by Fred Vargas
‘You haven’t always shaved when you come in to the office.’
‘That’s different. I’m being consulted now as an expert, and experts shave.’
Adamsberg was registering reluctantly the two wine bottles on the coffee table, the glass lying on its side on the still-damp carpet. White wine doesn’t stain. Danglard must have dropped off to sleep on his sofa without needing to worry about the keen eyes of his five children, whom he was bringing up as a single parent, like cultured pearls. The second pair of twins had in fact now left to go to university, and the empty-nest feeling didn’t help. The youngest one was still there though, the one with blue eyes who was not Danglard’s own, and whom his wife had left with him, as a baby, when she walked out down the corridor, without a backward glance, as he had told everyone at least a hundred times. Last year, at the risk of a serious quarrel, Adamsberg had become his torturer, hauling Danglard off to the doctor’s, and Danglard had waited for his test results in a zombie-like alcoholic daze. The tests had shown he was in perfect shape. There are some people who manage miraculously to escape everything that life throws at them, this was such a case, and it was not the least of Danglard’s talents.
‘And we are expected for what, exactly?’ asked Danglard, adjusting his cufflinks. ‘What’s this all about? Some kind of hieroglyph?’
‘The last drawing made by someone who committed suicide. A sign nobody can decipher. Commissaire Bourlin is very worked up about it, he wants to understand it before closing the file. The magistrate is on his back like a tick. A very big one. We have just a few hours.’
‘Oh, if it’s Bourlin,’ said Danglard, relaxing, but smoothing down his jacket. ‘He thinks the new magistrate’s going to burst a blood vessel, does he?’
‘Since he’s a tick, he’s afraid he’ll spit poison at him.’
‘What you mean, if we’re talking about a tick, is that Bourlin is afraid it will inject the contents of its salivary glands into him,’ Danglard corrected him, as he tied his tie. ‘Nothing like a snake or a flea. Actually a tick isn’t an insect, it’s an arachnid.’
‘Yeah, right. So what do you think about the contents of Vermillon’s salivary glands?’
‘You don’t want to know. But I’m no expert on obscure signs. I’m just a miner’s son from Picardy,’ the commandant reminded him with pride. ‘I only know a few bits and pieces.’
‘Well, he’s placing his hopes in you, in any case. For his conscience’s sake.’
‘If it’s to act as someone’s conscience for once, I certainly wouldn’t want to let him down.’
IV
DANGLARD HAD PERCHED on the edge of the blue bathtub, the same one in which Alice Gauthier had slit her wrists. He was looking at the side of the white washstand, on which she had drawn the sign with an eyebrow pencil. In the tiny bathroom, Adamsberg, Bourlin and the latter’s young officer were waiting in silence.
‘Talk among yourselves, dammit! I’m not the oracle of Delphi,’ said Danglard who was annoyed that he had not been able to identify the sign at once. ‘Brigadier, would you be good enough to get me a cup of coffee? I’ve been fetched straight from bed.’
‘From bed or from an early-morning bar?’ the young man whispered to Bourlin.
‘And my hearing’s perfect,’ said Danglard, still poised elegantly on the edge of the old bath, without taking his eyes off the drawing. ‘I didn’t ask for any comment, I just asked you, very politely, for some coffee.’
‘One coffee, you heard,’ said Bourlin, gripping the arm of the young officer, his large hand easily encircling it.
Danglard took a battered notebook out of his back pocket and copied the drawing. It looked like a capital H but the central bar was slanting, and then entwined with the bar was a concave line.
‘Anything to do with her initials?’ Danglard asked.
‘Her name was Alice Gauthier, maiden name Vermond. But she had two other first names, Clarisse and Henriette, so H could be for Henriette.’
‘No,’ said Danglard, shaking his heavy jowls, just now shadowed with grey stubble. ‘It’s not an H. The line across is clearly oblique, it goes up. And it’s not a signature. Any signature always ends up changed, it absorbs the writer’s personality, it gets deformed, contracted, fixed. Nothing like the straight lines in this letter. This is a faithful, almost childlike reproduction of some sign or emblem, with which the writer isn’t familiar. If she wrote it once or five times, it would be a maximum. Because it looks like the work of a pupil trying hard to get it right.’
