The Crowded Grave

need to get into this time,” Bruno told her. “He’s on the run and I need to know what he left behind.”
    Monique stubbed out her Royale filter and led the way to the tent, where the two sleeping bags zipped together had been replaced by a single sack, left open to air. Teddy’s rucksack was still there. Donning a pair of evidence gloves, Bruno opened it, found a toilet bag and saw with satisfaction that although the toothbrush was missing the hairbrush was still there.
    “Do you want a receipt for this?” he asked Monique. “I’ll have to take the whole rucksack.”
    “You’d better,” she said. “Just so I’m covered if there’s any problem. And do you want the envelope he left in the safe? They usually leave valuables with us.”
    “Yes, please.” He was angry with himself that he hadn’t asked her if there was anything else.
    Teddy had left a large manila envelope that seemed to contain only papers. Bruno put it into the rucksack, thanked Monique and headed back to the mobile police unit parked at the château. From a previous case he recognized Yves, one of the forensic experts, and showed him the rucksack. Yves took fingerprints from the hairbrush handle and then used tweezers to take some hairs from the brush itself. Bruno checked that Yves had the DNA data on the unidentified corpse for comparison, and then lugged the rucksack up to Isabelle’s stately room.
    He handed her Teddy’s big envelope—her English was better than his—and started to unpack the rucksack. “They’ve already taken Teddy’s fingerprints from the hairbrush,” he said as she slipped on some evidence gloves.
    “Routine.” She shrugged, and began shuffling through the papers, and Bruno went through the pockets of the rucksack and of every item of clothing inside it. He unrolled pairs of socks, looked at name tags and labels and smoothed out scraps of paper, candy wrappers and old bills that had found their way to the bottom of the sack.
    Isabelle leafed through Teddy’s papers and found his university transcripts, letters of recommendation from his professor and teachers, certificates from other archaeology digs where he’d worked—all the stuff he’d need if the museum wanted to check his credentials.
    “All as you’d expect, but what’s this?” she said, looking up. “This isn’t his handwriting, at least it’s not like the handwriting on these other papers.”
    She held up what seemed like a crudely drawn map, which looked much older than the rest of the papers in the envelope. She took it to the desk by the window, pushed aside the huge vase of flowers and beckoned Bruno to come over.
    “Get rid of those damn flowers,” she said. He smiled to himself as he took the vase to the corner of the room and then joined her, bending over the map. It was a photocopy of an older document, but something on one of the corners had been covered when the photocopy was made, and the paper was much whiter there.
    The map showed a river, joined by a stream, and then some lines that could have signified contours and a small track leading from a road. The main feature was a cross, with some thin lines drawn as if to measure its distance from the road, the stream and the start of the contoured slope. Each line had somescrawled numbers beside it and arrows led off the page to other locations, identified only by initials.
    “If those letters on the edge are
SD
, they could stand for ‘St. Denis,’ ” said Isabelle.
    “That would make these letters look like
LE
, which could be Les Eyzies, so this is the river,” said Bruno, drawing on his mental map of the district. Suddenly the location jumped into place.
    “It’s the archaeological dig,” he said. “And those scrawls beside the lines are distances in meters. The track runs a hundred and twenty meters from the river, and then this cross here is fifteen meters from the stream, eight meters from the start of the contours. I’ll need to go back and pace out the distances, but I think this is a map that shows where the unidentified corpse was buried.”
    “So this is how Teddy knew exactly where to dig,” said Isabelle. “And the map must have been drawn by somebody who knew where the body was buried, probably by somebody who took part in the killing. So how did Teddy get hold of it?”
    “What’s this blank patch?” Bruno asked. “Why would they want to cover something when they made the copy?”
    “That’s simple,” she said, and reached into her