Death on the Pont Noir (7 page)

‘Lucas?’ It was late in the afternoon when Desmoulins stuck his head round the door and got Rocco’s attention. ‘Those crash-damaged vehicles you were asking about?’

Rocco blinked, his thoughts still on Saint-Cloud’s briefing and his final words. He wasn’t in the habit of telling Massin everything he was doing day to day because it wasn’t necessary. But he didn’t like being told by an outsider to hold back information about his movements; it went against the grain of all he’d been taught.

‘What about them?’ He’d forgotten about the Englishmen, and had almost pushed the crash investigation to the back of his mind. If Saint-Cloud wanted his help on security checks for de Gaulle, he would have to hand over some of his caseload for others to handle. Still, his curiosity in unexplained events never entirely vanished, no matter what other priorities came up.

‘Nothing’s shown up in any local garages, but a Renault
truck has been found torched in a quarry near Picquigny. There are remnants of camouflage canvas and green wood on the scene, so it could be the one you’re looking for. The locals thought the smoke was a farmer burning dead wood, so they didn’t bother checking it out earlier. They only just got round to calling it in when they realised what it was.’

Picquigny. About ten kilometres to the west of Amiens. Rocco stood up. He needed a break and some fresh air. ‘Better take a look, then. Get Rizzotti, will you? And tell him to bring his camera. Let’s go see what we can find.’ He wasn’t expecting much, but it was an outstanding matter to be checked out, and it might serve to clear his mind a little.

By the time they arrived, the remains of the truck were cold, with only a thin veil of smoke hanging in the air like a ghost. The carcass had settled onto the axles, and the tyres had burnt down to the rims. The throat-catching aroma of burnt metal and rubber was overlaid with the harsher tang of petrol fumes.

Rocco recognised the model by its stubby size and shape. A Renault Goelette 4x4, a small, brutishly effective workhorse, often used as a military ambulance among other functions. There were a few about in private hands, sold off by the military and used in all manner of capacities. He stood back from the scene while Dr Rizzotti took an initial look around, but could see nothing about the location to tell him why the truck had been torched here. It was parked off the road in an old chalk quarry, just out of sight of passing vehicles, but he could think of lots of other places where it would have probably remained unseen for longer. But why set fire to it? It was screaming to be noticed by someone sooner or later, no matter how uninquisitive the
locals might be. Perhaps it had become a liability and the men driving it had been left with no choice but to dump it and leave.

‘You think I can tell anything from this?’ Dr Rizzotti murmured, gesturing at the remains. ‘I’m a doctor, not a mechanic.’

‘I’m not asking for an annual service on it,’ Rocco replied. ‘I need your scientific eye, that’s all.’ He had initially found Bernard Rizzotti defensive and overcautious in his opinions, but over the ensuing months they had formed a good working relationship. The doctor had found the investigative side of his work rewarding, and responded well to Rocco including him in the procedure whenever possible.

Rizzotti grunted and smiled an acknowledgement. ‘Very well. Let me see. As you can see from the remains, the fire was clearly fierce enough to scorch the surrounding vegetation and blacken the chalk face of the diggings. But there is not enough soft material in a truck cab like this to cause that level of heat, so I think perhaps the person who set the fire used petrol to help it along.’ He shrugged. ‘That would suggest they wanted to obliterate as much as possible of the vehicle and leave nothing for us – you – to work with.’

The fire had certainly done that, eating away at anything consumable on the truck and leaving a shell of thin metal for the cab and hood, and the bare metal structure of the rear bed with the wooden floor and sides almost completely gone.

Desmoulins found a stick and began teasing open the driver’s door and poking around inside, while Rocco went
round to the front of the cab, where Rizzotti was squatting before a pile of ash on the ground.

‘Interesting,’ Rizzotti muttered. Under the remains of the vehicle’s front wing, he had found a thick section of wood that had not burnt all the way through. The end of the wood showed traces of saw marks and a sticky coating. Rocco bent to touch it. Was it tar … or black paint?

