by Fred Vargas
‘Sorry, Josette.’
‘No, it wasn’t too difficult, I enjoyed the chase. Clémentine got me a bowl of coffee with some Armagnac and warm rolls. She looked after me as if I was a submarine captain, getting the torpedoes ready. Anyway. 12 March 1944. A village called Collery in the Loiret. The day of the funeral of Gérard Guillaumond, who had died aged 61.’
‘Drowned?’
‘Yes. It was either an accident or suicide, they never found out which. His boat had sprung a leak and it sank in a marshy lake. And after the funeral, when everyone had gone home, the son, Roland Guillaumond, killed his own mother, Marie Guillaumond.’
‘There was a witness, I seem to remember, Josette?’
‘Yes, the cook. She heard screams from upstairs. She went up and the son of the family pushed past her on the stairs, as he rushed out of his mother’s bedroom. The cook found her mistress lying dead. There wasn’t anyone else there, so there was never any doubt at all who had killed her.’
‘And did they catch him?’ Adamsberg asked anxiously.
‘No, never. The police appeared to think he had gone to earth in the local maquis, and perhaps had been killed in the fighting afterwards.’
‘Were there any photos of him in the press?’
‘No. It was wartime, remember. The cook is dead now, I checked the registration records. So, commissaire, do you really think he’s our judge? I thought he was born in 1904, so he’d have been forty in 1944.’
‘Take off about fifteen years, Josette.’
XLIX
CURTAINS TWITCHED DISCREETLY AS THE STRANGER WENT BY. Adamsberg was walking through the narrow streets of Collery, wondering where to begin. The murder had taken place almost sixty years earlier, and he wanted to find someone who could remember it. The little village smelt of wet leaves and the wind carried the slightly vegetal smell from the green weed-covered pools of the Sologne. It was quite unlike the majestic order of Richelieu’s purpose-built town. Just a little village, with houses higgledy-piggledy and huddled together.
A child pointed out the mayor’s house on the main square. Adamsberg presented himself, with his badge in the name of Denis Lamproie, asking to be directed to the former house of the Guillaumond family. The mayor was too young to have known the family, but of course everybody in the village had heard about the famous Collery murder.
In Sologne, as in other rural areas, it was not easy to extract a quick answer to a question on the doorstep. Parisian abruptness was not the style. Adamsberg found himself with his elbows on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, facing a little glass of eau-de-vie at five in the afternoon. In these parts, wearing a Canadian lumberman’s cap did not appear to surprise anyone: the mayor kept his cloth cap on and his wife her headscarf.
‘Normally,’ the chubby and inquisitive mayor explained, ‘we wouldn’t open the bottle before seven o’clock. But since it isn’t every day a commissaire comes down from Paris, it’s allowed, isn’t it, Ghislaine?’ turning to his wife for approval.
Ghislaine, who was peeling potatoes on the corner of the table, nodded, as if she were used to it. She had to lift a finger to keep her glasses on which were patched up with sticking plaster. There wasn’t a great deal of money in Collery. Adamsberg peered across to see whether she took the eyes out like Clémentine. Yes, she did. Had to get rid of the poison.
‘Ah, the Guillaumond affair,’ said the mayor, banging the cork back in the bottle with the palm of his hand. ‘That caused a stir all right. I was only five, but I heard all about it.’
‘Children shouldn’t be exposed to things like that,’ Ghislaine said.
‘The house was left empty. Nobody would move in. People said it was haunted. Rubbish of course.’
‘Of course,’ murmured Adamsberg.
‘In the end they knocked it down. What people said was that Roland Guillaumond was off his head. I don’t know if he was. But to impale his own mother like that, something must have been wrong.’
‘He impaled her?’
‘Well, when someone takes a garden fork to do it, I call it impaling. Is that the word? Isn’t that right, Ghislaine? If someone lets off a shotgun or bashes their neighbour over the head with a shovel, well, I’m not excusing them, but you know it happens sometimes, if people are having a go at each other. But to take a garden fork and stick it in your mother’s guts, begging your pardon, commissaire, I call that barbaric.’
‘His own mother too,’ Ghislaine added. ‘What are you looking into that old story for?’
‘I’m looking for Roland Guillaumond.’
