by Fred Vargas
‘Care home, my foot,’ said Lucio. ‘He was put somewhere where he went through hell. You have to make him scratch, that’s the only way. Where was he as a kid? The parents must have known. Means the pair of them were assholes. Good motive for killing, isn’t it? Bang, bang, a nice clean shot in the head, debt paid.’
‘Lucio, someone else was murdered, a woman in Paris, and she’s got no connection with Amédée’s childhood.’
‘At the same time?’
‘Day before.’
‘Well, that’s just to put you off the scent. If you’ve got dogs chasing after you, chuck them a piece of meat and carry on.’
‘That’s what I said this afternoon,’ said Danglard, ‘though I put it differently. At any rate, Henri Masfauré wasn’t a slave-driver to Céleste. Not only did he leave her half a million, but it was her choice absolutely to go and live in that cabin in the woods, no question about that. Amédée explained to Estalère. By the end of the day, Estalère was the only one he would talk to.’
‘So what’s this bit about, hombre?’
This was the first time that Lucio had called him hombre, which Danglard took to be an honour. He had rather thought the old man tended not to rate too highly his roundabout way of talking.
‘She’d had her eye on the cabin for a long time – it’s an old apple store. But she waited until Amédée was twelve before she asked the boss. Every evening of her life – I’m trying to report her words as Amédée told it – when she went to sleep, she would “go off to her cabin”, to chase away her troubles. A make-believe cabin in her head, of course, she said, surrounded by dangers, the wind, the storm, wild beasts. She imagined it over and over again, the cabin, never finding total security or the perfect cabin, until she found this old hut in the woods. Masfauré refused at first, he said it was too dangerous. But that was exactly what she liked about it. No feeling of security unless there was a threat of danger. She never sleeps so well as when the rain is beating on the roof and the wild boar is rubbing against the wooden walls.’
‘It must have changed when Marc arrived, then?’
‘To some extent. He sleeps outside and protects her. She took him in as a stray orphan, starving and whining outside her door.’
‘Who was this that was whining?’ asked Lucio.
‘A young wild boar,’ Adamsberg explained. ‘She called him Marc. And he defends her better than a regiment of soldiers.’
‘The cabin’s a womb substitute,’ said Lucio. ‘Once we’re out of it, idiots that we are, we just have to fight, as we used to say in Spain, you need to get yourself a new one.’
‘Out of what?’ asked Zerk.
Adamsberg asked his son for a cigarette, possibly to cover up his naivety, and muttered to him quickly: ‘The mother’s womb.’
‘Well, in that case,’ said Zerk, giving his father a light for the cigarette, ‘we should all be living in cabins.’
‘We all certainly try to,’ Lucio agreed. ‘So this woman, Céleste, did she have some problem with her mother?’
‘They quarrelled when she was a youngster,’ said Danglard. ‘But the mother died before they could be reconciled.’
‘There you are then, what did I say?’ remarked Lucio, opening a bottle of beer with his teeth. ‘She couldn’t bury the quarrel, she hasn’t finished scratching. And that takes you straight to a log cabin. You shouldn’t try to winkle her out of it, that woman, no way.’
The mother cat came to rub up against Adamsberg’s leg, picking up a few little burrs as she did. Adamsberg stroked her head, which sent her to sleep for a few minutes. He had the same effect on his very young son, Tom. Adamsberg’s fingers, like his voice, seemed to contain some soothing and soporific quality, more effective than any log cabin. But he wasn’t about to try and scratch Céleste’s head.
‘Right, I’m off to my own cabin,’ he said, standing up. ‘Time to go, it’s coming on to rain. Lucio, don’t piss against the tree.’
‘I’ll do as I please, hombre.’
XIII
COMMISSAIRE BOURLIN WOKE Adamsberg at six in the morning.
‘I’ve got another suicide on my hands, commissaire. Got a pen handy? 15th arrondissement again, or it wouldn’t be on my plate.’
‘Bourlin, are you going to call me every time someone dies in your division?’
