The Crowded Grave

Sécurité whose troops made up the firearms team. The sergeant shook his head and shrugged; no plates for Bruno.
    They had discussed the approach, and Bruno had said there was no obvious reason for Jan to be alert and armed. He wanted to drive up beside the smithy, to go in himself while the armed team deployed quietly, and make the arrest. The sergeant had objected, wanting his men in place while Bruno used the bullhorn to call Jan to give himself up. Bruno had won that argument, but as he clambered out of the truck, feeling clumsy from the flak vest beneath his jacket, he was wishing that he’d listened to the sergeant.
    The place was quiet. There was no sound of hammer on iron nor of Jan’s salty curses, and none of the usual smell of burning coke. The smithy was empty, the tools all neatly tidied away and the fire cold. There was no car in the other barn,and the door to the main house was locked and the windows shuttered. Bruno signaled to the truck and men in black with weapons pointed deployed around the rest of the property. As the sergeant approached, Bruno gestured to the locked door. The sergeant turned back to the van and returned with a heavy ram. He took one side, Bruno the other, and they smashed it into the lock while another trooper stood cover behind them, his weapon aimed into the doorway. The door toppled open, but no sound or sign came from within.
    The sergeant went in first, flicking the button on the flashlight taped beneath the barrel of his rifle to illuminate the room. Bruno followed, and once the sergeant came down from upstairs and pronounced the premises clear, Bruno flicked on the switch inside the doorway, and the room blazed with light. He felt relieved. He’d begun to expect that they’d find Jan’s dead body in the abandoned house.
    “I’ll search the house,” Bruno told the sergeant. “I’d be grateful if your team could search everywhere else. Hold any papers that you find for me, and let me know of any signs that other people have stayed here. There’s an office with a computer in the barn by the smithy. Leave that to me.”
    Bruno took off his jacket, wriggled out of the flak jacket and handed it to the sergeant. “I’d have thought they’d have improved these things since my day,” he said.
    “You ought to see the new German ones,” the sergeant said. “My brother’s in the paratroopers in Afghanistan. He brought one back, light and terrific. He said it would stop anything short of an RPG.” He paused. “What unit were you in?”
    “Combat engineers, then attached to paratroopers,” said Bruno.
    The sergeant raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly. “You can count on us, then,” he said.
    “Check in the smithy for any false walls or trapdoors or anything like a basement,” Bruno said. “Get two of your men to take a good look in that lean-to where he stores his coke. Shift some of it if you have to.”
    The sergeant nodded and Bruno went into the house, but there was no study, no box of family files and documents. Jan must have kept everything in the office in the smithy. There was a bookshelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, some in Danish and some in German, and a row of political books in French, presumably Juanita’s.
    The drawers in the main bedroom contained only clothing, and standing on the chest there were a lot of photos of Juanita. They seemed the only items in the house to have been dusted, which reminded Bruno that he’d always liked Jan. There were two other bedrooms, each with two single beds made up with creased and grubby sheets. Another four people had been staying here. In the spare bathroom he found soiled towels and the discarded wrapping in Spanish of a disposable razor. In the bottom of the bath was a small, empty plastic bottle of shampoo, marked with the name of a hotel in Bayonne. That might be useful.
    Still looking for documents, Bruno checked the usual places, the attics and the freezer, the water tank of the bathroom and beneath the plastic bags of the garbage bags. There was nothing. The smithy office contained paperwork from the business and all the household bills, each loosely stuffed into separate file boxes marked for water, gas, electricity and taxes. Bruno pulled the drawers out of the filing cabinets. Wrapped in plastic and taped to the underside of the lower drawer were three passports. A West German one and an East German one were a decade out-of-date, both bearing the photo of a much-younger and much-slimmer Jan