The police arrived twenty minutes later, when the fire was still burning with a dense white smoke that gave off impenetrable fumes. Two convoys of traffic had gathered along the road in both directions; and the police radioed for reinforcements with firefighting and breathing equipment.
It was not until the next day that forensic experts confirmed that the burning explosive had been white phosphorus — a rare and lethal substance, restricted almost entirely to military use. The Police Routière had no record of such a load being transported anywhere in France on the previous day; and no military establishment in the country had reported the loss or theft of white phosphorus.
The forensic report could only state that at least two people had died in the car; for apart from a small amount of body fat adhering to the melted metal and congealed tarmac, which had been scraped up with the chassis, only the remains of several teeth had been found; and these had belonged to more than one person.
The Inspector who had been called in from the Police Criminelle in Dijon, ordered a further, more intensive examination of the wreckage, together with a thorough search of the area surrounding the fire. By the following evening the make of car had been identified as the Citroën CX, though the number plates, chassis and engine markings had been obliterated.
The police also made three important discoveries. The first was a fragment of metal, deformed at one end but almost intact at the other. For some time the experts were perplexed. They tried fitting it to every known part of the Citroën mechanism, and checked it against all known car accessories. It was one of the ballistics experts who finally recognized it as part of an American MI6 carbine.
The second discovery was of eighteen empty 7.62mm shells, scattered over a small area on the bank of the road opposite where the wreck had been found. At first the police were again puzzled by the markings round the firing cap; until the same ballistics expert confirmed that they were Russian, and that the shells fitted the Kalashnikov AK 47, the standard Soviet submachine gun.
The third, perhaps most important find, was a curved disc, blackened but unmelted by the heat, with two holes in each end. In the laboratory it was cleaned, and found to bear the engraved name ‘Pierre-Baptiste Chamaz’ and what appeared to be an inscription in Arabic. The metal was identified as a rare heat-resistant alloy used in the aerospace industry, and not available on the open market.
The inspector was satisfied that it was part of an identity bracelet, belonging perhaps to a pilot or fireman — someone who faced the regular hazard of being burnt to death. He was also satisfied that he had a case of murder on his hands. The fact that at least two weapons had been used — one American, the other of Communist origin — also suggested a political motive. Reluctantly — for he was an ambitious man — he now referred the case to Paris, but not before he had given an extended Press conference during which he was photographed from many angles, holding up Chamaz’s identity bracelet, the fragment of the American carbine, and a number of Russian machinegun shells.
The case received wide publicity in both the local and national Press. A squad of detectives from the capital had meanwhile set up their headquarters in Besançon, with open lines to the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) — The French Security Service — and to Interpol headquarters, both in Paris. No record could be found on the files of either organization relating to a Monsieur Pierre-Baptiste Chamaz. But a Professor of Arabic, from Grenoble University, translated the inscription on the bracelet as ‘Silence Speaks the Truth’.
It was the third day before the police obtained their first tentative lead: the proprietor of the Café du Col, on the road eight kilometres away from the scene of the incident, remembered the three strangers who had entered the café about half an hour before the police were first alerted, which meant around ten minutes before the explosion. His description of the three was not inspired, but he did remember that they had arrived in a Citroën; and one of them had made a long-distance telephone call in a language which the proprietor insisted was not European.
Here the police had their first and only piece of luck. The café telephone was not yet on automatic, and all long-distance calls had to go through the operator in Besançon. Enquiries at the town’s Central Post Office, giving the time of the call to the nearest quarter of an hour, produced an operator who remembered it at once. The man had been abrupt and impatient, she said; he had asked, in a foreign accent, for a Paris number. When she had told him there would be a slight delay, he had shouted at her that it was ‘a matter of the most supreme priority’, adding the phrase, ‘un appel diplomatique d’urgence!’
She looked up her file for that afternoon and found the number, which Paris reported as unlisted and belonging to an address in the Seventeenth Arondissement under the subscriber’s name of Bloch.
That evening three armed plain-clothes officers from the DST called at the address — a top-floor flat in a dingy house behind the Place Clichy. The old concierge told them that during the ten months that Monsieur Bloch had rented the flat, he had never even set eyes on him. The officers went upstairs and found a door
