A Climate of Fear

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Amédée,’ said Adamsberg, turning towards the young man who looked concerned, ‘you told us you couldn’t remember anything except a few images from your first five years in some institution.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No it isn’t, it’s wrong. You weren’t in any institution. You were fostered at a farm. At Le Thost, with a brutal family, and your parents came to fetch you when you were five.’

  Amédée locked his fingers together like spiders’ legs and was unable to speak. Victor immediately moved on to the attack.

  ‘Where did you go digging all that up?’

  ‘With the social security authorities, and at the farm, or to be more precise, by visiting a neighbour, Madame Mangematin. Roberta. She used to come and help with the laundry on washing days for the Grenier couple. She remembers Amédée. Who had been abandoned at birth, and whom a couple called Masfauré came to take back five years later.’

  Adamsberg was speaking as slowly and gently as he could, but he was conscious that his words would be startling for the younger man.

  ‘Don’t you remember anything, Amédée, when I say those names?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do we have to talk about the ducks? You said you remembered some ducks.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Placing his hand on the table, Victor had bent back the two top joints of his index finger. Amédée did the same. A signal of complicity, a warning not to speak.

  ‘One day you chopped the heads off seven or ten of them. And then you were forced to pluck and clean them, and eat them day after day, morning, noon and night. A big boy on the farm, who was older than you, helped you out.’

  ‘I remember that big boy, I told you that before.’

  ‘And the ducks, you remember them? The hatchet? The blood?’

  ‘Yes, he remembers,’ said Danglard, speaking as softly as Adamsberg.

  Amédée uncurled his index finger.

  ‘What’s the point of all this?’ he said, sweat beginning to form on his forehead and upper lip. ‘Yes, I was fostered. But my parents told me never to talk about it. I don’t like remembering it, and I don’t like talking about it. And anyway, what does it matter? What possible interest can it have for you?’

  ‘The boy who helped you eat the ducks,’ Adamsberg insisted, ‘you remember him?’

  ‘If there’s one person in the world I do want to remember, it’s him’.

  ‘He protected you, right?’

  ‘I’d have died a hundred times over, if it wasn’t for him’.

  Victor had now bent all his fingers back, but Amédée seemed not to notice, or not to be able to receive the signal, as he was propelled back into the dark memory of the farm at Le Thost where there had been only one bright spot, the ‘big boy’.

  ‘And when your parents arrived, these unknown parents, they snatched you away from him. I was told you were hanging on to him, and he didn’t want to let you go.’

  ‘I was too little to understand. Yes, they did snatch me away, it was for my own good, they told me afterwards. But he whispered in my ear: “Don’t worry, wherever you are, I’ll be there. I’ll never leave you. Wherever you go, I’ll go.” ’

  Amédée was gripping his thighs. Adamsberg took a deep breath, looked up and let his eyes wander over the treetops. The worst was yet to come.

  ‘But he’d disappeared,’ said Amédée in a choked voice. ‘Of course he had, how would he ever have found me? But I only realised that much later. For years I waited for him, I used to look out over the park every evening, but he didn’t come.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He came all right.’

  Amédée leaned back in his chair, his hands over his forehead, like an animal who has been beaten for no cause.

  ‘He kept his word,’ Adamsberg went on, as Victor unbent his fingers and tightened his lips. ‘And you really didn’t recognise him?’ he asked, leaning towards Amédée. ‘Him!’ he said, pointing to Victor with a slight movement of his hand. ‘That other Victor, also known as Victor Masfauré.’

  Amédée turned his head towards his father’s secretary, extremely slowly, like a man with frostbite, unsure how to use his body.

  ‘When you’d last seen him, he was a gawky teenager with an ugly mug, but when you met him ten years later, he was a grown man, a muscular man with a beard. But what about his curly hair, Amédée, and his smile?’

  ‘I’ve still got an ugly mug,’ said Victor, aiming to lighten the tension of the moment.

  ‘I’m going to take a walk with my colleagues. I’ll leave you two alone for a few minutes.’

