by Fred Vargas
“It’s because you speak too slowly,” said Watchee.
“Yes,” said Adamsberg. “The husband, that’s to say the American, John Neil Padwell, got into trouble by allowing jealousy to consume him, and then allowing himself to torture and then to kill his wife’s lover.”
“Simon Hellouin,” Watchee said, summing up.
“Yes. Padwell was charged and tried. Simon’s brother – Paul, our man – gave evidence and heaped it all on Padwell. He produced letters from his brother describing how cruelly, how brutally Padwell treated his wife. John Neil Padwell was sent down for twenty years, and served eighteen of them. If Paul had not come to the stand, he might have got off much more lightly by pleading tem-porary insanity.”
“All that’s got nothing to do with Massart,” said Soliman.
“As much as your lion has,” Adamsberg retorted. “Padwell must have come out of jail about seven years ago. If there’s anyone he wants to take it out on, it’s Paul Hellouin. After the trial Ariane gave up everything and came back to France with the brother, Paul, with whom she lived for a year or two. So it was a double whammy. He’d given evidence against him and then ran off with his wife. I got the story from Paul Hellouin’s sister.”
“But what’s the point of it all?” Camille asked. “Hellouin was killed by Massart. We’ve got the fingernails. The nail results are incontrovertible.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Adamsberg said. “And the nail business bothers me.”
“So?” said Soliman.
“I don’t know,” said Adamsberg.
“Don’t stray from Massart,” he said. “We’ve don’t give a fart for your Texas convict.”
“I’m not straying. I might even be getting closer. Maybe Massart is someone else.”
“Don’t make it more complicated, young fella,” said Watchee. “Sufficient unto the day.”
“Massart only came back to Saint-Victor a few years back,” said Adamsberg, taking his time.
“About six years ago,” Watchee confirmed.
“And nobody had seen him for twenty years.”
“He was doing the rounds of village market days. He reseated rush-bottomed chairs.”
“Is there any evidence? One day a guy turns up and says, ‘I’m Massart.’ And everyone chirps back, ‘Sure, you’re Massart, haven’t seen you around in a long while.’ And everyone reckons that the man living all alone up on Mont Vence is Massart. No-one of his family is left, he hasn’t got any friends, and his acquaintances haven’t seen him since he was barely out of his teens. What evidence is there that Massart really is Massart?”
“Fucking hell,” said Watchee. “Massart . . . is Massart, sod it. Whatever are you trying to get at?”
Adamsberg looked Watchee in the eye. “Did you recognise him, then? Could you swear it was the same person as the young man who left the area twenty years before?”
“Good grief. I’m pretty sure it was him. I remember Auguste as a young man. He wasn’t a very pretty sight. A bit slow and heavy, like. Raven-black hair. But he had attitude. A hard worker.”
“There are thousands of guys who fit that description. Could you swear it was the same man?”
Watchee scratched his thigh and pondered.
“Not on my mother’s head,” he said regretfully, after a while. “And if I can’t swear to it, then no-one in Saint-Victor can either.”
“That’s what I was saying,” said Adamsberg. “There’s no conclusive proof that Massart is Massart.”
“What about the real Massart?” Camille asked, knitting her eyebrows.
“Rubbed out, got rid of, replaced.”
“Why would he have been rubbed out?”
“Because of his likeness.”
“Are you saying that Padwell usurped Massart’s identity?” asked Soliman.
“No,” Adamsberg sighed. “Padwell is now sixty-one. Massart is much younger. How old do you think he is, Watchee?”
“He’s forty-four. He was born the same night as young Lucien.”
“I’m not asking you for the real Massart’s age. I’m asking you to give a guess as to the age of the man called Massart.”
“Oh,” said Watchee, furrowing his brow. “Not more than forty-five, and not less than thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Definitely not sixty-one.”
“So we’re agreed on that,” said Adamsberg. “Massart is not John Padwell.”
“Why have you been boring on about that man for the last hour, then?” asked Soliman.
“That’s the way my mind works.”
