An Uncertain Place

by Fred Vargas

  ‘No, I only remembered about the dog much later,’ Adamsberg lied. ‘After Vaudel’s doctor had come along.’

  Retancourt tossed her head, indicating that she did not believe this for a second.

  ‘What did the doctor have to say,’ came Justin’s high-pitched voice.

  ‘For now he’s not told us any more about Vaudel than we’ve told him about the murder. Professional confidentiality, both of us are stymied.’

  ‘No secret, game over,’ said Kernorkian under his breath.

  ‘But the doctor did say that Vaudel had enemies, only he seemed to think they were imaginary. He knows more than he’s saying. He’s a skilled doctor, at least: he reset a dislocated jaw that was interfering with nursing.’

  ‘Vaudel’s?’

  Adamsberg didn’t really want to look at Estalère. Sometimes you wondered if he was doing it on purpose. But he glanced at Maurel, who was scribbling something in a notebook. He knew that Maurel was collecting stories about Estalère, something which Adamsberg did not regard as innocent fun. Maurel saw him looking and closed the notebook.

  ‘Did someone check whether Pierre junior was in Avignon when Émile was attacked?’ Voisenet asked.

  ‘Mordent took charge of that, but the Avignon cops dragged their feet, they didn’t check until it was too late to be sure.’

  ‘Mordent should have insisted.’

  ‘He did insist,’ said Adamsberg, defending Mordent and his distracted mind. ‘Gardon said there were some results from the lab?’

  Danglard stood up automatically. The commandant’s memory, knowledge and powers of synthesis made him the reporter of choice for summing up scientific data. This was a Danglard who stood up almost straight, whose complexion was almost fresh and whose expression was almost animated, having been regenerated by a second immersion in the British climate.

  ‘Concerning the body, it is estimated that it was cut into about four hundred and sixty fragments, and about three hundred of those were reduced to pulp. Some parts had been hacked off with an axe, others cut off with a chainsaw, using a wooden block as an anvil. The samples show wooden splinters and sawdust. The same block was used to crush body parts. The elements of mica and quartz found in the remains indicate that the killer rested the item on the block, and used a club to beat down on a granite stone. The most savagely attacked parts were the joints: ankles, wrists, knees, elbows, shoulders and hips, as well as the teeth and the feet, tarsals and metatarsals. The big toe had been pounded to pieces, but not the other toes. The least damaged features were the hands, apart from the carpal segments, and the longer bones, the iliac, the ischium, the ribs and breastbone.’

  Adamsberg had not managed to take all this in, and he raised a futile hand to stop the recital. But Danglard pressed on.

  ‘The rachis was differently treated from the others, the sacro- and cervical vertebrae were clearly more fiercely attacked than the lumbar and dorsal ones. Of the cervicals nothing is left of the atlas and the axis. The hyoid has been preserved and the shoulder blades barely touched.’

  ‘Danglard! stop!’ said Adamsberg, observing the horror on the surrounding faces, and seeing that some had already melted away. ‘Let’s do a diagram, that will be more helpful for everyone.’

  Adamsberg was an excellent draughtsman, and with a few deft strokes of his pen could bring anything to life on paper. He spent many odd moments scribbling, standing up, resting the paper on a notebook or on his thigh, and drawing in blacklead, charcoal or ink. His sketches were lying about in the office because he abandoned them as he came and went. Some of his colleagues, being admirers, discreetly collected them – notably Froissy, Danglard and Mercadet, but also Noël, who would never have admitted to it. Now Adamsberg quickly sketched on the whiteboard the outline of a body with its skeleton, one from the front, one from the back, and gave Danglard two ink markers.

  ‘Mark in red the parts that were particularly attacked, and in green the least damaged.’

  Danglard illustrated what he had just been describing, and added red to the head and genitals and green to the clavicles, the ears and the pelvis. Once the drawing had been coloured in, it showed some kind of logic, though a strange one, demonstrating that the killer had not been arbitrary in what he chose to destroy or to spare. But the meaning of this weird series of choices was inaccessible.

  ‘There was some selection in the internal organs too,’ Danglard went on. ‘The killer wasn’t interested in the stomach, intestines or spleen, lungs or kidneys. But he attacked the liver, heart and brain, burned part of the brain in the fireplace.’

