Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,47

been given a voice, their symbolism being shifted without consultation. Ignored in the campaign for a war, ignored in the planning of a battle, pounded beyond recognition during its execution and shunted around for convenience afterwards like pieces of furniture.

He turned and walked back to the bridge. A few metres beyond it lay the mouth of the track he’d seen on the map, coming out at right angles from the fields. It looked little used, although flat and compacted and very straight. There were no ruts that he could see, just a few faint imprints of horses’ hooves. Carthorses were still the norm around here, ponderous and powerful beasts, a world away yet from what was common elsewhere. Tractors were coming in, but financial help was expensive. For those rich in time but with little money, the old ways still prevailed.

A sad-looking wooden structure sat alongside the track a hundred and fifty metres away. Too big to be a shed, but too small for a barn, it was black and forlorn and looked as if a strong wind might send it tumbling across the fields at any moment like an empty cardboard box. Topped by a rusting corrugated-metal roof, it looked forgotten and forlorn, like the track itself, with only a line of pigeons sitting on the apex to give it any semblance of current use. Life and progress had passed by very closely over the years, with the road and the bridge, brushing against it. Yet the shed had remained as it had always been, ignored and desolate, a monument to a time long gone.

He walked up the track, the mud sucking at the soles of his shoes, and wondered how far the track ran. The map hadn’t been detailed enough for that, and it would take some local knowledge to find out for sure. But someone would know.

He bent and examined the ground. Tyre marks, puddled with muddy water, showed where a vehicle had pulled in and stopped. Clear treads, sharply outlined. Not tractor tyres, nor cartwheels, which would have been worn smooth. Something newer. Heavy. And footprints where the driver had climbed out. Not a farmer’s boots, with their heavy, wavy-line patterns and worn-down heels, but flat soles, smooth, with sharply defined edges like his own.

City shoes.

He approached the shed. The pigeons watched him come, then took off in a rush, scattering into the sky in a burst of flapping wings, leaving behind a stained roof and a few drifting feathers. The dilapidated structure they’d been perched on looked even worse up close, a miracle of dogged survival in decayed wood and corrugated sheeting, the slats of the walls curled at the ends and shot through with knot holes that had long lost their hard centres.

He peered through one of the holes. What limited light there was filtering through showed a floor covered by browned, dry grass and nettles to waist height, throttling a set of rusted harrows. Stacks of rotting wooden crates piled haphazardly to the ceiling, remnants of a long-forgotten harvest, took up the remainder of the space. One of the wall slats moved as he touched it, and dropped like a guillotine, narrowly missing his fingers. He decided to leave well alone before the whole place fell on him. Desmoulins would have a field day if he had to come and dig him out from under a fallen barn. He checked the near end of the structure, which had two large doors held together by a huge padlock. It was rusted with age, the keyhole jammed with years of dirt.

A car engine broke into the silence, followed by the hiss of tyres on wet tarmac. He turned as a beaten-up grey van clattered by on the road, the driver an old man in workman’s blues and a peaked cap giving a jaunty salute through the flapping quarter-light.

Rocco watched as it disappeared into the distance, taking the rain with it and leaving behind nothing but the drip-drip and gurgle of water running off the fields and into a storm gully.

It was the only vehicle to have passed by since he’d arrived.

He walked back down the track and heard the beat of wings as the pigeons returned, reclaiming their places on the shed roof. He crossed the road and stopped at the top of the bank on the far side, where stout white poles standing at knee height were the only indication of the road’s edge and the drop beneath. He looked down, his feet close