by Fred Vargas
‘Ducks,’ Retancourt said firmly. ‘Heads chopped off.’
‘Guillotine,’ Adamsberg murmured.
‘Commissaire,’ said Retancourt, ‘with respect, that’s what people do to ducks. Cut their heads off. Perfectly normal on a farm.’
‘It does sound more like a farm than an institution,’ Justin remarked.
‘Perhaps it was one of those places where they have animals around for therapy,’ said Mordent. ‘It’s quite fashionable. Contact with animals, responsibility, little tasks in the farmyard, feeding them, changing their water.’
‘For a child, chopping duck’s heads off isn’t a “little farmyard task”, is it?’ said Adamsberg.
‘Perhaps he just saw it happen by chance. And in any case, he was a disturbed little boy. Perhaps he still is.’
‘What else does Amédée remember?’
‘A cold bed, and a woman shouting. That’s about it.’
‘Any other children with him?’
‘He remembers one big boy, who took him for walks, and he idolised him. Probably one of the helpers. The family doctor lives in Versailles, so I’m going there now with Veyrenc. Retancourt is going to tackle Pelletier, looks a tricky one.’
Danglard was calling on the other line.
‘The lawyer was in Versailles, I’ve just left him.’
‘They did everything in Versailles, these people.’
‘Well, it would be a better place to go than the village of Malvoisine. Given the kind of sums we’re talking about. Masfauré had gone for a large legal firm. Very elegant building, old panelling, Aubusson tapestries on the wall, there’s a hunting scene with a few delicious, slightly risqué details, that –’
‘Danglard, please,’ Adamsberg cut him off.
‘Sorry. The lawyer hasn’t finished calculating the value of the whole estate but it’s getting on for 50 million euros. No less! There was even more before, but Henri Masfauré had put a lot of his own money into his research into pumping CO2 out of the atmosphere and the reconversion of residues. The prototype factory that was supposed to test the technology is nearing completion, it’s down in the west in the Creuse département. A philanthropist and a very important scientist, according to the lawyer. There’s a will, made a year and five months ago.’
‘Go ahead,’ said Adamsberg, pulling a crumpled cigarette out of his jacket pocket. Although in theory he didn’t smoke, the commissaire abstracted cigarettes from his son’s packets, and stuffed them into his pockets loose, where they twisted and fell to bits, as they enjoyed their new life of freedom.
‘Everything goes to his son Amédée, on condition he gets the factory finished and sees that it starts working. There’s a legacy of a hundred thousand euros to Victor, and five hundred thousand to Céleste.’
‘I can understand in Céleste’s case,’ Adamsberg said, ‘but it’s unusual to leave as much as a hundred thousand to your secretary. One wonders what he’d done to deserve a sum like that.’
‘No, commissaire, it’s just that these people don’t view money the way you and I do. But they’re certainly large enough sums to be a motive to cause his death.’
‘To kill Masfauré, maybe, but not Gauthier, the maths teacher in Paris.’
‘Unless,’ said Danglard. ‘Perhaps the idea was to commit a previous murder, accompanied by the same cryptic sign, to throw people off the scent. In which case, we’d have a classic case of a red herring.’
‘Shall I keep on noting all this?’ asked Justin. ‘It’s not the report now, just speculation.’
Justin’s meticulousness was precious, you could always count on the excellence of his minute-taking, though the downside of that was his extreme pedantry.
‘Yes, Justin, get it all down,’Adamsberg ordered. ‘But how could Victor or Céleste have known about the existence of Alice Gauthier?’
‘Well, Victor had known in essence that she existed, ever since the Icelandic events. And Céleste, well, she’s had every opportunity of poking around the house, so she could have chanced on some kind of correspondence between Alice and Masfauré. Then if the cops conclude they both committed suicide, fine. And if they start going off on the Iceland trail, even better. But if not, there’s always the weird sign, invented to throw us off the scent. A well-planned sequence, anticipating what the logic of any police inquiry might be.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘I agree,’ Justin put in. ‘Though I won’t write that down,’ he said to himself.
