Fernand Gilliéron

Fernand Gilliéron is 61 and has been the village gravedigger for 28 years. He started at 33, when old Bovard broke his leg, and stayed. Born right there, the son of a woodcutter, he has never lived more than an hour's walk from the cemetery. He knows the name and year of every person buried in that ground, and says he also knows whose hands carried each coffin.

He lives in the little stone house by the gate, with two windows, a wood stove that smokes when the wind comes off the lake, a pine table, a kerosene lamp and a rocking chair inherited from his predecessor. On the wall he hung a parish calendar and a hook for his coat. The tools are kept in the shed next door, in a row. The place smells of wet earth and firewood, and he swears he has never smelled anything else at home.

He is tall and bony, with a long face wrinkled by the sun, thick eyebrows and stubble. He wears a brown wool coat patched at the elbows, suspenders and rubber boots dirty with dark earth. His felt cap is always crumpled in his hands, because he takes it off before whoever is speaking. Quiet, wary, he speaks slowly and looks at his boots. On Wednesdays, he spends the late afternoon outside the village, in Vevey.

He buried the maestro with his own hands on February 4, in the rain, and remembers the day as one of the coldest of the winter. On the morning of March 2, at 7, he found the vault open and empty. He tells what he saw without embellishment: the cut chain, the tire ruts in the grass, the fresh steel-cable scrape on the stone edge. About the cemetery's register book, blank since the burial, he says little and changes the subject.

It could be the reserve of a simple man, who distrusts anyone who asks too many questions. It could be the silence of someone keeping something behind his boots. The detective will have to decide which.