Rizzotti supplied the answer. ‘It looks like a railway sleeper. I bought a couple recently from the rail depot, for my garden. Extremely heavy and durable.’ He prodded the end with his pen. ‘See? Weathered by age and preservative. The flames ran out of heat before they could consume the wood completely.’ He dug gingerly in the pile of ash and lifted something from the powdery remains. It was curved and uniform, the thickness of a little finger, and heavy, about a metre in length.

‘Steel cable,’ said Rocco. He recognised the spiral shape of the burnt metal. He’d seen plenty in burnt-out trucks in Indochina. The sight triggered flashes of memory he didn’t wish to pursue. He shook his head and focused hard on what he was seeing.

Rizzotti pursed his lips, anticipating Rocco’s question. ‘The sleeper could have been lashed to the front of the truck to act as a counterweight,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe the truck had a small crane or winch fitted by a previous owner.’ He gestured towards the rear of the vehicle. ‘It’s definitely not there now, though.’

Rocco recalled what Simeon had told them. The truck had rammed the car, coming out of the track at speed. That being the case, a large lump of wood on the front would have acted as an ideal battering ram and added extra weight to the collision.

Desmoulins came round to join them. ‘Nothing useful in the cab,’ he said. ‘Apart from this.’ He opened his hand to reveal a thin circular metal disc. Although burnt black, it had clearly withstood the worst of the heat and showed a portrait on one side, and a date.

‘It’s an English penny.’ Rocco took it from him and turned it over. Sure enough, the figure of Britannia showed on one side, with the royal profile just visible on the opposite face.

‘War relic?’ suggested Desmoulins. It wasn’t uncommon to find English coins in the fields around here, lost during both wars as soldiers passed through on their way to and from the front … or back towards Dunkirk in May and June 1940.

‘Not unless the war happened within the last two years and nobody told us,’ replied Rocco. He held it up for them to see.

The coin was dated 1961.

Ten minutes later, Rizzotti stood up from where he had been examining the rear of the truck. ‘Lucas.’ He looked shocked, and was pointing at the ground between the truck’s rear wheels.

Rocco joined him. All he could see was more ash, some remnants of oil, and a few remnants of unburnt wood beneath the scorched heavy metal of the truck’s axle assembly.

Then Rizzotti used a stick to move the ash, gently flicking it to one side. It revealed a grey-white object, stick-like but clearly not wooden.

Rocco felt his gut tighten. He’d seen this kind of thing before. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

Rizzotti nodded. ‘A thigh bone. At a guess, male, not young, and quite long.’ He poked around a little more and uncovered more bones and, to one side, a fragment of cloth which had somehow escaped the worst of the flames. Attached to it was a single metal coat button. ‘The fire in the truck bed must have been fierce,’ Rizzotti continued. ‘They were probably carrying a fuel can or some liquid which acted as an accelerant.’

‘Or lots of dry wood.’ Rocco stepped round the ruined truck to where a tangle of branches lay in a heap, the sides scorched and blackened, but not burnt through. He squatted and looked closer at the ground beneath the truck. ‘Would the truck bed produce this much ash?’ From what he could recall, Renault trucks weren’t that big, built more for utilitarian use, not style or comfort.

‘Possibly not.’ Rizzotti had walked back to the car to get his camera, and was setting it up to take pictures. He studied the branches, then looked around at the sides of the quarry walls. The quarry had long been abandoned, allowing a thick spread of bushes and trees to proliferate. Some older trunks showed evidence of having been cut some time ago, no doubt for fence posts, while others had fallen down from the quarry rim of their own accord, no doubt due to wind damage, and lay rotting on the quarry floor. ‘I see what you mean,’ he concluded. ‘This is brushwood and dry tinder.’ He pointed at the branches Rocco had noticed. ‘It looks like they piled them under and on top of the bed of the truck – perhaps covering this poor unfortunate – then set fire to it. It would have acted like a Viking funeral pyre.’ He grimaced and began clicking away with the camera. Then he paused and
looked at Rocco, who hadn’t answered. ‘You okay?’

