Death on the Rive Nord

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Armand Maurat was in the presence of death. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it… but it was there, sticking to him as relentlessly as the tail lights of the Berliet truck he was driving.

His stomach lurched as the narrow road dipped unexpectedly, catching him off guard. Outside the cab, a cold spray was being blasted across his windscreen by a solid, vengeful easterly, reducing visibility to a blur of trees and hedgerows and an occasional sign pointing to a remote village tucked away in the darkness.

He reached out and banged the radio perched on the dashboard. It responded with a hiss of static, but even that drifted and ebbed as the sound waves became blocked by a nearby hill. Cheap crap, he thought savagely. Bought under the counter at a transit warehouse outside Paris, the packaging had guaranteed high-quality music but delivered mostly mush — or worse, what passed for singing these days. Give him Aznavour any day, even Brel. Depressing son of a bitch, Brel; enough to make a weak man jump off a bridge. On a lonely drive in the dark, though, it suited his mood of isolation.

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