‘But how could they have known about the will?’ Adamsberg went on.
‘There was a copy of it in Masfauré’s house,’ said Danglard. ‘Which hasn’t been found. I’ll ring off, commissaire, because I need to book our tables at the inn. By the way, I found out why this place is called the Hollow. Nothing to do with our inquiry but it’s interesting. Oh, sorry, forgot Pelletier, very important. He doesn’t get anything. Or rather he doesn’t now. In a previous will, he got fifty thousand. And according to the lawyer, who’s a stickler for form, but with an easy manner – this lawyer behaves as if he’s an old aristocrat, but actually, I think the “de” in his name is invented, because all the Des Mar . . .’
‘Danglard!’
‘I didn’t note that,’ said Justin, non-committally.
‘Yes, well, Pelletier gets nothing at all.’ Danglard picked up the thread. ‘Because Masfauré suspected he was exaggerating the prices of horses and their stud value. If you have a stallion from a good line, it can be worth thousands of euros and that’s not counting the ones with really illustrious ancestry.’
‘No, don’t count them, please, commandant.’
‘Masfauré suspected that Pelletier was in cahoots with the dealers, preparing false accounts and splitting the difference in cash.’
‘That must have been what Céleste suspected too,’ said Adamsberg.
‘No doubt. And if it’s true, you can just see how much money he could have made. So Masfauré changed his will.’
‘This lawyer whose name doesn’t really start with a “de”, does he know why Masfauré didn’t take Pelletier to court over this?’
‘He wanted to complete his investigations before taking any action. Pelletier is an absolutely irreplaceable stud master, he could do anything he liked with the horses, make them dance on one leg by whistling a waltz. So Masfauré wanted to be quite certain of his facts before getting rid of him. That gives Pelletier a good motive for murder too.’
‘What’s Voisenet doing now?’
‘He’s looking into the wife who died in Iceland.’
‘Put him on the line.’
‘That is, er, he’s actually just made a quick visit to the tower of haunted spirits.’
‘Excellent,’ said Adamsberg. ‘At least then we’ll know one thing for sure in this fog of uncertainty.’
‘Yes, whether they’re jackdaws or hooded crows,’ Danglard agreed.
All that evening, Adamsberg pored over his colleagues’ reports. He hadn’t put the heating on, so he lit a fire in the grate after supper. Feet up on one of the firedogs on the hearth, with his laptop – or tölva – resting on his thigh, he went through the information that Justin was emailing to him from home, or rather his parents’ house, where he was still living at the age of thirty-eight. Since he had no household of his own to look after, Justin was always available for consultation, unless he happened to be out playing poker.
Noël had opted to use kid gloves when he began questioning Pelletier about the real stud value of his horses, thinking he would get a result by roundabout questions. But Retancourt, not one to use kid gloves as a rule, had waded straight in, saying there was some talk that he had been cheating on his employer. Pelletier had flown into a rage, and in a reflex action had hurled himself at the large policewoman, not realising that he would make less impression on her than on a concrete pillar. Retancourt had angled her shoulder and thrown him to the ground without striking a blow. Her rough childhood among four brothers who liked fighting had en
abled little Violette to acquire formidable combat skills. But once he was on the ground, Pelletier had whistled in a special way and two aggressive stallions had come racing towards them, panting through their nostrils. Back on his feet, Pelletier got the horses to stop fifty centimetres short of the two officers, and they had understood very clearly that these huge males, with powerful hooves, might charge again at a sign from their keeper. Noël had pulled his gun.
‘Stop right there!’ Pelletier ordered. ‘That horse is worth half a million. More’n you’d be able to pay for in compensation, eh, you piddling little cop!’
This last exchange had been reported by Retancourt, not by Noël. Adamsberg could imagine how furious and humiliated that had made Noël feel. No one had ever called him a piddling little cop before.
‘See, if you died,’ Pelletier went on, eyeing Noël like a horse dealer sizing him up, ‘the compensation’d be ten thousand, mebbe, and that’s being generous. She’d be worth more,’ he said, pointing at Retancourt and spitting on the ground. ‘Ten times as much. I do not cheat on the sales, so get that into your thick heads. I hear any more about that, I’ll sue.’