‘You don’t give up in Paris, do you? But surely after all this time, he couldn’t be arrested even if he was alive?’
‘No, of course not. But the Guillaumond father was a relation of one of my colleagues. He’s distressed about it. So there’s a personal side to the investigation if you like.’
‘Oh, if it’s a personal matter, that’s different,’ said the mayor, raising up his calloused hands, rather as Trabelmann had surrendered to the claims of childhood memory. ‘Nobody wants a murderer in the family. But you won’t find Roland now. Everyone says he died in the maquis. There was a lot of fighting round here in ‘44.’
‘What did the father do for a living?’
‘He was a metalworker. Salt of the earth, they used to say. He’d married well, you know, a girl from a good family in La Ferté-Saint-Aubin. And to think it ended in a bloodbath, bad business, eh, Ghislaine?’
‘Would there be anyone still in Collery who knew the family? Who might be willing to talk to me?’
‘Well, you could try André,’ said the mayor, after thinking. ‘He must be about eighty-four. He used to work with the father long ago.’
He looked at the clock.
‘You’d better go round before he starts his supper.’
The mayor’s eau-de-vie was still burning his stomach when Adamsberg knocked at the door of André Barlut. The old man, wearing a thick corduroy jacket and a cloth cap, looked suspiciously at the badge. Then he took it in his gnarled fingers, and twisted it this way and that, looking at both sides in curiosity. He had a three-day beard and sharp dark eyes.
‘Let’s just say it’s something personal, Monsieur Barlut.’
Two minutes later, sitting in front of another glass of spirits, Adamsberg was asking his questions again.
‘As a rule, I don’t open the bottle before the Angelus,’ the old man said, without answering the questions. ‘But when I have visitors …’
‘I’m told you’re the memory of the village, monsieur.’
André winked. ‘Ah, if I told you everything that’s in here,’ he said tapping his head, ‘it’d make a book. A book about what folks get up to, commissaire. How do you like this then? Not too fruity? Helps to think, is what I say.’
‘It’s excellent,’ Adamsberg agreed.
‘Makes it myself,’ said André. ‘Drop of this won’t hurt you.’
Sixty degrees of alcohol, Adamsberg estimated silently. It set his teeth on edge.
‘Now old Guillaumond, you want to know about him, oh, he were almost too good to be true. Took me on as his apprentice and we were a good team. You can call me André, monsieur.’
‘You were a metalworker too, André?’
‘Ah, no. I’m talking now about when he were a gardener. The metalworking, that stopped after his accident. Lost his fingers in the grinder,’ André explained, demonstrating with his own hand.
‘How did he do that?’
‘Like I said. Got his hand caught. His thumb and little finger. So his right hand, he just had the three middle fingers left,’ said André holding out his hand with three fingers up. ‘After that of course, he couldn’t do metalworking. But his hand didn’t stop him working as a gardener. Garden tools, he could use them all right.’
Adamsberg looked in fascination at the wrinkled old hand. Three fingers. The father’s mutilated hand, like a fork or a trident. Three fingers, three claws.
‘Why did you
say he was “almost too good to be true,” André?’
‘Well, so he was. Good as gold, always help you out, always had a joke and a kind word. Mind you, I wouldn’t say the same for his wife. And I got my own ideas about that.’
‘About what?’
‘About him drowning. She wore him out, that woman. She ground him down. And in the end, mebbe he couldn’t be bothered patching up the boat, and it got a leak in the winter, or mebbe he just let himself drown. It’s my opinion, she’s the reason he ended up in the water.’
‘You didn’t like her, then?’
‘No, weren’t nobody liked her. Now her, she were the daughter of the big pharmacy in La Ferté-Saint-Aubin. Plenty of money there. But she took it into her head to marry Gérard. In those days, he were a fine figure of a man, see. But it all went bad. She had to be a fine lady, she looked down on him. Living in Collery with a metalworker, that weren’t good enough for her, oh no. She thought she’d married beneath her. And it got worse after his accident. She were ashamed of him, and she didn’t mind who knew it. She were no good at all, that woman.’
