Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,46
but instinct made him decide against talking to Saint-Cloud just yet. He stared instead at the map, and his overlay of the road and track.
If he understood the map details and the descriptions correctly, the road ran across the bridge, which spanned a drop into a deep gully. Beyond the bridge lay open fields, a smoothly rolling expanse of Somme countryside, no doubt dotted with the trademark white blemishes of former shell-holes and trenches so common in the area. No other roads, no houses or farm buildings. Anyone driving along it had a clear run to the main road three kilometres away. If they made it that far, they were away and free.
He shivered. He was thinking like an assassin.
His eyes were drawn back to the bridge. To the track.
He was looking at a kill zone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By the time Rocco arrived at the Pont Noir, it was raining hard, cold, stinging needles that numbed the skin and blurred the landscape, moving across the fields in a malevolent cloud, drenching everything in their path. He shrugged it off; bad weather had never bothered him much, not once he’d got an idea firing up and needing answers. And this one was beginning to call loud and clear.
He walked to the centre of the structure. Other than the patter of the rain, it was deathly quiet here, and considerably colder than in town, as if the weather wanted to punish the rolling fields for being there. But there was something else, too: it was, as Berthier had said in his apologetically poetic manner, as if history itself had laid its ghostly hand on the area, draining the land of any warmth. Then a bird sang; a single trill, but distant and faint, as if it didn’t wish to come close to disturb this place with its cheerful song. Maybe it was protesting at the rain. Or maybe it had forgotten to leave for warmer climes.
The bridge’s parapet consisted of thick wire hawsers linking a series of metal posts each two metres apart. Rocco peered over the wires to the gully below. It was a long way down. He shuffled forward until his toes protruded over the iron lip along the edge and used his rain-spotted toecaps as gun sights, focusing on the ground. He wondered what had caused this enormous gash in the earth. It was overgrown in places, nature having reclaimed it over the years, with an array of rabbit holes in the side of the bank between scrubby bushes holding the soil together. There were clear signs of man-made digging, too, with strips of tape between small white posts marking where measurements had been made.
He shivered and continued walking, his footsteps brisk on the tarmac. The surface of the road was good, solid and smooth, untroubled by the passage of too many heavy trucks. He stepped off the far end of the bridge and walked a hundred metres or so to where something white fluttered on a post adjacent to the road. It stood out because it was so out of place amid these fields. He found an oblong patch of mud the size of a rugby pitch marked out by pegs and white tape. Inside the oblong were more lines and squares, similar to the kind of markings used by builders.
It was the planned memorial site.
Rocco stared across the fields, scanning the area back to the bridge. The landscape lay muffled and still beneath the blanket of cold rain, fields normally full of sugar beet and wheat now empty and soaked, uninviting. A male hare moved against the background in the middle of a field, slow and cautious like an old man testing his limbs, rather than the fleet-footed creature that it could be, and one or two birds circled further away, seeking thermals to carry them higher.
Other than that, nothing.
He tried to picture this place as it had been nearly half a century ago, churned by war and man, an open charnel house, muddy, cold and desolate and dotted with humanity, some alive, most not. Even with his experience of war, he found it difficult; the war here had been like no other. He thought instead of the symbolism involved: of the president coming here to give a nod of his head to a stone representing what had gone before, so that others might feel a sense of recognition, of remembrance. Not that Rocco objected to that; he just wondered what the men themselves would have thought had they