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

names, and a group of men came up. As he explained the plan to them, Bruno found the bulldozer driver eating a slice of free pizza at the wheel of his enormous machine. Bruno described the task and the driver set off up the steep and curving road to the car park and the stretch of flat land where the trebuchets stood. By now Rossillon had gathered a score of men he seemed to know and sent most of them up the hill after the bulldozer in a couple of trucks. He sent another group to the walnut orchard and then followed his friends in a car, telling Bruno they all worked at the bars and restaurants that nestled around the castle entrance and had commercial freezers with plenty of ice.

Bruno found the Sarlat fire chief, explained this last, desperate bid to save the castle and village, and said they would need a water tender. The fire chief shook his head in disbelief and said it was ridiculous. Then he said it was impossible; he was about to evacuate the remaining trucks and firemen.

‘We’ve got to be seen to try everything and it’s the only chance we’ve got,’ said Bruno. ‘Our last throw.’

‘Putain, you’re right. We’ll give it a shot.’ The fire chief grinned. ‘They’ll never believe this when they see it on TV. It’s worth a try – if only to keep the TV crews out of my hair.’

Ten minutes later, the two big trebuchets had been turned and were now pointing to the top of the hill, the red fire glow fiercely outlining the skyline. They stood ten metres high and the long throwing arms looked to Bruno even longer. Rossillon’s team were hauling on the ratcheted wheels and pulleys that raised the huge counterweight and lowered the throwing arm.

‘Sixteen hundred kilos of sand in that wood box,’ said Rossillon. ‘That’s the counterweight. Now’s the hard part. The throwing arm itself would only send it sixty, eighty metres. With the sling on the end we get the extra force, like the tail of a whip. But if we don’t place the sling exactly right, it won’t work.’

He helped his team fix the ropes with the big leather sling to the tail of the throwing arm. A small truck raced up to him, braked, and two men got out. They began hauling out sacks filled with ice-cubes, loosely closing the necks of the sacks with string. It took two men to carry each sack to the sling of the trebuchet.

‘Stand back,’ called Rossillon. He took a sledgehammer and approached the big machine.

‘Wait, wait,’ came a cry as a TV truck pulled up nearby and a cameraman jumped out, a colleague flipped a switch and the scene was bathed in arc light. A director shouted, ‘Okay, we’re filming, let her loose.’

Rossillon mouthed a curse at them and then with a powerful swing he knocked away the heavy bolt of wood that held the ratchet in place. The great weight plunged down and the long throwing arm swung over the massive oak pivot. The sling at the end of two metres of rope whipped over and the ice-filled sack soared into the air. Bruno saw it briefly silhouetted against the glow of the fire before it dropped down.

‘Mon Dieu,’ he said aloud in tones of disbelief. ‘It worked.’

A cheer came up from the guys who’d already started hauling again on the ratchet and pulleys of the trebuchet that had just fired, even as Rossillon was supervising the loading of another sack into the second, slightly smaller one.

‘I’m putting less ice in this one because I’m not sure of the range,’ he said. Again, the throwing arm came down, and again the bag of ice was placed into the leather sling and Rossillon and his carpenter carefully straightened the ropes attaching it to the throwing arm. Rossillon handed the sledgehammer to Bruno, saying, ‘This was your idea.’

Bruno knocked away the block of wood that had secured the ratchet and again the almost balletic swing of the throwing arm and the extra whiplash effect of the sling sent another sackload of ice over the brow of the hill and into the fire.

By this time, Prunier and the Sarlat fire chief and half the volunteers had joined them on the level ground that Rossillon called his place d’armes to watch the modern use of the medieval catapults, cheering as each one fired. By now they had the waterproof jute sacks filled with water from the tender. It took three men to wrestle it onto the sling and then Simon arrived in his car with his oyster sacks.

‘I’ve got thirty-six sacks here,’ Simon announced, throwing open the back of his car. ‘And on the way I called my colleague at St Cyprien and he’s bringing another load from his warehouse. And he’s calling the hypermarket at Sarlat. They should have more.’

‘That’s great. We can forget the ice and just shoot water,’ said Rossillon.

By this time the men had fallen into a routine. The sacks were placed empty in the sling of the trebuchet before they held each one upright to be filled by a hose from the tender. Then they loosely sealed the top with string, backed away and fired it off.

Bruno checked his watch. It was a quarter to four. Every three minutes, one sack of fifty litres and another of more like seventy litres of water, which meant seventy kilos of weight, was fired over the hill. If they could keep up the pace, that was thirty-six hundred litres each hour. Bruno told himself that maybe the glow of the fire was slackening just a little. But then he realized it wasn’t the fire that was slackening but the lightening of the sky behind him to the east as the dawn began to break.

‘I don’t know if it’s your mad idea or if we just got lucky,’ said the fire chief. He had suddenly appeared at Bruno’s side with a walkie-talkie. ‘The fire