The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  ‘Good idea. I’ll come now for the Land Rover and I’d better change into uniform at the Mairie. Tell Philippe I’ll see him at Siorac.’

  The car park at the Siorac golf course was filled with police and fire vehicles, a command truck flying a tricolor beside a military signals van. A row of arc lights had already been lit against the gathering dusk. Philippe was waiting outside the command truck, talking urgently into his phone in such a way that told Bruno he was live on air with the local radio station. By now Bruno could smell the smoke. He reported to the command truck, saying he had a Land Rover available. He was given a large-scale map and a list of three remote dwellings near St Laurent-la-Vallée inhabited by two old couples and a disabled woman. They were to be taken to the Mairie at Coux and then he should report back. He checked the map he’d been given against his phone, identified the three remote cottages and set off.

  His Land Rover took twenty minutes to get there, an endless line of cars coming the other way, their headlights dimmed by the smoke that was starting to thicken as the evacuation gathered pace. In St Laurent, he spotted a Gendarme truck with Yveline and Sergeant Jules directing traffic. He slowed, peeped his horn and waved. Yveline flagged him down and came across to his vehicle with a list. She put a tick beside the three addresses assigned to Bruno and told him to report back to her before heading for Coux.

  ‘You won’t have much time,’ she said. ‘The fire’s getting close.’

  He found the first house easily enough. After checking that they had their key documents with them along with a change of clothes, he installed the two old people into the bench seat alongside him. In the second house he found the disabled woman in a wheelchair with her young daughter, no more than eleven or twelve, Bruno thought. He lifted the woman from her wheelchair and laid her on one of the Land Rover’s rear benches while the daughter folded the wheelchair. She went back for a suitcase and sat on it beside her mother. Bruno heaved the wheelchair onto his roof rack and secured it with bungee cords. The third house was harder to find. It was deep in the woods and by now the smell of smoke was strong and an ominous orange glow coloured the darkening sky to the south.

  ‘There,’ called the girl from the back. ‘Off to the right behind us, I saw a light.’

  Bruno reversed along the dirt track, saw a small unmarked turning to the right and a single light some fifty metres away in the trees. He drove down, thinking his police van could not have made it down this overgrown track. He turned the Land Rover for an easier departure, went to the front door of the house and knocked, noting the stench of a septic tank that had not been emptied for too long. No answer. The door was unlocked and he went in, almost gagging from the smell of rotting food and something else, something ominous. The main room was empty, and so was the kitchen, the sink overflowing with dirty plates. He called out the names of the couple who lived there but there was no reply.

  He checked the bathroom at the back of the house by the kitchen, where the stench of the septic tank was even worse. Upstairs he found an old man asleep in a chair by a bed on which an old woman lay. He was holding her hand. Bruno at first thought she was dead but he checked her pulse. It was faint but she was alive. He woke the man, and led him, barely awake and unprotesting, down the stairs. He checked that the man had his wallet, found the woman’s handbag, checked for her ID card and carte vitale and led the husband to his Land Rover. He had to lift the disoriented and almost helpless old man into the back where he asked the young girl to keep an eye on him.

  ‘Just shout if you need me,’ he said, and went back upstairs. He was about to scoop up the woman and her bedclothes when he saw they were sodden with urine. He found blankets in a wardrobe, wrapped her in those instead and carried her downstairs. He put her onto the other bench in the back of the vehicle and used more bungee cords to hold her in place.

  Back in St Laurent, he told Yveline of the condition of his last two passengers, adding that he didn’t want to inflict this on the young girl for long. She had enough on her plate looking after her mother, let alone the two old people. Yveline nodded, saying the fire had started moving much faster than had been expected. Despite all the warnings on radio and TV, too many people had left their departure until the last minute. The roads were getting jammed. She sent him on his way, to join a slow-moving line of cars. When he finally reached the Mairie in Coux he found a line of waiting cars as volunteers tried to sort out who needed medical attention. Bruno was surprised at the number of elderly people there, some of them sitting on a low wall, others leaning on walking sticks, several in wheelchairs. He was impressed by their patience and stoicism, taken from their homes to an unknown place for the night.

