Death on the Pont Noir

Chapter FORTY-SIX



Rocco was staring through a veil of tangled, bare branches at the bridge, half a kilometre away, and wondering what the hell he was doing here. He and Claude had found a spot where they could just see the bridge and the road leading over it, but where they were hidden from view by a clump of bushes. It wasn’t great but it was the best they could do at short notice.

He shivered and took a turn back and forth, trying to work some warmth back into his feet and lower legs. The air was bitingly cold and, just for the moment, clear, the earlier snow having turned by degrees to a miserable, grey sleet before dying out. But there was more on the way. The clouds looming overhead were heavy, grey and dough-like, waiting to dump their contents on the land below, and he wondered if a change in the weather might interrupt any attack plans. If there were any.

‘Where does that track lead?’ he said, stepping back alongside the passenger window. ‘The map doesn’t say.’

‘Nowhere. It’s just a track through the fields.’ Claude held up a hand, giving it some thought. ‘Actually, that’s not strictly true. If they drive carefully, they could reach a road at the other end – but that’s ten kilometres over rough ground. And after this weather?’ He pulled a face. ‘Unlikely. Hardly a quick getaway.’

‘So they’d be trapped.’ Rocco tensed as a dark shape approached the bridge, wobbling slightly on the road, bouncing on soft suspension. It was a dark-blue saloon with something strapped on the roof. A cupboard or a box – it was difficult to tell from here. The car trundled across the bridge and continued on down the road towards them, passing the proposed site of the new war monument and rattling past them without stopping.

‘Unless things went right and nobody saw them.’ Claude pursed his lips and eyed the car out of sight. ‘If they were cool-headed enough and had the right vehicle, I suppose they could do it.’ He grinned. ‘Unlikely now, though, huh? With us here.’

Rocco lifted a pair of binoculars off the back seat, focusing on the track beyond the shed. Nothing. No waiting truck, no motorbikes – another favoured form of transport for an attack – and no men. Just the shed, run-down and ready to fall over.

‘There aren’t many of those left,’ Claude told him, following his line of sight. ‘I’m amazed it’s lasted this long.’

‘It was locked tight by rust when I saw it, and full of farm rubbish. I thought it might be something they’d use, but I was wrong.’ Yet he felt sure he’d got the location right. The circumstances, the pointers, the confluence of the ramming idea, de Gaulle’s visit and the similarities of the sites … it had all been so clear. So obvious.

He swung the glasses back to the shed and stared hard, the rubber eyepieces pressed into his skin. It looked the same as it had the other day, so what was he worried about? The roof still stained with bird droppings, the wooden walls peppered with holes and the planking warped by the elements, the whole thing surrounded by a hovering grey mist, like a scene from a ghost film. Yet something was tugging at his mind, gently insistent. Something … different. What the hell was it? Or was he just desperate for something to show up that would prove he’d been right about this?

‘It’s an old cart shed,’ Claude continued chattily, showing his mastery of all things rural. ‘They were just big enough to take a hay cart. Take it in one end, unhitch the horse, fold up the shafts and close the door, take the horse out the other. Saved trying to reverse it in. The logic was impeccable.’

Rocco took his eyes off the road. Tried to follow through what Claude had said. ‘What are you saying?’ Then it hit him. ‘That shed has a back door?’ He hadn’t looked. It hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Yes. Same as the front. In one end, out the other. Why?’

Then Rocco realised what had been bothering him.

The pigeons on the roof. There were none. Why was that? And that mist around the base of the structure: it was moving, billowing gently outwards. Yet there was none anywhere else.

And it was growing.

As he opened his mouth to speak, to voice what he was seeing, the shed moved. It trembled, then seemed to shake itself like a living beast, and lifted, before exploding in a great shower of wood fragments and smoke, the latter billowing out in a great cloud to join the mist around the base.

Not mist. Exhaust smoke.

‘My God! Lucas!’ Claude grabbed his arm and pointed beyond the shed to the road leading to the bridge. Another car had appeared in the distance. Only this one was shiny and sleek, and rode the tarmac with undoubted elegance, at sharp odds with the sleety brown of the surrounding fields and the grubby snow clouds gathered overhead.

A gleaming black Citroën DS.