The brigadier came back with some coffee, provocatively offered in a boiling hot thin plastic cup directly to Danglard’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ the commandant said without reacting. ‘If she killed herself, she might be pointing her finger at the people who drove her to it. But why draw a coded sign in that case? Out of fear? But fear on whose behalf? Her relatives? She’s invited us to search, but without wanting to give anything away. If someone killed her – and that’s your worry, isn’t it, Bourlin? – no doubt it indicates whoever attacked her. But then again, why not something more direct?’
‘It must be a suicide,’ grumbled Bourlin, looking beaten.
‘May I?’ asked Adamsberg, leaning against the wall and deliberately pulling a crushed cigarette out of his jacket pocket.
This was the magic word, allowing Bourlin to strike a huge match and light his own cigarette. With the tiny bathroom suddenly full of smoke, the brigadier stalked out, to stand in the doorway.
‘What was her occupation?’ Danglard enquired.
‘She taught maths.’
‘That’s not it either. It’s not a mathematical or physics symbol. It’s not the zodiac or a hieroglyph. It’s not a Freemason’s sign or a satanic cult. Nothing like that.’
He muttered to himself for a moment, looking annoyed and concentrating hard.
‘Unless,’ he went on, ‘it’s an Old Norse letter, some kind of rune, or a Japanese or even Chinese character. There are various characters like an H with an oblique bar. But they don’t have that concave loop underneath. That’s the tricky bit. So we’re left with the hypothesis that it’s a Cyrillic character but badly drawn.’
‘Cyrillic? You mean the Russian alphabet?’ asked Bourlin.
‘Russian but also Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, plenty of choice.’
With a meaningful glance, Adamsberg cut short the learned disquisition he sensed Danglard was about to launch into on Cyrillic characters. And indeed Danglard regretfully abandoned his story of the disciples of St Cyril who had invented that alphabet.
‘There is a Cyrillic character Й not to be confused with И,’ he explained, drawing them on his notebook. ‘And you can see that it has a little concave sign like a cup over the top. It’s pronounced “oi” or “ei” depending on context.’
Danglard intercepted another look from Adamsberg which stopped him taking this further.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘supposing this woman was having difficulty drawing the sign, given the distance between the bath and the washbasin, which meant she had to stretch her arm out, she might have misplaced the little cup sign, putting it in the middle, not on top. But if I’m not mistaken, this character isn’t used at the start of a word in Russian, only at the end. And I’ve never heard of an abbreviation that uses the end of a word. Still, you might look through her address book to see if any of her contacts might have used the Russian alphabet.’
‘I think that would be a waste of time,’ said Adamsberg quietly. It was not to avoid upsetting Danglard that Adamsberg had spoken in an undertone. Except on very rare occasions, the commissaire never raised his voice, taking his time to enunciate, and sometimes running the risk of lulling his interlocutors to sleep with his gentle intonation, hypnotic to some, attractive to others. Results of an interrogation might be very different depending on whether he or one of his officers was conducting them, since Adamsberg could either make the suspect drop off, or else provoke a sudden flow of confe
ssions, as if a magnet had attracted a set of obstinate nails. The commissaire didn’t attach great importance to it, admitting that he sometimes sent himself to sleep without realising it.
‘What do you mean a waste of time?’
‘What I say, Danglard. It would be better to try and find out whether the concave line was drawn before or after the oblique line. And the same for the two vertical strokes of the H, were they drawn before or after?’
‘What difference would that make?’ asked Bourlin.
‘And,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘whether the oblique line was drawn upwards or downwards.’
‘Yes, obviously,’ Danglard agreed.
‘The oblique line looks as if it’s crossing something out,’ Adamsberg continued. ‘As if to negate it. But only if it was drawn upwards, firmly. Then, if the smile was drawn first, it was struck out afterwards.’
‘What smile?’
‘I mean the convex curve, it looks like a smile.’
‘Concave,’ Danglard corrected.
‘If you like. But that line, on its own, looks like a smile.’