  Crouching down on the grass at a distance, Adamsberg could see the two men grabbing each other’s hands, and interrupting each other, trying to talk at the same time. He watched as Amédée leaned his head on Victor’s shoulder, while Victor patted his hair. A quarter of an hour later, the situation seemed to have calmed somewhat. He gave them another five minutes, then signalled to his colleagues, who were sitting on a bench to the side – on account of Danglard’s English tweed suit, which was not intended to make contact with the damp ground.

  ‘Watch their fingers,’ Adamsberg said, as he took his time approaching the table. ‘When Victor bends his index finger, he’s telling Amédée not to say anything.’

  ‘And you really didn’t recognise him?’ Adamsberg asked Amédée once more.

  ‘No,’ said Amédée, his hand still gripping Victor’s arm, and a quite changed expression on his face.

  ‘But subconsciously, you did, didn’t you? You recognised him emotionally, and you adopted him and loved him, although he was just your father’s secretary.’

  ‘Yes,’ Amédée admitted.

  ‘That takes us to you, Victor, and your secrets. What is your real name?’

  ‘You know that, it’s Masfauré.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. A child abandoned at birth is normally given three first names and the last one becomes a surname. So what was it.’

  ‘Laurent. The Greniers knew me as Victor Laurent.’

  ‘But you gave yourself the name Masfauré, to get Henri’s attention. You entered his house under a false name, and you got settled in there, without telling Amédée that you were his old companion from the farm.’

  Pretending to be drowsy, one of his hands holding on to Amédée’s, Victor explained in a tired voice.

  ‘I didn’t want to shock him. Amédée seemed to have recovered, he was well cared for here, if a bit melancholy, but, well, he was living his life, and I didn’t want to upset everything. Just being here was enough for me.’

  ‘That’s all very fine, and indeed I quite believe you,’ said Adamsberg. ‘But coming back like that, without telling him, keeping him in the dark for twelve years, what sense was there in that?’

  ‘What I just told you.’

  ‘No,’ said Veyrenc firmly.

  ‘No,’ Adamsberg echoed. ‘Amédée would have welcomed you with open arms as his saviour from Le Thost. It wasn’t from him that you really wanted to hide your origins.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Victor insisted, looking more grim, and frowning under his incongruous thatch of blond curls.

  ‘No. It wasn’t from him you were hiding, it was from her.’

  ‘Her? Who?’ Victor made an attempt at a rebellious movement.

  ‘Marie-Adélaïde Pouillard, Madame Masfauré.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You snooped into the Greniers’ correspondence as soon as you were old enough. And you knew what was going on, before Amédée left.’

  ‘There wasn’t any correspondence,’ cried Victor, ‘or else it had all been destroyed. I did look for it, but I didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Destroyed? When it could have been used for all kinds of blackmail? People like the Greniers? I don’t think so. You did find it. How else would you have known the address of Amédée’s new home?’

  There was a pregnant silence, and Danglard proposed that they all h
ave a glass of port. Or something of the kind. He bestirred his long flabby legs over to the house in search of Céleste. ‘Can you give us something strong?’ he asked. And for once this wasn’t for himself. Everyone waited in silence, as if the drinks would resolve everything, or at any rate hold things still.

  ‘All right,’ Victor finally said, after two glasses of port, ‘I did look through the papers in the Grenier house. They were hidden in a crack in a rafter, behind a rusty scythe. But there were only a couple of letters.’

  ‘Look, we’re agreed, aren’t we, that you made this discovery before Amédée was taken away?’

  ‘Yes,’ Victor conceded, taking another glass. ‘I was thirteen.’

  ‘There weren’t just a couple of letters, there were about a hundred. And you learned quite a lot.’

  Victor bent back his index finger, this time as a message to himself. Amédée had long since given up trying to understand. He was still staring at Victor with that amazed, puzzled but almost beatific expression sometimes seen in Estalère.

  ‘It was just his mother’s name and address,’ Victor summed up curtly. ‘When I came of age, I left the farm, I went from one job to another, but once I got a motorbike, I would go to look at him, through the woods. Until I found a way of getting taken into the house.’

  ‘With a new CV and a new name.’

