The Coldest Case by Martin Walker (mobi reader android txt) 📕

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 idea – 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