GREY SOULS

This is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in1917, and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in NorthernFrance. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight andsound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughterbecause they are needed in the local factory. One freezing cold morning inthe dead of winter, a beautiful ten year old girl, one of three daughtersof the local innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal.Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Theirinterrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together whatactually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested andinterrogated, he was sitting by the bedside of his dying wife. He believesthat justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But thedeath of the child was not the only crime committed in the town duringthose weeks.