“That’s not a mind working. That’s flying in the face of common sense.”
“That’s right. That’s the way my mind works.”
Watchee nudged Soliman with his stick. “Respect, boy,” he said. “What are you going to do next, young fella?”
“The flics have made up their minds to publish Massart’s photograph in an appeal for witnesses. The magistrate reckons there’s a prima facie case for doing so. Tomorrow all the newspapers will print the mug shot.”
“Great,” said Watchee, smiling.
“I’ve been onto Interpol and asked for the whole file on the Padwell case. I’m expecting it in the morning.”
“But what’s it bloody well got to do with you?” said Soliman. “Even if your Texan has murdered Hellouin, he wouldn’t have laid a finger on Sernot or Deguy. Would he? And even less on my mother, right?”
“I know,” Adamsberg said calmly. “It doesn’t fit.”
“So why are you carrying on with it?”
“I don’t know.”
Soliman cleared the plates and glasses, put the crate back inside, folded the stools, picked up the blue plastic bowl. Then he picked up Watchee with one arm under his shoulders and the other under his knees and carried him back up into the lorry. Adamsberg stroked Camille’s hair.
“Come,” he said after a moment’s silence.
“I’ll hurt your arm,” she said. “It would be better to sleep apart.”
“It would not be better.”
“But it would be all right.”
“It would be all right. But it would not be better.”
“If I hurt you?”
“No,” Adamsberg said, shaking his head. “You’ve never hurt me.”
Camille wavered, still torn between the attractions of peace and those of chaos.
“I had stopped loving you,” she said.
“Everything comes to an end,” Adamsberg said.
XXXIV
NEXT MORNING THE same gendarme came to collect Adamsberg to get him to the gendarmerie at Belcourt for nine o’clock. He spent two hours with Sabrina Monge in the cell where she had spent the night. Danglard and Lieutenant Gulvain arrived on the 11.07 train, and Adamsberg handed the young woman over to them, together with a great deal of unnecessary advice. He had blind faith in Danglard’s psychological insight; and he reckoned his number two was a more qualified practitioner of compassion than he was.
At noon he got himself driven to the gendarmerie at Châteaurouge to stand by for the Interpol file on John Neil Padwell. Fromentin, the man in charge at Châteaurouge, was a very different type from Aimont: ruddy and squat, and not exactly eager to lend a hand to the civilian branch. He considered – quite correctly – that Adamsberg, being outside his official area of operation and without official charge of the case, had no standing to give him orders, which Adamsberg refrained from doing anyway. As at Belcourt and at Bourg-en-Bresse, he stuck to asking for information and offering advice.
But since Adjudant Fromentin was a coward, he did not dare to go head to head with the commissaire, whose two-edged reputation had preceded him. Moreover, he turned out to be susceptible to the fog of flattery which Adamsberg could raise when needed, so that in the end the broad-shouldered Fromentin was virtually at the commissaire’s beck and call. He too was standing by for the Interpol fax, even though he did not grasp what Adamsberg hoped to get out of a dead case, with no thread of connection to the savagings of the
big bad wolf. As far as he knew, that’s to say according to the man’s sister, Simon Hellouin hadn’t had his throat cut by animal fangs. He had simply been taken out à l’américaine, that’s to say, by a good old bullet to the heart. Before shooting him, Padwell took the time to burn his balls off by way of reprisal. Fromentin winced with dread and horror. Half the population of the United States, he reckoned, had reverted to savagery, and the other half had turned into plastic dolls.
At three thirty the lab results from the IRCG landed on Adjudant Aimont’s desk, and he forwarded them to Fromentin within five minutes. Hairs found on the corpse of Paul Hellouin belonged to the species Canis lupus, the common wolf. Straight away Adamsberg sent the information on to Hermel, to Montvailland and to Adjudant-chef Brévent, at Puygiron. He had nothing against getting up the nose of a man who had still not sent in the long-awaited paperwork on Auguste Massart.