As for Amédée, the commissaire could now better understand the nervous, withdrawn but sensitive nature of the young man, who had been ready to run away. And his possible mental disturbance. He had been isolated for five years from birth. In a ‘cold bed’. Cold, in some luxury psychiatric establishment? Had he had regular visits from his parents? There was no way of knowing. According to the family doctor in Versailles, Amédée suffered not only from persistent chest infections and earaches, which were indications of stress, but from some form of ‘repression’. That is, he had deliberately repressed any memory of his early years. ‘Too painful?’Adamsberg scribbled. ‘Abused? Abandoned.’ And he added: ‘Decapitated ducks.’
Amédée’s mother, irresistible though she might have been, did not have a good reputation in the neighbourhood, whether Malvoisine, Sombrevert or even Versailles. Opinion on that score was unanimous, apart from the mayor of Sombrevert, who was counting on Amédée’s vote. There were sixteen separate witness statements, all in agreement, and expressed in every kind of register – from the mayor’s deputy, who had taken coffee with Estalère: ‘Let’s say she acted as if she was to the manor born’, to the lady at the dry cleaner’s, whose words were ‘thought she was Lady Muck’, Justin reported. Other descriptions were ‘built like a Greek goddess’, ‘oh, she looked down on other people’, ‘you never got a please or thank you out of her’. She was seductive all right, but a gold-digger, ‘who didn’t look after her kid at all’, ‘lucky for him Céleste was there’. She was interested in money most of all, ‘tight with her money, she was’, and ‘never had enough of it, poor Monsieur Henri’. As for the high society of Versailles, they had always regarded her as a vulgar upstart.
Voisenet and Kernorkian had managed, from a few letters discovered in boxes in the attic, to reconstruct the circles Marie-Adélaïde Masfauré (née Pouillard) had moved in before her wealthy marriage. The picture was incomplete but seemed to point to working-class parents without resources, of whom she had quickly become ashamed, her early days employed at a Paris hairdresser’s, then an apprenticeship as a make-up artist, followed by a modest stage career. Her beauty and combative vivacity had taken her to the casting couch of at least three theatre directors.
Adamsberg looked up at his son, who was padding quietly about in the kitchen.
‘Danglard’s coming round,’ he said, which immediately brought a smile to Zerk’s face, and prompted him to fetch another glass from the sideboard.
‘Isn’t he staying out there with the others?’
‘No, Danglard sleeps back home with his children. In his lair.’
‘I thought the children had left the nest.’
‘Even so. He sleeps near their beds.’
The gate squeaked and Zerk opened the door.
‘He’s stopping in the garden,’ he said, ‘and Lucio’s offering him a beer.’
The commandant had put a bottle of white wine down in the grass and was chatting to Lucio, the old Spaniard who shared a small communal garden with Adamsberg. Worldly-wise and ceremonious, Lucio always drank two beers outside in the evening, whatever the weather. Then he pissed against the beech tree before going inside, and this was the only point of disagreement between the two neighbours. Adamsberg claimed he was destroying the base of the tree, while Lucio argued that he was providing it with beneficial nitrates. Danglard had sat down alongside the old man on a wooden packing case under the tree, and did not look as if he would budge any time soon. Adamsberg took two stools outside, followed by Zerk, who was carrying a glass for the commandant, two beers wedged between his fingers, and a corkscrew. When Adamsberg had first encountered his previously unknown son aged twenty-eight, Zerk had called it a ‘cork-hook’, and used various other odd terms. Adamsberg had wondered whether this young man was intelligent and original, or, on the contrary, slow and limited. But as he sometimes wondered the same about himself, without letting it assume much importance, he had abandoned the enigma.
‘How many cats have you got here now?’ asked Danglard as some graceful shapes went past in the shadows.
‘The little one has grown up,’ Adamsberg said, ‘and she’s very fertile. Six or seven, I don’t know, I get them mixed up, except for the mother who comes and rubs against my legs.’
