Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,3

your trouble. This, my friend, is one of life’s unique pleasures. You should enjoy it while you can.’

‘If I was twelve, I would.’ Rocco took a mouthful of coffee and swallowed. At least Claude knew how to make a wake-up drink. He felt his synapses respond to the jolt of caffeine and shook himself. ‘To what do I owe this debatable pleasure, anyway? Have you lost your way home?’

‘Not quite.’ Claude put down his bread and brushed crumbs from his hands. ‘I had a call this morning from a farmer who works a couple of fields about six kilometres from here, towards Bray. Name’s Simeon. He was calling from a café where he’d gone to take a medicinal drink. Seems he had a nasty shock. He claims he saw a truck ram a car this morning on an open stretch of road out near his fields. Then two men jumped out of a ditch and opened fire on it with handguns.’ He picked up his bread and took another bite. ‘How about that?’

Rocco stared at him. ‘Have you been drinking paraffin?’

‘No. I’m serious.’ Claude held out a hand. ‘See – steady as a rock.’ As Rocco made to get up, reaching for his gun, he added pragmatically, ‘There’s nothing to see. They’ve all gone – car, truck and men. We’ll go out in a while. You want more coffee?’

Rocco sank back onto his chair. As he’d learnt in the past few months since being posted here, there was world time and there was Poissons time. And trying to bring the two together usually gave him a headache.

‘Go on, then. I think I’m going to need it.’

‘An army truck?’ Lucas Rocco tried to imagine what any military vehicle would be doing out here on a deserted road in the middle of open farmland. There was a small barracks in Amiens, but it was used for shipping local army conscripts in and out, and relied almost exclusively on the station for its troop movements.

‘Yes. Small and stubby – not one of the big ones. But it was going fast. It smashed right into the car, as clear as day. Deliberately, I swear it.’ The farmer, a weather-beaten stick of a man named Simeon, dressed in heavy trousers and large rubber boots, pushed his cap to the back of his head and eyed Rocco with caution, as if awed by the sight of a man just over two metres in height with shoulders to match. Or maybe it was the all-black clothing and shoes; black in these parts was usually the prerogative of the old or the Church. Rocco, however, was clearly no priest.

‘And it happened here?’

‘That’s right.’ Sensing a willing if unusual audience, Simeon settled his feet apart and got ready to tell his story all over again. ‘Right here.’ He pointed at the section of road where they were standing, a little-used stretch of straight and surprisingly wide tarmac recently made redundant by a new section of road built three kilometres away under a local government regeneration scheme. ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’

You’d have had trouble seeing it with anyone else’s, Rocco wanted to say, still dulled by lack of sleep in spite of Claude’s industrial-strength coffee. He forced himself to concentrate. ‘Where were you when you saw this crash happen?’

‘Out there.’ Simeon pointed across the fields, still sugar-iced by the remnants of frost. ‘By the old machine-gun site. I was about to hitch the horse up to drag an old stump out of the ground when I heard the noise. See the blackthorn?’ He leant towards Rocco as he pointed, bringing with him a waft of sour breath and cheap wine. ‘Just to the left. There’s a bit of dead ground, so they couldn’t see me.’

Rocco nodded. He had to assume that a blackthorn was what he was looking at because it was the only bush in sight. ‘But you could see them?’

‘Sure. Well, pretty good, anyway. The light wasn’t great and my eyesight’s not what it was, but it was clear enough.’

Rocco wondered if the day would ever come when he’d get a witness carrying a camera and a total power of recall. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Well, as I already told Lamotte, here, after the truck rammed the car, both vehicles stopped, then two men jumped out from the side of the road and threw things – but I couldn’t see what they were. Then they took out guns and started shooting. I got out of here