A Climate of Fear

by Fred Vargas

  In the dining room, Eggrún was bandaging Veyrenc’s ankle with professional care, after applying a strong-smelling ointment, not unlike the one Pelletier had put on Hecate’s hock. Rögnvar was stooping over the injured leg, looking preoccupied. He beckoned Almar over to translate.

  ‘Are you sure you twisted your ankle as you ran on the shingle?’ he asked Veyrenc.

  ‘Yes, sure. It’s just a sprain, Rögnvar.’

  ‘But it hurts a lot, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Veyrenc admitted.

  ‘And when you fell, did you feel a sharp pain? As if it went right through to the bone?’

  ‘Yes, after a bit. Probably a torn ligament.’

  Rögnvar picked up his crutches and headed over towards Gunnlaugur who was playing a game of chess against himself.

  ‘I know what you’re going to ask,’ said Gunnlaugur.

  ‘Yes. Call the airport and get them to have a plane on standby to go to Akureyri hospital. We need to check the ankle once an hour. If the purple goes above the bandage, we’ll need to fly him out.’

  ‘How can anyone take off in this fog?’

  ‘I’d put my hand in the fire that it’s not reached the runway, or not so thick anyway. It’s just settled over Fox Island and on us.’

  Gunnlaugur pushed a pawn forwards and stood up.

  ‘I’ll go and phone,’ he said. ‘Don’t touch the pieces.’

  Behind his back, Rögnvar examined the chessboard. Then he moved the black castle. He was the best player on Grimsey, an island famed for proficiency at chess.

  Adamsberg helped Veyrenc walk to a small bedroom Eggrún had prepared for him on the ground floor.

  ‘What about her?’ Eggrún indicated, pointing to Retancourt.

  ‘Just leave her be,’ said Adamsberg. ‘She can recover five times as fast as the rest of us.’

  Eggrún glanced at the chessboard where her husband had just discovered Rögnvar’s underhand move.

  ‘By the time they’ve had a game and a return match,’ she said, ‘dinner won’t be before eight thirty. Go and get some rest for three hours.’

  At seven, Rögnvar left Gunnlaugur puzzling over a crucial move that threatened his queen, to go and take a look at Veyrenc’s leg, while the lieutenant slept. For the moment ‘it’ wasn’t bad enough to cause more concern. Nevertheless, his toes were swollen. And a purple patch about the size of a krona coin had appeared above the top of the bandage.

  ‘Tell them to stay on standby,’ he said, sitting back down, dropping his crutches on the floor.

  Retancourt, who had been awake for half an hour, asked in sign language if she could sit alongside them to watch the game. From the corner of her eye, she could see Eggrún laying the table and bringing in dishes: herring, cod and salmon, fried, smoked or salted, in thin slices, accompanied by beer and even a bottle of wine. And that was just the first course. A banquet, to indicate that the successful assault on the afturganga’s island had broken the ice, so to speak.

  Sitting on his bed, Adamsberg had nodded off only for a few moments. He was waiting for the clock to chime the quarter hour at 8.15 before going to help Gunnlaugur move Veyrenc to the table. Retancourt joined them and sat down solidly, her features looking perfectly rested. Adamsberg poured out the wine and raised his glass.

  ‘To Violette,’ he said gravely.

  ‘To Violette,’ Veyrenc echoed.

  ‘Your fall on the beach could have meant the end for us,’ said Retancourt, clinking glasses with Veyrenc.

  ‘It wasn’t my fall, Retancourt. It was the afturganga that caught me. Rögnvar is convinced of that. He’s not going to leave me until he’s sure my leg isn’t going to develop gangrene.’

  ‘He’s right about one thing,’ said Retancourt. ‘Nothing and nobody could possibly live on that island. There weren’t even any seabirds’ eggs on the cliff. No sign of any seals poking their noses out of the water. I couldn’t see any movement in the sea. Those tourists were lucky if they managed to catch seals, very lucky.’

  This would be the moment, thought Adamsberg, still feeling dazed by the shock of his discovery, and yet what else had he been expecting, when he went off to gather the remains, supposedly, of a campfire and seal blubber?