  ‘Where was the harm in that? I’d promised him.’

  ‘True. But then living here for twelve years without saying anything that might “upset” him, I can’t buy that. It was for another reason that you kept quiet.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Victor repeated automatically.

  His voice was both tired and excited: he was by now slightly drunk, as Adamsberg had intended, pouring him out some more port. The more you drink, the faster you drink, which is what Victor did, knocking back his fourth glass in a couple of mouthfuls. Amédée still said nothing, as he gripped Victor’s arm. Danglard, on this occasion, took care to remain sober.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Adamsberg insisted. ‘It was the same envelope that came each month, containing the allowance for both children. And you found that out.’

  ‘No, my mother never paid anything.’

  ‘Not true, Victor. The envelopes had dates and handwriting on them. Adélaïde Pouillard’s handwriting in the early years. Then Adélaïde Masfauré’s. The same first name and the same handwriting. It was easy enough to grasp what was happening.’

  ‘They were all destroyed,’ Victor muttered.

  ‘You can’t destroy people’s memories. The postman’s for example. He remembers.’

  Fuddled with the generous amounts of port Adamsberg had poured him, Victor, the good Samaritan, uncoiled his fingers.

  ‘All right,’ he said simply.

  ‘You weren’t just companions of misfortune, were you?’ said Adamsberg as quietly as possible. ‘You’re brothers.’

  Adamsberg left the table again, and plunged into the woods, where Marc the wild boar confronted him with his snout. His colleagues had taken up positions on the clean bench. Adamsberg sat down on a pile of dry leaves: Marc lying beside him, allowed the policeman to scratch his soft furry muzzle, well away from the emotions which were presently being unleashed at the table. Adamsberg had inherited from his mother an extreme reticence about expressing feelings which, she said, wore away like soap and dispersed if you talked about them too much. He looked up, and so did Marc, when he saw Veyrenc standing in front of him.

  ‘That’s another twenty-five minutes gone,’ Veyrenc said. ‘If we wait for these two brothers to work through all their emotional baggage, we’ll be here a couple of years.’

  ‘And that would suit me just fine.’

  Adamsberg stood up, brushed down his trousers with his hand and gave a last stroke to Marc’s snout before returning to the table of revelations and confessions. The tough bit was coming next, and he chose to go at it quickly. He spoke without sitting down now, pacing up and down on the grass, as the others followed him with their eyes.

  ‘Victor comes back, like a ghost, secretly, twelve years ago, under a false name. Why? Because he doesn’t want anyone to find out that Adélaïde is his mother. Very odd behaviour. Which makes sense only from one point of view: he intends to kill her.’

  ‘What?!’ yelled Victor.

  ‘You’ll get your chance to talk in a minute, Victor. Let me finish,’ Adamsberg ordered him. ‘And I’ll make it the worst-case scenario. Victor has been nursing this intention for a long time, ever since he was a child at Le Thost. It gets even worse when he sees her turn up, his own mother, and she contemptuously and completely ignores him. He sees her take the little boy away and leave him there. Every day, every night, he nourishes his hate, his anguish and his plan. She’s going to pay for this. So when he’s twenty-five, he manages to get taken into the Masfauré establishment under a false name. He waits for his chance. It’s vital that no one should actually know she’s his mother. But she will know all right, just before he attacks her. In Iceland. He encourages the idea of the trip to the warm rock. In an isolated place like that, anything might happen. A hole in the ice, or perhaps he can lure her to one side on the island, she slips on the frozen ground, her head strikes a rock, he calls for help, too late, she’s dead. He swears to himself that she’s not going to return alive from the island. But then they get caught in the fog, and the “legionnaire” is stabbed by this violent individual in their group. Let’s assume for the moment that it wasn’t Victor who did that. But he seizes the opportunity it gives him. In the night, having taken the man’s knife, he aims for the heart and kills his mother as she sleeps. And the second murder is immediately attributed to the violent man, and his vengeance is accomplished. But ten years later, danger looms up. Amédée receives this letter from an Alice Gauthier and shows it to him. And the day after Amédée’s visit, Alice Gauthier is found bleeding to death in her bath. But why draw the sign?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that sign!’ said Victor furiously.

