Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,44

that they all aimed at what usually turned out to be an official car.

An official car.

Like they use in processions.

A Citroën DS.

He skidded the chair closer, his heart tripping faster as the possibilities began building in his mind. He was looking at the section of the map which included the road where Simeon had witnessed the ramming incident, and thinking about rehearsals. The road was nowhere special … not even on a regular through-route and little used even by locals. But that surely made it ideal for a practice run; something you didn’t want anyone to see, where timing and distance had to be specific.

A truck with a battering ram on the front. Thinking of assaults on a car, that detail alone was very unusual: someone had decided that whatever they were going to do, guns alone would not work. So, if it was a rehearsal, all he had to do was figure out where the real event was to take place. Presumably somewhere similar in layout.

Twenty minutes later, he was about to give up when his eyes landed on a straight section of road in the middle of open countryside, several kilometres from any visible habitation. The ground looked level, there were few trees or other natural cover, unless what looked like a smudge mark was a small copse.

Something about it made his gut clench.

He checked the scale of the map. The smudge lay approximately two hundred metres from the road. Almost adjacent to it on the map, the road was flanked by two broad lines and chevrons indicating a cutting. Or was it an embankment? God, he should know this – he’d studied enough maps in his time, reading them like a book to determine fighting terrain, gradients, dead ground, approach routes and exits. He rubbed his face. He’d had too much coffee and too little sleep. He felt a burst of impatience and went to the legend panel in one corner, showing the scale and markings. Chevrons – that was it. It meant the road passed over a bridge with a gully beneath.

Back to the map.

The layout was similar enough to where the ramming had happened, but he could see no reason why anyone, least of all the president, would need to travel along it. It was in the middle of nowhere, for God’s sake. Just a boring, straight, little-used piece of tarmac lost in a patchwork of fields made famous only by history.

He bent closer. Faint lettering showed against the bridge.

Pont Noir. Black bridge.

He turned and checked the office. A uniformed officer was working quietly across the far side. He was a long-service member named Berthier, consigned to desk duties. If anyone knew the area, he would.

‘What’s the Pont Noir?’ Rocco asked him.

The man looked blank for a moment, his concentration broken. Then, ‘Ah, Pont Noir. You’ve never been there?’

‘No.’

‘It’s like … a war relic – a site.’

‘A memorial?’

‘Not yet – but it’s going to be. It’s a deep gully, some say formed centuries ago. They uncovered a number of military remains there a couple of years ago, then a lot more just recently. French, mostly, but British, Indians and Australians, too. Like the League of Nations. They think it could have been a field hospital from the First World War, dug into the gully as protective cover. A team of university archaeologists are out there on and off, along with British and Australian volunteers. They’ve been trying to get it excavated and declared a national monument. It’s not the sort of place to take your girlfriend, though.’

‘Why?’

The man hesitated, wary of causing offence. ‘It’s … creepy. Always chilly, even in summer. It’s like there’s no life to the place … like the warmth has been sucked out of it.’ He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘Sorry, but you’d have to go there to see what I mean.’

‘Who would know most about it?’

‘There’s a British War Graves Commission office in Arras – they’ve been monitoring and running the excavations. But the local historical society would be involved, too, and the national monuments office in Paris.’

War graves. Rocco remembered John Cooke, the British gardener who worked in the area. He’d met him on his first day in Poissons, when he’d found a dead woman in the British military cemetery just outside the village. The man had been helpful and calm in the face of what had been a daunting discovery.

He checked his watch. Just after eight. Where the hell had time gone? He looked up the number of the Arras