An Uncertain Place

by Fred Vargas

  ‘There were actually seventeen feet,’ Danglard said. ‘Eight matched pairs and one isolated foot. Nine people then.’

  ‘People or corpses?’

  ‘Corpses. It seems that the feet were amputated after death, with a saw. Five men, four women, all adults.’

  Danglard paused, but the deep-sea gaze of Adamsberg was intensely waiting for more details.

  ‘The feet were definitely taken from the cadavers before they were buried. Radstock has made a note “In the morgue? Or in the cold stores of the undertakers?” and also, according to the styles of the shoes, though that has to be checked, it looks as if all this happened between ten and twenty years ago, spread over a long period. In short, this was someone who cut off a pair of feet here, then another there, from time to time.’

  ‘Until he got tired of his collection.’

  ‘What’s there to say he got tired?’

  ‘The event we’ve witnessed. Just cast your mind back, Danglard. This man amasses his trophies for ten or twenty years, a diabolically difficult thing to do. He fanatically stores them in a freezer. Did Stock say anything about that?’

  ‘Yes, he says they had been frozen and defrosted several times.’

  ‘So the foot-chopper took them out now and then to look at them for God knows what purpose. Or perhaps to move them.’

  Adamsberg leaned back against his seat and Danglard glanced up at the roof again. Another few minutes and they would be out from under the sea.

  ‘And one night,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘despite all the trouble he had taken to build up his collection, the foot-chopper abandons his precious loot. Just like that, on a public street. He leaves it all behind as if it doesn’t interest him any more. Or – and that would be even more disturbing – as if it wasn’t enough for him any more. Like those collectors who junk one lot of stuff to go off in search of something new, moving up a stage. The foot-chopper switches to a more worthwhile quarry. Something better.’

  ‘Or worse.’

  ‘Yes. He’s going deeper into his tunnel. No wonder Stock is upset. If he follows this trail, he’ll get to some worrying levels.’

  ‘Where will he get to?’ asked Estalère, meanwhile closely observing the effect the champagne was having on Danglard.

  ‘He’ll go on until he reaches some unspeakable, cruel, devastating event, the one that has triggered the whole story, a story that ends in cut-off feet, or eating wardrobes. Then the dark tunnel opens up with its stairways and its caves, and Stock will have to go down into it.’

  Adamsberg closed his eyes, passing without any visible transition to an apparent state of sleep or escape.

  ‘We can’t say that the foot-chopper has moved on to a new phase,’ Danglard interjected, before Adamsberg escaped from him altogether. ‘Or that he is getting rid of his collection. What we do know is that he deposited it outside Highgate Cemetery. And, good grief, that’s not a matter of indifference. It’s almost as if he were making an offering.’

  The Eurostar sped out into the daylight, and Danglard’s brow cleared. His smile encouraged Estalère.

  ‘But, commandant,’ Estalère whispered, ‘what did happen in Highgate?’

  As so often and without meaning to, Estalère was putting his finger on the crucial spot.

  V

  ‘I DON’T KNOW THAT IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO TELL THE HIGHGATE story,’ said Danglard, who had by now ordered a third glass of champagne, for Estalère, and was drinking it on his behalf. ‘Perhaps it’s better not to keep telling it. It’s one of those dark tunnels people dig, isn’t it, commissaire, and this one is very old and long-forgotten. Perhaps we should just let it collapse into itself. Because the problem, when some madman opens up a tunnel, is that other people can get into it, which is really what Radstock was telling us in his own way. And that’s what happened in Highgate.’

  Estalère was waiting for him to go on, with the happy expression of a man who is about to hear a good story. Danglard looked at his bland, naive face and was unsure what he should do. If he took Estalère into the Highgate tunnel, he might damage that innocence. In the squad they tended to refer to Estalère’s ‘innocence’ rather than to his stupidity. Four times out of five, Estalère just didn’t get it. But his naivety sometimes generated the unexpected benefits of unsullied innocence. His blunders sometimes opened up avenues so obvious that nobody else had thought of them. Most of the time, though, Estalère’s questions merely held things up. People tried to treat them with patience, partly because they liked Estalère, and partly because Adamsberg had decreed that one of these days he’d come out of it. The others made an effort to believe this, and the collective effort had become a habit. In fact, Danglard liked talking to Estalère when he had plenty of time, because he could expound vast quantities of knowledge without the young man becoming impatient. He glanced over at Adamsberg, whose eyes were closed. But he knew the commissaire wasn’t sleeping and could hear every word he said.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘The feet are for Radstock to deal with. They’re behind us on the other side of the Channel now.’

