An Uncertain Place

by Fred Vargas

  Leaving the house, he had called up his most trusty lieutenant, Retancourt, who in his view was the person best able to stand up to anything under creation. To thwart or redirect things as she wished.

  ‘Retancourt, get over there to Justin, they’ve got all the platforms out. I don’t know what’s happened. The address is a villa on a private road in Garches, leafy suburb, old man, and apparently an indescribable scene in the house. From Justin’s voice it sounded really bad. Fast as you can.’

  With Retancourt, Adamsberg alternated between ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ without thinking about it. Her first name was Violette, an unlikely one for a woman who stood over 1m 80 and weighed 110 kilos. Adamsberg called her by her first name, or her surname, or her rank, depending on which was uppermost in his mind: his respect for her enigmatic abilities or his warm appreciation for the safe refuge she offered him – when she was so moved, and if she was so moved. This morning he was waiting for her, in a passive state, making time stand still, while his men spoke in low voices in the room and the blood dried on the walls. Perhaps she had been held up by something crossing her path. He heard Retancourt’s heavy tread before he saw her.

  ‘Bloody tailback all the way down the boulevard,’ Retancourt was grumbling. She did not appreciate being held up.

  Despite her remarkable size, she trod nimbly over the platforms and sat down heavily at his side. Adamsberg gave her a grateful smile. Did she know that to him she represented his tree of salvation, a tree with tough and miraculous fruit, the kind of tree you put your arms round without being able to encircle it, the kind of tree you climb up into when the mouth of hell opens? You build yourself a tree house in its highest branches. She had the strength, the ruggedness and the self-contained quality of a tree concealing a monumental mystery. Her shrewd gaze now took in the room, the floor, the walls, the men.

  ‘It’s like a slaughterhouse! Where’s the body?’

  ‘Everywhere, lieutenant,’ said Adamsberg, stretching out his arms to encompass the whole room. ‘It’s been chopped up, pulverised, scattered. Wherever you look, you see parts of it, and when you see it all, you can’t see any of it. There’s nothing but the body, but the body isn’t there.’

  Retancourt inspected the scene in a more systematic manner. From one end of the room to the other, organic fragments were scattered on the carpets, the walls, in ghastly chunks alongside the legs of the furniture. Bones, flesh, blood, something burnt in the fireplace. A disaggregated body, which did not even arouse disgust, in the sense that it was impossible to associate these elements with anything resembling a human being. The officers were moving around cautiously. Every step carried the risk of touching some unseen piece of the invisible corpse. Justin was talking in a low voice to the photographer – the one with freckles whose name Adamsberg could never remember – and his short blond hair was soaked and clinging to his scalp.

  ‘Justin’s in shock,’ said Retancourt.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He was the first to get here, and he’d no idea what he’d find. The gardener had raised the alarm. The duty officer at Garches called his boss, who called us when he realised what they were up against. Then Justin walked right in on it. You should relieve him. Can you co-ordinate the takeover with Mordent, Lamarre and Voisenet? We’ll have to do a spot check, inch by inch, make a grid and collect the remains.’

  ‘How on earth did he do it? Think how long it must have taken.’

  ‘At first sight, it looks like he had a chainsaw and a blunt instrument of some kind. Between eleven last night and four this morning. He was able to get on with it because these villas are quite a long way apart, with big gardens and hedges. No very close neighbours and most of them are away for the weekend anyway.’

  ‘An old man, you say. What do we know about him?’

  ‘That he lived here, alone, and that he had plenty of money.’

  ‘Plenty of money, yes,’ agreed Retancourt, looking at the tapestries on the walls, and the baby grand which took up a third of the room. ‘But alone? Surely you don’t get mas sacred like this if you’re really alone in the world.’

  ‘That’s if it’s him at all, Violette. But we’re nearly certain about that. The hair looks the same as we found in the bathroom and bedroom. So if it was him, his name was Pierre Vaudel, seventy-eight, former journalist, specialised in legal affairs.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yes, but according to the son, he didn’t have any serious enemies. Just a few disputed cases and some vague grudges.’

  ‘Where’s the son?’

  ‘On his way by train – he lives in Avignon.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything else?’

  ‘Mordent says he didn’t burst into tears.’

  Dr Roman, the police pathologist, who had returned to work after a long time off sick, came and stood in front of Adamsberg.

  ‘No point trying to get the family to identify him. We’ll do it by DNA.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen you sit down on a case. Some reason you’re not standing?’

  ‘Because I’m sitting, Roman, that’s all I want to do. What would you deduce from this carnage?’

  ‘Some body parts haven’t been entirely crushed with a heavy implement. There are recognisable sections of thighs, arms, just bashed about a bit. But the murderer took special care to demolish the head, hands and feet. They’re completely shattered. The teeth too. It’s a very thorough job.’

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’

  ‘Sometimes you get faces and hands being obliterated to avoid identification. But that’s got much rarer since we have DNA checking. I’ve seen plenty of bodies that’ve been damaged or burnt, and so have you. But such a ferocious way of dismembering the body? No, it’s quite beyond comprehension.’

