The Crowded Grave

and identifying him as Dieter Vogelstern. That settled any lingering question of whether Janwas Horst’s brother. There was also a valid Cuban passport, with a more recent photo, in the name of Jan Pedersen, the same name as on the Danish passport he had used to obtain his French residency. Tucked inside it Bruno counted eighty one-hundred-dollar bills.
    He went outside and called Isabelle, asking if she could get a forensics team to Jan’s place. There might be fingerprints or DNA traces that could help identify Jan’s guests, and maybe even a credit card number from the stay at the Bayonne hotel. He gave her the various passport numbers, marveling at the vast international bureaucratic machine that he could summon into action for such an investigation.
    “The fact that Jan left the cash and the Cuban passport suggests that either he thinks he’s coming back, or he left involuntarily,” he said.
    “Or he doesn’t suspect we know about him,” said Isabelle.
    “Jan’s no fool. He must have known his real identity was likely to emerge once I started asking about Horst’s father and brother and said we’d be contacting the German police.”
    “So if we assume that Jan’s guests were the Basque unit, does that mean that the two brothers are in this voluntarily? You know them both, what’s your assessment?”
    “My views aren’t worth much. I never suspected that Jan wasn’t the Danish blacksmith he pretended to be,” said Bruno. “For what it’s worth, and I know him a lot better, I can’t see Horst involved.”
    Bruno hung up when he heard the sergeant calling from a small, half-ruined barn some distance to the rear of the smithy. Part of the low roof had collapsed and the rest was bowed, a sure sign that the laths had rotted; the windows were covered with stout wooden shutters. Bruno hoped this would not be Jan’s tomb, but the sergeant was pointing at the door itself and the sturdy modern bolt, still bright with newness.
    “It stinks of piss inside and there’s a filthy bed,” the sergeant said. “Someone was probably held prisoner here.”
    Bruno looked in, and paused, taking the sergeant’s flashlight. He shone it upward to see how much headroom there might be. There was one place where he could stand upright. Moving the light around he saw a bucket, evidently the only sanitation available, and an army surplus camp bed of canvas and thin metal bars. A filthy blanket lay atop it, and there was an empty plastic bottle beneath. Bruno switched off the flashlight and closed the door, trying to assess how much light the room’s occupant might have had. He just knew Horst had been there. There were some cracks in the door and one or two in the apex of the roof, but the sense of darkness was very strong. He must have spent a wretched couple of days in this place, Bruno thought, aware that his own brother was his jailer.
    Bruno opened the door again and shone the flashlight around, trying to see if Horst had left any scrap of paper or any scratch marks on the stones of the wall. He crouched down beside the bed, shining the light into every seam and each pouch where the metal bars fit to see if some slip of paper had been squeezed into the gap. There was nothing. He was bracing himself to start examining the contents of the bucket when the sergeant called out to him.
    Bruno turned. “See this?” the sergeant asked, pointing to scratches on the inside of the door. The marks were only visible now that Bruno had opened the door wide and folded it back against the outside wall. The sinking sun threw the scratches into relief.
    “ETA = Jan = RAF,” he read aloud, adding to himself, “Red Army Faktion.” Easier to scratch that into the wood than “Baader-Meinhof.”
    It was proof that Jan had been part of Baader-Meinhof and was now working with ETA and the Basques. And furtherproof that Horst had been kept there, and that whatever protection he’d been prepared to give his brother had been withdrawn. Horst was a victim, rather than an accomplice.
    “Sarge,” came a shout from the lean-to beside the smithy. One of the troopers had emerged and was waving, his face blackened with the coke they had moved, much of it now piled on the bare ground outside. “We got something.”
    The floor of the lean-to was made of a solid sheet of cement, except in the rear corner where coke dust in the cracks revealed a large square. The troops must have swept the floor for the cracks to emerge. Bruno was