The Crowded Grave

night, but it’s there now.”
    “You heard nothing unusual?” She shook her head again.
    “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go and ask the other neighbors if they heard or saw Horst come back anytime after he left yesterday morning, if they heard anything, or if he had any visitors.”
    Bruno used his handkerchief to open the back door for her, blocked it open with a stone and went to his car to get a pair of rubber gloves. A couple of plants had been half wrenched from the ground beside the terrace, and there were two more lines dragged in the thin grass that led to the pounded patch of gravel where Horst’s car was parked.
    Back indoors, he examined the papers strewn across the floor. They were printouts in German, heavily corrected and annotated in Horst’s spiky handwriting. Bruno recognizedthe words
Archaeologie
and
Neanderthal
, but that was all. The bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling, but one of them had a cupboard where the lower shelves should have been. Inside were more files, marked “Bank” and “Tax” and another marked “Clothilde,” which contained letters and photos. Beneath them was an old photo album, and as Bruno leafed through he saw pictures of Horst as a young man getting his university degree and as a student with long hair and one of those curved mustaches that had been popular back in the sixties. The photos were chronological, so as Bruno turned the pages back he saw Horst as a schoolboy and as a child. There were family snaps of Horst with an older woman, presumably his mother, and several in which he had his arms around the shoulders of another boy, a year or two older.
    There seemed to be no pictures of a father, until he turned one page and stopped in surprise at a family group, of Horst as a baby in his mother’s arms. The older boy was sitting on the knee of a man in black uniform with a swastika armband. On the lapels were the two jagged lightning flashes that Bruno knew stood for SS.
    Horst was in his mid-sixties and had already stayed on at his university beyond the usual age of retirement. He’d have been born close to the end of the war, so he shouldn’t be surprised at Horst’s father, if that was indeed who he was, being in uniform. Being in the SS was somewhat different.
    He and Horst had never talked about the war, nor had Horst discussed his parents, although once or twice he’d remarked on the occasional incident of anti-German prejudice. But he seemed to understand it as the result of the ferocity with which the local Resistance had been crushed by the Wehrmacht. Bruno leafed back quickly through the remaining photos. There was one, clearly a wedding day with a younger,prettier version of Horst’s blond mother holding the arm of the same man, still in uniform and with an Iron Cross around his neck.
    Bruno eased the photo from the little corner tabs that held it in place, and on the back was a faded stamp of a photographer with an address in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin. There was no date, but tucked beneath it was another photo, the same man sitting on top of a tank with some other men in overalls, all of them grinning for the camera. Behind them was a burning house and one of the old French road signs. Bruno strained to read the words on the concrete arrow and was pretty sure it was Dunkerque.
    This could put a different perspective on Horst’s disappearance. Some local with long memories might consider this as a motive to do Horst harm, although Bruno had never understood those who sought to blame young Germans for the sins of their fathers. He’d have to get an expert to look at the photos to see if they could identify the units Horst’s father had served in. Some of them, like the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, were infamous in this part of France for the atrocities they had committed while heading for the Normandy beaches to attack the allied beachheads after D-day in June 1944.
    Bruno closed the family album and went to the printer, but the out-tray was empty. Beside it on the wide shelf was a tray where Horst kept his keys for house and car and museum, and they were still there, along with his mobile phone, his passport and wallet, cash and credit cards inside. Whatever had happened was no burglary. He pulled out his own phone and called Clothilde at the museum.
    “I’m at the house now and I’m worried. His wallet and passport and keys are all here, along with the car. When did you last see him?”
    “Yesterday morning. We spent the night