  He went in and saw the local Mayor’s wife, whom he knew slightly, and explained about the old man and his probably dying wife. She checked the evacuation list and told him to take his passengers to the St Denis medical centre, where they had doctors and the facilities to deal with them. Bruno obeyed, although he thought there might be better uses for his Land Rover. He took the back way to St Denis, the hill road through Audrix, thinking the main road through Le Buisson might be blocked with traffic. It had taken him an hour to get from the old couple’s house to St Denis, a journey that would normally take twenty minutes. And it took almost as long again to unload his passengers, ensure they were taken in and then drive back to Siorac.

  There were lessons to be learned from this emergency. He’d have to file an after-action report suggesting that dedicated evacuation routes should be made in the future, with evacuating traffic allowed to use both lanes. Separate roads should be kept clear for police, fire and medical personnel. The planning should have been done already, except that nobody official had anticipated a fire such as this in the Dordogne. They should have done, Bruno thought, after the nine French départements in the south had been hit by fires during the same September week three years earlier, with thousands of people evacuated and the main north–south autoroute closed.

  When he got back to the assembly point in the Siorac car park he saw Yveline’s van again but there was no sign of her. He learned from Sergeant Jules that St Laurent had been abandoned and the pompiers were trying to establish a new control line to stop the fire along the D53 and D50 local roads at Veyrines. Bruno drew on his mental map of the region, thinking that the only line of resistance after Veyrines would be the River Dordogne itself.

  ‘When we pulled out from St Laurent, there were fires on the hills to each side of us, moving as fast we were. It was scary,’ said Jules. ‘Looks like you got your people out just in time.’

  ‘Where’s Yveline?’

  ‘Down at the river bank. They’ve requisitioned refuse trucks and milk tankers and she’s trying to get them filled with water and taken up to the fire engines for the hoses. They haven’t got enough tenders since most of them were assigned to the fires in the Landes. The St Cyprien gendarmes are collecting those above-ground swimming pools, you know the ones, thick plastic sheeting in a cradle. There’s a plan to move them to Veyrines and use the available tenders to fill them so the fire engines can recharge faster.’

  ‘Sounds like a decent idea,’ said Bruno. ‘I’d better report in.’

  Despite his uniform, Bruno waited in line for nearly twenty minutes outside the command centre before he could report. He was told to take back roads to Allas-les-Mines, and evacuate some more families between there and Milandes, but to use only the small road through the woods to Envaux. On no account was he to use the Allas bridge. The main road and bridge at Allas were reserved for the fire engines. It was at that moment that Bruno fully understood the problem of the bottlenecks at the few available river crossings. Along the twenty-kilometre stretch from St Cyprien to Castelnaud there was only that one narrow bridge at Allas.

  A police vehicle drew up, blue light flashing, and Commissaire Prunier climbed out, pausing to greet Bruno as he entered the control centre.

  ‘I have an i
dea – let’s use the gabarres,’ said Bruno, referring to the flat-bottom boats that in the past had taken barrels of good Bergerac wine down river to the port at Libourne. These days, they were pleasure boats that could take forty or fifty tourists on a river cruise.

  ‘I’m on evacuation duty but can’t use the Allas bridge because the fire engines need it,’ Bruno went on. ‘Given the traffic jams on other roads, that means dumping carloads of old and disabled people at Allas without being able to get them across the bridge. I suggest we call out the gabarres from Beynac and use them to evacuate people from the quay at Envaux. We can take them back across the river to Beynac where they’ll be safe. Mon Dieu, they’d be out of danger just staying on the river.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Prunier, nodding. ‘I’ll call the Mayor of Beynac and get him to organize the gabarres and send them to Envaux. You start evacuating people to the quayside there.’

  ‘Please make sure the control centre here knows that Envaux is to be the evacuation point,’ said Bruno at the door. ‘And that the Mayor of Envaux knows to keep that quayside open. If there are volunteers who can help elderly and disabled people get aboard the boats, even better.’

  ‘Consider it done,’ said Prunier. ‘Now, get going.’

