I bent down to the trail bike, took out the key and threw it out into the middle of the river, then went back to the guy and untied him. When the rope got loose from his neck and hands and feet he lay there on his side gasping. I pushed him with my toe. “Put the rope back in the trunk of the car.” He looked at me weirdly. “Go ahead. Just do it. Put it back neat.”

While he did that I inspected the car. A little scratch on the front bumper, but hardly visible. I wiped it down with the Hermes scarf. Rinsed the scarf in the river and wrung it out a few times. I left the scarf under the passenger seat. Silk dries fast. I turned the Mercedes around. Rolled gently up the dirt track to the road. I looked in the side mirror, the guy was already gone.

There was something that I’d forgotten. I stopped the car. Put it in reverse. Rolled the Mercedes back down the incline until I came up alongside the trail bike. I got out of the car and went over to the bike. I popped the seat up and looked inside the little storage area. A pack of cigarettes, and a bundle wrapped in a rag. I unwrapped the bundle. Three screwdrivers. Good ones with slotted cushion grips. I selected the biggest one of them and tested the blade. The flathead was wide, shaped like a snake head. The tip had been sharpened to a razor edge. So the kid wasn’t innocent. As the rider, he would have been the one to lean over and stab Gilles Vaugeois in the forehead. At speed, with the derestricted trail bike engine, he would have managed enough kinetic energy to put that thing into the skull.

I wrapped the big screwdriver in the rag, took it back with me to the Mercedes, and placed it on the passenger seat.

When I rolled back up the incline, and came over the top, a Municipal Police Peugeot 308 was blocking the road entrance.

The words ‘Police Municipale’ were painted on the hood in boxy block letters. The same words were boxed into a horizontal blue stripe running across the two doors. The sun reflected off the windshield, making it impossible to see inside. I accelerated slowly to beat the glare and the cruiser responded, rolling over the dirt and gravel like a mirror image of what Bertha the Mercedes was doing. Pretty soon we were forming up into the classic police cruiser conversation configuration, the cop sixty-nine. The driver’s side window rolled down and Bonnet was looking at me with a little smile on his face. All that was missing was a sack of doughnuts.