  ‘Wait. Later,’ said Adamsberg, pouring him another glass. ‘Second danger. The cops turn up to question Amédée about his conversation with Alice Gauthier. Who had told him the truth: Adélaïde Masfauré was indeed killed on the island. But as for the monstrous man and his actions, the only evidence we have for that comes from the statements made by . . . Amédée and Victor. Why would that monster have killed Adélaïde? In the first case, the legionnaire, one might imagine a quarrel between two panicking males. But why her? After the first murder, it was possible her husband might have taken the chance to eliminate his wife. Or perhaps it was his devoted secretary, Victor? Alice Gauthier could have conveyed her doubts to Amédée. Victor sees there’s a risk he might be suspected, especially since now Masfauré has also been killed. The cops are going to ask questions, they won’t go away. So Victor gives Amédée his version of what happened. That’s why there was that chase on horseback, to get their story straight between them: Adélaïde Masfauré being sexually attacked, the man falling backwards into the fire – it’s a realistic detail, but it sounds a false note if it’s given such prominence – the man’s humiliation, and then the stabbing in front of everyone. “If we don’t say this,” Victor tells Amédée, “your father might be suspected. What are the police going to conclude? That after killing his wife and then Gauthier, he finally committed suicide? Is that what we want?” Amédée, who always obeys Victor’s instructions, because for him Victor can do no wrong – but also believing that his father must be guilty – backs up his story. There you are, I’ve finished.’

  Victor poured himself another glass – Adamsberg had lost count by now. Arms folded and cheeks inflamed by alcohol, Victor made an effort to speak calmly, holding his back as straight as Robespierre’s. The attitude of a man who is very drunk and extremely shocked, but trying to maintain his equilibrium.

  ‘No, commissaire, you’re wrong. It happened the way Amédée and I told you. Otherwise why would the killer
have threatened us? Why would everyone have kept quiet for ten years? If it was me that killed her? Tell me that.’

  ‘That is indeed the problem. The long silence.’

  ‘But on the other hand, commissaire,’ Victor said resolutely, ‘your version is quite plausible, I recognise that.’

  He stood up unsteadily, then with a violent gesture swept the glasses off the table. He caught up the bottle of port, and drank a few mouthfuls straight from it. Then standing legs apart, and swinging the bottle from his hand, he shouted aloud:

  ‘And I’ll tell you why it’s so plausible! Because yes, I did want to kill her! Yes, I’d always wanted to! Yes, when she took Amédée away, and yes, I promised myself one day I’d do it. Yes, when I came here to be close to my brother. And yes, I said nothing, so that no one would know I was her fucking son. The son of my fucking mother, I mean! Kill her and get away with it, yes! And Iceland was a golden opportunity. So of course, I backed the idea of going to the godforsaken rock! But yes, that guy did kill the legionnaire, believe it or not! And I did have the idea that I could stab her and make it seem like it was him! Yes, you reconstructed it all quite correctly! Only I didn’t kill her. It was that bastard who stole my murder! My murder!’

  Victor drank again and this time lost his balance and keeled over on to the grass. He tried to get up but failed, and stayed sitting on the ground, hugging his knees, head down between his legs. Then came a free flow of hiccups, sobs and cries of distress. Adamsberg raised his hand to stop anyone intervening.

  ‘Leave me be, Amédée,’ said Victor between hiccups. ‘I don’t wanna get up.’

  ‘A blanket, shall I get you a blanket?’

  ‘I wanna be sick. Bring me something to make me sick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some horse manure.’

  ‘No, Victor.’

  ‘Please, fetch some horse manure. I want it now.’

  Amédée, at a loss, looked up at Adamsberg who reassured him with a glance.

  ‘But then when we were safe back in Grimsey,’ Victor began again, in his husky voice, tears and mucus streaming from his face, ‘I realised that the killer had saved my – what would you say, saved my soul? I wouldn’t really have wanted to do it. No, that’s not it. I could have done it, I was going to do it, kill her, murder her. No, I understood something else.’