‘A smile someone wanted to cross out?’ suggested Bourlin.
‘Something like that. As for the two uprights, they could be framing the smile, like a sort of simplified face.’
‘Well, very simplified,’ said Bourlin. ‘Far-fetched. I’d say.’
‘Yes, too far-fetched,’ Adamsberg agreed. ‘But check all the same. What order do they use to write the Cyrillic character, Danglard?’
‘You’d write the two uprights then the slanting line, then add the little curve on top. Like we put accents on last.’
‘So if it seems the curved line was drawn first, then it couldn’t be a failed attempt to write the Cyrillic letter,’ remarked Bourlin, ‘and we don’t need to waste time looking for some Russian in her address book.’
‘Or a Macedonian. Or a Serb,’ Danglard added.
Put out by his failure to decipher the mystery sign, Danglard dragged his feet as he followed his colleagues into the street, while Bourlin issued orders on his phone. In fact, Danglard always dragged his feet, which meant he wore out his soles very quickly. And since the commandant was deeply attached to English-style elegance, to make up for having nothing beautiful about his looks, renewing his London-made shoes was a problem. Anyone crossing the Channel was implored to bring him back a pair.
The brigadier had been impressed by the glimpses of Danglard’s knowledge, and was now walking docilely alongside him. He had started to get ‘a bit of polish’ as Bourlin had said. The four men parted on the Place de la Convention.
‘I’ll call you when I get the forensic results,’ said Bourlin, ‘it shouldn’t be long. Thanks for your help, but I think I’m going to have to close the file tonight.’
‘Since none of us understands it,’ said Adamsberg with a wave of his hand, ‘we can say anything we like. It reminds me of a guillotine.’
Bourlin watched for a moment as the two colleagues walked away.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said to his junior. ‘That’s just Adamsberg.’
As if that statement was enough to clarify everything.
‘Still,’ said the brigadier, ‘what does he have in his brain, that Commandant Danglard, to know so much stuff?’
‘White wine.’
Less than two hours later, Bourlin telephoned Adamsberg. The two vertical lines had been drawn first: left, then right.
‘Like when you write an H then,’ he went on. ‘But next, she drew the curved line.’
‘So not an H.’
‘And not the Cyrillic alphabet either. Pity, I liked that theory. Then she added the crossbar, which was drawn upwards from the bottom.’
‘So she struck out the smile.’
‘Precisely. We’ve got nothing here, Adamsberg. Not an initial, not a Russian. Just some unknown symbol, addressed to some person or persons unknown.’
‘Whom she’s accusing of driving her to suicide, or alternatively that she wants to warn of some danger.’
‘Or,’ suggested Bourlin, ‘she simply killed herself because she was terminally ill. But first, she wanted to leave a record of someone or something, some event in her life. A final confession perhaps, before leaving this world.’
‘And what kind of confession does one make at the very last moment?’
‘A secret you couldn’t bring yourself to tell before.’
‘For instance?’
‘A secret child?’
‘Or a sin, Bourlin. Or a murder. What sin could this dear old Alice Gauthier have committed?’
‘I wouldn’t call her “dear old” Alice. She was authoritarian, a very firm character, tyrannical even. Not a very nice woman.’
‘So did she have some problems with her former pupils? Or with the education authorities?’
‘No, she was very well regarded professionally, she was never censured for anything. Forty years in the same school, in a difficult area. But according to her fellow teachers, the kids, even the toughest of them, dared not open their mouths during her lessons, she wouldn’t put up with any nonsense. So you can imagine that head teachers clung on to her like a sacred treasure. She just had to appear in the doorway of a classroom for the din to stop immediately. Her punishments were dreaded.’
‘Did she go in for corporal punishment?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
‘What then? Writing out three hundred lines?’
‘Not even,’ said Bourlin. ‘The punishment was, she would withdraw her affection. Because she loved her pupils. That was the big threat. Losing her affection. Lots of them went to see her after school, on one pretext or another. Just as an example of how tough this little woman was, she got hold of one young drug pusher in the school and, I don’t know how, he gave her the names of a whole gang within the hour. So that’s the kind of woman she was.’