  ‘You said it might be an offering. Who to? Is the cemetery owned by someone?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. There’s a master.’

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘The Entity,’ replied Danglard with a smile.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘The west end of the cemetery, the oldest part, where we were the day before yesterday, was opened in 1839. But of course the master might have lived there before that.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Some people say that it was because the Entity lived there already in the ancient chapel on Highgate Hill that the place was chosen as a site for a cemetery.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘No, a man. More or less. And it was his power that drew the dead and the cemetery towards him, you see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They don’t bury anyone now in the west section, it’s become a well-known historical site, it’s famous. There are extraordinary monuments there, strange things of all kinds, and the graves of famous people, like Dickens or Marx.’

  A flicker of anxiety crossed the face of the young brigadier. Estalère never tried to conceal either his ignorance or the great embarrassment it caused him.

  ‘Karl Marx,’ Danglard explained. ‘He wrote an important work on the class struggle, the economy, that kind of thing. He’s the father of communism.’

  ‘Right,’ said Estalère. ‘But is that something to do with the owner of Highgate?’

  ‘Call him the Master, most people do. No, Marx is nothing to do with him. It was just to show you that West Highgate Cemetery is famous worldwide. And feared.’

  ‘Yes, Radstock was afraid. But why?’

  Danglard hesitated. Where to begin this story? If he told it at all.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘nearly forty years ago, in 1970, two girls were coming home from school and they took a short cut across the cemetery. They arrived home in distress, saying they had been chased by a black shape, and that they had seen the dead rise from their graves. One of the girls fell ill and started sleepwalking. When she did this, she used to go into the cemetery and always walked towards the same catacomb, the Master’s catacomb, as they called it. The Master must have been calling her. They kept a watch and followed her, and found several dead animals drained of all their blood. The neighbourhood began to panic, the rumour spread, the papers got hold of it and it snowballed. So some sort of self-styled priest decided to go along with other people who were equally worked up to exorcise the Master of Highgate. They went into the vault and found a coffin without a name, somewhat apart from the others. They opened it up. You can guess the rest.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There was a body in the coffin, but it looked neither living nor dead. It was lying there perfectly preserved. A man, but an unknown and nameless person. The exorcist hesitated to put a stake through his heart, because the Church forbids it.’


  ‘Why would he want to do that anyway?’

  ‘Estalère, don’t you know what one’s supposed to do to vampires?’

  ‘Ah,’ the young man said, ‘so this was a vampire.’

  Danglard sighed, and wiped some condensation from the train window.

  ‘Well, that’s what the people thought, and they’d come along with crucifixes, garlic and stakes. And their leader pronounced an exorcism in front of the open coffin: “Get thee gone, wicked being, bearer of all evil and falsehoods! Depart this place, creature of vice.”’

  Adamsberg opened his eyes wide.

  ‘You know this story?’ said Danglard, slightly combatively.

  ‘Not this one, I know others. At this moment in the story, there’s usually an unearthly cry.’

  ‘Precisely. There was a great sound of roaring in the vault. The exorcist threw some garlic in and got out, and they stopped up the entry to the catacomb with bricks.’

  Adamsberg shrugged.

  ‘You don’t stop vampires with bricks.’

  ‘No, and it didn’t work. Four years later, there was gossip that a nearby house was haunted, an old Victorian house in Gothic style. The same exorcist searched the house and found a coffin in the basement, which he recognised as the very same one he had bricked up four years earlier.’

  ‘And was there a body inside?’ asked Estalère.

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s an even older story, isn’t there?’ asked Adamsberg. ‘Or Stock wouldn’t have been so frightened.’

