A Climate of Fear

by Fred Vargas

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Fred Vargas

  Title Page

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Copyright

  About the Book

  THE NEW INSPECTOR ADAMSBERG NOVEL

  A woman is found murdered in her bathtub, and the murder made to look like a suicide. A strange symbol is found near the body.

  Then a second victim is discovered, who was also part of a group of tourists on a doomed expedition to Iceland ten years earlier.

  How are these deaths, and rumours of an Icelandic demon, linked to the secretive Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre? And what does the mysterious symbol signify?

  Commissaire Adamsberg is about to find out.

  About the Author

  Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. A historian and archaeologist by profession, she is now a bestselling novelist. Her books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 45 languages.

  Also by Fred Vargas

  The Inspector Adamsberg Series

  The Chalk Circle Man

  Have Mercy on Us All

  Seeking Whom He May Devour

  Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

  This Night’s Foul Work

  An Uncertain Place

  The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

  The Three Evangelists Series

  The Three Evangelists

  Dog Will Have His Day

  I

  ONLY ANOTHER TWENTY metres, twenty little metres to reach the postbox, it was harder than she had expected. That’s ridiculous, she told herself, there aren’t little metres and big metres. There are just metres, that’s all. How curious that at death’s door, even from that privileged position, you should go on having such futile thoughts, when anyone might think you would come up with some important pronouncement, one that would be branded with red-hot iron in the annals of human wisdom. A pronouncement that people would repeat now and then in days to come: ‘Do you know what Alice Gauthier’s last words were?’

  Even if she had nothing memorable to declare, she nevertheless had an important message to deliver, one that would certainly be inscribed in the most despicable annals of humanity, which are infinitely larger than those of wisdom. She looked at the letter, held in her shaking hand.

  Come on, just sixteen little metres. From the door of her building, Noémie was watching over her, ready to intervene at the slightest stumble. Noémie had done everything she could to stop her patient venturing out on to the street alone. But Alice Gauthier’s imperious character had been too strong for her.

  ‘And let you read the address over my shoulder?’

  Noémie had taken offence, she didn’t do things like that.

  ‘Everyone does things like that, Noémie. I had a friend – an old rogue he was too – who always said: “If you want to keep a secret, well, keep it.” I’ve kept this secret for a long time, but it’s going to hinder my getting to heaven. Although I’m not sure if heaven’s where I’m going, whether or no. Just get out of my way, Noémie, and let me out.’

  Alice, get a move on for God’s sake, or Noémie will come running. She leaned on her Zimmer frame, and forced herself forward another nine metres, well, eight anyway. Past the pharmacy, then the launderette, then the bank, and she’d be there, by the little yellow postbox. And just as she was starting to smile at her approaching success, her sight clouded over and she lost her grip, falling down at the feet of a woman in red, who caught her in her arms with a scream. Alice Gauthier’s handbag spilled open on the ground and the letter fell from her grasp.

  The pharmacist came running out of her shop, and was quickly feeling her everywhere, asking questions, applying first aid. The woman in red was meanwhile putting the scattered objects into the handbag, before placing it back at its owner’s side. This bystander’s brief role was coming to an end, the emergency services had been called, she had no further part to play, so she straightened up and moved away. She would have liked to go on making herself useful, to be more important at the scene of the accident, or at least to give her name to the paramedics who were arriving in force, but no, the pharmacist had now taken complete charge, with the help of a distraught woman who said she was the nurse-companion: this one was talking loudly, on the verge of tears, protesting that Madame Gauthier had absolutely refused to be accompanied, she lived just a stone’s throw away, at number 33a, and she, the nurse, had not been the least bit negligent. They were putting the old woman on to a stretcher now. On your way, Marie-France, it’s none of your business any more.

  But it is, she thought, as she went down the street, yes, she really had done something. By catching the woman as she fell, she’d prevented her striking her head on the pavement. Perhaps she had saved her life, who could deny that?

  The first days of April, and the weather was milder now in Paris, but there was still a nip in the air. A nip in the air. If there was a ‘nip’, where in the air did it lie? In the middle somewhere? Marie-France frowned in irritation at the silly questions that flew at random through her head like gnats. Just when she had saved someone’s life too. Or was the nip scattered everywhere in the air? She fastened her red coat more tightly and pushed her hands deep into her pockets. On the right, her keys and her wallet, but on the left her fingers met a thick wad of paper that she had not put there. Her left-hand pocket was the one she used for her travelcard and the forty-eight centimes for bread. She stopped under a tree to think. And there in her hand was the letter belonging to the poor woman who had fallen down in the street. Turn your thought over seven times in your head before you act, her father always used to say to her, though he had never in his life taken his own advice. No doubt he barely managed more than four times. The writing on the envelope was very shaky, and the sender’s name on the back, Alice Gauthier, was printed in big wobbly letters. Yes, this was certainly her letter. Back there, Marie-France had returned everything to the handbag, and in her haste to pick up the papers, purse, pills and tissues before the wind whisked them away, she had stuffed the letter into her pocket. The envelope had fallen on the other side from the bag, the woman must have been holding it in her left hand. That’s what she had set off to do all on her own, Marie-France thought: post a letter.

