Children of War
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2014 Walker and Watson Ltd
The moral right of Martin Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN 978 1 84866 401 2
TPB ISBN 978 1 84866 402 9
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84866 403 6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Also by Martin Walker
Bruno, Chief of Police
Dark Vineyard
Black Diamond
The Crowded Grave
The Devil’s Cave
The Resistance Man
For my fellow members of the ancient and honourable
Confrérie du Pâté de Périgueux
Benoît Courrèges, chief of police of the small French town of St Denis and known to everyone as Bruno, had witnessed too much violent death. After twelve years in the French army and eleven as a policeman, he had seen the gruesome effects of artillery shells and machine guns and then of the hot metal of automobile crashes on the human body. And while he often hoped to forget the impact of a bullet on his own flesh, the sullen ache in his hip with the coming of each winter’s damp would remind him of the shot that had sent him tumbling into the snow in the hills above Sarajevo. He’d never forget the brightness of the French
tricolore
on the sleeve of the medic who had worked on him until the helicopter came. Any sight of his country’s flag now always brought back to Bruno the red of his blood against the white of the snow and the blue helmet he’d been wearing as a United Nations peacekeeper.
But Bruno had never seen anything quite as grim as the sight of the dead man now lying trussed and half-naked before him. Rain trickled down the corpse’s chest and stomach, gleaming on the fresh burn marks where the stubs of male nipples had been. The body was lit by the headlamps of Bruno’s own van and the large fire engine of St Denis. Flickering flames on the tyres of the burning car defied the steady rain and the
white foam the firemen had used to douse the fire. Breathing through his mouth to avoid the doubled stench of charred flesh and burning rubber, Bruno checked his watch. Dawn was still an hour away.
It was not only the smell that turned his stomach. He felt sickened by a personal sense of outrage that such an evil killing had taken place on his turf, almost within sight of the town he was sworn to protect. Even though the dead man was a stranger, Bruno felt the manner of this man’s death had been a kind of pollution of these woods that he knew so well. He’d never be able to bring his horse or his dog this way without thinking of it. And this atrocity had been carried out by people skilled in the blackest arts of death, professionals who were notoriously hard to bring to justice. But he’d find them.
‘He’s certainly dead and it’s obviously murder. Did you see the wound under the chin?’ asked Fabiola, a doctor whose presence was legally required to certify death. Bruno nodded. A stiletto up through the soft skin of the mouth and straight into the brain killed quickly and with very little blood. It was one of the assassin’s tricks taught to troops in special forces.
‘I can’t even give you an approximate time of death,’ she went on. Fabiola was the best doctor at the medical clinic of St Denis and a good friend. She wore no hat and rain had plastered streaks of her dark hair to her face, covering the scar on her cheek. Without make-up her face was pale in the headlights and her eyes enormous. The thought struck him how beautiful Fabiola could be.
‘Normally I’d use an anal thermometer for body temperature, but he’s been badly sodomized and then the fire …’ Her voice broke off.
‘The ground is dry beneath his hips,’ said Bruno. ‘The storm broke just after two this morning, so presumably they chained him to the tree before then.’
‘You were awake for the storm?’ she asked. He nodded. The lightning had not disturbed him but the quick scuttle of Balzac into his bed had jolted him awake just as the thunder came. Usually barred from his master’s bed, the basset hound was still young enough to be granted a dispensation during the tempests that occasionally gave this gentle valley of the river Vézère a brief taste of an Indian monsoon. Bruno had risen, gone to the window and looked out to see if the rain was hard enough to damage the vineyards now that the harvest was due.
After a lapse into a steady drizzle, the rain was coming harder again, the tail-end of a storm front that had swept in from the Atlantic. Once Fabiola had finished her examination, Bruno tried to cover the body with a plastic sheet. It protected the charred bones of the feet and lower legs but didn’t stretch as far as the man’s wrists, still handcuffed around the trunk of a young chestnut tree. The poor devil would have to stay that way, arms stretched out behind his head, his legs staked apart and his back arched like some medieval torture victim, until the forensics team arrived from Périgueux with their cameras and checklists.
‘Do you think he was killed before the fire burned his feet away?’ Fabiola’s voice sounded forced as she tried to control it.
Bruno shrugged, a gesture that turned into a shudder as he thought about it. ‘That’s more your expertize than mine. I don’t know how you’d tell.’
‘The autopsy will confirm it. After death the heart stops pumping blood.’
There was no doubt that this murder would require an autopsy. It was worse than brutal. Bruno suspected the feet had been burned deliberately before the car was set on fire. The blaze might have scorched the legs but it could hardly have devoured them. He guessed the killers had poured petrol onto his feet.
The only time Bruno had heard of that being done was in the Algerian war. It was a cruel joke of the rebels, who called the white colonists on their land the
pieds-noirs
, the black feet, after the black boots the French troops had worn when they first conquered the country in 1830. ‘We’ll give you black feet,’ they taunted the French prisoners as they poured the petrol. Hercule had told him that; an old friend, now dead, who had served in the vicious conflict France had fought in vain to keep Algeria and its oil.
‘No identification?’ Fabiola asked. ‘I’d say North African heritage with that hair and the olive skin.’
‘Nothing on him and the registration plates were removed from the car.’ Bruno had taken the VIN number from the engine block but he didn’t expect an answer until much later in the day. Fabiola was staring at him, expecting him to say more. ‘All we know is that Serge up at the farm was getting up for the cows and saw the explosion in the woods. He called the
pompiers
just after four. You may as well go back to bed, but I’m stuck here until the forensics team arrives.’
Bruno yawned and stretched. It had been a broken night, the phone call with the special tone waking him before midnight. Then he had dozed, expecting to be called again, until the storm had woken his dog. He’d slept again, Balzac tucked in against his shoulder, until Albert had called him to
report the fire in the woods. At least the storm had stopped it from spreading. Like most of the rest of southern France, the
Département
had recently issued a forest fire alert after the dry summer.
‘It’s too late to go back to bed and I wouldn’t sleep, not thinking about this.’ Fabiola gestured with her chin at the plastic-covered corpse. ‘I’ll go back and shower and put some coffee on. Feel free to come and have a cup once you can get away.’
‘Thanks, but it will be some time. I might have to leave the horses to you this morning.’
‘Poor Bruno. Nobody should have to see scenes like this. If you need something to help you sleep …’