But Rocco was barely listening. He was staring at the button retrieved from the ashes and reflecting on how often these investigations hinged on chance discoveries. If he hadn’t gone to see Father Maurice, he wouldn’t have known anything more about the button he’d found on the side of the road, or that it had come from a tramp’s jacket. Yet now its twin was staring up at him.

A child’s birthday coat button, clearly embossed with the number 5.

‘We need to find the DS,’ said Rocco. He was more convinced than ever that he was now leading a murder hunt. It might have been an accident to begin with, whatever had happened out on that stretch of road. Pantoufle might have wandered into the path of the truck, befuddled perhaps by cold or drink or hunger. But covering up the death and burning the body changed everything.

They were back in the office, putting their thoughts together. Rizzotti was compiling detailed notes on the burnt truck and the body, prior to requesting some scientific confirmation, while Rocco and Desmoulins went over the facts they had amassed so far.

On paper, it didn’t amount to much, other than a dead body and an unexplained event involving a truck and a car. But there was something tugging at his instincts that told him this was far deeper than a cover-up of a dead vagrant. Why go to so much trouble? They could have left him lying
in the ditch and nobody would have been any the wiser. The road wasn’t used much; it could have been days, maybe weeks, before a body might be discovered, especially with snow on the way.

A phone jangled across the other side of the office. A uniformed officer listened for a moment, then held out the receiver to get Rocco’s attention. ‘Are you looking for a DS? Black, lots of side-impact damage?’

Rocco jumped up and strode across the office, snatching the phone from the man’s hand.

‘Rocco. You’ve found a DS?’

The man on the other end was a patrol officer who had stopped by a remote car breaker’s yard looking for a spare mirror, and had spotted a clean but badly damaged Citroën DS about to go under the breaker’s cutters. ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘The inside’s been fitted out like a race car – loads of reinforcing struts and padding. But it’s taken a hell of a bang on one side.’ He read out the car registration, which Rocco wrote down for checking later. ‘What do you want me to do, Inspector?’

‘Stay there and don’t let anyone near it,’ he ordered. ‘If anyone tries, shoot them in the foot.’ He dropped the phone back on its cradle and handed the registration number to the uniformed officer. ‘Check that, will you? Urgent.’ He looked at Desmoulins with a tight grin. ‘All good things come to those who wait. Let’s go.’

The breaker’s yard, a polite misnomer for a scrap metal dump, was located down a single-track lane on the northern outskirts of Amiens. Surrounded by a corrugated tin fence two metres high, with rolled barbed wire pinned
along the top, it looked damp, unwelcoming and sinister. Like a hundred such similar sites Rocco had been to during his investigations, it was not intended as a place of beauty. But he also knew that places like this often hid by design a wealth of detail from passing eyes.

He drove through the entrance, a sagging pair of wooden frames covered in corrugated steel and wire, and stopped in the middle of an open, muddy space with a
tired-looking
office cabin on one side looking out at an expanse of broken cars and car parts arranged in rows. The place was sour and depressing, and he felt instantly unclean. A dog was barking somewhere close by, the noise angry and menacing, and he checked that his MAB 38 was within easy reach. He’d seen the mess some scrapyard dogs could make of a man, and had no desire to find himself on this one’s menu.

The yard’s owner, Olivier Bellin, was an overweight,
rat-faced
individual clothed in a grubby vest and trousers and a surly manner. He stared aggressively at Rocco around a yellow cigarette end and lifted his unshaven chin in query. A sharp wind was whistling around the yard, but he seemed not to notice.

‘What do you want? And why’s this Nazi stopping me and my men going about our lawful work?’ He jerked an oily thumb at the patrol officer who was leaning against a DS parked at the front of the yard. Two men in filthy overalls and welder’s goggles were sitting on a pair of rotting car seats nearby, smoking. ‘You’ve no right doing this. I’m a respectable businessman.’