  Should she take it back to her? But where? She must have been taken to the emergency depart
ment of some hospital or other. Should she give it to that nurse or whatever she was at number 33a? Watch it, little Marie-France, watch it. Turn your thought over seven times. If this Gauthier woman had taken the big risk of going out to post a letter, it must mean she hadn’t meant it to fall into anyone else’s hands. Turn your thought over seven times, but not ten, or twenty, her father would say, otherwise it gets worn out and you’ll never find the answer. There are people like that, who go on thinking in circles for ever, it’s sad, just look at your uncle.

  So no, not the nurse. It must be significant that Madame Gauthier had set out on an expedition without her help. Marie-France looked around to see if there was a postbox nearby. Over there, the little yellow rectangle across the square. Marie-France smoothed the envelope out against her leg. She had a mission, she had saved the woman and now she’d save the letter. It had been intended for the postbox, hadn’t it? So she was doing no harm, on the contrary, in fact.

  She slipped the envelope into the slot labelled Paris suburbs, after checking several times that it was to an address in the Yvelines département, postcode 78, to the south-west of the city. Seven times, Marie-France, not twenty, or this letter will never get sent. Then she slid her fingers inside the box to check that it had fallen down inside. Yes. Last collection 6 p.m., it’s Friday today, the recipient will get it first post Monday.

  A good day that was, my girl, a very good day.

  II

  DURING THE MEETING with his officers, Commissaire Bourlin from the 15th arrondissement of Paris was chewing the inside of his cheeks, looking undecided, hands clasped over his large paunch. He had been a handsome man once, older colleagues remembered, before he had put on an enormous amount of weight in a few short years. But he still had plenty of presence, as the respectful attitude of his listening staff indicated. Even when he blew his nose noisily, almost ostentatiously, as he just had. It was a spring cold, he had explained. No different from an autumn cold or a winter cold, but it was airier, less commonplace, more light-hearted, somehow.

  ‘We should close the file, sir,’ said Feuillère, the most eager of his lieutenants, summing up the general feeling. ‘It’ll be six days ago this evening that Alice Gauthier died. Suicide, an open-and-shut case, surely.’

  ‘I don’t like suicides when there’s no note.’

  ‘The man in the rue de la Convention a couple of months ago didn’t leave a note either,’ said a junior officer who was almost as fat as his chief.

  ‘Yes, but he was drunk out of his skull, lonely and penniless, not the same at all. Here we have a woman of very orderly habits, a retired maths teacher, having lived an extremely conventional life, we’ve checked her out. And I don’t like suicides who have just washed their hair that morning, and who are wearing perfume.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ a voice said, ‘some people like to look their best when they’re dead.’

  ‘So one evening,’ the commissaire said, ‘Alice Gauthier, wearing perfume and a tailored suit, runs a bath, takes off her shoes and gets into the water, fully dressed, before slitting her wrists?’

  Bourlin took a cigarette, or rather two, since his thick fingers prevented him taking one at a time. Consequently, there were always lone cigarettes lying alongside his packets. For the same reason, he never used a lighter, because he was too clumsy to roll the wheel, but had a large box of outsize matches bulging from his pocket. He had declared this office in the police station a smoking zone. The nationwide smoking ban was driving him to distraction, at a time when the world was bombarding beings – all beings, not just human beings – with 36 billion tons of CO2 a year. 36 billion, he would say. And you can’t even light up a cigarette on a station platform in the open air!

  ‘Commissaire, this woman was dying, and she knew it,’ Feuillère insisted. ‘Her nurse told us: the Friday before she died, she had tried to go out and post a letter, she was absolutely determined, wouldn’t hear a word against it, but she didn’t manage it. Result: five days later, she slits her wrists in the bath.’

  ‘A letter that may have contained a farewell message. That would explain why there wasn’t a note in her home.’

  ‘Or her last wishes.’

  ‘But who was she writing to?’ asked the commissaire, taking a deep pull on his cigarette. ‘She had no direct heirs, and her savings didn’t amount to a huge fortune, anyway. Her lawyer hasn’t received any change to her will, and her twenty thousand euros will go to saving polar bears. And in spite of this vital letter going astray, she kills herself instead of writing again?’

  ‘Because the young man called to see her,’ replied Feuillère. ‘On the Monday and then again on the Tuesday, the neighbour is sure about that. He heard him ring the bell and say he’d come by appointment. At a time when she was alone every day, between seven and eight in the evening. She must have told him about her last wishes, so the letter would be beside the point.’

