Death on the Pont Noir (21 page)

Moments after Tasker and Biggs had thrown themselves back in the DS, Calloway was revving the car and hurtling away from the bank, the engine screaming in protest. Tasker let him get on with it and reloaded the sawn-off, leaning out of the window to fire two parting shots at the front door of the bank to keep the third man’s head down. Then he sat back and swore repeatedly. He’d be glad to see the back of this shit town and shit country, and get back home to where he felt able to breathe.

‘What,’ said Calloway quietly, ‘the fuck happened back there?’ It was the first time Tasker had ever heard him swear. ‘And where’s the cash – and Jarvis?’

‘There ain’t no cash and Jarvis is dead. We were sold a pup.’ Tasker was breathing hard, the rush of adrenalin making his nerve ends jangle. He was trying to work out what had just happened, how such a simple job had gone
belly up. ‘There wasn’t the money we were told about, and another mob was already there.’

‘Mob?’

‘Firm … crew … you know what I bloody mean. Frenchies.’

‘How?’

‘Because we were sent on a sucker job. Somebody’s going to pay dearly for this if it’s the last bloody thing I ever do!’ He dug in his pocket and took out two more cartridges, and sniffed at them as if they were a source of comfort.

Calloway seemed happy with that. ‘Fair enough. So, where are we headed – back to Calais?’

‘Not yet.’ Tasker had been toying with an idea for some time. It had taken root days ago, but had grown fast over the past few hours, fermenting in his mind and now tugging so urgently at his consciousness that he couldn’t let it go. ‘Soon, though.’

Rocco was the cause of all this. Had been from the very beginning, ever since he’d walked into that cell, revealing that he spoke English and even understood cockney slang, treating Tasker like a nobody, a gofer, and questioning Calloway first. That was right out of order.

He breathed deeply, his blood pressure rising the more he thought about it. Even dropping the suspicion of corruption on the big French cop hadn’t given Tasker the satisfaction he’d expected, not long-term. He knew his thinking was irrational, that he was on foreign soil and way out of his depth. But he didn’t care.

Because right now he had nothing to go back to. It was over. Ketch had seen to that. Ketch and his smooth-talking, number-crunching weasel, Brayne. They’d talked him and 
the others into a dead-end job – he didn’t need a degree in accountancy to know it, either. Not now. There were only so many ways the game could be played, and after years of using the distraction thing for their purposes, Tasker knew and recognised when he himself had become the distraction. It was the way things were. But he didn’t have to like it.

Before anything else, though, he had a score to settle over here. After that, well, he’d get back to the Smoke and make a couple of visits. He stroked the shortened barrels of the shotgun. He’d have to lose this one, but he’d soon get another just like it or better. No sweat.

Then they’d learn what it meant to have crossed George Tasker.

‘So where to?’

Tasker leant forward and picked up a road map of the area, found the place he wanted and stabbed it with a thick finger. It was back towards Amiens, but off to the east. ‘Here.’

Calloway glanced across, nodded and began looking for a turn to get them off the main road and double back. ‘Poissons-les-Marais? What’s there, then?’

‘Not what,’ said Tasker, rolling the two shotgun cartridges between his fingers. ‘More like who.’

Rocco was staring through a veil of tangled, bare branches at the bridge, half a kilometre away, and wondering what the hell he was doing here. He and Claude had found a spot where they could just see the bridge and the road leading over it, but where they were hidden from view by a clump of bushes. It wasn’t great but it was the best they could do at short notice.

He shivered and took a turn back and forth, trying to work some warmth back into his feet and lower legs. The air was bitingly cold and, just for the moment, clear, the earlier snow having turned by degrees to a miserable, grey sleet before dying out. But there was more on the way. The clouds looming overhead were heavy, grey and dough-like, waiting to dump their contents on the land below, and he wondered if a change in the weather might interrupt any attack plans. If there were any.

‘Where does that track lead?’ he said, stepping back 
alongside the passenger window. ‘The map doesn’t say.’

‘Nowhere. It’s just a track through the fields.’ Claude held up a hand, giving it some thought. ‘Actually, that’s not strictly true. If they drive carefully, they
could
reach a road at the other end – but that’s ten kilometres over rough ground. And after this weather?’ He pulled a face. ‘Unlikely. Hardly a quick getaway.’

‘So they’d be trapped.’ Rocco tensed as a dark shape approached the bridge, wobbling slightly on the road, bouncing on soft suspension. It was a dark-blue saloon with something strapped on the roof. A cupboard or a box – it was difficult to tell from here. The car trundled across the bridge and continued on down the road towards them, passing the proposed site of the new war monument and rattling past them without stopping.

