Adrian Magson - Death on the Pont Noir

‘And it happened here?’

‘That’s right.’ Sensing a willing if unusual audience, Simeon settled his feet apart and got ready to tell his story all over again. ‘Right here.’ He pointed at the section of road where they were standing, a little-used stretch of straight and surprisingly wide tarmac recently made redundant by a new section of road built three kilometres away under a local government regeneration scheme. ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’

You’d have had trouble seeing it with anyone else’s, Rocco wanted to say, still dulled by lack of sleep in spite of Claude’s industrial-strength coffee. He forced himself to concentrate. ‘Where were you when you saw this crash happen?’

‘Out there.’ Simeon pointed across the fields, still sugar-iced by the remnants of frost. ‘By the old machine-gun site. I was about to hitch the horse up to drag an old stump out of the ground when I heard the noise. See the blackthorn?’ He leant towards Rocco as he pointed, bringing with him a waft of sour breath and cheap wine. ‘Just to the left. There’s a bit of dead ground, so they couldn’t see me.’

Rocco nodded. He had to assume that a blackthorn was what he was looking at because it was the only bush in sight. ‘But you could see them?’

‘Sure. Well, pretty good, anyway. The light wasn’t great and my eyesight’s not what it was, but it was clear enough.’

Rocco wondered if the day would ever come when he’d get a witness carrying a camera and a total power of recall. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Well, as I already told Lamotte, here, after the truck rammed the car, both vehicles stopped, then two men jumped out from the side of the road and threw things — but I couldn’t see what they were. Then they took out guns and started shooting. I got out of here as quick as I could at that point. It was like a war zone… apart from the camera.’

‘Camera?’ There had been no mention of a camera in his call to Claude Lamotte. A car being rammed by a truck and guns firing had been the sum total of the story.

Rocco glanced at Claude who looked blank. ‘He didn’t mention it before.’

‘Didn’t I? I thought I did. By the trees over there.’ Simeon pointed at the only clump of trees around, two hundred metres away. Pines, Rocco noted, sharp and spiky and rigid with cold against the horizon, like a scene from the Eastern Front. ‘The truck came down the track from behind the trees, and that’s when I noticed the camera, sitting on a tripod thing. But there was nobody with it. Don’t they usually have a man sitting behind it with a megaphone shouting at everyone and wearing riding britches?’ He looked at Rocco. ‘Don’t they?’

Rocco decided to change tack before he lost the will to live. ‘Can you describe the men?’

Simeon considered the question, then said, ‘No. Not really. At least four, I’d say. Two drivers, two gunmen… and maybe one other.’ He mimed drawing a gun and firing, making a soft paff-paff noise, and smiled. ‘But from here…? I didn’t get any detail.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Earlier today — about eight. Roughly. I don’t have a watch. No need, see. Seasons are more important in my line of work.’ He pursed his lips and frowned, as if he’d just surprised himself by saying something profound.

Rocco shook his head and walked away towards the copse. It was shaping up to be another tale of unlikely events unsubstantiated by reality or facts, and likely due to the after-effects of too much vin de pays and a bad night’s sleep.

Simeon watched him go, then nudged Claude. ‘Is he for real? I heard we had a new flic in the neighbourhood, but not one like him.’

‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ Claude muttered. ‘He’s been here a while now. And he’s good, so you’d better watch yourself.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve been off sick, haven’t I? It’s why I’m trying to catch up, pulling out tree roots in this shitty weather instead of leaving it until spring.’ He sniffed and lifted his chin towards Rocco. ‘Does he always dress like he’s going to a funeral?’

‘Always. He goes hunting in the marais like that, too, when he has to. Just mind you don’t tick him off because when he goes after someone, he doesn’t stop. He’s… what do they call it — relentless.’

‘That was him?’ Simeon’s eyes widened. ‘I heard about that. A gun battle, so they say. Grenades, too.’ He pulled a face then spat on the ground. ‘And to think it used to be so peaceful around here.’

Rocco reached the trees and did a careful examination, quartering the ground in a grid fashion. If anyone had been here, especially with a camera, there would be signs. It was a godforsaken spot, made worse by the bitter breeze cutting through the branches and whining like a soul in torment. The ground surrounding the trees was mostly covered with clumps of coarse grass, with a carpet of pine needles closer in. He noted other details and dismissed them: scraps of fertiliser bags rotting away beneath a bush; old bottles without labels glinted dully in the shadows; a rusting bucket without a handle; and further back, where the ground was clear, a set of footprints side by side where someone had stood and taken a leak, the story etched in the frosty ground. Size 42 or 43, he guessed, which told him nothing he could use. He finally found a spot by the side of the road where three holes had been pierced in the earth in a triangular spread about a metre across. A tripod, just as Simeon had said. So he hadn’t imagined that bit. But was it a camera or something else? The grass around it was trampled flat, but not as much as he would have expected if a cameraman had been working it. So what had been the point?

He flicked some pine needles from the cuffs of his trousers and walked back to join Claude and Simeon, scanning the ground as he went. Then he saw something in the grass verge. He stopped. The stems here had been either crushed or churned up, as if something heavy had rolled across here recently. But it wasn’t the grass or the earth that caught his attention.

It was the blood. Lots of it.

He took a rubber glove from his coat pocket and slipped it on, then carefully lifted some of the grass clumps to one side. The earth beneath was dark brown, and in parts, where it had been covered, more of a dark red. He wondered if a wild boar had been shot by a farmer and carted off as a trophy. Or maybe hit by a car. Both were possibilities. But the spread of blood seemed too extensive. And tied in with what Simeon had witnessed, there seemed to be another, less mundane possibility. He stepped back along the verge, his unease growing. More blood, flecks of it scattered across the grass, some on the edge of the tarmac, the bigger flecks with a covering of insects feeding on this rare bounty.

And a human tooth.

Forget the boar, then.

The tooth was worn down, and chipped around the top edges. A molar, by the look of it, stained with blood. Not a young one, either.

There was something else in among the bloody earth. Too uniform to be a stone and too rounded to be a piece of dirt. Rocco plucked the object out of the blood and turned it over.

It was a metal button embossed with a number five. A child’s button? His blood ran cold at the implication. But the tooth went against that — it was definitely an adult’s.

He scanned the fields, feeling a familiar buzz building in his head: the signal which told him something was beginning; that something bad had happened here. If anyone had been killed or injured in the crash seen by Simeon, then Amiens hospital, less than twenty kilometres away, would soon provide the answer.

Failing that, he would need Rizzotti’s help. In the absence of a bigger budget, the on-loan doctor was the only person approaching a scientific presence the local police force had. Although he might not be able to make sense of this with his limited equipment and experience, he would be able to gather evidence to prove whether the blood was animal or human, although the teeth pretty much made that a given.