‘417 rue de Vaugirard, third floor, door code 1789B.’
‘1789! Ah, the Revolution, always the Revolution!’
‘What are you muttering?’
‘Nothing, I’m trying to get dressed with one hand.’
‘The code doesn’t work anyway, they don’t use it.’
‘Signs of a break-in?’
‘No. Perfect suicide. Well, I should say ghastly suicide, Japanese-style, knife in the belly. Probable motives: he ran an art publishing house, went bust, lots of debts, financial ruin.’
‘Any prints on the knife?’
‘Only his own.’
‘So why am I putting my clothes on for this, Bourlin?’
‘Because on his bookshelf there are three books on Iceland. And he wasn’t a big traveller. Something on Rome, a map of London, a guide to the Camargue, that’s it. But three on Iceland. So I looked for the sign. Well, I sweated blood trying to find it, believe me, because white on white, it was’t easy, you had to be looking for it.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘The sign’s there all right, carved with the tip of the knife on a skirting board, right down by the floor. But done recently, there are flakes of paint on the ground.’
‘Tell me the address again, I wasn’t listening properly.’
The man had been killed in his kitchen, which was now awash with blood. Stepping platforms had been brought in for the police to walk across. The crime scene people had finished, and they were, with some difficulty, removing the body. The victim was small, but overweight and heavy, and their gloves slipped on the blood-streaked dressing gown.
‘What time?’ Adamsberg asked.
‘2.05 this morning, exactly,’ Bourlin replied. ‘The neighbour heard an awful cry and the sound of someone falling. He called us. Look, here’s the sign.’
Adamsberg crouched down and opened his notebook to copy it.
‘Yes, that’s it. But it looks smaller, more hesitant.’
‘Yes, I noticed that. You think someone’s imitating it?’
‘Bourlin, for now we’re floating around like bubbles in the wind. Better not think too hard.’
‘As you like.’
‘Have you got photos of the victim on your laptop?’
‘In my witch that counts? Yes. Victor might be able to identify him. His name is Jean Breuguel, B R E U G U E L. Not like Bruegel the Elder, as Danglard would say, just Breuguel.’
‘OK,’ said Adamsberg who had no idea what Bourlin was talking about. ‘Send the pictures to Victor. Explain to him in brief what’s happened. Here’s his email address,’ he said, passing his notebook over.
A notebook full of sketches, either in the margins or taking up whole pages, Bourlin noticed, as he prepared to send the photographs to Le Creux.
‘Did you do those? All the drawings?’
Adamsberg was looking down at the platform, bending under Bourlin’s weight, surrounded by a sea of blood.
‘Yeah,’ he said with a shrug.
‘That’s Victor, there, under his address?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s Amédée, Céleste, Pelletier,’ said Bourlin, riffling through the pages.
‘By the way, Masfauré had written Pelletier out of his will, on suspicion of cheating over the price of horses for the stud.’
But Bourlin wasn’t listening, instead turning over the pages of the notebook, suspended twenty centimetres over the pool of congealing blood. Finally, he typed Victor’s email address into his phone, and handed the notebook back to Adamsberg, looking suspicious.
‘Did you do a picture of me too?’
Adamsberg smiled and turned to the first
page.
‘Actually, this was done from memory,’ he said, ‘on our first visit to Le Creux.’
‘Oh, you haven’t made me look bad at all,’ said Bourlin, who was actually rather pleased with the image of himself in the drawing.
‘Here,’ said Adamsberg, tearing out the sheet, and handing it to him. ‘Keep it if you want.’
‘Could you do my kids?’
‘Not now, Bourlin.’
‘Yes, but one day?’
‘Yes, OK, one day when we all go back to have a meal at the Auberge du Creux.’
‘Right, the pictures have gone off,’ said Bourlin, closing his laptop. ‘Come and look at the books on Iceland. They’re in here,’ he said as they went into the sitting room. ‘I put them on the coffee table. You can pick them up, there weren’t any prints on them.’
Adamsberg shook his head.