‘Pretty sharp then?’
‘Still thinking about your guillotine?’
‘No, I was thinking about the lost letter. To this unknown young man. Perhaps one of her former pupils?’
‘So the sign might refer to the pupil? A gang’s emblem? A secret symbol? Don’t get me started again, Adamsberg, I’ve got to close this one down tonight!’
‘Look, find an excuse to hang on to the case. Just one more day. Say you’re still working on the Cyrillic possibility. But whatever you do, don’t tell them we’re involved.’
‘Why should I hang on? You’ve got something in mind?’
‘No, nothing. I’d just like to have a think.’
Bourlin sighed in discouragement. He had known Adamsberg long enough to realise that ‘thinking’ didn’t mean much where he was concerned. Adamsberg didn’t think. He didn’t sit down at a table with paper and pencil, he didn’t stare in concentration out of the window, he didn’t draw up a table of facts with arrows and figures, he didn’t even put his chin in his hand. He pottered about, walking silently, weaving in and out of offices, passing remarks, pacing slowly round a crime scene. But no one had ever seen him thinking. He seemed more like a fish, swimming along aimlessly. No, that’s not right, a fish does have an aim. Adamsberg was more like a sponge, drifting with the currents. But what currents? And some people said that when his vague brown eyes looked even more distracted, it was as if they contained seaweed. He belonged to the sea more than to dry land.
V
MARIE-FRANCE GAVE a start when she read the death announcement. She had missed a few days, so she had dozens of notices to catch up on. Not that this daily ritual gave her any morbid satisfaction. No, the reason – and this was an awful thing to say, she thought, not for the first time – was that she was watching out for the death of a first cousin who had once been fond of her. And on that side of the family, which had plenty of money, they published a notice in the paper if anyone died. It was in this way that she had learned of the deaths of two other cousins and of the husband of the cousin in question. Who was therefore alone in this world, and rich. Her husband
had made his money from balloons, of all things. Marie-France was forever wondering whether there was any chance that the manna of this cousin’s wealth might perhaps descend on her. She’d tried calculating the size of the manna. How much would it be? Fifty thousand? A million? More? After tax, what would there be left? Would her cousin have thought of leaving it all to her? What if she left it all to the Society for the Protection of the Orang-utan? She’d been pretty keen on orang-utans, Marie-France could quite understand that, and was ready to share it with the poor creatures. Don’t get carried away, my girl, just read the announcements. The cousin was getting on for ninety-two, it couldn’t be long, could it? Although in that family, they bred centenarians, the way other families bred large numbers of children. In her family, they produced old people. And they didn’t do a great deal with their lives, which, she thought, probably preserved them. This cousin, though, had got about a bit, to Java, Borneo and all those scary islands – because of the orang-utans – and that might wear you out sooner. She went on reading chronologically.
Régis Rémond and Martin Druot, cousins of the deceased, along with her friends and colleagues, regretfully announce the death of Mme Alice Clarisse Henriette Gauthier, née Vermond, in her sixty-sixth year, after a long illness. The funeral will leave her home, 33a rue de la . . .
33a! She heard again the nurse calling out: ‘It’s Madame Gauthier from 33a . . .’ Poor woman, she’d saved her life – by preventing her head striking the pavement, she was convinced of that now – but obviously it hadn’t been for long.
Unless, that letter . . .? The letter she had decided to post? What if it had been the wrong thing to do? What if the precious letter had triggered some disaster? Was that why the nurse had been so opposed to it? Well, the letter would have been posted anyway, Marie-France consoled herself, pouring out a second cup of coffee. That was fate.
No, it wouldn’t! The letter had fallen to the ground when the woman collapsed. Think, girl, think it over seven times. And if Madame Gauthier, in the end, had committed a . . . what did he used to call it, my old boss? He was always talking about it – an acte manqué, a Freudian slip. Something you don’t mean to do, but you do it all the same, for reasons hidden beneath other reasons. Had the old woman’s fear of what might come from posting the letter made her suddenly feel dizzy? And had she then lost the letter as an acte manqué, abandoning the idea for reasons hidden under other reasons?