  ‘Almar had a word with me earlier,’ he said, as he brought out a tin box for cough sweets, now holding the five little bones, and placed it on the table. ‘These were down inside the holes,’ he explained, for the benefit of Retancourt, who had been fast asleep when Almar had washed the bones.

  ‘They’re bones,’ said Retancourt, picking one up.

  ‘Must be from puffins,’ said Veyrenc. ‘So they did at least find something to eat.’

  ‘No, Louis, they’re not from puffins. They’re human.’

  Adamsberg stood up, in the silence that followed, to go and fetch Almar from his room. The little guide had just woken up, and was struggling into a thick blue sweater.

  ‘Come and explain to them,’ Adamsberg asked. ‘I can’t remember the right names, I won’t be credible.’

  ‘They’re the carpals,’ Almar said, pointing to his own wrist, ‘between the forearm and the hand, the wrist bones if you like. There are eight of them, and they fit together in two rows. Have you got a piece of paper, commissaire? Thank you. It’s easier to show you this way,’ he went on, drawing the two bones of the forearm, then the eight smaller carpal bones and finally the hand bones, or metacarpals, as he called them. ‘So on the upper row we have the scaphoid, the lunate, the triquetral, and the delicate little pisiform, which looks like a squashed chickpea.’

  ‘Pretty names,’ said Veyrenc in a carefully neutral voice.

  ‘And the lower row consists of the trapezium, the trapezoid, the capitate and the hamate.’

  ‘Are you a doctor, then?’ asked Retancourt, still chewing automatically on her meat.

  ‘No, but I work part-time as a physiotherapist in Lorient. I have this second job as an interpreter from time to time. That’s why I can tell you you’ve just got a bad sprain,’ he said, turning to Veyrenc. ‘Nothing’s broken, but perhaps there is a torn ligament and a bruised metatarsal. We won’t be able to tell for sure till the swelling goes down. I’ll give you an anticoagulant injection before the flight, and we can get a boot to hold the foot once we’re in Reykjavik. I’ll organise that for you. Six weeks resting the foot.’

  Veyrenc nodded slowly, his eyes on the tiny bones Almar was handling.

  ‘And they’re old, are they, these bones?’ asked Retancourt.

  ‘No. They can’t come from the man with the herring smokery. Anyway, in his time, there would have been posts in the holes. Look at this one,’ he said, holding it up to the light, ‘you can still see a bit of ligament on it. I’d say between seven and fifteen years old.’

  Retancourt’s blue eyes looked up at Adamsberg.

  ‘We didn’t hear that any of the tourists was injured, or lost a hand.’

  ‘No, lieutenant.’

  ‘What is worrying,’ said Almar, ‘is that these two, a triquetral and pisiform, fit together perfectly. See? Their indentations correspond exactly. And the triquetral fits on to the lunate. Try.’

  The bones passed from hand to hand as they tried to fit them together like a Chinese puzzle, while Adamsberg made signs to order another bottle of wine. Almar was a fast drinker.

  ‘It’s not so easy when you’re not used to it,’ said Almar, taking them back. ‘Then these two, the trapezoid and the capitate, also fit together. But their upper grooves don’t fit with our lunate and triquetral.’

  ‘So you conclude?’ said Adamsberg, who already knew what was coming, and was filling up their glasses.

  ‘You ordered wine? But I told you it cost a fortune here,’ said Almar.

  ‘Eggrún let us have the first bottle on the house, so I ordered another out of courtesy.’

  ‘By the way, did Brestir give you back the five hundred kronur? His boat came back safe and sound.’

  ‘Yes, Almar. Can you go on
please? The grooves that fit and the ones that don’t.’

  ‘Yes. So what we have are bones from two different wrists. That I can say for sure.’

  ‘Right and left then?’ asked Veyrenc.

  ‘No, two right hands. From two individuals, I would guess,’ he went on, spreading the little bones into two piles, like poker chips, ‘a man and a woman. The triquetral, the pisiform and lunate come from a woman, the trapezium and the capitate from a man. So if it comes from your group, I can tell you that something fucking out of the ordinary must have happened.’

  ‘So what did happen, for God’s sake?’ asked Veyrenc.

  Almar took two long sips of wine.

  ‘You’d better finish the story, commissaire,’ said Almar, raising his hands. ‘I’ve done my bit. I don’t want to carry on.’