  Danglard drew three arrows pointing outside the body for brain, heart and liver.

  ‘It’s an attempt to destroy his spirit,’ hazarded Mercadet, breaking the rather stunned silence of the officers, who were gazing mesmerised at the drawings.

  ‘The liver?’ asked Voisenet. ‘Does the liver have anything to do with the spirit?’

  ‘Mercadet’s got a point,’ said Danglard. ‘Before Christianity, but afterwards too, people thought of several souls existing inside the body, the spiritus, the animus and the anima. Spirit, soul and movement, which might lodge in different parts of the body, such as the heart and liver, which are seats of fear and emotion.’

  ‘OK,’ said Voisenet, since Danglard’s fund of knowledge was considered unchallengeable.

  ‘To destroy the joints,’ said Lamarre, speaking stiffly as usual, ‘would be so that the body would never function again. Like breaking the gears of a machine.’

  ‘What about the feet? Why the feet but not the hands?’

  ‘Same thing,’ said Lamarre. ‘So that he never walked again.’

  ‘No,’ said Froissy, ‘that doesn’t explain the attention to the big toe. Why smash that in particular?’

  ‘Oh, what the fuck are we doing?’ said Noël, getting to his feet. ‘Why are we looking for reasons for this goddam butchery? There’s no reason in it at all, it’s just what was in the killer’s mind, and we’re not even close.’

  Noël sat down again, and Adamsberg nodded.

  ‘Like the guy who ate the wardrobe.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Danglard.

  ‘What did he do that for?’ asked Gardon.

  ‘Same difference. We don’t know.’

  Danglard came back towards the board and took out a sheet of paper. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘The killer didn’t just chuck the bits about in any old order. Dr Roman was right, he arranged them. I won’t go into it, you can see the spatial distribution in the report, but to give you an example, the five metatarsals of the foot were thrown into the four corners of the room, and the same for other parts, here and there, a couple under the piano.’

  ‘Perhaps it was just an automatic reflex,’ said Justin, ‘he threw it all round him.’

  ‘There’s no pattern in any of this,’ Noël said again, angrily. ‘We’re wasting our time trying to interpret it. This killer was in a mad rage, he demolished this body, he went to town on some bits, and we have no idea why, end of story. We just don’t know.’

  ‘The mad rage went on for hours,’ Adamsberg pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Justin. ‘If he went on being angry, perhaps that’s why he did all this. He couldn’t stop, he just went on and on blindly till he had reduced everything to pulp, like someone who drinks till he collapses.’

  Or who scratches a spider bite all his life, Adamsberg thought.

  ‘We need to move to the other evidence,’ announced Danglard.

  He was interrupted by his telephone, and moved away – rather fast for Danglard – pressing his mobile eagerly against his ear. That’ll be Abstract, Adamsberg diagnosed.

  ‘Should we wait for him?’ asked Voisenet.

  Froissy shifted on her chair. She was getting anxious about eating – it was 2.45 already – and started to clench her arms around herself. Everyone knew that missing a meal brought on a panic attack and Adamsberg had asked his colleagues to watch out for that, because three times when
out on a mission she had fainted with fear.

  XVI

  THEY RECONVENED IN THE CORNET À DÉS (THE DICE SHAKER), a scruffy little bar at the end of the street. At this time of day the classier Brasserie des Philosophes opposite had stopped serving lunch, since it observed conventional hours. According to one’s mood and wallet, merely by crossing the street one could opt to be either a bourgeois or a worker, rich or poor, choose lemon tea or a vin ordinaire.

  The owner passed round fourteen cheese baguettes – there was no choice, all that was left was Gruyère – and the same number of coffees. He put three carafes of red wine on the table, without being asked. He didn’t like customers who refused his wine, which was of unknown origin. Danglard said it was a lousy Côtes-du-Rhône and the others believed him.

  ‘This painter who killed himself in prison – are we any further forward with him?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘Haven’t had time,’ said Mordent, who was pushing away his sandwich untouched. ‘Mercadet’s going to do that this afternoon.’

  ‘The horse manure, the hairs, the Kleenex, fingerprints, anything from those?’