‘Well, you brought her into the world so she’s attached to you, hombre,’ said Lucio. ‘We’ve had two litters, there are nine of them now. Pedro, Manuel, Esperanza,’ he started, counting on his fingers.
As Lucio went on listing them, Adamsberg passed a sheaf of papers across to Danglard.
‘I just printed out these reports. Seems she was a greedy wife more than a mother. And we know nothing at all about the first five years in the life of little Amédée.’
‘. . . Carmen and Francesco,’ Lucio concluded, having accounted for all the cats.
‘Céleste only entered the picture when the boy was five,’ said Danglard, reaching out his glass to Zerk.
‘Where did she come from?’
‘A village near Sombrevert, with good references. Reading between the lines, because she doesn’t like to speak ill of people, she let us understand that the boy would never have received any real affection, or comforts, even material ones, if it hadn’t been for her. The mother waltzed off whenever she felt like it, to Paris or elsewhere, while the father worked from dawn to dusk in his study. Everything depended on Céleste, right up to today. One way and another, she said, apart from the natural shock and sorrow, his mother’s death didn’t actually change Amédée’s daily life, he was a teenager by then.’
‘How did Amédée react when he was told his father didn’t commit suicide?’
‘He was relieved that he couldn’t have been responsible. But he immediately realised that he’d make “a fucking good suspect”, as he put it. He’s expecting to be arrested at any moment. Everything seems to have come to a standstill out there, except for Victor, who’s sorting out Masfauré’s papers and Pelletier, who’s carrying on working, because murder or no murder, the horses have to be fed and watered. Amédée is mooching around the woods and fields, with burrs sticking to his trousers. Now and then he sits down on a bench and pulls them off.’
‘Point in his favour.’
‘Not what I think,’ said Danglard, ‘he just has no idea what to do with his ten fingers.’
‘That,’ Lucio interrupted, ‘is an existential question. What should you do with your ten fingers? I’ve only got five, but I still ask myself that. At my age.’
Lucio had lost an arm as a child during the Spanish Civil War, and this amputation had left him with an ongoing, unabated and recurrent obsession. Just before the incident, he had been bitten by a spider and hadn’t finished scratching the itch. For Lucio, ‘finishing scratching’ had become a determining concept in an individual’s lifetime behaviour. You have to finish scratching an itch, or y
ou will suffer from it all your life long.
‘Amédée only cheers up when Victor stops working and comes to see him,’ Danglard went on. ‘Amédée doesn’t seem to have any other anchor in his life besides Céleste and Victor. No girlfriends. Victor protects him, that’s obvious. You’d think he’d done it all his life. Every couple of hours, he leaves the study and goes for a stroll with him.’
‘What about Victor himself?’
‘Well, like everyone else, he’s wondering who killed his employer. And Alice Gauthier. Voisenet dared to suggest it could be Amédée, and Victor’s brows came down like thunder and he turned his back on Voisenet, as if restraining himself from hitting him. Then he came back and said. “For Christ’s sake it must be the Iceland business. What else could it be? I told you about that mad killer! Who else can it be?” Voisenet replied rather tactlessly that there was no way of identifying the man he meant, or any other members of the group. “So that’s why you’re homing in on Amédée, is it,” Victor said, ‘because you can’t find anyone else? So you need a scapegoat.” Talking of wildlife, they’re hooded crows. Voisenet was disappointed, he’d been hoping for ravens. I think it was because of the tower that he was a bit off form when he was doing the questioning. But he did take the trouble to put a ring of bird droppings round the cabin without Céleste noticing.’
‘Good. At least that’s something we’ve accomplished.’
‘This Amédée,’ Lucio butted in, ‘is he the one who says he can’t remember anything about the first five years of his life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not surprising then if he looks at his fingers as if they don’t belong to him. He hasn’t finished scratching, that’s all.’
‘It’s more that he doesn’t want to scratch, Lucio,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He’s deliberately wiped out all his memories, he’s incapable of telling us where he was, who with, or why.’
‘He must have had a really nasty bite then.’
‘The suggestion is he was in some kind of care home, and not a cheap one, because his father was very rich.’