  ‘I don’t want to get into that,’ muttered Danglard.

  ‘But Stock knows it, commandant. So we ought to know about it too.

  ‘It’s his problem.’

  ‘No, we saw it too. So when does the old story go back to?’

  ‘Eighteen sixty-two,’ said Danglard with extreme reluctance. ‘Twenty-three years after the cemetery was created.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘That year, a certain Elizabeth Siddal, known as Lizzie, was buried there. She’d overdosed on laudanum. A kind of dope they had in Victorian times,’ he added, for Estalère’s benefit.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Her husband was a famous man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite painter and a poet. Some manuscripts of her husband’s poems were buried with her in the coffin.’

  ‘It’s not long till we get there,’ said Estalère, looking suddenly alarmed. ‘Will we have time for this?’

  ‘Don’t worry, it won’t take long. Seven years later, the husband had the grave opened. Then there are two versions of this. The first says that Rossetti regretted his romantic gesture and wanted to get his poems back in order to publish them. According to the second version, he couldn’t bear living without his wife, and he had this rather scary friend, called Bram Stoker. Have you heard of him, Estalère?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Well, he’s the creator of Count Dracula, a very powerful vampire.’

  Estalère looked alarmed once again.

  ‘It’s only a novel,’ Danglard explained, ‘but we do know that the whole subject had an unhealthy fascination for Bram Stoker. He knew all these rituals that relate the living to the undead. So anyway, he was a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s.’

  In his effort to concentrate, Estalère was twisting another paper napkin, anxious not to miss a word.

  ‘Some champagne?’ Danglard asked. ‘We’ve got plenty of time. It’s not a nice story but it’s quite short.’

  Estalère shot a glance at Adamsberg, who seemed indifferent, and accepted. If he was making Danglard tell the story, it would be only polite to drink his champagne.

  ‘Bram Stoker was passionately interested in Highgate Cemetery,’ Danglard continued, stopping the drinks trolley again. ‘He made one of his heroines, Lucy, go wandering there, and he made the place famous. Or perhaps, some people say, he was driven to it by the Entity itself. According to the second version, it was Stoker who persuaded Rossetti to look once more at his dead wife. Well, anyway, Rossetti did break open the coffin seven years after her death. And it was then, or perhaps earlier, that the Highgate catacomb was first opened.’

  Danglard stopped speaking, as if he too were caught up in Dante Gabriel’s dark wanderings, faced with the keen gaze of Adamsberg and the bemused expression of Estalère.

  ‘Right,’ said Estalère, ‘he broke open the coffin – and he saw something?’

  ‘Yes. Well. He discovered with dread that his wife was perfectly preserved. She had kept her long auburn hair, her skin was as fresh and pink and her nails as long as if she had just died, even better than she had looked in life. That’s the truth, Estalère. As if the seven years had done her nothing but good. Not a trace of decomposition.’

  ‘Is that really possible?’ asked Estalère, gripping the plastic cup.

  ‘It’s what happened in any case. She had the “rosy glow” of the living – in fact, she was rosier than ever. It was described by witnesses, I’m not making this up.’

  ‘But the coffin was normal? Just a wooden one?’

  ‘Yes. And the miraculous conservation of Lizzie Siddal caused a big scandal in England and beyond. People immediately started connecting it with the Master – the Highgate Vampire – and saying he had taken possession of the cemetery. There were ceremonies, people saw apparitions, they chanted incantations to the Master. From that time, the catacomb was open.’

  ‘So people went in.’

  ‘They certainly did, thousands of them. Until the two girls who were followed, more recently.’

  The train braked, as they approached the Gare du Nord. Adamsberg sat up, shook out his jacket which he had rolled into a ball, and patted down his hair.

  ‘And what’s Stock’s connection to all that?’ he asked.

  ‘Radstock was part of a team of policemen sent up there when they heard about the exorcism sessions in the 1970s. He saw the preserved body of the man, and he heard the exorcist addressing the vampire. I guess he was young and impressionable at the time. And then finding these dead people’s feet in the same place the other day must have upset him a lot. Because they say the Entity – or the Vampire if you like – still reigns in the dark reaches of Highgate.’