‘No, naturally, because these are brand new. All three of them. No dust, no pages turned down, impeccable condition.’
He opened one of the books and sniffed it.
‘They even smell new.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Bourlin, sitting down beside Adamsberg on a ramshackle grey sofa. ‘Wait a minute. You mean he’s put these books here to send us chasing off on the Iceland trail? But because they’re brand new, it’s a false scent?’
‘Exactly. We were wrong, Bourlin.’
‘He slipped up, then. He should have bought some second-hand ones.’
‘Didn’t have time, maybe. Three murders in a week, think about it, he’s moving fast. But the books did at least make us look in one direction, and we found the sign.’
‘But why is this wretched sign everywhere, if he wants us to believe these are suicides?’
‘He knows we don’t think they’re suicides any more. Or else he doesn’t really want us to. A murderer who signs his work is bursting with pride, just banal pop psychology, as Retancourt would say. Some day or other, when we’ve closed the files, he’d have made it clear that these were indeed murders, committed by him, his work. So that these deaths are not consigned to the oubliettes of the tower in Le Creux.’
‘But perhaps the sign hasn’t been drawn for us, but so that the other people should know about it. The rest of the Icelandic group?’
‘But look, we think this one here never set foot in Iceland, Bourlin.’
‘Shit, no, I forgot,’ said Bourlin, shaking his head. ‘And this time the sign’s a bit different too. But who else would know the link between the first two murders and the sign? Victor and Amédée – and only them. You showed them the drawing.’
The two men thought for a moment in silence. That is, Adamsberg was dreaming, but Bourlin was thinking and indeed ruminating, turning his thoughts over twenty times in his head, while he blew his nose, still affected by his spring cold.
‘Unless it’s not the same killer,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Unless there’s someone who knows about the other two murders and the sign, and used them in order to commit this one. Then slipped in the books on Iceland. But wasn’t very used to drawing the sign.’
‘You’re thinking that could be Victor?’
‘Yes, could be. In order to lift any suspicion from Amédée, who will surely have a cast-iron alibi for last night. But who could watch Victor coming and going? At night, Céleste is in the woods, and Pelletier’s a long way off, in the stables.’
Bourlin clasped his head between his two enormous hands.
‘Not that I want to dodge out of anything, Adamsberg, but I wouldn’t be at all sorry to hand all of this over to you. I’m completely lost.’
‘That’s because you haven’t slept.’
‘You’re not lost then?’
‘I’m used to it, it’s not the same.’
‘I’ll get the Thermos.’
Bourlin poured them both some coffee in cut-glass goblets, the only receptacles he could find without going back into the kitchen.
‘Used to what?’ he asked.
‘Used to being lost. Bourlin, just imagine you’re walking on a beach, with sand and rock pools.’
‘Yes, OK.’
‘And you see a lot of seaweed all tangled together, making up a sort of Gordian knot. A big heap, maybe a very big one.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s what we’ve got here.’
‘A heap of shit, you mean.’
‘Alas, no. Is there any sugar?’
‘No, it’s in the kitchen, I don’t dare go in there to fetch sugar. Question of respect, Adamsberg.’
‘I don’t mean the sugar, I mean the ball of shit, that’s what the “alas” was about. Because shit is a coherent kind of matter, easily analysed, whereas a tangle of seaweed is made up of thousands of different strands, all coming from dozens of different kinds of algae.’
The two men drank their unsweetened coffee, looking tired. It felt sad, in this small sitting room as the pale dawn came up: the surroundings looked as if they had remained unchanged for twenty years. Barely illuminated by fitful gleams of sun, the room was redolent of decline and neglect. It felt odd, what was more, to be drinking coffee out of cut-glass goblets.
‘Take a look at your tölva to see if Victor has replied,’ said Adamsberg without moving, plunged deep as he was in the old sofa pitted with cigarette burns.
Bourlin had three goes at typing his password, as the keys were small for his large fingers.
‘You can add another strand to your seaweed,’ he announced finally. ‘Victor says he’s never seen this one before. And he’s supposed to be, what did Danglard call him, a hypermnasiac?’