  Bruno delivered his final load of evacuees to the quayside at Envaux just after two in the morning. Several lights were on and a group of people stood on the quay but there was no boat in sight. The local Mayor, whom Bruno had met when dropping off the first group, came to the Land Rover waving a mobile phone. As Bruno opened the door she said, ‘I just spoke to them at Beynac. The gabarre is finally on the way. The skipper was nervous about running aground if he sailed at night but finally agreed.’

  ‘How many evacuees do you have now?’ he asked.

  ‘With the people in your vehicle, about thirty, all either old or disabled. After that we’ll have to get our own people out. We’ve been told the bridge at Allas is off limits and the radio said the fire is moving fast towards Milandes. So here at Envaux we’ll require a second boatload.’

  ‘Do they have a reception group organized at Beynac?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been told they have doctors and social workers standing by and they’ve set up a basic medical centre in the castle.’ She paused, then gave him a tired smile. ‘It’s really impressive how people are working together on this.’

  ‘A pity we can’t do it all the time.’

  She nodded, still smiling, and he liked her at once. He could imagine the pressure she would be under, organizing the evacuation of her own village while trying to cope with the carloads of the elderly and disabled being brought to her quayside by Bruno and other volunteers. An attractive woman in her fifties with fine eyes, her hair was tied up loosely in a bun that somehow looked as if it had been done with care. This was a woman proud of herself, he reflected, elected by her neighbours and evidently efficient. She smiled at him again and to Bruno’s pleasure the tiredness left her face. He had a sense of how she must have looked two, three decades earlier. He thought she looked even better now.

  ‘We can offer you coffee, mineral water, wine, a cold beer or a cognac along with a jambon-fromage,’ she said. ‘I thought you might need food.’

  He wasn’t hungry but the idea of a baguette stuffed with ham and cheese was tempting since Bruno assumed he’d be working all night. ‘Thank you, madame. I’d love a baguette and a petit rouge. Have you heard from the command post?’

  ‘Yes, I was on the phone to them just before you came. They said you were bringing the last of the evacuees but they stressed that the wind is veering, now coming from the south-west. I’m to tell you that they are gathering the pompiers and volunteers at Castelnaud-la-Chapelle. They want to save the castle.’ She paused and looked at him. ‘Your face is filthy from smoke and I imagine you could use a bathroom. Come with me.’

  She led him into a house whose door was open. Inside was a simple office, two desks and bookcases filled with files. She showed him to an anonymous bathroom, bare but sufficient. He assumed it was part of the Mairie. He washed his face, neck and hands and ran water over his head. When he emerged she was waiting with a baguette in a paper bag and a full bottle of red wine, already opened with the cork stuffed halfway in. He looked at the label and his eyes widened when he saw it was a Margaux from 2015.

  ‘I’ve got the files and papers ready to put on board,’ she said. ‘I can’t take the wine but I wouldn’t want a bottle like that to go to waste. You should have it. Thank you for what you’ve done tonight. I heard it was you who had the idea to use the gabarres.’

  ‘Somebody else would have thought of it. By the way, I’m Bruno,’ he said. ‘From St Denis.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I’m Marguerite.’

  A boat horn sounded from the river. They went to the door and saw the gabarre approaching.

  ‘Good luck at Castelnaud.’ She turned and went to the quayside, giving instructions for the stretcher cases and wheelchairs to board first. Bruno took an appreciative mouthful of the wine, straight from the bottle, followed by a large bite of baguette. He chewed and swallowed and washed it down with another mouthful of wine. He replaced the cork, went back to the Land Rover to stash the food and bottle, and then began helping the evacuees to board.

  ‘What did you see of the fire on the way here?’ he asked the skipper after introducing himself. It had almost reached the southern bank of the river just before Milandes, he was told.

  ‘What about the chateau?’ he asked. Milandes was a place he liked and knew well, and he felt a twinge of concern for the fate of its collection of hunting hawks.

  ‘The village and chateau looked okay, protected by its big car park. But from the island down to Milandes, it’s woodland all the way back for twenty kilometres. The fire just raced through.’

  ‘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.