  ‘Is that why you talked about an offering?’ asked Estalère. ‘The foot-chopper was making an offering to the Entity?’

  ‘That’s what Radstock thinks. He’s afraid some madman wants to start the whole nightmare up again, and “revive” the powers of the sleeping Master. But I guess it isn’t really likely. The foot-chopper wants to offload his collection, right? He can’t just chuck it all in the bin, any more than we can bear to throw away our childhood toys. He wants to find a suitable place for them.’

  ‘And he chooses a place worthy of his fantasies,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He chooses Higg-Gate, where the feet could go on living.’

  ‘Highgate,’ Danglard corrected. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean the foot-chopper believes in the Vampire. It’s the character of the place that counts. Well, anyway, all that’s well behind us now, and on the other side of the Channel.’

  The train pulled in to the platform and Danglard seized his bag brusquely, as if to mark with a decisive action an end to the numbing effect of his story.

  ‘But when you’ve seen something like that,’ said Adamsberg softly, ‘a bit of it sticks and stays inside you. Any experience that’s too beautiful or too horrific always leaves some fragment of itself in the eyes of people who have witnessed it. We know that. In fact, that’s how you recognise it.’

  ‘Recognise what?’

  ‘Something either overwhelmingly beautiful or overwhelmingly terrible, Estalère. You recognise it by the shock, the little splinter that remains.’

  As they walked back up the platform, Estalère tapped the commissaire on the shoulder, Danglard having parted from them in haste, as if regretting having said too much.

  ‘The little fragments of things we’ve seen, what happens to them?’

/>   ‘You put them away, you scatter them like stars in the big box we call memory.’

  ‘You can’t get rid of them?’

  ‘No, that’s not possible, the memory doesn’t have a compartment marked trash.’

  ‘So what happens if we don’t like them?’

  ‘Either you have to lie in wait for them and destroy them, like Danglard, or you leave them well alone.’

  In the metro, Adamsberg wondered in which compartment of his memory the ghastly feet in London were going to lodge, on which galaxy of stars, and how long it would take for him to think he had forgotten them. And come to that, where would the wardrobe man go, or the bear and the uncle, or the girls who had seen the vampire and were trying to get back to him? What had happened to the one who had gone to the catacomb? And the exorcist?

  Adamsberg rubbed his eyes, looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep. Ten hours, why not? But in the event, he got only six hours.

  VI

  SEVEN THIRTY NEXT MORNING. THE COMMISSAIRE, THUNDERSTRUCK, was sitting on a chair, and gazing at the crime scene, under the anxious eyes of his colleagues – so abnormal was it for Adamsberg to be thunderstruck, or indeed to be sitting on a chair. But he remained where he was, his face expressionless, and his eyes darting around, as if he had no wish to see, and was projecting his gaze far away so that nothing should lodge in his memory. He was forcing himself to think back, to 6 a.m., when he had not yet seen this room drenched in blood. When he had been dressing quickly, after the phone call from Lieutenant Justin, putting on the white shirt from the day before and the elegant black jacket lent to him by Danglard, both of them completely inappropriate to the situation. Justin’s choked voice had foretold nothing good; it was the voice of someone who was sick to the stomach.

  ‘We’re using all the platforms,’ he had said. That meant the plastic stands which were put on the ground to prevent any contamination of a crime scene by people’s feet. ‘All the platforms’. That meant the whole surface of the crime scene could not be trodden on. Adamsberg had left home hurriedly, avoiding Lucio, the tool shed, and the cat. Up to that point, he had been quite all right, he had not yet entered that room, he had not yet sat down on this chair, in front of carpets soaked in blood and strewn with entrails and splinters of bone, between four walls spattered with organic matter. It was as if the old man’s body had literally exploded. The most revolting thing was perhaps the scraps of flesh on the black shining lid of the half-size grand piano, as if on a butcher’s slab. Blood had also dripped on to the keys. This was another phenomenon for which there was no word: someone had reduced the body of another man to mincemeat. The word ‘killer’ was inadequate and derisory.