‘Yes, and next year I’ll be pope.’ Lucas had heard all about Bellin and his illicit dealings over the years on the
way from the station. The man had a lengthy record, had served two prison sentences for assault and robbery, and was suspected of having ‘disappeared’ at least two cars involved in major bank jobs. All in all, not one of Amiens’ finest citizens.

‘Where did the DS come from?’ he asked. ‘And be careful who you’re calling names.’

Bellin shrugged, which made his chest wobble. ‘Search me. It had been left outside the gates. Happens all the time … people treat this place like a rubbish dump.’

Rocco looked around at the muddy yard with its piles of dead cars and other junk. ‘I wonder why?’ He fixed the man with a hard stare. ‘Don’t mess with me, Bellin, I’m not in the mood. I’m investigating a possible murder and I think this car was involved.’

‘So?’ Bellin spat the cigarette out. The soggy mess landed very close to one of Rocco’s English brogues. ‘Nothing to do with me. I don’t know anything about any murder.’

‘Well, the car is now in your hands. That lands it on your doorstep – literally. Do you know what conspiracy is?’

Bellin feigned a look of boredom. ‘No. Should I?’

‘It means an agreement between people to commit a criminal act. One of the most serious is in the murder of a third party. Even after the event.’ He waited while Bellin processed what he was hearing. It was a slow grind, rather like watching one of those tumbling-man toys in action. But understanding dawned slowly on the scrap dealer’s face.

‘So – how does that affect me?’

‘It means anyone involved,’ Rocco explained carefully,
‘anyone – no matter what their role – gets the same sentence as the person who drove the car.’ It wasn’t entirely correct because of the likelihood of extenuating circumstances, but he wasn’t about to tell Bellin. Let the grubby little toad sweat a bit.

‘Hey – no! Wait!’ Bellin appeared to wake up as the words finally dropped into place like coins in a slot machine. ‘That’s not right. I told your man, the car was outside when I got here. I don’t know who left it there. I can’t be held responsible for what happened before it came here, can I?’

‘You can,’ Desmoulins put in, ‘if you don’t explain why you’re about to cut up an expensive car like that. You’d make a nice sum even if you sold it to one of your grubby criminal
potes
to do up. Give it new paperwork and a bit of paint, and sooner or later some mug will buy it.’ He leant closer. ‘And don’t tell me that hasn’t crossed your devious little mind, because I know you better than that.’

Bellin said nothing, but his beady eyes were going runabout, Rocco noticed. Not that he would crumble too easily; men like him would only cave in if they were on the brink of arrest and saw no other way out.

‘I think Mr Bellin gets the message,’ he said. ‘We’ll let him think it over.’ He walked away and stopped alongside the Citroën.

The uniformed officer gave a nod of recognition. ‘I hope this is the one you’re looking for.’

Rocco studied the damage to the side of the car. It looked as if a giant fist had hit the car amidships, pushing in both front and rear passenger doors. Had it not been for a network of sturdy metal poles welded together and covered in foam padding to form a protective cage, he
guessed the damage would have been more extensive. He tugged a splinter of oily wood from the gap between the doors and sniffed at it. It smelt faintly of tar.

A connection.

‘I think it just might be. But we’ll soon find out. Well spotted.’ He looked around at the oil-sodden ground they were standing on and nodded at Desmoulins, who was peering in the driver’s side. ‘We need to get this out of here. Can you get it picked up and taken to the station? We can get Rizzotti to have a proper look there.’

‘Sure.’ Desmoulins looked at the patrol officer. ‘Can I use your car radio?’

The two men walked away, leaving Rocco to consider the car and what secrets it might eventually give up. That the vehicle had been left here to quietly disappear, he had no doubt. The same happened in Paris and other cities on a regular basis. Cars used in criminal enterprises were routinely repainted, re-registered or underwent some other transformation, often permanent. And yards like this were nearly always involved. They had the equipment and willingness to do such work … and their unwelcoming appearance, aided by guard dogs, was usually enough to put off casual snoopers from paying too much attention to what they were doing.