‘Hypermnesiac I think. Not sure though.’
‘So it’s like you said. This Breuguel wasn’t one of the group. But someone wants us to think he was.’
‘Have you established how the killer got in?’
‘The kitchen door opens on to the service staircase,’ Bourlin explained, ‘but in particular on to the rubbish chute. Every night, this is according to the downstairs neighbour, Breuguel went out on the landing to throw his bin bag down the chute before he went to bed. All the killer had to do was wait on the landing and follow him into the kitchen to attack him.’
‘And to know his habits.’
‘Or to have watched him for a while to find them out. Like the others, this man must have been likely to talk. Ruin, depression, factors that would combine to make him confess.’
‘Confess what?’
‘About Iceland.’
‘But this guy never went to Iceland,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Oh shit,’ said Bourlin, plunging his head in his hands again.
‘It’s like I said. The tangle of seaweed. Hard to escape. What time is it?’
‘You’re wearing two watches. Why don’t you look at them?’
‘Because they don’t work.’
‘So why wear them, and anyway why two of them?’
‘I don’t know, it goes back a long way. But can’t you tell me the time?’
‘Eight fifteen.’
Bourlin poured more coffee into the glasses.
‘Still no sugar,’ he moaned in a desperate tone, as if the lack of sugar summed up the alarming state of the investigation so far. ‘And I’m hungry.’
‘You can’t go nicking food from the kitchen, you said so yourself, Bourlin. You don’t rob the dead, when it means treading in their blood.’
‘Well, fuck that.’
Adamsberg hoisted himself out of the old sofa and walked round the shabby sitting room. Bourlin had returned with some sugar and a can of ravioli, which he was eating cold from the tip of his penknife.
‘Feeling better?’ Adamsberg asked.
‘Yeah, but this stuff’s disgusting.’
‘What we have to do,’ Adamsberg started slowly, and almost scientifically, ‘is to imagine that this big tangle we were talking about’ – and he spread his arms wide – ‘is even bigger than we thought.’
‘How big?’
‘Big as you.’
The
two men considered this possibility in silence. Then Bourlin attacked the ravioli once more.
‘In that case, we’re fucked,’ he announced. ‘We’ll never find the killer.’
‘That’s quite possible. When someone sends thirty billiard balls down towards you, it’s hard to spot the right one. The one you need to start.’
Adamsberg took a bit of ravioli from Bourlin’s knife.
‘What do you think of this cold ravioli?’ Bourlin asked.
‘You’re right, it’s disgusting.’
‘Well, that’s one thing we’ve established.’
‘And the birds in the tower, they’re hooded crows.’
‘Two things, then.’
‘So faced with this situation,’ said Adamsberg, coming to a halt, ‘we have to throw our own billiard ball into the game. However futile it might be. Go back to the old tried and tested methods.’
‘Put out a press release, you mean?’
‘Yes, press and social networks. It’ll go round the world in less than six hours.’
‘To tell the killer that we know these are not suicides?’
‘He’ll certainly appreciate that. But we shouldn’t try to provoke a character who’s obsessed with the guillotine.’
‘If it is a guillotine.’
‘If it is. I’m not forgetting, Bourlin. We should be concerned with protecting the surviving members of the Icelandic trip. Now that he’s opened the floodgates, we can’t be sure he isn’t already thinking of eliminating them, one after another, to have done with them once and for all.’
‘Are you pulling my leg? You said we should forget about Iceland. Because of this man and his new books.’
‘And what if Victor’s lying? What if he really did know him?’
‘So we go back to the Iceland business?’
‘How can we afford to ignore anything, when we have no idea where we are with this?’
‘Do we mention the sign in the press release?’
‘No,’ said Adamsberg, after a moment. ‘We’ll keep that to ourselves for now. We’ll publish something along the lines of . . . oh, Danglard will draft it – “Three murders in a week”. With names and photos.’
‘Three?’ asked Bourlin. ‘And what if number three has absolutely no connection with Iceland?’