Death on the Pont Noir

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 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 to the lip. It wasn’t quite so far down at this point as it was in the centre of the bridge, but still dizzying enough.

At the bottom was a gleam of water; a natural pond formed by nature, its surface as forbidding as black glass, the edges an indistinct mass of weeds and reeds.

He tried not to think about what would happen to any car plunging down right here, or the occupants trapped inside.