Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

length. Automatically, François turned his head and blew. Ash tumbled to the floor. “Sorry. The smoke stops me from smelling the corpses. Some of them get a bit ripe until I do the embalming. Anyway, look at the size of that bump. I don’t think he got that by accident.”
    Bruno nodded, agreeing. “Have you called a doctor?”
    “Of course. You know the law. Anything suspicious on a body and we call the police first and then a doctor. I called the medical center and asked for that new one, Fabiola. She signed the initial death certificate, so she has to be called in. Max’s death was marked as nonsuspicious. She was the one who told me to try that number I reached you on. Your own cell phone isn’t working. Have you changed it?”
    “It’s a long story. Use the new number for the moment. It was a nonsuspicious death when we found the body, but it’s certainly suspicious now,” said Bruno. “What do you make of it? Could he get that kind of wound from just falling and hitting his head on something?”
    “If he fell from a height, yes. But the way it’s supposed to have happened, collapsing in a wine vat, I can’t see how that would have caused this bump. It’s not the usual kind of wound you get from a club or anything like that. I can’t say much more because I don’t have the kind of equipment that forensics teams have, but it just looks odd to me.”
    “Could it have been inflicted after death?” Bruno pressed. “I wasn’t being gentle when I pulled him out of the vat and threw him over the side. Maybe the wound happened when he landed.”
    “Don’t ask me.” François shrugged. “You need a forensics specialist.”
    Bruno was already on the phone to J-J when Fabiola arrived, pulling on surgical gloves and a face mask, wrinkling her nose at the smell from François’s cigarette. With her scar covered, Bruno noticed that her eyes were magnificent, large and dark and fringed with very long eyelashes. She took plastic bags from her briefcase and put them on the corpse’s hands, and then pulled out a magnifying glass and began to peer at the wound.
    “The doctor is looking at him now, J-J. What time should I expect you? Okay, within the hour. Call me when you get to Saint-Denis because I’ll be at the farmhouse where it happened, sealing off the place. You might have trouble finding it.”
    “There are wood splinters in this gash in the head,” said Fabiola as Bruno closed his phone. “I’ll leave them there, but make a note of that, would you?”
    “The forensics experts from Bergerac …,” Bruno began.
    “I know,” she said briskly. “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to affect what clues may be left. But write down what I said about the wood splinters. I’m pretty sure that blow to the head wouldn’t have been fatal, and I’m going to stick with my initial opinion of asphyxiation as the cause of death, but he may have been knocked unconscious.”
    “Could that have been accidental?” Bruno asked.
    “I don’t know. Head wounds are funny things.” She pulled back the eyelids, peered into the mouth and nostrils and then began to examine the rest of the body more closely.
    “Have you noticed the penis?” asked François. “If you ask me, this guy had sex not long before death. You might want to tell the forensics team to check the seminal vesicles.”
    Fabiola nodded and took her magnifying glass to the groin area. “I think you’re right. Make a note of that too,” she said to Bruno, and took another plastic bag and placed it carefully around the boy’s genitals. She parted his legs and peered closely. “No sign of anal penetration.” Then she began to look at the hands through the thin plastic film, paying particular attention to the nails. “Left hand, foreign matter in the nails of index and middle fingers. Hair, possibly pubic.”
    Her inspection completed, Fabiola took a large plastic bag and wrapped it around Max’s head. “Short of cutting him open, that’s the best I can do, but make sure the forensics team gets my notes, and give them my card. Since this looks like it’s going to be a police inquiry, I’ll type out a statement for you, Bruno. I can’t rule out the possibility that he fell awkwardly and hurt his head that way, but I’d say it was unlikely. I think somebody hit him or pushed him.”
    “It could have been me, when I got him out of the vat,” said Bruno. “You remember helping me hold him up when we tried to breathe air into