by Fred Vargas
“Really?” Soliman said, somewhat bewildered.
“I’ve simplified it somewhat,” said Adamsberg.
“So right now,” said Soliman hesitantly, “you’re paddling back upstream?”
Adamsberg nodded.
“Do you mean to say,” Soliman went on, “that if I’d made it over those last bloody fifty metres, if I’d been able to touch her, I’d have ended up at the fag end of your loony drainage system?”
“Something like that,” said Adamsberg.
“Does Camille know that or are you making it up for yourself?”
“She knows.”
“What about the trapper? Does he know?”
“He’s wondering.”
“But Watchee’s expecting you this evening. He’s been bored out of his mind all day with his foot up on the bowl. He’s waiting for you. Actually, he gave me an order to bring you back.”
“That’s different, then,” said Adamsberg. “How did you get here?”
“On the moped. Just hang onto me with your left arm.”
Adamsberg rolled up the papers and stuck them in an inside pocket.
“Are you bringing all that stuff with you?” Soliman asked.
“Sometimes I absorb ideas through my skin. I prefer to have them close to me.”
“Do you really hope to make any headway?”
Adamsberg winced as he put on the jacket weighed down with its load of documents.
“Have you got an idea?”
“Only subliminally.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I can’t see it. It’s hovering on the edge of my field of vision.”
“That’s not very practical.”
“No.”
Soliman was telling his third African story of the evening to a tensely silent audience. His floods of words served to submerge the pregnant glances darting about between Camille and Adamsberg, between Adamsberg and Johnstone, between Johnstone and Camille. Adamsberg, unsteadily so to speak, occasionally raised his eyes to look at the trapper. He’s giving in, Soliman thought, he’s giving in. He’s going to walk away from his river. When Johnstone looked back at him, somewhat aggressively, the commissaire put his nose in his dinner plate, as if he were mindlessly fascinated by the decorative pattern on the china. Soliman went on with his story, a mightily muddled affair involving a vindictive spider and a terrified bird, a muddle Soliman wasn’t quite sure he knew how to untangle.
“When the marsh god saw the brood on the ground,” he pursued, “he was seized with such anger that he went to see the son of Mombo the spider. ‘Son of Mombo,’ he said, ‘it was thee who cut the branches in the trees with thy disgusting mandibles. Henceforth thou shalt never again cut wood with thy mouth, but instead spin thread with your backside. And with that thread, day after day, thou shalt tie the branches back to the trees and leave birds to hatch their eggs in their nests.’ ‘Like hell I will,’ said the spider, son of Mombo . . .”
“For God’s sake,” Johnstone interrupted. “Don’t understand.”
“You’re not supposed to,” Camille said.
By half past midnight only Adamsberg was left alone with Soliman. He turned down the boy’s offer to take him back to the hotel. The one-way trip on the moped had been quite an ordeal for his arm.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll walk back.”
“It’s eight kilometres.”
“I need a good walk. I’ll take a short cut across the fields.”
Adamsberg’s eyes were so distant and lost that Soliman did not insist. The commissaire sometimes wandered off into a world of his own, and at such times no-one really felt like keeping him company.
* * *
Adamsberg turned off the road to get to the narrow path that had a crop of sprouting maize on one side, and on the other flax. The night was rather dark and windy: cloud cover had come in from the west earlier on that evening. He proceeded slowly, with his right arm held tight in its sling and his head down, following the wavy white line made by the pebbles that marked out the path. He came down to the flatland and took his bearings from the steeple at Montdidier which loomed black in the far distance. He could barely understand what had struck him so forcibly this evening. The river story must have muddied his vision and twisted his mind. But all the same, he had seen it. The hazy idea that had been quivering on the edge of his eye earlier on was beginning to acquire shape and consistency. An unacceptable and frightening consistency. But he had seen with his eyes. And all the things that creaked like ill-fitted hinges in the story of the man and the big bad wolf were eased by the hypothesis. The absurd murder of Suzanne Rosselin, the unwavering itinerary, Crassus the Bald, Massart’s fingernails, the missing cross, all these clues fitted back into the picture. The hypothesis smoothed off all the awkward corners and left a single, smooth, obvious and well-lit path ahead. And Adamsberg could now see the whole of that path from its beginning to its end, with its diabolical ingenuity, its anguish and cruelty, and its spark of genius.