That morning Massart’s photograph had been published in the papers, and there was rising pressure in editorials, on television and on radio. The murder of Paul Hellouin and the subsequent slaughter of the Châteaurouge sheep had finally got the press and the police going all-out. The werewolf’s bloody progress was mapped out in every daily paper. They showed the route covered so far by the homicidal maniac in bold, and the route he was expected to follow thereafter towards Paris in a dotted line. It was a route he had laid out himself, and which he had followed quite scrupulously throughout, with the exceptions of his side-trips to Vaucouleurs and Poissy-le-Roi. Public interest announcements were being put out all the time, warning the inhabitants of villages and towns on the wolf-man’s route to exercise extreme caution and above all to avoid going out after dark. Police stations all over France were now getting floods of calls making denunciations and reporting varied sightings. For the time being they were not following up any of these leads unless they were located on or very near Massart’s red-line route. The scale of the case now made it imperative to coordinate the various local efforts. The national director of the police judiciaire stepped in to put Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg in overall charge of the werewolf affair. He got the news around five in the afternoon, at Châteaurouge. From that moment on Adjudant Fromentin squirmed at Adamsberg’s feet and did his best to foresee and to fulfill the commissaire’s every whim. But Adamsberg did not need anything very much. He was waiting for the Interpol file. Unusually for him, he did not go out for a walk in the fields one single time that Saturday evening. Instead he sat around with his ear alert for the chirruping of the fax machine, filling time by doodling in his jotter. He was trying to sketch a likeness of Adjudant Fromentin.
The documents spewed out of the fax just before six, dispatched to him by Police Lieutenant J. H. G. Lanson, of Austin, TX. Adamsberg swooped on the sheets in impatient expectation and took them over to the window to read. As they were in English he had to ask Fromentin to translate for him.
The marital and criminal history of John N. Padwell seemed to match in all details the story told by the sister of Paul and Simon Hellouin. He was born in Austin, TX, and went to work in the metal industry. He married Ariane Germant at the age of twenty-six, and they had a son, Stuart D. Padwell. After eleven years of marriage, he had tortured his wife’s lover, Simon Hellouin, and then shot him through the heart. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail, served eighteen of them, and came out seven years and three months ago. Since which time J. N. Padwell had not left the United States and had had no subsequent criminal record.
Adamsberg spent a long time poring over the pictures of the killer that his American colleagues had forwarded. One was full-face, the other two side-on, from left and from right. He had a square face and a firm look and seemed to be fair-skinned. Rather vacant eyes, thin and slightly cunning lips. There was malice as well as blinkered obstinacy in that face.
He had died of natural causes in Austin, TX, on 13 December, one year and seven months ago.
Adamsberg shook his head, rolled up the fax sheets, and tucked them into his jacket.
“Interesting?” asked Fromentin, who had been waiting with his question until the commissaire had finished reading.
“That’s the end of that,” said Adamsberg with a look of glum disappointment. “The man died last year.”
“That’s a pity,” said Fromentin, who had taken no interest at all in the Padwell lead.
Adamsberg bade him goodnight with a left-handed handshake and departed the gendarmerie at an even slower pace than usual. His temporary equerry fell into step and accompanied him to the small car he had been allocated. Before getting in, Adamsberg took the roll out of his jacket pocket and studied the photograph of J. N. Padwell once again. Then he put the papers back, lost in thought, and slid into the passenger seat. The gendarme dropped him fifty metres from the lorry.
What he saw first was the black motorbike on its kickstand by the side of the road. Then Johnstone came into view. He was on the lorry’s nearside wing, arranging a heap of photographs that he laid out on the ground. Adamsberg did not experience anything unpleasant, only a gnawing regret at not having Camille to hold in his arms tonight, and a fleeting, barely noticeable pang of fear. The Canadian was a much more serious and reliable proposition than he was. Basically, if reason were his sole guide, he would give the man a hearty recommendation. But desire and self-interest went in the other direction and prevented him from just letting go of Camille in favour of the tall chap with the wardrobe chest.