  ‘Where does it take us, Roman? Insanity?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s as if he went on repeating gestures over and over until he could do no more, as if he were afraid of leaving something undone. You know, it’s a bit like when you go back ten times to make sure you’ve locked the door. He didn’t only crush everything, bit by bit, and started again more than once, he chucked the pieces all over the place. No one fragment ended up next to another, even the toes aren’t together. It’s almost as if he was scattering corn in a field. Did he think there was a chance the old man could come to life again, or what? Don’t ask me to try and reassemble the body, it’s impossible.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He was out of control, panicking, in some kind of endless rage.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as an endless rage,’ his colleague, Commandant Mordent, interrupted aggressively.

  Adamsberg stood up, shaking his head, and stepped on to a platform, then on to the next, carefully. He was the only one moving. The other officers had stopped to listen, standing still on their own platforms like so many pawns, as a key piece moved on the chessboard.

  ‘Normally, no, Mordent, but here, yes. This man’s rage, or panic or madness, goes beyond what we can see, taking us into unknown territory.’

  ‘No,’ the commandant insisted. ‘Rage and anger burn up quickly, then they’re over. This looks like hours of work. Four hours at least, and that’s not the way rage works.’

  ‘Well, what is it then?’

  ‘Hard labour, obstinacy, calculation. Maybe even setting up a scene for us.’

  ‘Impossible, Mordent, nobody could fake this.’ Adamsberg crouched down to look at the floor. ‘He was wearing boots? Big rubber boots?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what we thought,’ Lamarre confirmed. ‘Looks like a sensible precaution, given what he was going to do. The soles have left some good prints on the carpet. And there are some fragments of stuff from the ridges in the boots, mud or something.’

  Mordent murmured ‘hard labour’ again, and stepped diagonally like a bishop, while Adamsberg moved two paces forward and one to the side, accomplishing a knight’s move.

  ‘What did he
use to do the crushing?’ he asked. ‘Even with a heavy club or something, he couldn’t do that on the carpet.’

  ‘We’ve got a patch on the carpet hardly stained,’ Justin pointed out, ‘a rectangular shape. He might have put something on a block of wood or some metal plate, to act as an anvil.’

  ‘That’s a lot of heavy equipment to carry around: a chainsaw, a club, a block of wood. Plus spare clothes and shoes.’

  ‘You could get it all into a big sack. I think he must have changed outside in the back garden. There are some specks of blood on the grass, where he must have put down bloodstained clothes.’

  ‘And now and again,’ Adamsberg remarked, ‘he sat down for a rest. He chose this armchair.’

  Adamsberg looked at the chair, its carved arms and its pink velvet seat now stained with blood.

  ‘That’s a very fancy chair,’ he said.

  ‘That,’ said Mordent, ‘is not just a very fancy chair, it’s Louis XIII, no less. Early seventeenth century.’

  ‘All right, commandant, it’s Louis XIII,’ said Adamsberg evenly. ‘And if you’re going to nitpick all day, please go home. Nobody wants to work on a Sunday, and nobody likes having to wade through this slaughterhouse. And you’ve had more sleep than some of us.’

  Mordent made another bishop’s move, away from Adamsberg. The commissaire clasped his hands behind his back and looked again at the chair. ‘This was the murderer’s refuge, so to speak. He takes a break. Looks around at the destruction he’s causing, but he wants a few moments of relief and satisfaction. Or perhaps he’s just out of breath.’

  ‘Why are we saying “he”?’ asked Justin conscientiously. ‘A woman could have brought in the material if she parked near enough.’

  ‘This is a man’s work, a man’s mind. I don’t see an ounce of woman in this. And look at the size of the boots.’

  ‘The victim’s clothes,’ said Retancourt, pointing to a pile on a chair. ‘He didn’t tear them off, or rip them up. They’ve just been taken off, as if he were putting the man to bed. That’s unusual too.’

  ‘Because he wasn’t in a rage,’ said Mordent from the corner to which he had retreated.

  ‘Did he take them all off?’

  ‘Except the underpants,’ said Lamarre.

  ‘That’s because he didn’t want to see,’ said Retancourt. ‘He took the victim’s clothes off so as not to foul up the saw, but he couldn’t bring himself to strip the man naked. The idea upset him.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Roman, ‘at least we can say he wasn’t a doctor or nurse or a paramedic. I’ve stripped hundreds of bodies in my time, doesn’t bother me.’

  Adamsberg had put on gloves and was rolling between his fingers one of the little balls of earth from the boots.

  ‘There’s a horse somewhere,’ he said. ‘This is horse manure, stuck to the boots.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ asked Justin.

  ‘By the smell.’

  ‘So should we start looking for people who work with horses, racehorse trainers, stud farms, riding stables?’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Mordent. ‘Thousands of people go near horses, the killer could have got that on his boots just walking down any road in the country.’

  ‘Well, that’s already something, commandant,’ said Adamsberg. ‘We know the killer may have been in the country, or near horses anyway. When does the son get here?’

  ‘He should be at HQ in less than an hour. He’s called Pierre, like his father.’

  Adamsberg looked at his two watches.