He stopped walking and sat for a long while with his back propped against a tree-trunk as he sounded out his thoughts. A quarter of an hour later he got up slowly and, turning back on himself, made for the gendarmerie at Châteaurouge.
Halfway along, at the head of the path between the maize and the flax, he drew up short. Five or six metres away from him a broad-shouldered, hunched and hulking black shadow barred his way. It was too dark for Adamsberg to be able to make out the face. But he knew instantly that what was standing in front of him was the werewolf. The itinerant killer, the escape artist, the man who had been evading him for two weeks now, had at last come into the open for the bloody duel. Not one of his previous targets had survived. But none of them had been armed. Adamsberg stepped back a few yards, measuring the impressive bulk of his adversary, who came slowly forward, silently, with a sailor’s gait. Bright as a flaming brand, they are, my lad. You can see a wolf’s eye a mile off in the dark. With his left hand Adamsberg got his pistol out of its holster. From the weight of it he could tell that it wasn’t loaded.
The man rushed at him and knocked him off his feet with a single heavy body blow. Adamsberg was flat on his back on the ground with the man pinning him down, pressing his knees hard on both his shoulders. He winced from the pain, but tried to push the ton weight off him all the same, with his left arm. To no avail. He gave up the struggle and sought out his adversary’s eyes in the dark.
“The man I was looking for,” he said under his breath. “Stuart Donald Padwell.”
“Shut your trap,” Johnstone said.
“Get off me, Padwell, I’ve already alerted the flics.”
“Not true,” Johnstone replied.
The Canadian reached inside his jerkin and Adamsberg saw what he had got out when it he brought it right up to his face. An immense white jawbone.
“The skull of an Arctic wolf,” Johnstone said with a smirk. “Won’t die without knowing the solution.”
There was a loud bang. Johnstone started and turned, without releasing Adamsberg. Soliman was on him in a flash, pressing the barrel of the rifle into his ribs.
“Don’t make a move, trapper!” he yelled, “or I’ll put lead inside you! Lie down! Lie down! Lie down and roll over on your back!”
Johnstone did not lie down. He got to his feet, slowly, with his hands up, and stood in a posture that was not at all submissive. Soliman kept him at gunpoint and made him retreat towards the cornfield. Soliman’s long slim body looked pathetically dainty in the dark of the night. With or without a gun the lad wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. Adamsberg cast around with his good hand, found a large piece of rock and aimed at the wolf-man’s head. Johnstone collapsed. He had taken the stone on his temple. Adamsberg pulled himself off the ground and went over to examine the man.
“That’s fine,” he said with relief. “Give me something to tie him up with. He’s not going to stay like that for long.”
“I don’t have anything to tie him up,”
Soliman said.
“Take off your clothes.”
Soliman obeyed, and Adamsberg undid his holster straps and took off his shirt to use as rope.
“Keep your T-shirt on,” said Adamsberg. “Give me your jeans.”
In his underpants, Soliman made a good job of securing the arms and legs of the Canadian, who was now groaning as he lay on the ground.
“He’s bleeding.”
“He’ll recover, Sol. Just look at this, Sol. Look at the beast.”
Holding it carefully by the occipital cavity, Adamsberg showed Soliman the skull of the great white Arctic wolf. In the fitful moonlight Soliman brought his hand up to touch and ran his finger along the row of fangs.
“He’s filed the tips,” he said. “They’re as sharp as bayonets.”
“Have you got your mobile with you?”
Soliman felt around in his trousers and took out his phone. Adamsberg called the Châteaurouge gendarmerie.
“They’re on their way,” he reported, sitting down beside the body of the Canadian. He rested his head on his knees and concentrated on slowing down his breathing.
