Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,32
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 Citroën 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.’
Bellin shrugged, which made his chest wobble. ‘Search me. It had been left outside the gates. Happens all the time … people treat this place like a rubbish dump.’
Rocco looked around at the muddy yard with its piles of dead cars and other junk. ‘I wonder why?’ He fixed the man with a hard stare. ‘Don’t mess with me, Bellin, I’m not in the mood. I’m investigating a possible murder and I think this car was