by Fred Vargas
Camille moved further into the shade, took off her jacket, and immersed herself for two good hours in close study of a Water-cooled grinder with abrasive disk, a Turbocharged double-protection sump pump, and other clever contraptions that brought her both reassurance and instruction. But her eyes kept wandering from the page and peering into the far distance. She was not entirely at ease. She was holding her walking stick tight. Suddenly she heard something rustling, and then bushes being trampled. In a flash she was up on top of the stone, her heart racing and her stick on guard. A wild boar came out of the undergrowth ten metres away, saw her standing there, and then went back into the scrub. Camille took a deep breath, buckled up her bag, and went back down the path to Saint-Victor. It was not a good time for being on the mountain.
At dusk she perched on the rim of the trough in the village square, with her legs crossed under her, and the bread and cheese laid out beside her. Awaiting the hunters’ return, she could hear the muffled thuds of disappointment and defeat. From her lookout she also saw Johnstone coming back on his motorbike. Instead of parking it on its kickstand on the square, as he usually did, he drove on this evening, passed his weary companions, and rode straight up the steep incline to the house.
Camille found him sitting on the top step, lost in thought, his helmet still in his hand. She sat down next to him and he put an arm round her shoulders.
“Any change?”
Johnstone shook his head.
“Any trouble?”
Repeat gesture.
“Sibellius?”
“Found him. With his brother Porcus. Their territory is right down in the south-east. In a really nasty mood. Nasty but in clover. The hunters are going to try to get tranquillisers into them.”
“What for?”
“So as to get a cast of their jaws.”
Camille nodded to show she understood. “And Crassus?” she asked.
Johnstone moved his head once again. “Not a sign,” he said.
Camille finished her piece of cheese in silence. Dragging words out of the Canadian phrase by phrase could be tiresome.
“So nobody can find the beast,” she concluded. “They can’t, and you can’t.”
“Can’t be found,” Johnstone agreed. “But he must leave a scent, the dogs ought to pick it up.”
“And so?”
“He must be one tough guy. Real tough.”
Camille pursed her lips. She wasn’t convinced. It was true, of course, that they’d taken a hell of a long time to close in on the Beast of Gévaudan all that time ago. Assuming what they’d got really had been the right one. There had never been any definite proof. As a result of which, the Beast still preyed on people’s minds after more than two hundred years.
“Well, well,” she mumbled with her chin on her knees, “I’m really surprised.”
Johnstone stroked her hair for a long moment.
“There’s someone who’s not surprised at all,” he said.
Camille turned to look at him. It was quite dark now, and she couldn’t see his face properly. She waited. At night he had to say more because his sign language couldn’t be seen. In the dark he could be almost fluent.
“Someone who doesn’t believe in it,” he said.
“In the hunt?”
“In the beast.”
Another pause.
“Don’t get it,” Camille said. She sometimes fell into involuntary imitation and compacted her own sentences by clipping the first word.
“Who doesn’t believe there is a beast,” Johnstone explained, with effort. “No beast. And who told me, confidentially.”
“I see,” Camille said. “So what does this someone believe it is, then? A dream?”
“No.”
“A hallucination? A collective delusion?”
“No. Someone who does not believe there is a beast.”
“Nor sheep torn to bits?”
“No. Of course not. Sheep, yes. But no beast.”
Camille shrugged her shoulders in despair. “So what does this someone believe it is, then?”
“A man.”
Camille sat up straight and shook her head. “A man? Who kills sheep with his teeth? And what about those bite marks?”
Johnstone pulled a face in the dark. “The person thinks it’s a werewolf.”
Another pause. Then Camille put her hand on Johnstone’s arm.
“A werewolf?” she whispered instinctively, as if the evil word could not be spoken out loud. “A werewolf? You mean a nutter?”
“No, no, a werewolf. There’s a person around here who thinks it really is a werewolf.”
Camille tried to make out Johnstone’s face in the dark, to see whether he was having her on, or what. But the Canadian’s expression remained stony and serious.
“Are you talking about the kind of guy who turns into a monster at night with claws that grow and hair that sprouts all over and canines that stick out over his lower lip? The sort of guy who goes around eating people lost at night in the woods and then stuffs his hairy chest inside his suit jacket in the morning before going in to the office?”
“You got it,” said Johnstone, seriously. “A werewolf.”
“And we’re supposed to have one around here?”
“Yup.”
“And it’s supposed to have eaten all those sheep since the end of winter?”