  ‘A young man whose name we don’t know, who’s now disappeared. At the burial, there were only some elderly cousins. No young man. So? Where did he go? If he was a close enough acquaintance for her to call him in urgently, he must have been a relative or a friend. In which case, he ought to have come to the funeral. But no, he’s vanished into thin air. Carbon-dioxide-laden air, let me remind you. And the neighbour heard him say his name from behind the door. What was it again?’

  ‘He couldn’t hear clearly. André or Dédé, some name like that, he can’t be sure.’

  ‘André is a rather old-fashioned name. So why did he say it was a young man?’

  ‘Because of his voice.’

  ‘Commissaire,’ called another lieutenant, ‘the examining magistrate wants us to close this one. We’re still getting nowhere with the schoolboy who was stabbed, or the woman who was attacked in the Vaugirard car park.’

  ‘I know,’ said the chief, grabbing the second cigarette lying by the packet. ‘I had a conversation with him last night. If you can call it a conversation. Suicide, suicide, close the file, move on, never mind if you bury some facts, small ones, I grant you, by trampling on them like dandelions.’

  Dandelions, he thought, the poor relations of the flower world, no one respects them, you tread on them or feed them to rabbits, whereas no one would tread on a rose. Still less feed it to a rabbit. There was a silence, each of the men in the room torn between the impatience of their new examining magistrate and the negative mood of the commissaire.

  ‘All right, let’s close it,’ sighed Bourlin, as if physically surrendering. ‘On condition we have one more stab at finding out about the sign she drew by the side of the bath. It was very firm and very clear, but incomprehensible. That was it, her last message.’

  ‘But we don’t know what it means.’

  ‘I’ll call Danglard. He might know.’

  Nevertheless, Bourlin reflected, pursuing his train of thought, dandelions are tough plants, whereas a rose is always delicate.

  ‘Do you mean Commandant Adrien Danglard?’ asked a junior officer. ‘From the Serious Crime Squad in the 13th?’

  ‘The same. He knows things that you won’t learn in thirty lifetimes.’

  ‘Yes, but behind him,’ murmured the officer, ‘there’s Commissaire Adamsberg.’

  ‘So what?’ said Bourlin, standing up almost majestically, fists on the table.

  ‘So nothing, sir.’

  III

  ADAMSBERG PICKED UP his phone, pushed aside a heap of files and put his feet on the table, leaning back in his chair. He had hardly slept at all the night before, since one of his sisters had gone down with pneumonia, out of the blue.

  ‘The woman in 33a?’ he asked. ‘The one who cut her wrists in the bath? Why the hell are you bothering me with this at nine in the morning, Bourlin? From the internal report, it was a straightforward suicide. You’ve got suspicions?’

  Adamsberg liked Commissaire Bourlin. A man with a large appetite for food, drink and tobacco, perpetually on the boil, living life at full tilt, skirting precipic
es but solid as a rock himself, with a shock of curly hair like the fleece of a newborn lamb, he was someone to respect, and would still be at his post when he was a hundred years old.

  ‘Our new examining magistrate, Vermillon, he’s keen as mustard, and on to me like a tick,’ said Bourlin. ‘You know what they do, ticks?’

  ‘Yes indeed. If you find a beauty spot with legs, it’s a tick.’

  ‘And what do I do with it?’

  ‘You extract it by using a very tiny clawhammer. You’re not calling me for that?’

  ‘No, because of the magistrate, who is one enormous tick.’

  ‘So you want us to use a huge clawhammer, the two of us, and extract him too?’

  ‘No, but he wants me to close the file on this woman, and I don’t want to.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘This suicide, a woman who had washed her hair that morning and was wearing perfume, didn’t leave any note.’

  Adamsberg listened, eyes closed, while Bourlin filled him in on the case.

  ‘An incomprehensible sign? Alongside the bath? And what do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing from you. I want you to send me Danglard’s brain to have a look. He might know what it means, he’s the only person I can think of. Then at least I’ll have a clear conscience.’

  ‘Just his brain? What am I supposed to do with his body?’

  ‘Get the body to come along as best it can.’

  ‘Danglard isn’t in yet. As you may know, he keeps different hours depending on the day. Or should I say the evening before?’

  ‘Haul him out of bed, I’ll be expecting both of you over at her apartment, 33a. Just one thing, Adamsberg, my trainee, the brigadier, is something of a young brute. Needs a bit of polish.’

  Sitting on Danglard’s old sofa, Adamsberg drank a strong coffee, while the commandant got dressed. It had seemed the quickest solution simply to drive over to Danglard’s, wake him up and take him off directly in his car.

  ‘I haven’t even had time to shave,’ Danglard grumbled, as he bent his large ungainly body to look in the mirror.