Death on the Pont Noir (10 page)

Unable to sleep for the thoughts whirling around in his head, Rocco got up early, put a saucepan of water on a low heat, then dressed quickly in a tracksuit and went for a run. It was still dark outside, but he was able to follow the lane out from the village easily enough, his usual training route when he was in the mood.

The air was bitingly cold and deathly still, and he’d even got the jump on the village cockerels, usually so vocal and quick to wake everyone. Other than the brief stomping of a few cows startled by his passing, and one or two early birds ignoring the mad human to start the day with their singing, he was alone. No traffic, either, as usual. Perfect.

He covered a kilometre at a brisk rate, then turned and jogged back. In spite of the temperature, he’d built up a sweat and his lungs were aching as they took in the chilled air. As a training run it was nothing like enough, but better than nothing.

Back indoors, he bathed, drank his coffee, then headed for the car. He wanted to get to the office before the main shift came on and the atmosphere got blown to hell by noise, confusion and the daily briefing, which he tried to miss anyway. He also wanted to take a good look at the wall map and have a think.

The map in the main office was big enough to include even small details of the countryside up to thirty kilometres out from Amiens, including tracks, streams, old WWI and WWII ammunition sites, trenches and other topographical details natural and man-made. The only items not marked were the many filled-in shell craters left over from the war, their locations circular white scars on the land and still visible if one knew where to look.

Rocco focused on the roads.

He grabbed a chair and sat down with a fresh coffee, staring up at the map and following the network of major roads likely to be used during a visit, linking Amiens with the safest routes in and out, and the quickest route to and from Paris. He discounted the main national roads, where ambush points were aplenty simply by being accessible from both sides. Saint-Cloud and his men would have the most obvious choke points covered, using the local police to flood the area and discourage anyone from considering any possible assault. Instead, he looked for some kind of pattern elsewhere, something that would jump off the wall and smack him between the eyes.

But nothing did.

He made more coffee, brutally strong this time, with lots of sugar, and tried to stop thinking like a policeman. He had to get into the mind of the attackers, of the men
who wanted de Gaulle out of the picture for ever. He had to picture how, rather than preventing a killing, he would execute one. He had to go against the grain.

To think like an assassin.

He shuffled close to the map on the chair and sat back, eyeing the uneven web of roads. He automatically discounted anywhere close to villages or towns, anywhere where security forces would be certain to close down the area, flooding all possible means of escape with men and guns. That way lay certain failure.

So, somewhere remote, then.

He thought about where de Gaulle would be likely to go if he came here. And come here he would, he was certain of that. There could only be a limited number of places the president would consider worthwhile visiting out here, from strategically important industrial sites to places of national interest. And each one of those would have to be a point of maximum political impact. The president would want it, the advisors would suggest it – and the public would expect it.

Something out there must ring a bell.

He thought back to previous attacks. The only common denominators seemed to be de Gaulle on one side and his enemies on the other. And although the use of cars, guns and explosives was common, as were roadside attacks, none of them presented a pattern. All the attacks were clearly planned, but the methodology was almost random in nature, perpetrated by different groups with different training, skills and reasoning. Except that they all aimed at what usually turned out to be an official car.

An official car.

Like they use in processions.

A
Citroën
DS
.

He skidded the chair closer, his heart tripping faster as the possibilities began building in his mind. He was looking at the section of the map which included the road where Simeon had witnessed the ramming incident, and thinking about rehearsals. The road was nowhere special … not even on a regular through-route and little used even by locals. But that surely made it ideal for a practice run; something you didn’t want anyone to see, where timing and distance had to be specific.

A truck with a battering ram on the front. Thinking of assaults on a car, that detail alone was very unusual: someone had decided that whatever they were going to do, guns alone would not work. So, if it was a rehearsal, all he had to do was figure out where the real event was to take place. Presumably somewhere similar in layout.

Twenty minutes later, he was about to give up when his eyes landed on a straight section of road in the middle of open countryside, several kilometres from any visible habitation. The ground looked level, there were few trees or other natural cover, unless what looked like a smudge mark was a small copse.

Something about it made his gut clench.