“Anyway the last twenty of them.”
“What about you?” Camille asked hesitantly. “Do you believe in it?”
Johnstone smiled vaguely and shrugged his shoulders.
“Good Lord, no,” he said.
Camille stood up, smiled herself, and waved her arms as if she was chasing shadows away.
“So who’s the oaf who told you all that?”
“Suzanne Rosselin.”
Camille, dumbfounded, stared hard at the Canadian still sitting on the step with his helmet in his hand, and still as calm.
“Is that true, Lawrence?”
“Yup. The other evening, when you were fixing the leak. She said it was a fucking idiot of a werewolf that was holding the whole region to ransom. That was why the tooth-prints weren’t normal.”
“Suzanne said that? You really mean Suzanne?”
“Sure. The old bag.”
Camille stood there in dismay, her arms hanging loose by her side.
“What she said,” Johnstone specified, “was that the fucking idiot of a werewolf had been –” he hunted for the right word “– had been awoken by the return of the wolves and that now he was taking advantage of their raids, which allowed him to cloak his own crimes under their mantle.”
“Suzanne is not crazy,” Camille muttered.
“You know very well she’s completely round the bend.”
Camille said nothing.
“If you were honest with yourself you’d admit it,” Johnstone said. “And you haven’t heard the worst of it yet,” he added.
“Don’t you want to come inside?” Camille asked. “I’m cold, really freezing.”
Johnstone looked up and then got to his feet in a start, as if he had only just noticed how much he had shocked Camille. Camille loved the old bag. He put his arms round her, rubbed her back. As for himself, he had heard so many never-ending folktales about old hags who turn into grizzly bears, which turn into ptarmigans which then became lost souls, that he had long since stopped being worried by barking mad animal superstitions. Humankind has never been entirely rational about the wild. But here, in this cramped little land of France, everyone had lost the habit of the wild. And the thing that mattered was that Camille loved the old bag.
“Come inside,” he said, kissing her hair.
Camille did not switch on the light, so she wouldn’t have to extract words one by one from Johnstone. The moon was beginning to rise, that would be enough for seeing by. She nestled into an old straw-backed armchair, drew her knees up to her chin and crossed her arms. Johnstone opened a jar of preserved grapes, poured a dozen into a cup and hand
ed it to Camille. He drained off a glassful of the preserving spirit for himself.
“We could drown our sorrows,” he suggested.
“There’s not enough alcohol left in that jar to drown a fly.”
Camille swallowed the grapes and put the pips back into the cup. She’d have preferred to spit them into the fireplace but Johnstone did not approve of women spitting into fireplaces, since they were supposed to rise above the brutality of males, including their spitting habits.
“I’m sorry for what I said about Suzanne,” he said.
“Maybe she’s read too many African folktales after all,” Camille speculated wearily.
“Perhaps.”
“Do they have werewolves in Africa?”
Johnstone spread his hands, palms upwards.
“They must do. Maybe they’re not wolves, though, but man-jackals, hyena-men.”
“Let’s have the rest,” Camille said.
“She knows who it is.”
“Who the werewolf is?”
“Yup.”
“Tell me.”
“Massart, the man at the slaughterhouse.”
“Massart?” Camille almost shouted. “Why Massart, for heaven’s sake?”
Johnstone rubbed his cheek, not knowing what to say.
“Come on, out with it.”
“Because Massart is smooth-skinned.”
Camille held out her cup like a machine and Johnstone spooned in another serving of grapes in cognac.
“What, you mean no body hair?”
“Have you seen him?”
“Once.”
“He’s got no hair.”
“I don’t get it,” Camille said, obstinately. “He’s got hair on his head like you and me. He’s got a black fringe right down to his eyes.”
“I said body hair, Camille. He’s got no hair on his body.”
“You mean on his arms and legs and chest?”
“That’s right. He’s as smooth-skinned as a choirboy. Haven’t seen it close up, but apparently he doesn’t even need to shave.”
Camille screwed up her eyes the better to picture Massart standing beside his van the other day. She recalled the pallor of his forearms and face, which struck such a contrast with the swarthy skins of everyone else. Well, maybe yes, he might also have no body hair.
“And so what?” she said. “What’s that bloody well got to do with it?”
“You’re not really into werewolves, are you?”
“Hardly.”
“You wouldn’t know one if you saw one walking down the street.”
“No, I wouldn’t. And what would tell me that some poor old sod was a werewolf?”
