Adrian Magson - Death on the Pont Noir

Suddenly the thicket moved and two shots rang out. One of the young boars flipped over and lay still. Instantly the mother squealed and charged, barrelling through the undergrowth like a vengeful rocket.

This time the scream they heard came from a man.

Claude fired two shots into the air, quickly reloading while Rocco covered him, then fired twice more.

In the silence that followed, they heard the squeals of the boars diminishing towards the far side of the wood, then a groan close by. It was followed by a crackling noise as someone made their way through the trees across their front, but too far away to see clearly.

‘He’s heading towards the road,’ said Claude. ‘Come on — we can cut him off.’ He showed Rocco the way and both men ran towards the light.

‘Put the gun down.’ Rocco’s voice didn’t need to be loud; sound travelled well in this cold, thin air. But it carried authority.

He and Claude had burst out of the trees and run across the field in time to see the fugitive coming at an angle towards them. If he saw them or the other men waiting by the road, he made no move to change direction, but staggered on, slipping and sliding on the icy ground. He was dragging one leg badly, his breathing laboured and hoarse.

The man looked beaten and hopelessly unsteady on his feet, like a prizefighter at the end of a long, brutal bout. His shoes were clogged with mud and bits of vegetation and the cloth around his injured leg was badly torn, the flesh beneath showing bright red. His shoulders were dusted with snow and muddy, and his face was pinched and near blue with cold.

Biggs, thought Rocco. The other one had been Jarvis.

Then the runner seemed to realise where he was. He stopped, breathing heavily, and glanced back as if he thought the boar might still be after him. When he looked round, he shook his head with something approaching despair and looked at Rocco.

‘No way,’ he muttered, and coughed. ‘Too late, anyway.’ He clutched his stomach and spat on the ground. The spittle was bright red.

Claude said, ‘She hurt him.’

The end of the man’s gun barrel was wavering slightly. Rocco wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think enlisted men in the British army used pistols. Most had rifles, a few used machine guns. This one was carrying a revolver, probably army issue. He was holding the gun low, like a cowboy in a western.

Rocco stepped sideways, keeping on the move. No point in giving the man a standing target, even a lucky one. He said, ‘Put it down and lie on the ground, Mr Biggs. We will not harm you.’

The man’s face twisted in surprise on hearing his own name. He looked around wildly, instinctively seeking a way out. When he realised there was none, he said, ‘Piss off, copper.’ And pulled the trigger.

The shot zipped by Rocco’s right leg, hitting the ground three metres behind him.

‘I’ll kill you with the next one!’

Rocco moved sideways, but kept his distance. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Claude and, beyond him, a group comprising Desmoulins and Godard and his men. The man with a rifle was standing off to one side, the gun into his shoulder, waiting for a signal.

‘Last warning,’ Rocco said quietly, just enough for the man to hear. ‘You do not want to do this. The man back there will not miss.’

The second round came closer, the sound of the shot making a tearing noise as it went past his head. The gunman pulled the trigger again, but this time there was just a click. Frantically he scrabbled in his jacket pocket and produced a fistful of shells, shards of gold light flashing as some tumbled to the ground from frozen fingers. Grunting with pain and emotion, Biggs began tugging out the empties and feeding fresh ones into the cylinder. Then his face twisted in pain and he grabbed his injured thigh.

He peeled back the torn cloth. Blood was running down his leg and across his shoe, forming a puddle on the ground, bright red against the thin covering of snow.

Rocco didn’t bother asking who was behind this. He knew Biggs wasn’t going to give up. The man was operating on instincts alone, a form of bravado that would carry him until he could go no further. He’d seen it before in Indochina and elsewhere, where men on battlefields with nothing else to give simply surrendered to the last-ditch ethos drummed into them in endless exercises and training.

It was just a pity that it was being misused here.

He turned and walked towards the man. He couldn’t let this go on. He waited until the gun came up again, then planted his feet and lifted the Walther, the walnut grip warm and comfortable in his hand.

He fired once.

The shot took Biggs in the left shoulder, lifting the fabric of his jacket. He staggered and looked at Rocco in shock. But he wasn’t finished yet. He swore softly and lifted the pistol again, finger tightening on the trigger. Before Rocco could shoot again, another shot sounded, this time from the rifleman on the road, and Biggs was hit in the chest, flipping him onto his back.

In the silence that followed, a whistle came from the road, carrying eerily across the cold field. Rocco looked round. Desmoulins was making the sign of a telephone call and pointing at Godard’s blue van.

Rocco picked up the dead man’s revolver and walked towards the road, his shoes heavy with mud, and wondered if he was going to have to buy new ones. This job was getting far too heavy on clothing.

‘Sorry, Inspector,’ said the driver of the van, as if he’d interrupted something. He was half inside the vehicle. ‘A black DS driven by an Englishman named Calloway has been stopped coming out of Poissons.’

‘Anyone else inside?’ But Rocco already knew the answer to that one.

‘No. Calloway said the man named Tasker is in the village.’ He frowned and added, ‘He said Tasker has gone crazy and is going to kill you.’

‘But why come here?’ said Desmoulins. He was driving Rocco’s car with the inspector in the passenger seat. Godard and his men were following close behind. They were heading towards Poissons, leaving the two patrolmen to look after Biggs’s body. ‘He could have been away and clear by now, heading for the ferries.’

‘Away, maybe,’ Rocco replied, reloading his gun. ‘But not clear. Tasker’s been used and cut adrift by his own people, and I suspect he knows it. He’s got nothing to lose.’

It didn’t take much putting together, not once Desmoulins had got the story from the Bethune police. They had interviewed the French gunmen left inside the bank, and the wounded man had been eager to talk. They had been recruited to do the one job, each a solo operator under the command of an older armoured-car specialist, originally from Corsica. He was now dead, shot by the big Englishman, Tasker. They had never met their recruiters, all discussions having been carried out by telephone and through ‘contacts’. But investigators were already working on that angle. Rocco, however, had a good idea who was behind the recruitment.

Patrice Delarue.

It all fitted together, an oddly shaped jigsaw of disparate events. The original ramming had been a practice run, using Calloway’s skills to avoid maximum damage while giving the important man in the scheme, Fletcher, as near a real scenario as he could get without him knowing. Fletcher the giant fist: the real attacker. The other men had been bit players in a theatrical drama, added to provide a fog to prevent anyone seeing the real picture.

Distraction, too, had been the purpose of the other events, to draw away security and police attention from what was being planned: the smashing of the Canard Dore, the openly argumentative front put up by Tasker and his men, all the while knowing they would not be held for long; the burning of the truck, the disappearance — albeit mismanaged — of the damaged Citroen DS. And finally the bank job, skewed deliberately towards failure and using expendable men from two gangs to divert police attention from what was really going to happen.