The Devil's Cave: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 5)

Albert’s command car, with Lespinasse’s son Edouard from the garage as the first-aid volunteer on duty.Ahmed would bring the emergency vehicle once the full crew of volunteers had assembled. As they roared up to the roundabout, Bruno saw Fabiola running from the medical centre and waving them down. Albert braked and she climbed in.
    ‘I just heard the siren,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
    ‘Accident, could be a death,’ Albert said. ‘Father Sentout called it in, on his way back from a big Palm Sunday service. There were skid marks and glass on the road and the barrier was broken. He’s waiting there to give the last rites.’
    As the road hugged the cliff to climb the steep hill they saw the priest’s little blue Peugeot first, then Father Sentout himself, a shawl around his neck and a small case in his hand. ‘I can’t get down, it’s too steep, but I can see smoke,’ he shouted as they pulled up.
    Albert handed Bruno and Edouard a harness each, fixed a rope to the belt buckle and then tied the other end around the towing bracket of his command van. Two of the supports of the protective wooden fence had been uprooted and the sturdy logs splintered and broken. It looked as though a heavy truck had gone through it and over the almost sheer cliff that led down to the river below. Trees and branches were smashed, but over a narrower span than the breach in the barrier. Half sliding, half scrambling and clutching at broken tree stumps, they went down about twenty metres before seeing wisps of smoke rising from the tyres attached to some burned-out machinery.
    ‘It’s a motorbike,’ Edouard said into the small radio affixed to his yellow jacket. Bruno could not decipher the jumble of static and voice that responded from the road above buthe heard the siren as the emergency vehicle arrived. It took another few minutes to find the driver. He had been thrown to one side and lay impaled on a jagged tree branch. The stump poked bloodily from just above his hip. His helmet was still in place but his neck was visibly broken. At least the rider had been spared the fire that had consumed his bike.
    ‘There must be another vehicle down here,’ Edouard said, kneeling over the body and checking for any sign of life. ‘That gap’s much too wide for just a bike.’
    There was a scrambling above them and Fabiola appeared with Ahmed beside her. She went straight to the body and after a moment pronounced the rider dead. But Bruno and the other two were staring down at the unbroken woods below them and trying to think where another vehicle might possibly be.
    ‘The damage to the trees stops here, at his bike,’ said Ahmed. ‘There’s no other vehicle down here.’
    Bruno and Edouard fixed the harness to the body, eased it off the stump, and Ahmed used his radio to tell the team above to start the winch. Fabiola stepped back from where she’d been working on the body, sealing a small phial she’d taken from her belt-pack that she’d filled with some of the blood that had pooled in the rider’s lap.
    ‘Whoever he was, he was as drunk as a lord,’ said Edouard. ‘You can smell the booze from here. Bloody fool.’
    Bruno and Edouard scrambled to keep up as the winch began hauling. It was only when they got to the road and Father Sentout removed the helmet to apply some oil to theforehead that the head rolled towards him and Bruno realized he knew the dead man.
    ‘It’s Louis Junot,’ he exclaimed, thinking that the scene with his daughter must have destroyed Junot’s good intentions and driven him back to the bottle. ‘Poor old Louis.’
    ‘Drunk in life, drunk in death,’ said Edouard against the sound of the priest’s muttered prayers as he knelt beside the body.
    Bruno began looking closely at the broken fence and at the skid marks, trying to visualize what had taken place. But he couldn’t make the pieces fit. The skid marks might have come from another vehicle that hit and crushed the fence, and Junot had then gone over the edge as he tried to avoid the car. But if that were the case, Junot must have been coming from the other direction. His momentum would have taken him through the fence and to the right. But he and his bike seemed to have gone straight down the hill. And there must have been a second vehicle: the skid marks showed two sets of wheels. Bruno checked the splintered fencing, looking for flecks of paint from whatever vehicle had struck it. What he found instead were threads of what