* * *
André had known the family well. As a small boy, he had played with Roland, an only child like himself, the same age and living opposite. He used to go to the house after school and in the evening. Every night after supper they did the same thing: they had to play Mah Jong. Because that was what they did at the pharmacy in La Ferté, and the mother insisted on keeping it up. But it gave her plenty of chances, which she never missed, to humiliate Gérard. Because in Mah Jong, the rules say you can’t dilute. What does that mean, asked Adamsberg who didn’t know anything about the game. It means mixing different suits to try and win more quickly, like mixing hearts and clubs at cards, for instance. That wasn’t supposed to happen if you were playing properly. Only coarse people did that. André and Roland didn’t do it, because they dared not disobey her. They would rather lose than dilute. But Gérard, Roland’s father, couldn’t care less. He picked tiles with his three-fingered hand and made jokes. And Marie Guillaumond would be saying ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Gérard, the day you get a Hand of Honours, hens will have teeth.’ It was just another way of putting him down. The Hand of Honours was a sort of especially good hand, like a fistful of aces. André had heard her say this more times than he could remember, always with that sarcastic tone, commissaire. But Gérard just laughed, and he never got one. Nor did she neither, come to that. She always wore white, his wife, so she could see the least little speck of dirt on her clothes. As if it mattered in Collery. The cook and maid called her ‘the white dragon’ behind her back. Yes, that woman had really worn Gérard down.
‘What about Roland?’ Adamsberg asked.
‘She brainwashed him, commissaire, no other word for it. She wanted him to be a gentleman, make a lot of himself, go to the city. It was “Roland, my pet, you won’t be a failure like your father,” “You won’t be a lazy so-and-so.” So then of course, he got to thinking he were too good for the likes of us boys in the village. Got very stuck up. But really, I think it was the white dragon as didn’t want him to play with us. We weren’t good enough, she said. So in the end, Roland, he turned out different from his dad. Proud and stuck-up, you couldn’t say anything to him. Bite your head off, he would.’
‘Did he fight other boys?’
‘Threatened to. Tell you what we used to do, when we were oh, fourteen, fifteen, we used to catch frogs and make ’em blow up with cigarettes. Not a nice thing, you might think, monsieur, but there wasn’t a lot to do in Collery.’
‘Frogs, did you say, or toads?’
‘Frogs, now. Green ones. If you put a cigarette in their mouth they puffs it and they just blows up, like that, ploff! Gotta see it to understand.’
‘I think I can imagine,’ said Adamsberg.
‘So now Roland, he’d turn up with a knife, and splat, just cut the heads off the frogs. Blood all over. I suppose it came to the same for the poor old froggy, he were dead, just the same. But we didn’t like that, us others, no. Then he’d wipe the blood off on the grass, and march off. Just showing us he could do what he wanted.’
André helped himself to another glass. Adamsberg did his best to drink as slowly as possible.
‘Still must’ve been more than that to him,’ André went on. ’Cause Roland, he really did worship his pa. He didn’t like the way the dragon treated the old man. Didn’t say so, but I’d see how he’d clench his fists like this when she were tearing strips off his old pa.’
‘Was Roland good-looking as a lad?’
‘Oh, like a film star. All the girls were after him, the rest of us wasn’t anywhere. But Roland didn’t go with girls, tell you the truth, monsieur, I think he wasn’t quite normal, that way. Anyway, off he went one fine day to the city to do studying, and be a gentleman. Ambitious, see.’
‘Law school?’
‘That’s right. And then what happened, well it was bound to happen. Couldn’t anything good come out of a house like that, with all the bad feelings. At poor old Gérard’s funeral, the mother, she didn’t shed a tear. Not a one. I always thought what happened was when they got back home, she must have said summat.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well the kind of thing she would say. “Good riddance to bad rubbish” or summat of that. She’d a sharp tongue on her, that woman. And then, Roland, he’d have seen red, because the funeral would have shaken him up a lot. I’m not defending him, mind, but that’s what I think. So he just up and at her. Grabbed his dad’s fork and chased her up the stairs. And that’s how it fell out, if you ask me. Killed the old white dragon.’
‘With a trident?’
‘That’s what the police thought, because it looked that way and the fork had disappeared. That fork, it was a bit special. Gérard, he were always messing about with it, sharpening the points in the fire. He looked after his tools, that man. Once when he was digging, he broke a point off. Think he’d throw it away? Oh no, soldered it back on. Knew what he was about in metalwork, of course. And carved stuff on the handle and all. She didn’t like that either, the wife. Thought it was stupid. I don’t say it were art, but it were pretty enough, the handle.’