Camille was sitting rather stiffly beside Johnstone and concentrating entirely on the pictures of the wolves of the Mercantour spread out on the scorched grass. The trapper gave a staccato commentary for Adamsberg’s benefit: Marcus, Electre, Sibellius, Proserpine, and the snout of the late Augustus. Johnstone was calm and quite welcoming, but he was still giving Adamsberg that quizzical look that said: “What’s your game?”
Soliman laid supper on the wooden crate while Watchee sat stoking the campfire with his bad leg resting on the bowl. With a jut of his jaw Johnstone asked the old man what was wrong with his leg.
“He fell trying to get down from the cab,” Soliman explained.
“Any news from Texas, young fella?” Watchee asked Adamsberg, to change the subject.
“Yes. Austin faxed me the man’s vita.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Your vita is the story of your life. Vital, as it were.”
“Good. I do like to understand.”
“But”, said Adamsberg, “our man’s vital no longer. Padwell died a year and half ago.”
“You were wrong,” Soliman observed.
“Yes. You’ve already told me that once.”
With his injured arm Adamsberg gave up the idea of sleeping doubled up in the car. He called the gendarmerie and at last had himself driven over to that hotel in Montdidier. He spent all day Sunday in a small, hot and stuffy room listening to the news, keeping abreast of the Sabrina case, and rereading all the files that had amassed over the last week. Now and again he unrolled the faxed photograph of J. N. Padwell and looked at it with a mixture of curiosity and regret, turning the man’s image this way and that to catch it in light and in shade. He looked at it the right way round, then the wrong way round. He rotated it every which way. He stared deep into those empty eyes. He got away three times to the hidey-hole he had found in a deserted, overgrown kitchen garden. He made a sketch of Watchee sitting bolt upright with his right leg on the bowl, his beribboned hat pulled down over his eyes. He drew a picture of Soliman: bare to the waist, eyes on the horizon, leaning slightly forward in one of the proud and haughty poses he liked to adopt, and every one of which he had copied from Watchee. He did a sketch of Camille seen side-on as she gripped the lorry’s steering wheel and stared hard at the road ahead. He drew Johnstone leaning on his motorbike and looking straight at you with that silent, serious question hovering about his blue gaze.
There was a knock on the door around seven thirty in the evening, and Soliman came in, gleaming with sweat. Adamsberg looked up and s
hook his head, meaning to tell the youngster that there was nothing to report. Massart was having a quiet patch.
“Is Laurence still around?” he asked.
“Yes,” Soliman said. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t come over, right? Watchee’s going to barbecue some beef on the chicken wire. He’s expecting you. I came to collect you.”
“Has he had any news of George Gershwin?”
“You don’t give a damn for George Gershwin.”
“Maybe I give a bit more than you think.”
“It’s the trapper who’s keeping you away, isn’t it?”
Adamsberg smiled. “There are four beds. There are now five of us.”
“One man too many.”
“Quite.”
“You’re making yourself scarce,” said Soliman, “but it’s a ploy. As soon as the trapper’s turned his back, you’ll move back into his spot. I know what you’re up to. Can’t fool me.”
Adamsberg said nothing.
“And I’m wondering if that’s altogether straight,” Soliman pursued with difficulty, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m wondering if it’s altogether regular.”
“Regular with respect to what, Sol?”
Soliman hesitated.
“With respect to the rules,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t give a tinker’s fart for rules.”
“True enough,” Soliman said, getting worried.
“So?”
“Even so. You’re going behind the trapper’s back.”
“He’s facing me front-on, Sol. And he’s not a new-born babe.”
Soliman shook his head discontentedly.
“You’re diverting the current,” he said, “you’re redirecting the river, you’re taking all the water for yourself and you’re jumping into the trapper’s bed. That’s theft.”
“It’s the absolute opposite, Soliman. All Camille’s lovers – because we are talking about Camille, aren’t we? – draw water from my river, and all my lovers take water from Camille’s. At the source of the water there’s only her, and me. Downstream there can be quite a crowd. On account of which the headwaters are much less muddy than lower down the stream.”