“How did you know where I was?” he asked.
“After you’d gone I went to bed. Johnstone stole past me and out of the lorry with his clothes under his arms and dressed outside. I lifted the canvas on the side and through the slats I saw him walking off the same way you’d gone. I reckoned he was off to find you to have a proper row over Camille, and I told myself that wasn’t any of my business. Right? But Watchee sat bolt upright in bed and said: ‘Go after him, Sol.’ He reached under his bed, got the rifle, and shoved it in my hand.”
“Watchee watches over us,” Adamsberg said.
“He surely does. Then I saw the trapper blocking your road and I reckoned you were going to have a right old bust-up. Then it got really rough and I heard you say ‘Hallo Padwell’ or something. Which is when I twigged this wasn’t a row over Camille.”
Adamsberg smiled.
“You were going to get yourself murdered.”
Adamsberg frowned. “We were on the next bus behind him, right from the start. We made up some of the time, but we were still a few hours short of catching up.”
“I thought Padwell was dead.”
“This is his son. Stuart.”
“You mean the son’s carrying out his father’s wishes?” Soliman said, looking at Johnstone’s supine body.
“When Padwell killed Simon Hellouin, his kid was ten years old. Stuart saw the murder happen, and that screwed him up for life. Especially as his mother ran away straight after with Hellouin’s brother. For eighteen years, all through his prison sentence, Padwell must have filled his son’s head with the idea of taking revenge and eliminating all the men who’d taken the boy’s mother away and kept her out of reach.”
“What about the other two guys, Sernot and Deguy?”
“They have to have had affairs with the mother. There’s no other explanation.”
“And Suzanne?” asked Soliman in a ghostly voice. “What’s she got to do with the whole story? Did she know all about the trapper?”
“Suzanne didn’t know a thing.”
“Did she see him slaughtering the sheep with his bloody wolf’s head?”
“She saw nothing, I tell you. He didn’t kill her because she spoke out of turn about a werewolf. He killed her because she had not said anything about a werewolf and never would. But once she was dead he could have her say anything he wanted, she wouldn’t be around to deny it. That’s what Suzanne could do for him. Being unable to say she never said it.”
Soliman’s voice was all aquiver as he burst out: “But for heaven’s sake, what was the purpose?”
“To get the wolf story going. That’s the only reason, Soliman. He wanted to avoid the mistake of starting the rumour himself.”
The young man sighed in the dark. “I don’t get this wolf business. Not one bit.”
“He had to get people believing there was a madman committing random murders out there, and he needed a scapegoat. He certainly managed to get people obsessed with Massart the bloodthirsty werewolf. He had all it took – skills, knowledge, all the tools of the trade. He also had an alibi for being in the Mercantour.”
“What about Massart?”
“Massart’s dead. Has been since the beginning of the whole story. Padwell probably buried him somewhere on Mont Vence. Here come the flics, Sol.”
With one of them without a shirt and the other in his underpants, Adamsberg and Sol went to meet the gendarmes. Fromentin had called in reinforcements from Montdidier as well, since ten men didn’t seem too many for getting the big bad wolf-man under control.
“There you are,” Adamsberg said, pointing to Johnstone on the ground. “Call a doctor in. I wounded him in the head.”
“Who is this?” asked Fromentin, shining his torchlight into the Canadian’s face.
“Stuart Donald Padwell, son of John Padwell. He’s known here as Laurence Donald Johnstone. And this, Fromentin, is the murder weapon.”
“Fuck,” he said. “So it wasn’t a wolf.”
“Just a lupine mandible. You’ll find the paws and claws somewhere in the panniers on his motorbike.”
The adjudant, fascinated, shone his torch on the skull-bone.
“It’s an Arctic wolf,” Adamsberg said. “He set the whole thing up before coming over.”
“I see,” said Fromentin with a nod. “Arctic wolves are the biggest wolves of all, by a long chalk.”
Adamsberg looked at him, amazed.
“I like animals,” Fromentin explained, abashed. “So I read up on them when I can.”
