Death on the Pont Noir

Chapter TWENTY-ONE



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.’