He checked the scale of the map. The smudge lay approximately two hundred metres from the road. Almost adjacent to it on the map, the road was flanked by two broad lines and chevrons indicating a cutting. Or was it an embankment? God, he should know this – he’d studied enough maps in his time, reading them like a book to determine fighting terrain, gradients, dead ground,
approach routes and exits. He rubbed his face. He’d had too much coffee and too little sleep. He felt a burst of impatience and went to the legend panel in one corner, showing the scale and markings. Chevrons – that was it. It meant the road passed over a bridge with a gully beneath.

Back to the map.

The layout was similar enough to where the ramming had happened, but he could see no reason why anyone, least of all the president, would need to travel along it. It was in the middle of nowhere, for God’s sake. Just a boring, straight, little-used piece of tarmac lost in a patchwork of fields made famous only by history.

He bent closer. Faint lettering showed against the bridge.

Pont Noir
. Black bridge.

He turned and checked the office. A uniformed officer was working quietly across the far side. He was a
long-service
member named Berthier, consigned to desk duties. If anyone knew the area, he would.

‘What’s the Pont Noir?’ Rocco asked him.

The man looked blank for a moment, his concentration broken. Then, ‘Ah, Pont Noir. You’ve never been there?’

‘No.’

‘It’s like … a war relic – a site.’

‘A memorial?’

‘Not yet – but it’s going to be. It’s a deep gully, some say formed centuries ago. They uncovered a number of military remains there a couple of years ago, then a lot more just recently. French, mostly, but British, Indians and Australians, too. Like the League of Nations. They think it could have been a field hospital from the First World War, dug into the gully as protective cover. A team of university
archaeologists are out there on and off, along with British and Australian volunteers. They’ve been trying to get it excavated and declared a national monument. It’s not the sort of place to take your girlfriend, though.’

‘Why?’

The man hesitated, wary of causing offence. ‘It’s … creepy. Always chilly, even in summer. It’s like there’s no life to the place … like the warmth has been sucked out of it.’ He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘Sorry, but you’d have to go there to see what I mean.’

‘Who would know most about it?’

‘There’s a British War Graves Commission office in Arras – they’ve been monitoring and running the excavations. But the local historical society would be involved, too, and the national monuments office in Paris.’

War graves. Rocco remembered John Cooke, the British gardener who worked in the area. He’d met him on his first day in Poissons, when he’d found a dead woman in the British military cemetery just outside the village. The man had been helpful and calm in the face of what had been a daunting discovery.

He checked his watch. Just after eight. Where the hell had time gone? He looked up the number of the Arras office and dialled, and immediately got through to a superintendent named Blake, who spoke fluent French.

‘The site was uncovered not long ago after a landfall,’ the man told him. ‘A number of remains were found, and it was initially thought to have been a roadside burial site, maybe near a field hospital, which they hadn’t had time to signpost during a battle. That happened quite a lot, and sites easily got lost. At first it seemed to be mainly
British and Australians, then a researcher in London found a reference written on a battlefield map, so they began digging a bit wider. What they discovered was a whole network of graves up to a hundred and fifty strong.’

‘So it’s a cemetery,’ said Rocco.

‘Not quite, Inspector. Partly because of the location in the gully, and the difficulty of accessing it for visitors and the likelihood of further subsidence, we’re in the process of moving the remains to a site nearby, clear of the road. But there are … sensitivities about the area.’

‘In what way?’

‘Some want the road and bridge closed permanently as a mark of respect to the dead. It’s actually not used much and they say it would be easy to use alternative routes. But plans have been put forward by the Australian and British Governments, countries which have the majority of dead on the site, for a memorial to be erected nearby, and for the road to be kept open as a sign of unity and determination.’

‘What’s the likely outcome?’

‘Oh, I have no doubt their proposal will go ahead. We’ve already marked out a potential site with access for visitors. And approval has already come from the highest level, in fact.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The president himself.’ His voice dropped. ‘In fact – and this is top secret, you understand – he’s expressed a wish to make a private visit when he’s next in the area, as a sign of respect. As a military man himself, he likes the idea of a memorial. All we need to know now is when that will be.’

Rocco thanked Blake and put the phone down. He turned back to the map. His head was buzzing and he suddenly wanted a drink. Unwise, under the circumstances, and not a good idea generally, although it would certainly dull the enormity of the idea forming in his mind. But that was the last thing he wanted to do.

A war memorial in the making, in the middle of nowhere, with de Gaulle’s full approval and an expressed desire to visit the site without public ceremony or the customary press entourage. Suddenly Saint-Cloud’s briefing and what Massin had told him about the attack on the official car was assuming a whole different slant.

