruno. “It’s his budget.”

  As the region’s chief detective for the Police Nationale, J-J automatically took over any suspicious death inquiry. Not that they were frequent. The number of homicides each year in the département was usually in single figures, and J-J almost always solved them, sometimes with Bruno’s help.

  “Good luck with identifying her,” said Fabiola, closing her medical bag. “With luck you’ll be finished in time so we can go riding together later. I’ll leave the death certificate at the clinic for you to pick up, and I’ll put down ‘death by a fall, probably suspicious.’ What I ought to write down is ‘suicide by stupidity.’ ” She blew him a kiss by way of goodbye.

  Bruno waved back as he pulled out his phone to call J-J and sent Balzac off to search. By the time he had briefed J-J, Balzac’s bark signaled that he had found something. Bruno strolled a few meters along the base of the cliff to see his dog standing beside the dead woman’s missing shoe. Stroking Balzac in appreciation, Bruno sent him off to search for any traces of the woman’s scent. Then he went back to his van for binoculars and began to scan the cliff. About twenty meters above the fallen shoe and slightly to its right, he saw something glinting in the morning sun. It could be a piton, one of the metal supports that climbers hammered into cracks in the rock to support a rope. He’d leave that for J-J’s people to examine.

  Balzac barked again, this time from about a hundred meters away across the valley. His tail was stretched out flat, one paw raised, his neck lifted, the pose he assumed when pointing at game. Bruno walked across the turf to join him, feeling the ground start to become boggy beneath his feet as he neared the bank of the small River Beune, which here spread out into several sluggish streams. His dog waited with the dutiful patience of a well-trained hunting hound, his whole body pointing to the slope across the valley. It seemed that the dead woman must have come that way, across the watery meadow. Odd, therefore, that there had been no sign of mud on her legs or shoes.

  Bruno returned to the body. Although J-J’s team would doubtless take their own photos, he began taking pictures with his phone, just so he had a record and could start the process of identification. He started with a general shot of the location, used his zoom to capture the letters scrawled on the wall of the château and finally moved in for some close-ups of the face before examining the hands more closely. Good forensic work might get some partial prints, but mostly the fingertips had been scraped bloody.

  Other questions nagged at him, beyond the obvious one. Did she fall or was she pushed? Why would anyone have wanted to climb the cliff? If she wanted to get inside the outer wall of the château, it would be easier to climb where it was lower. Easier still, he thought, to come from the opposite direction, along the ridge where the only obstruction was a crumbling wall. Had she been trying to get into the tower itself? Or was she simply daubing some unfinished slogan? Perhaps the count would know.

  Chapter 3

  The count appeared not long after Fabiola left, and found Bruno poking through the grass at the base of the cliff where Balzac had found the missing shoe. Balzac darted across to greet the newcomer, who bent to fondle the basset’s long ears. The count, a tall man, rose to his full height as Bruno greeted him and began to explain what little he knew as they walked toward the body.

  “I’ve never seen her before and I have no idea who she is, God rest her soul.” The count’s usually cheerful face was solemn as he stared down at the body, shaking his head. He raised his hand to his brow and crossed himself. Only then did he look up at the cliff looming above and stepped back in surprise as he spotted the large scrawled letters on the castle wall.

  “What on earth…?” the count exclaimed. “Is this supposed to be some kind of graffiti art? Was she painting these letters? It doesn’t mean anything, not in any language I know.”

  “I was hoping you might help identify her or whatever slogan she was daubing. She’s not carrying any papers and you can see from the state of her hands we’ll have trouble getting fingerprints.”

  “I’m assuming she was one of the Templar enthusiasts. We’ve had trouble with them before, trying to break in and dig around the place. I invited some of them in to watch at the last archaeological dig here, so they could be satisfied there’s none of that legendary
Templar treasure here. I thought we’d seen the end of them after that. I think I’ve got an e-mail address somewhere for the secretary of their association. Perhaps he might be able to identify this unfortunate woman.”

  “Maybe this was an accidental fall, but some aspects are troubling,” Bruno said, explaining why he’d called in J-J and the detectives. “It’s not even clear how she got here.”

  “She could have left a car in the parking lot up the hill,” the count said. “I came here a different way.”

  “There was no car parked when I came and no car key in her pocket.”

  “You’d better check the parking lot at Cap Blanc as well. It’s just across the valley, an easy stroll, although a lot longer by road.” He pointed and Bruno turned to look. It was the same direction that Balzac had taken.

  “I had no idea it was so close,” he said. Bruno knew Cap Blanc, a cave in which prehistoric people had carved bas-relief sculptures of horses so lifelike they seemed to be walking out of the wall.

  “Just over there is the gisement, the rock shelter where they found the Venus of Laussel,” the count replied, pointing. “And you know about the carving of the horse’s head in the cave beneath the cliff. There have been more important prehistoric finds in this little spot than almost anywhere else on earth, quite apart from the château. Listen, Bruno, I’d rather not have this body here long. We have a group of schoolkids coming from Bergerac later this morning. What are you planning on doing with her?”

  “Detectives from the Police Nationale in Périgueux are on their way, so it will be up to them. I imagine we’ll have to put her into the morgue in Bergerac until we can identify her, and then it will be up to the next of kin. We’ll check the missing-persons list, distribute a photo through the media, all the usual procedures.”