Death on the Pont Noir

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Rocco thanked Blake and put the phone down. He turned back to the map. His head was buzzing and he suddenly wanted a drink. Unwise, under the circumstances, and not a good idea generally, although it would certainly dull the enormity of the idea forming in his mind. But that was the last thing he wanted to do.

A war memorial in the making, in the middle of nowhere, with de Gaulle’s full approval and an expressed desire to visit the site without public ceremony or the customary press entourage. Suddenly Saint-Cloud’s briefing and what Massin had told him about the attack on the official car was assuming a whole different slant.

If Blake knew, why hadn’t Saint-Cloud mentioned it? Or was Blake merely playing up the possibility to highlight the presence of the burial site?

As he stared at the map, he felt the hairs move on the back of his neck. It wasn’t just the road or where it led to that mattered. It was something else. Faintly drawn, as if the draftsman had been unsure about whether it existed or not, a thin line met the road at right angles.

It was a track, coming out of the fields immediately adjacent to the bridge. A single track, probably unsurfaced, and meeting the road immediately opposite a point where the gully was at its deepest.

He grabbed a sheet of white paper and a pencil from a desk nearby and slapped it over the map where the ramming had occurred. Drawing quick lines on the paper, he sketched a rough outline of the track and the road, adding a circle to show the conifers where the camera had been stationed and where Simeon’s mysterious watcher had been standing.

Then he slid the paper across and placed it over the area of the Pont Noir, where the road crossed the bridge… and a track came out of nowhere at right angles. The only thing missing was the clump of pine trees.

Other than that, it was almost identical.

Rocco felt his heart pounding. There were times — not often, but rewardingly common enough — when idle thoughts, coupled with facts and suspicions, turned to absolute certainty. And right now was one of those times.

He picked up the telephone. It was time to call Saint-Cloud. If anyone could confirm the exact itinerary and timing for the president to visit the Pont Noir, it would be his security chief.

Then he put down the receiver.

He couldn’t think why, 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.