  Adamsberg took the two male bones and put them under the light.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you can see the mark of a knife, and there, two other marks. The bones were cut at the point where the wrist joins the hand. And the cut edges are black. It’s not dirt, they were burnt by the fire.’

  Adamsberg put the bones on the table at the very same moment that one of the chessplayers behind him moved a piece on the board.

  ‘Check and mate,’ said Adamsberg heavily. ‘They were cut up, cooked and eaten. The legionnaire and Adélaïde Masfauré. They were eaten.’

  Eggrún had come over to clear the dishes from the silent table and put in front of each of them a pancake with rhubarb jam. Almar thanked her enthusiastically.

  ‘If you don’t eat your dessert, you’ll be the ones who get eaten,’ he said. ‘Force yourselves.’

  ‘Matter of courtesy,’ muttered Veyrenc.

  ‘So, as gifts go, this was one all right,’ said Adamsberg, attacking his pancake.

  ‘You mean from the afturganga?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now we know why he called you from so far away. It wasn’t a detail. And it was polluting his island.’

  ‘Yes. Catching seals my foot,’ said Adamsberg, raising his voice. ‘They killed them in order to eat them! I’m going to have a smoke outside,’ he added, picking up his anorak.

  ‘Finish your pancakes first,’ Almar told him.

  ‘They’re excellent,’ Retancourt murmured in an even voice. ‘Almar, please thank Eggrún for this dinner. Warmly.’

  ‘Shall we tell Danglard about this?’ Veyrenc asked Adamsberg. A rare spark of anger flashed across the commissaire’s vague gaze.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  While Adamsberg and Retancourt were putting on their anoraks, Veyrenc picked up the rustic wooden crutches which Gunnlaugur had given him. ‘No, we don’t need them,’ he had been assured. There were a dozen pairs of them in the house, tourists were always having falls, Almar had translated.

  ‘Berg,’ said Gunnlaugur, looking up from the chessboard, a pawn in his hand. ‘Stay in front of the house. Don’t go more than three metres away. There’s a bench in front of the second window on the right, a red one. Try and find that and don’t leave it.’

  They found the bench, especially since Gunnlaugur had opened the window to guide them in this extraordinary fog. Adamsberg had never seen anything like it. Pure cotton wool.

  ‘We need to put some more ice on that sprain,’ said Almar who had followed them out, holding his glass.

  ‘We’ll find some, doc,’ said Veyrenc. ‘No shortage of snow round here.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ said Adamsberg, lighting everyone’s cigarettes. ‘I can’t see more than a metre ahead, but I know it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Horribly beautiful,’ said Almar.

  ‘I think I’d like to stay here,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘With Gunnlaugur and Eggrún fussing over us as if we’re their chicks, I’ll stay too,’ said Veyrenc. ‘I need an Icelandic first name. Almar, what should it be?’

  ‘Easy, you can be Lúðvíg.’

  ‘Perfect. And Retancourt?’

  ‘What’s her first name?’

  ‘Violette, like the flower.’

  ‘Well, Víóletta then.’

  ‘Easy really, Icelandic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Horribly easy.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was going to stay,’ remarked Retancourt. ‘Do they play a lot of chess here?’

  ‘It’s a national sport, practised with passion,’ said Almar.

  ‘We didn’t have time to copy the runes on the stone for Danglard,’ said Veyrenc after a silence. ‘It probably said something like stranger who treads this isle beware . . .’

  ‘. . . of the monstrous vices of contemptible hypocrites,’ said Adamsberg. ‘We could sit around making up stuff like this all our lives, without mentioning it. Never tell anyone about the warm island and the bones. It wouldn’t be so bad. We’d chat about this and that and go over it again and then drink up, and then go to sleep.’

  ‘What time’s the plane tomorrow?’ asked Veyrenc.

  ‘Midday on the tarmac,’ said Adamsberg, ‘and by the time they’ve got rid of the million birds, we’ll be at the airport in that town on the other side by about one o’clock.’

  ‘Akureyri,’ said Almar.

  ‘Then take-off for Reykjavik’s at 14.10, arrival in Paris 22.55, local time.’

  Paris.

  There was an almost stormy silence.

  ‘We’d chat about this and that, and go to sleep,’ said Adamsberg.