  ‘I’ll send you a relief team at midday. Retancourt, Mordent, Lamarre and Voisenet, you deal with collecting evidence. Justin and Estalère, you start investigating the personal background. Accounts, diary, notebooks, wallet, telephone, family photos, medicines, all that stuff. Who he knew, who he called, what he bought, clothes, food, what he liked doing. Get everything you can, we’ll have to reconstruct it as fully as possible. This old man wasn’t just killed, he was reduced to nothingness. He didn’t simply have his life taken, he was literally demolished, wiped out.’

  The image of the polar bear flashed suddenly into his mind. The bear must have left the uncle’s body in a state something like this, but cleaner. Nothing left to bring back or bury. And the son Pierre would certainly be unable to bring the murderer’s skin back to the widow as a trophy.

  ‘I don’t think what he ate is going to be very relevant,’ said Mordent. ‘It would be more to the point to see what legal cases he wrote about. And his family and financial situation. We don’t even know if he was married. We still don’t even know it’s him.’

  Adamsberg looked around at the tired faces of the men standing on platforms.

  ‘Break for everyone,’ he said. ‘There’s a cafe down the road. Retancourt and Roman will stay on duty.’

  Retancourt walked Adamsberg to his car.

  ‘When the place has been cleaned up a bit, call Danglard. Get him working on the victim’s background, but don’t let him near the crime scene.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Danglard’s squeamishness at the sight of blood or death was well known and uncritically accepted in the squad. They usually didn’t call him in until the worst had been cleaned up.

  ‘What’s eating Mordent?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem himself at all. Putting on a front and making snide remarks.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed.’

  ‘The way the killer threw everything around, does it ring any bells?’

  ‘Reminds me of my grandmother, not that she’s got anything to do with it.’

  ‘Tell me all the same.’

  ‘When she was losing her marbles, she started laying things out in patterns. She couldn’t bear one thing touching another. She separated newspapers, clothes, shoes.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘Anything made of cloth, paper or leather. Shoes had to be ten centimetres apart; she lined them up on the ground.’

  ‘Did she say why? Was there some reason?’

  ‘An excellent reason. She thought that if these objects touched each other they might catch fire because of the friction. As I said, nothing to do with this Vaudel business.’

  Adamsberg raised his hand to indicate he was taking a message, listened carefully, then pocketed his phone.

  ‘A few days ago,’ he explained, ‘I helped deliver two kittens. It was a difficult birth. The message says the cat is doing OK.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Retancourt after a pause. ‘I suppose that has to be good news.’

  ‘The killer might have been like your grandmother. He might have wanted there to be no contact, to keep all the elements separate. But that’s the opposite of making a collection,’ he added, thinking of the London feet again. ‘He crushed everything to bits, destroying any coherence. And I wonder why Mordent is being such a pain in the backside today.’

  Retancourt didn’t like it when Adamsberg’s remarks became inconsequential. These non sequiturs and distractions might make him deviate from his purpose. With a wave, she went back to the house.

  VII

  ADAMSBERG ALWAYS READ THE NEWSPAPER STANDING UP, while he took a turn around the desk in his office. It wasn’t even his own newspaper. He borrowed it every day from Danglard, and gave it back in a crumpled state.

  An article on page 12 described the progress made by a police investigation in Nantes. Adamsberg knew the commissaire in charge quite well: a solitary and tight-lipped man when on the job, but the life and soul of the party after work. Adamsberg tried to recall his name as a mental exercise. Since London, and perhaps since Danglard had presented such an encyclopedic account of Highgate Cemetery, the commissaire had been feeling he ought perhaps to try harder to remember names, phrases, sentences. His memory for them had always been poor, though he could recall a sound, a facial expression or a trick of the light years later. What was that cop’s name? Bollet? Rollet? He could keep a tableful of twenty people amused, something Ad
amsberg admired. And just now he felt envious of this Nolet (having just read his name in the article) because he was dealing with a nice obvious murder, whereas Adamsberg couldn’t rid his mind of the Louis XIII armchair with its stained velvet seat. Compared with the chaos in Garches, Nolet’s inquiry was bracing. A clean killing, two bullets to the head, the victim had opened the door to the killer. No complications, no rape, no madness, a woman of fifty killed, a professional job: you’ve-pissed-me-off-I’m-going-to-kill-you. Nolet just had to find a husband or lover and tie the case up, without having to wander over several square metres of carpet covered with flesh. Without venturing into the territory of madness, Stock’s dark continent. Stock wasn’t his real name either, Adamsberg knew that, the British cop who wanted to retire and go fishing. With Danglard perhaps, who knew? Unless that woman, Abstract, succeeded in hauling Danglard off somewhere else.

  Adamsberg raised his head as the office clock made a click. Pierre Vaudel, son of Pierre Vaudel, would be here in a few minutes. The commissaire went up the wooden stairs, avoiding the irregular step which made people trip, and went into the annexe with the coffee machine to get himself a strong espresso. The little room was more or less the den of Lieutenant Mercadet, a man with a gift for statistics and various logical exercises, but suffering from mild narcolepsy. Some cushions in a corner allowed him to take a nap every now and again to refresh himself. Just now he was folding his blanket and rubbing his eyes.