“That’s how. A werewolf is an unhairy man. You know why? Because his wolf-coat is on the inside of his skin.”
“Is that some kind of a joke?”
“Go read the old books written in your own old country. You’ll see. It’s all there in black and white. And there are loads of country-folk who know all the lore. The old bag included.”
“You mean Suzanne.”
“Suzanne.”
“And do they all know about the inside-outside nonsense?”
“It’s not nonsense. It’s the mark of the werewolf. The only mark. He’s got his hair on the inside because he’s an inside-out person. At night he turns himself round and his hairy coat reappears.”
“Which makes Massart nothing more than a fur coat worn with the silk lining on the outside?”
“If you like.”
“What about the teeth? Are they reversible too? Where does he store them during the day?”
Johnstone put his glass down on the table and turned to face Camille.
“Look, Camille, there’s no point getting excited. And I’m not bloody well responsible for any of this. It’s the old bag who’s saying it.”
“You mean Suzanne.”
“Suzanne.”
“Of course,” Camille said. “I’m sorry.”
She stood up, took the grape jar and poured the last dregs into her cup. One grape after another soon soothed stiff muscles. They’d been preserved by Suzanne. In her backroom at Les Écarts she had a still where she made spirits – her “fire-water”, she called it – in quantities way above the maximum allowance for vine growers. “I don’t give a toss for any bloody maximum allowances,” she said. Nor did she give so much as a tinker’s fart for all other allowances, exemptions, taxes, quotas, insurance policies, safety guidelines, sell-by dates, communal burdens or parish meetings. Buteil, her farm manager, made sure the business did not wander too far from the bounds of legality and Watchee dealt with veterinary health. How could a woman like that, Camille wondered, a woman who could stamp on social norms as easily as she would barge through a barn door, how could she believe in something that came so close to being collectively acceptable? She screwed the cap back on the jar and paced up and down, clutching her cup. Unless Suzanne, by dint of standing up to the rules of the collectivity, had ended up creating her own order of the world. Her own order, her own laws, her own explanations of how the world worked. While everyone else went chasing after a monster animal, marching to the same drummer, in thrall to the same idea, she, Suzanne Rosselin, stood her ground as the undying opponent of whatever is unanimously agreed. She defied consensus and used a different logic – no matter whether it was good logic or bad, just so long as it wasn’t the same as everybody else’s.
“She’s crazy,” said Johnstone to sum up, as if he had been following Camille’s train of thought. “She’s living in her own world.”
“So are you. You live in the snow with your bears.”
“Except that I’m not crazy. Maybe I should be, but actually I’m not. That’s the difference between me and the old bag. She doesn’t give a damn. She doesn’t even give a damn about stinking of lanolin.”
“Leave off about the smell, Lawrence.”
“I’ll not leave off about anything. She’s dangerous. Think of Massart.”
Camille passed her hand across her face. He was right. If Suzanne was off the wall with her werewolves, that was her affair. You can be crazy whatever way you want. But pointing the finger at someone else was quite another kettle of fish.
“Why Massart?”
“Because he’s smooth-skinned,” Johnstone repeated patiently.
“No, that won’t do,” Camille said. “Apart from the hair. Forget the bloody hair. Why do you think she’s getting at him? He’s quite like her – a loner, out on his own, and unloved. She ought to be on his side.”
“Quite. He’s a bit too much like her. They plough the same furrow. She has to get rid of him.”
“Stop thinking grizzly bears.”
“But that’s how things work. They’re a pair of fierce competitors.”
Camille nodded.
“What did she tell you about Massart? Body hair aside.”
“Nothing. Soliman came in and she shut up. Didn’t learn anything more.”
“You picked up a fair bit all the same.”
“More than enough.”
“What’s to be done?”
Johnstone came closer to Camille and put his hands on her shoulders.
“I’ll tell you what my father always said.”
“OK,” Camille said.
“Steer clear and keep your trap shut.”
“Sure. And then?”
“We stay shtumm. But if by any mischance people outside of Les Écarts got wind of the old bag’s claim, then it’d be a bad lookout for Massart. You know what people did to suspected werewolves, not more than a couple of hundred years ago, in your country?”
“Tell me. Might as well know it all.”
“They sliced them open from neck to crotch to see if the hair really was on the inside. By then, it was a bit too late to say sorry about the mistake.”
Johnstone gripped Camille’s shoulders.
“It mustn’t go one centimetre beyond the fence of her sodding farm,” he impressed on her.