‘Unless things went right and nobody saw them.’ Claude pursed his lips and eyed the car out of sight. ‘If they were cool-headed enough and had the right vehicle, I suppose they could do it.’ He grinned. ‘Unlikely now, though, huh? With us here.’

Rocco lifted a pair of binoculars off the back seat, focusing on the track beyond the shed. Nothing. No waiting truck, no motorbikes – another favoured form of transport for an attack – and no men. Just the shed, run-down and ready to fall over.

‘There aren’t many of those left,’ Claude told him, following his line of sight. ‘I’m amazed it’s lasted this long.’

‘It was locked tight by rust when I saw it, and full of farm rubbish. I thought it might be something they’d use, but I was wrong.’ Yet he felt sure he’d got the location right. The circumstances, the pointers, the confluence of 
the ramming idea, de Gaulle’s visit and the similarities of the sites … it had all been so clear. So obvious.

He swung the glasses back to the shed and stared hard, the rubber eyepieces pressed into his skin. It looked the same as it had the other day, so what was he worried about? The roof still stained with bird droppings, the wooden walls peppered with holes and the planking warped by the elements, the whole thing surrounded by a hovering grey mist, like a scene from a ghost film. Yet something was tugging at his mind, gently insistent. Something … different. What the hell was it? Or was he just desperate for something to show up that would prove he’d been right about this?

‘It’s an old cart shed,’ Claude continued chattily, showing his mastery of all things rural. ‘They were just big enough to take a hay cart. Take it in one end, unhitch the horse, fold up the shafts and close the door, take the horse out the other. Saved trying to reverse it in. The logic was impeccable.’

Rocco took his eyes off the road. Tried to follow through what Claude had said. ‘What are you saying?’ Then it hit him. ‘That shed has a back door?’ He hadn’t looked. It hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Yes. Same as the front. In one end, out the other. Why?’

Then Rocco realised what had been bothering him.

The pigeons on the roof. There were none. Why was that? And that mist around the base of the structure: it was moving, billowing gently outwards. Yet there was none anywhere else.

And it was growing
.

As he opened his mouth to speak, to voice what he was 
seeing, the shed moved. It trembled, then seemed to shake itself like a living beast, and lifted, before exploding in a great shower of wood fragments and smoke, the latter billowing out in a great cloud to join the mist around the base.

Not mist.
Exhaust smoke
.

‘My God! Lucas!’ Claude grabbed his arm and pointed beyond the shed to the road leading to the bridge. Another car had appeared in the distance. Only this one was shiny and sleek, and rode the tarmac with undoubted elegance, at sharp odds with the sleety brown of the surrounding fields and the grubby snow clouds gathered overhead.

A gleaming black Citroën DS.

Jack Fletcher stared hard at a point in the front left corner of the shed, his foot poised on the accelerator, keeping the engine of the Renault at a smooth pitch. He’d judged the distances carefully with the help of the man who’d brought him here. He had spoken passable English, and between them they had worked out at what point Fletcher had to hit the gas in order to hit the car broadside on. From the three test runs he’d made, he knew precisely what the timing was and how fast the truck had to be going. And that was Fletcher’s speciality. There would be no messing this time, no holding back, even just a little. He’d had his orders. This one was for real.

He felt his heart tripping fast, reverberating through his chest even above the roar of the truck engine in the confined space of the shed. For the first time in years, he felt proud of what he was about to do. ‘Ruby’ Ketch, passing on orders from a higher authority, had selected him for this job, and him alone. No George bloody Tasker sticking his
oar in this time, telling him how he’d screwed up and gone in too heavy. This time, Tasker was going to see
and
feel what heavy was all about. And Calloway. They wouldn’t know what had hit them.

He laughed out loud at the absurd beauty of it. Because they bloody would know, of course they would; in the few seconds it would take them to suss it out, by which time it would be too late, they’d go mental as the realisation of what Ketch had planned for them actually sank in.

‘We got a big job for you, Jack.’ Ketch had said two days ago. He’d treated Fletcher to a few drinks before telling him what he’d wanted. ‘Seems we’ve got a couple of bleedin’ twicers in the camp.’

‘What?’ Fletcher wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Twicers. Cheats. Traitors. ‘Who?’

Ketch had told him, lighting up a big cigar while Fletcher absorbed the information.

Tasker
and Calloway
? He could hardly believe it. On the other hand, he’d never liked Tasker, and Calloway was too smooth for his own bleedin’ good. Smarmy young git. He found he’d been ready to believe anything of them.

