Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,35

of its more senior inhabitants.

Now, and in the dark, it was a place visited by bored kids looking for trouble, the occasional drunk seeking a place to doss down, and the various creatures of the night which had made it their own.

Halfway down the street stood the gutted remains of a butcher’s shop. The wooden sign was still there, hanging drunkenly by a single chain, but warped and rendered illegible by the elements. Only its telltale shape of a horse’s head remained. The building, though, like its neighbours, was a shell of crumbling brick and rotten plaster-and-lath construction, waiting for progress and the promised redevelopment of the area to erase its existence and replace it with another.

A dark Renault van with battered panelwork and a broken side window was the only vehicle in sight, left skewed at an angle to the kerb in front of the shop. A ripped plastic bench seat was leaning against the driver’s door, and a worn car tyre sat on the bonnet, indications to anyone passing that the vehicle had been abandoned to its fate.

A flicker of movement showed a small dog trotting along the pavement, following a zigzag course from scent to scent. It paused to cock its leg against a rear wheel, then sniffed along the van’s side before moving on into the night. A cat across the street watched it go, the fur on its back lifting momentarily, then settling as the dog vanished into the shadows.

Lights flickered in the darkness at the top of the street, where it connected with that part of the town which still had life and movement. The flicker grew to a glow, and a car’s engine puttered steadily over the silence as a vehicle nosed into the street, the headlights pushing back the dark and revealing the walls and empty windows of a dead zone. The light rushed on, washing quickly over the abandoned Renault and down to the far end, where a row of small garages with corrugated metal roofs stood like orphans, their walls and dilapidated wooden doors covered in graffiti, a tangled mess of emblems, slogans and angry cries for attention which would only ever come in the form of a developer’s bulldozer.

The car – a dark Panhard with a crumpled rear wing – slowed alongside the Renault, its occupants checking it out as the dog had before them. The car’s tyres crunched through a mess of rubble, a reminder that few vehicles ever passed this way. It was enough to satisfy them; they drove on and did a U-turn at the end and stopped facing back the way they had come.

The headlights were extinguished, returning the street to darkness.

Five minutes ticked by. The engine remained on, a muffled rumble in the dark. Other than that, no lights, no sound.

Finally, the front passenger door opened and a man stepped out. He stood with his head back, like an animal probing the night air. He was tall and athletic, and moved with confidence. Moments later he was followed by two other men, one the driver, who left the engine running and the door open. His companion stepped to one side to keep watch.

The lead man moved to one of the garages and produced a key, opening a large padlock holding the double doors together. The two men disappeared inside the garage, lighting the dark with the yellow glow of a flashlight.

‘Coucou, Baptiste. Time to go tickle a trout.’ A hoarse whisper echoed softly in the dark of the abandoned Renault van, and a foot tapped on the floor. Moments later, a figure rolled out from between the wheels and stood upright on the pavement. Turning, he padded silently along the street, hugging the ratty buildings, unobserved by the watcher at the garage who was taking an artistic leak over a pile of bricks to one side.

Another figure appeared on the far side of the street, surprising even the cat, which vanished without a sound. This one paralleled the first, treading carefully over a route scouted earlier that evening to note any obstacles to be avoided later. Both men were dressed in dark clothing and soft boots, and wore balaclavas pulled down over their faces.

Both were armed with handguns.

The man on watch shook himself and turned, mouth dropping open as he picked up a sound or a sense of something in the atmosphere. But he was too late. The first figure reached out a pair of brawny arms and plucked him off his feet, while