If Blake knew, why hadn’t Saint-Cloud mentioned it? Or was Blake merely playing up the possibility to highlight the presence of the burial site?

As he stared at the map, he felt the hairs move on the back of his neck. It wasn’t just the road or where it led to
that mattered. It was something else. Faintly drawn, as if the draftsman had been unsure about whether it existed or not, a thin line met the road at right angles.

It was a track, coming out of the fields immediately adjacent to the bridge. A single track, probably unsurfaced, and meeting the road immediately opposite a point where the gully was at its deepest.

He grabbed a sheet of white paper and a pencil from a desk nearby and slapped it over the map where the ramming had occurred. Drawing quick lines on the paper, he sketched a rough outline of the track and the road, adding a circle to show the conifers where the camera had been stationed and where Simeon’s mysterious watcher had been standing.

Then he slid the paper across and placed it over the area of the Pont Noir, where the road crossed the bridge … and a track came out of nowhere at right angles. The only thing missing was the clump of pine trees.

Other than that, it was almost identical.

Rocco felt his heart pounding. There were times – not often, but rewardingly common enough – when idle thoughts, coupled with facts and suspicions, turned to absolute certainty. And right now was one of those times.

He picked up the telephone. It was time to call
Saint-Cloud
. If anyone could confirm the exact itinerary and timing for the president to visit the Pont Noir, it would be his security chief.

Then he put down the receiver.

He couldn’t think why, but instinct made him decide against talking to Saint-Cloud just yet. He stared instead at the map, and his overlay of the road and track.

If he understood the map details and the descriptions correctly, the road ran across the bridge, which spanned a drop into a deep gully. Beyond the bridge lay open fields, a smoothly rolling expanse of Somme countryside, no doubt dotted with the trademark white blemishes of former
shell-holes
and trenches so common in the area. No other roads, no houses or farm buildings. Anyone driving along it had a clear run to the main road three kilometres away. If they made it that far, they were away and free.

He shivered.
He was thinking like an assassin
.

His eyes were drawn back to the bridge. To the track.

He was looking at a kill zone.

By the time Rocco arrived at the Pont Noir, it was raining hard, cold, stinging needles that numbed the skin and blurred the landscape, moving across the fields in a malevolent cloud, drenching everything in their path. He shrugged it off; bad weather had never bothered him much, not once he’d got an idea firing up and needing answers. And this one was beginning to call loud and clear.

He walked to the centre of the structure. Other than the patter of the rain, it was deathly quiet here, and considerably colder than in town, as if the weather wanted to punish the rolling fields for being there. But there was something else, too: it was, as Berthier had said in his apologetically poetic manner, as if history itself had laid its ghostly hand on the area, draining the land of any warmth. Then a bird sang; a single trill, but distant and faint, as if it didn’t wish to come close to disturb this place with its cheerful song. Maybe it was protesting at the rain.
Or maybe it had forgotten to leave for warmer climes.

The bridge’s parapet consisted of thick wire hawsers linking a series of metal posts each two metres apart. Rocco peered over the wires to the gully below. It was a long way down. He shuffled forward until his toes protruded over the iron lip along the edge and used his rain-spotted toecaps as gun sights, focusing on the ground. He wondered what had caused this enormous gash in the earth. It was overgrown in places, nature having reclaimed it over the years, with an array of rabbit holes in the side of the bank between scrubby bushes holding the soil together. There were clear signs of man-made digging, too, with strips of tape between small white posts marking where measurements had been made.

He shivered and continued walking, his footsteps brisk on the tarmac. The surface of the road was good, solid and smooth, untroubled by the passage of too many heavy trucks. He stepped off the far end of the bridge and walked a hundred metres or so to where something white fluttered on a post adjacent to the road. It stood out because it was so out of place amid these fields. He found an oblong patch of mud the size of a rugby pitch marked out by pegs and white tape. Inside the oblong were more lines and squares, similar to the kind of markings used by builders.

It was the planned memorial site.

Rocco stared across the fields, scanning the area back to the bridge. The landscape lay muffled and still beneath the blanket of cold rain, fields normally full of sugar beet and wheat now empty and soaked, uninviting. A male hare moved against the background in the middle of a field, slow and cautious like an old man testing his limbs, rather
than the fleet-footed creature that it could be, and one or two birds circled further away, seeking thermals to carry them higher.