He shone his beam onto Adamsberg’s arm.
“You’re bleeding, sir,” he said.
“Yes,” Adamsberg said. “He reopened the wound when he jumped on me.”
“Whatever made him come out in the open?”
“It was the evening. I gave him a look.”
“And then?”
“I saw John Padwell’s features on his face. He knew that I had not let his father’s case out of my mind, and he realised I was on the point of coming up with the right answer.”
Adamsberg watched Johnstone being walked to the car by two gendarmes. Another flic gave him back his shirt and holster-strap, and returned Soliman’s trousers to their owner.
“Did you spend the evening with him?” Fromentin asked with a frown as he fell in step behind his gendarmes.
“He was never absent,” Adamsberg said as he followed on in turn. “He created the rumour about a wolf-man, just as he got that threesome to track him down, just in order to keep the story alive. He got daily reports on the progress of the pursuit. We weren’t on his tail. He was wagging us.”
Johnstone was taken to the hospital in Montdidier while Fromentin himself drove Adamsberg and Soliman back to the lorry.
“If the Canadian’s in a fit state, we’ll do the interview tomorrow afternoon at three. Tell the prosecution service, and at the first opportunity tell Montvailland at Villard-de-Lans, Hermel at Bourg-en-Bresse and Aimont at Belcourt. I’ll call Brévent myself at Puygiron and get them to spade up the ground around Massart’s shack.”
Fromentin made no comment, signalled to one of his men to have Johnstone’s motorbike taken in, and drove off.
“Bloody hell!” Soliman suddenly exclaimed as he watched the gendarme’s estate car disappearing down the road. “Good heavens! What about the hair? And the fingernails? How do you account for that?”
“The fingernail issue is now settled.”
“But they were Massart’s fingernails! How can you make that fit?”
“They were Massart’s fingernails,” Adamsberg repeated as he paced up and down beside the road, “and they had been cut with a nail-clipper. Now, Brévent did not find a single piece of fingernail in the bathroom at Massart’s place on Mont Vence. Only when Hermel had the bright idea of combing the bedroom did any nail fragments turn up. But they were fragments that had been bitte
n off, Soliman. That’s what really clashed. On the one hand you had a guy who uses clippers, and on the other a guy who bites his nails in bed. Sol, it’s always one or the other, not both. With that worked out, I reckoned we’d been really lucky boys to unearth the hotel he was using and to get that hair and those two bits of fingernail. Really lucky, yes indeed. The map made me doubt whether Massart was a random killer. The fingernails made me doubt whether Massart existed.”
“Bloody hell,” Soliman said. “Explain the fingernails!”
“Johnstone cut the nails on Massart’s corpse, Soliman.”
Soliman winced in disgust.
“It never occurred to him that Massart kept his nails short by biting them. He just couldn’t imagine anything like that. He was too clean, too fastidious. That was his first mistake.”
“Did he make any other mistakes?” asked Soliman, his eyes glued to Adamsberg’s lips.
“A few. The candle thing, and arranging the murders at the foot of a cross. I don’t know if Johnstone found out about Massart’s superstitiousness for himself or if Camille gave him the information unwittingly. He enjoyed making use of it precisely because it seemed to get you interested. But when he had the flics breathing down his neck at Belcourt, he did his deed a long way from a Calvary or a cross. Truly superstitious people don’t do that. They pursue and persist and get all the more frantic if the challenge is serious. The last thing an obsessive would do in the face of difficulty would be to drop the obsession as if it didn’t really matter. Our man murdered Hellouin in an open field, and that told me that the placing of the previous murders beneath religious symbols was just stuff and nonsense, like the candles. Which brought me back to the same thought: that Massart was not Massart. You see, Sol, I was ready for the Padwell line. I was ready and waiting for it.”
“But,” said Soliman with a trace of anxiety, “if it hadn’t been for the son’s physical resemblance to the father, you’d never have put your finger on Lawrence. Not in a million years.”
“Yes I would. It would have taken a bit longer, that’s all.”