‘What kind of thing did he carve?’
‘Like in school. Stars, suns, flowers. Nothing too fancy, I s’pose, but Gérard that’s how he was. Liked to make things nice. Same thing with his spade, his pick, his shovel. You couldn’t mistake his tools for anyone else’s. I’ve still got the spade, kept it as a souvenir when he died. Oh, salt of the earth, Gérard was.’
The old man went out and fetched a spade, polished by years of use. Adamsberg examined the glossy handle, with its hundreds of tiny patterns carved into the wood, covered now with the patina of age.
‘Yes, it is pretty,’ he said sincerely, running his fingers over the handle. ‘I can see why you keep it, André.’
‘Makes me sad to think of him. Always a kindly word, or a joke. But not her. No, nobody missed her. I always wonder whether she didn’t do it. And whether Roland knew about it.’
‘Do what, André?’
‘Split the boards in the boat,’ the old man muttered, taking back his spade.
The mayor had driven Adamsberg in his van to Orleans station. As he sat in the freezing cold waiting-room, he chewed mechanically on some bread to mop up the eau-de-vie which was burning his guts, much as André’s words were burning in his brain. A humiliated father with a mutilated hand, and an ambitious and scornful mother. The future judge growing up caught between them, having a twisted boyhood, making him eager to wipe out his father’s weakness, to transform it into strength. Killing her with the trident, which echoed the father’s deformed hand, now turned into an instrument of total power. Fulgence seemed to have inherited from his mother the urge to dominate others and from his father the unbearable frustrations of a weak man. Every blow dealt with the trident restored the strength and courage of Gérard Guillaumond, who had been defeated and then swallowed up in the mud of the
marsh. The last laugh.
So of course the killer would not want to abandon the decorated handle of the weapon. It was the hand of the father. But why then had he not gone on attacking mother-figures? If he hated his mother, one would have expected him to target women in middle age, bossy, maternal figures. But in the list of those killed, there were as many men as women, and they were all ages, from teenagers to old people. Even among the women, there were young girls, quite unlike Marie Guillaumond. Was he trying to extend his power to the whole human race, by striking at random? Adamsberg chewed some more brown bread, shaking his head. This rage to destroy must have some other logic. It wasn’t just wiping out the humiliation, it was amplifying the judge’s power, like his choice of name. It was building a kind of rampart, a defence against any decline. But how could stabbing an old man to death with a fork bring Fulgence that kind of sensation?
Adamsberg suddenly felt the need to call Trabelmann and tell him that after tracking down the ear, he had extracted the judge’s whole body from the dead, and was now moving inside his head. A head he had promised to bring him on the end of a trident, in order to save poor old Vétilleux in his cell. When he remembered the aggressive behaviour of the commandant of gendarmes, Adamsberg felt an urge to stuff him into one of the windows of Strasbourg Cathedral as well. Just one third of him, up to the waist. Then he’d be face to face with the dragons of fairy stories, the Loch Ness monster, the fish from Pink Lake, the toads, the lamprey, and all the other creatures which Adamsberg was using to turn the jewel of Gothic architecture into a menagerie.
But that would not wipe out the commandant’s words. If it could, everyone would use this handy way of dealing with annoyances and there wouldn’t be a single free church window in the country, even in the tiniest chapel. No, he couldn’t wipe out that memory so easily. No doubt because Trabelmann was not so very far off the truth. A truth which he was skirting round gingerly, thanks to the extra impetus from Retancourt in the cafe on the Place du Châtelet. And when his blonde lieutenant gave you a push, it went through your brain like a drill. But Trabelmann had been talking about the wrong ego. Because there’s self and self, he thought as he walked along the platform. Self and brother. Was it perhaps true that the absolute protection he felt he ought to have given Raphaël had kept him in orbit, far from earth, far from other people in any case, in a kind of weightless existence? And the same went for his relations with women too, of course. To allow himself to get carried away would have been to abandon Raphaël to die alone in his cave. And that was impossible. So it might explain why he had always fled from love, and even destroyed it? Had he really gone that far?