  XL

  ‘GO GENTLY WITH Retancourt,’ Veyrenc said to Adamsberg after breakfast next morning. ‘I don’t think she can take this business of them eating the bodies.’

  ‘Well, who can, Veyrenc? Can you stomach the idea of Victor eating his mother? Or the great philanthropist tucking into his wife?’

  ‘Did they know? Or did they believe in the seal all along? Anyway Violette can’t stand the idea, she really can’t.’

  ‘She’s a sensitive soul,’ said Adamsberg, without irony.

  Retancourt joined them, bringing more coffee.

  ‘This is how I see it,’ she said, filling their cups. ‘They really did die from the cold. And the others then ate them, in order to survive. Like those people in the plane crash in the Andes.’

  Retancourt was trying to tone down the drama, to make it almost acceptable to her revolted imagination.

  ‘In that case,’ said Adamsberg, ‘why would Victor have invented his story of people being stabbed to death?’

  ‘Because by comparison, two stabbings would seem less serious,’ said Veyrenc. ‘At the same time, they could explain why Alice Gauthier had issued her summons to Amédée, which they had to tell us about.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Adamsberg. ‘But then, why invent this story of the killer threatening them all for ten years?’

  ‘To justify their silence? Whereas, in reality, nobody was threatening them. Their silence was instinctive and understandable. Who would go round boasting on their return that they had eaten their companions? They all agreed to keep quiet, for ever, there doesn’t actually have to be some imaginary murderer tormenting them.’

  Adamsberg went on stirring the sugar into his coffee.

  ‘Not how I see it,’ he said.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because what Victor told us, even if it’s not true, was a story full of fear. The way he described “the monster”, even if he was exaggerating, had something convincing about it. And that scare he had at the Auberge du Creux. Remember, Louis, when he suddenly stopped talking, because he thought he’d recognised “the man” in the mirror? If that wasn’t genuine fear, why would he want to make us think the killer had appeared at a neighbouring table? Pointless.’

  ‘I didn’t know about that bit,’ said Retancourt. ‘So who was that man?’

  ‘A tax inspector, we were told. Who may have had some resemblance to the killer.’

  ‘So you think there was a killer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, give us your version, Jean-Baptiste.’

  ‘It
’s even worse than the other possibilities.’

  ‘Just get on with it,’ said Retancourt, swallowing the last of her coffee.

  ‘Right. Although we don’t know a lot about this group, we do know there was a doctor among them. Victor said they called him “Doc”. It wasn’t important for his made-up story, so it must be an authentic detail. And that’s the essential point. I think there really was a fight between the murderer and the legionnaire. But not a genuine fight, I suspect. One that was deliberately provoked, in order to kill the man, but which could be disguised as a fatal accident. Then the murderer goes away with the corpse, to dispose of it, as he says. Once out of sight, he cuts up the body before it has time to freeze. He cuts off all the recognisable parts, head, hands, feet, bones, and slices off the meat.’

  ‘Hurry and get this over with,’ said Veyrenc.

  ‘Sorry, but I have to stress one detail. The killer only has a knife, an ordinary sheath knife. Not strong enough to cut through the solid bones of the arms, for instance. So he cuts the easiest place, the joint, the wrist, and the little carpals, as Almar showed us, stayed connected to ligaments. He gets rid of the remains of the corpse among the ice floes, and he freezes the pieces of meat he’s prepared. He lets some time go by, so as to make it seem realistic, and then look what happens, he manages to trap a seal! He brings the meat back to the camp. Was it when they were eating the so-called “seal” that the doctor, as he ate his share, came upon a bone? We may find out later. The same scenario is enacted for Adélaïde Masfauré. I don’t believe the cock-and-bull story about the attempted rape, the fall on to the fire, the burnt trousers and the stabbing. I think when it was his turn to be on duty at night, the killer simply smothered her, by pressing her face in the snow. She’s found dead in the morning, apparently of hypothermia. Once again, the killer gets rid of the body, brings back meat to the camp a few days later, a second miraculous seal, this time “a young one”. The doctor pulls a bone from his mouth, and identifies it straight away.’

  At this point Adamsberg stopped short and his eyes previously resting on Retancourt suddenly went blank. Retancourt immediately recognised this absent gaze, something she always feared.