He peered through the splintered glass remaining in the side windows. He could see nothing inside, neither normal travel rubbish nor personal effects, and if there was any kind of crime involved, such as the death of a vagrant, even accidentally, it was probable that it had already been cleaned out. But as he knew well, even the most careful cleaning sometimes failed to remove everything.

He rejoined Bellin, who was busy lighting another foullooking cigarette. The man had to take three tries before it caught, and he avoided looking Rocco in the eye.

‘Last opportunity,’ Rocco murmured. ‘See, I know you’re lying. But there’s no need for your men to hear. Tell me where the car came from … or who wants it to disappear. Phone number, name, location – any or all will do. Otherwise I’ll put a squad in here this afternoon and they’ll go through this rat hole centimetre by centimetre.’ He took his diary from his coat pocket. It was
leather-bound
and slim. ‘See this?’

Bellin nodded. ‘Yes. So?’

‘It’s the official log of every car stolen in northern France over the last eight months. Now, what are the odds of me finding one of the plates listed here among all that shit out there?’ He nodded at the piles of junk. ‘Or do you trust your men implicitly?’

Bellin stared at the diary, then his eyes flicked away. He nodded. ‘Okay. But I’m not admitting anything. This guy called me last week, said a car would be dropped off. It would probably be badly damaged, he said, and he’d pay good money for it to be scrapped. I didn’t argue, and why would I? The demand for scrap metal isn’t that good at the moment. I can barely keep those two men on as it is.’

‘My heart bleeds for you. Who was this benevolent person?’

‘No idea. On my mother’s life!’ He was looking intense and Rocco detected a note of desperation in his voice. Maybe he was telling the truth … or maybe he was more scared of the man who’d called him than he was of the police.

‘All right. Who dropped it off?’

‘I told you, it was—’

‘Suit yourself.’ Rocco began to turn away. ‘This yard is closed as of now. Nothing leaves here. Send your men home and give me the keys to your office.’

‘Wait!’ Bellin looked shocked and grabbed Rocco by the elbow, then let go with a cry of dismay when Rocco instinctively bunched his arm. ‘Sorry … I didn’t mean anything.’ His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘But you’ve got to listen to me … being seen talking to you could get me in the middle of one of those piles.’ He nodded at the heaps of chopped-up car parts lying around the yard. Few of them were much bigger than a man’s torso.

Rocco waited, his interest kicking into overdrive. If Bellin was this scared, he’d like to meet the person who could inspire this level of dread.

‘You’d better hurry, then, hadn’t you? Then I can be out of your hair.’

Bellin hesitated, then caved. He said quietly, ‘All right. This
mec
– I didn’t ask his name – just turned up outside the gate. He said this was the car for cutting, as arranged. That’s all. Then he jumped into another car that was waiting and that was the last I saw of him. And before you ask, I didn’t take a note of the registration or see the other driver. It wasn’t worth my face to look.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two days ago.’

Rocco considered it for a moment. The time frame was right, at least. But was he telling the whole truth? So, a guy turns up at the yard and dumps a car. Where hadn’t he heard that story before? It was probably going on right
now in every other city across France, no questions asked, in exchange for hard cash or favours. Some of those favours might include leaving the yard owner’s face in one piece, as Bellin was suggesting. He guessed he wasn’t going to get much more from this man. Even crooks had their limits when self-preservation was at stake.

‘Can you describe him? Young, old, dark, fair, bad breath … what?’

Bellin gave an elaborate shrug, undoubtedly more for the benefit of his two men than anything, a display of obduracy should anyone have cause to ask later. ‘Youngish, early thirties, medium height, dark hair, a bit of a tan. Didn’t notice anything else.’

‘Like a million other Frenchmen. That’s a big help.’

Bellin’s eyes narrowed, as if he’d suddenly seen a way out. He dropped his cigarette in the mud and stamped on it. ‘Actually, that’s the thing. Not like any Frenchman – not in that way, anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He spoke French okay … but not good. And he wasn’t dressed like anyone around here.’

‘Go on.’

‘I think he was a
Rosbif
. An Englishman.’