‘We need someone we can rely on, Jack, to sort this out,’ Ketch had continued, flicking away the match. ‘Someone with the balls to do it right.’ He’d looked Fletcher in the eye from close up, the smell of the cigar mixing with cologne and filling Fletcher’s nose. ‘We need ’em to go away, Jack. Gone for good – know what I mean?’

He’d accompanied the words by taking out his trademark pen and writing a number on a paper napkin. It was a big number, so big it had almost made Fletcher’s eyes water. And preceded by a pound sign. It was more than Fletcher
had earned in years, and he swore the number sat there looking up at him with a devilish grin on its face, calling out to him to pick it up.

Ketch had leant closer, a reassuring hand on Fletcher’s shoulder. ‘Money like this, you could retire, Jack.’

‘Eh?’ That had come as a surprise. But not an unwelcome one.

‘Call it your signing-off fee, eh? Bloody good sign-off, too. You’d be in clover. And the job you’d be doing, you’d be a legend.’ The final four words were said in a hushed whisper, and Jack Fletcher felt his chest would explode.

He’d picked up the napkin and thought, a job like this, I’d do it for bloody nothing.

Now, watching through the gap he’d made between the planks in the wall, he waited for the black Citroën to appear. They’d be driving at a steady pace, he’d been assured, unsuspecting because Tasker and Calloway had been told the crash would take place a good mile further down the road, on a bend. They’d probably be gassing, telling themselves how clever they were to be cheating on Ketch and the rest, and wouldn’t even give the shed a passing glance. To them, it would be a shitty structure in the middle of a vast brown rolling sea of muddy fields.

He looked at his wing mirrors out of habit, before remembering that he’d ripped them off before driving into the shed. They’d have only got in the way, and he wasn’t going to use them in any case. And he sure as buggery wasn’t going to hand the truck back to anyone, not once he’d finished with it. The drum of petrol in the back would see to that. One match and
woof
– all gone, just like the last one.

He checked his watch. Another five minutes. He was ahead of himself. And nervy. He needed to calm down. He left the motor running and jumped out, squeezing through the narrow gap between the truck and the side of the shed. He shuffled to the back of the truck where he’d made a hole in the rear doors to let out the exhaust smoke. He sparked up a last cigarette, feeling the cold bite of a draught fanning the air around him. That was better. He could do this, no sweat.

He checked the time again. He wasn’t sure why it was so critical; Tasker had never been punctual for anything. Still, best follow orders. He tossed the cigarette aside and made his way back to the cab.

A flash of movement showed in the spyhole between the boards, and he revved the engine, his heart going with it. Christ, they were early. No, wait. It was a dark-blue saloon with a cupboard strapped on the top, bobbing about like a jelly. Christ, he’d be pulled over for that back in England, daft bugger. He breathed out in short sharp bursts, willing his heart rate to return to normal.

He coughed, eyes fixed on the road through the gap. His throat was hurting and a veil of smoke drifted in through the open side window. Exhaust fumes were building up inside the shed. He swore but didn’t dare take his eyes off the road. He’d been revving the engine too much and it wasn’t being carried away sufficiently at the back. He should have thrown out all the wooden crates instead of cramming them alongside the truck. Trouble was, a local might have noticed and come to investigate.

Two minutes seemed to drag by achingly slowly. Then another car appeared. Black, shiny, a pale flash of blinds at the windows.

A Citroën DS.

Fletcher hit the accelerator hard, relieved he’d kept the engine warmed and ready to fly. He coughed again, his throat raw now, as the stubby little truck leapt forward like a terrier going after a rabbit. It hit the front doors with a mighty crash, the railway sleeper strapped to the front ripping through the rotten wood like paper and showering the cab and bonnet with years of accumulated dust and debris, cobwebs and bird shit. The rush of daylight flooding the cab made him blink after the gloom. The truck bounced as it hit the track, and shook off a cascade of planks tumbling around the roof. As it hit clear air, it seemed to gather speed as if revelling in the cold, clear atmosphere like a bull let out to grass.

And Jack Fletcher, fired by the excitement of it all, screamed unintelligible words at the top of his lungs, pounding the steering wheel with his fist, eyes streaming with tears but fixed on the target vehicle, now about two hundred yards away and approaching the end of the track and the bridge without a care in the world.

The instructions had been clear as day. No messing.
No hesitation. Do it
.

So intense was he on the target, so high with excitement, that Fletcher failed to notice the billowing rage of smoke trailing behind him; failed to see the flames started by the cigarette landing in the old dried grass beginning to consume the rear of the truck … and creeping towards the drum of petrol lashed in the back.

‘Broadside on, Jack, as hard as you can. Push the bastard twicers right over the edge.’

He was going to be a legend.