Adrian Magson - Death on the Pont Noir

‘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 Citroen 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.’