Other than that, nothing.

He tried to picture this place as it had been nearly half a century ago, churned by war and man, an open charnel house, muddy, cold and desolate and dotted with humanity, some alive, most not. Even with his experience of war, he found it difficult; the war here had been like no other. He thought instead of the symbolism involved: of the president coming here to give a nod of his head to a stone representing what had gone before, so that others might feel a sense of recognition, of remembrance. Not that Rocco objected to that; he just wondered what the men themselves would have thought had they been given a voice, their symbolism being shifted without consultation. Ignored in the campaign for a war, ignored in the planning of a battle, pounded beyond recognition during its execution and shunted around for convenience afterwards like pieces of furniture.

He turned and walked back to the bridge. A few metres beyond it lay the mouth of the track he’d seen on the map, coming out at right angles from the fields. It looked little used, although flat and compacted and very straight. There were no ruts that he could see, just a few faint imprints of horses’ hooves. Carthorses were still the norm around here, ponderous and powerful beasts, a world away yet from what was common elsewhere. Tractors were coming in, but financial help was expensive. For those rich in time but with little money, the old ways still prevailed.

A sad-looking wooden structure sat alongside the track a hundred and fifty metres away. Too big to be a shed, but
too small for a barn, it was black and forlorn and looked as if a strong wind might send it tumbling across the fields at any moment like an empty cardboard box. Topped by a rusting corrugated-metal roof, it looked forgotten and forlorn, like the track itself, with only a line of pigeons sitting on the apex to give it any semblance of current use. Life and progress had passed by very closely over the years, with the road and the bridge, brushing against it. Yet the shed had remained as it had always been, ignored and desolate, a monument to a time long gone.

He walked up the track, the mud sucking at the soles of his shoes, and wondered how far the track ran. The map hadn’t been detailed enough for that, and it would take some local knowledge to find out for sure. But someone would know.

He bent and examined the ground. Tyre marks, puddled with muddy water, showed where a vehicle had pulled in and stopped. Clear treads, sharply outlined. Not tractor tyres, nor cartwheels, which would have been worn smooth. Something newer. Heavy. And footprints where the driver had climbed out. Not a farmer’s boots, with their heavy, wavy-line patterns and worn-down heels, but flat soles, smooth, with sharply defined edges like his own.

City shoes.

He approached the shed. The pigeons watched him come, then took off in a rush, scattering into the sky in a burst of flapping wings, leaving behind a stained roof and a few drifting feathers. The dilapidated structure they’d been perched on looked even worse up close, a miracle of dogged survival in decayed wood and corrugated sheeting, the slats of the walls curled at the ends and shot through
with knot holes that had long lost their hard centres.

He peered through one of the holes. What limited light there was filtering through showed a floor covered by browned, dry grass and nettles to waist height, throttling a set of rusted harrows. Stacks of rotting wooden crates piled haphazardly to the ceiling, remnants of a long-forgotten harvest, took up the remainder of the space. One of the wall slats moved as he touched it, and dropped like a guillotine, narrowly missing his fingers. He decided to leave well alone before the whole place fell on him. Desmoulins would have a field day if he had to come and dig him out from under a fallen barn. He checked the near end of the structure, which had two large doors held together by a huge padlock. It was rusted with age, the keyhole jammed with years of dirt.

A car engine broke into the silence, followed by the hiss of tyres on wet tarmac. He turned as a beaten-up grey van clattered by on the road, the driver an old man in workman’s blues and a peaked cap giving a jaunty salute through the flapping quarter-light.

Rocco watched as it disappeared into the distance, taking the rain with it and leaving behind nothing but the drip-drip and gurgle of water running off the fields and into a storm gully.

It was the only vehicle to have passed by since he’d arrived.

He walked back down the track and heard the beat of wings as the pigeons returned, reclaiming their places on the shed roof. He crossed the road and stopped at the top of the bank on the far side, where stout white poles standing at knee height were the only indication of the road’s edge
and the drop beneath. He looked down, his feet close to the lip. It wasn’t quite so far down at this point as it was in the centre of the bridge, but still dizzying enough.

At the bottom was a gleam of water; a natural pond formed by nature, its surface as forbidding as black glass, the edges an indistinct mass of weeds and reeds.

He tried not to think about what would happen to any car plunging down right here, or the occupants trapped inside.