The Coldest Case, Martin Walker [famous ebook reader txt] 📗

‘So I wouldn’t be able to drive to Castelnaud on this side of the river?’

‘Not a chance, we saw the fire jumping the road. You’ll have to cross the river and take the north bank.’

That left Bruno no choice but to talk his way across the bridge at Allas. He waited on the quayside until told to untie the mooring rope, threw it back on board the gabarre, waved. Then he returned to the Land Rover and attached the magnetic flashing blue light to his roof. To his surprise, the bridge was clear and nobody was guarding it. The people of Envaux could have used it after all. That would be another item for his report.

Once over the river he turned east onto the narrow two-track road. It was usually packed with tourists throughout the summer, but now it was deserted but for the occasional ambulance, police car or fire truck. The glow of fire loomed terrifyingly bright across the river. The lovely castle of Milandes was a silhouette against the fire that had spread through the woods behind and the reflection of the flames flickered in the river. Bruno was stopped by a gendarme at the entrance to the village of Beynac, showed his police ID and said he was under Prunier’s orders to get to Castelnaud.

From this vantage point, looking across one of the great bends in the river, he could see the farmland in the low-lying ground illuminated by the fires that covered the entire hill behind the crops. Those woods, he knew, ran all the way to the great medieval fortress of Castelnaud. There was something almost Biblical about the scene, the red glow of the sky seeping into the darkness of the smoke. The bright, shooting yellow bursts of flame seemed ready to set alight the dappled water of the river and dance in the ripples as each new flare signalled the incineration of yet another tree.

The gendarme handed Bruno back his ID card and waved him on. He drove beneath the huge cliff, now glowing red, on which perched the fortress of Beynac. It seemed to stand in defiance of the fires across the river, just as it had stood in defiance of enemies in siege after siege in the Middle Ages. The road here hugged the river until it escaped the town and continued north towards Sarlat. Bruno turned south, following the river bank to the bridge at Tournepique. Here it was the massive stone towers and walls of Castelnaud that were silhouetted against the flickering redness that loomed over the hill behind the fortress. Bruno felt a sudden lurch in his sense of time. It could be the Middle Ages once again, the embattled castle under siege.

24

Bruno was waved down just before the bridge and told to turn off the road and into a field, where scores of other civilian vehicles were already parked. He did so and walked across the bridge, checking his watch. It was twenty minutes before three. Dawn would break in less than three hours. He wondered if Castelnaud would still exist by then.

Police and fire trucks filled the town car park and the field where in normal times sightseers watched while enormous balloons were inflated to take a load of passengers soaring over the valley. A huge water tender was poised as close to the bank as it could get, giant hoses sucking up the river water. As soon as one left, heading for the far side of the hill where the pompiers were still trying to hold back the flames, a second took its place, thrusting its proboscis into the river like some beast at a waterhole. There was no sign of a third.

Dozens of men, presumably volunteers, were stretched out on the bank, resting or trying to sleep, while others were helping direct the fire trucks to the narrow road that led up the hill. Still more volunteers gathered around crates of bottled water that were disappearing as fast as they could be unloaded from a supermarket truck. Amid the bustle and shouting and sense of emergency, Bruno saw in the gloomy faces and lowered heads of many of the volunteers a mood of dejection, even of hopelessness. They had done their best but it hadn’t been enough; the fire had won. He saw the same faltering morale in the expressions of the men standing in line at a mobile pizza truck that was providing free food.

Another fluttering tricolor marked the local command centre, this time with an armée de l’air communications truck parked alongside. Bruno wondered if the water-dropping aircraft operated at night. Presumably the pilots needed to sleep. Inside the command centre he found Commissaire Prunier, one phone to his ear, staring at the screen of another phone in his hand and telling someone the evacuations were complete.

‘No lives have been lost so far. We managed to get the people out on gabarres, but the fire still isn’t under control,’ he was saying into his phone. ‘What we’ll need in future is a gabarre refitted to hold a fire engine that can suck up water and pump it out in fire hoses. Maybe a flat-bottomed barge would do. Perhaps you could put a team together when this emergency is over, Monsieur Le Prèfet, and run a cost and feasibility study. We’ll speak tomorrow.’

Prunier closed that phone, nodded at Bruno and showed him the screen of the other one. It was obviously linked to a drone that was tracking the front line of the fire, heading for the fortress on the hill above them that dominated the village and the river crossing.

‘Hi, Bruno, it looks like we’re going to lose the Eco-museum, the walnut plantations and maybe everything this side of the bridge,’ he said. ‘The pompiers and volunteers are all exhausted and there are no more reinforcements. We’ve had to send a lot of men and equipment to Domme to