  ‘You were right, the two samples of horse manure were different,’ said Justin. ‘Émile’s wasn’t the same as the pellets in the house.’

  ‘We can check the dog for comparison,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Ten to one it comes from that farm.’

  Cupid was crouching at his feet – Adamsberg had not yet dared to confront the cat with him.

  ‘That dog stinks,’ called Voisenet from the top of the table. ‘We can smell him from here.’

  ‘We take a sample first, we clean him up afterwards.’

  ‘What I mean is,’ insisted Voisenet, ‘he smells bad anyway.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Noël.

  ‘No surprises in the fingerprints,’ Justin continued. ‘Vaudel’s and Émile’s are all over the house. Émile’s are mostly on the card table, the mantelpiece, the door handles and the kitchen. Émile was a conscientious cleaner it seems, because the furniture isn’t dusty. But we’ve got a partial print from Pierre junior on the desk, and a good one from a chair back. He must have pulled it up when he was working with his father. And there are four prints on the lid of a little writing desk in the bedroom, unknown male.’

  ‘Could be the doctor,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He would have done the consultation there.’

  ‘And we have another, different man in the kitchen, and a woman’s print in the bathroom, on the washbasin.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Noël. ‘Vaudel had a woman in the house.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong, Noël, no woman’s prints in the bedroom. The neighbours say he rarely went out. He got everything delivered and he also had his hairdresser, his bank manager and a men’s outfitter from the avenue come to the house. Same result for phone calls, nothing personal. He spoke to his son a couple of times a month, and it was always the son who made the first move to call him. Their longest conversation was four minutes sixteen seconds.’

  ‘He didn’t call Cologne at all?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘In Germany? No, why?’

  ‘Apparently he had an old flame, a German lady, getting on a bit now, a Frau Abster in Cologne.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he didn’t sleep with the hairdresser.’

  ‘I didn’t say he didn’t.’

  ‘No, he didn’t have women callers, the neighbours are pretty sure about that. And in this road they all seem to know each other.’

  ‘How do you know about this Frau Abster?’

  ‘Émile gave me a love letter that he was supposed to post to her if Vaudel died.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It’s in German,’ said Adamsberg, taking it from his pocket and putting it on the table. ‘Froissy, you can handle that, can’t you?’

  Froissy looked at it and frowned.

  ‘It says, more or less: Guard our empire, resist to the end, stay beyond attack.’

  ‘Unhappy love affair,’ Voisenet pronounced. ‘She was married to someone else.’

  ‘But then there’s this word in capitals at the end,’ said Froissy, ‘and it’s not in German.’

  ‘Some sort of code they used?’ said Adamsberg. ‘Some reference to a moment only they knew about?’

  ‘Oh, here we go,’ said Noël. ‘Secret words. Load of rubbish, girls like it, drives men up the wall.’

  Froissy asked quickly if anyone wanted another coffee and some hands went up. Adamsberg thought that she too probably invented secret words, and that Noël’s remark had offended her, given that she had had plenty of love affairs, all of which turned toxic in record time.

  ‘Vaudel obviously didn’t think it was rubbish,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘It could be a code,’ said Froissy, bending over the scrap of paper, ‘but anyway, it seems to be in Russian: KИCЛOBA. That’s Cyrillic script. Sorry, I don’t know any Russian. Not that many people do.’

  ‘I do a bit,’ said Estalère.

  There was a stunned silence, which the young man did not seem to notice, since he was stirring his coffee.

  ‘How come you know Russian?’ said Maurel, almost accusingly.

  ‘I tried to learn it once. I only got as far as pronouncing the alphabet.’

  ‘But why Russian? Why not Spanish?’

  ‘I just felt like it.’

  Adamsberg passed him the letter and Estalère concentrated. Even when he was concentrating, his eyes didn’t narrow. They remained wide open, looking on the world in surprise.

  ‘If you pronounce it properly it sounds something like “kisslover”,’ he said. ‘So if it is a secret love message, that would make sense: kiss, lover, that’s English for “embrasser”, “amant”.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Froissy.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Noël, taking the paper to have a look. ‘Put it on a letter, get the girls going.’

  ‘I thought you said just now codes were rubbish,’ Justin piped up. Noël smirked and gave the letter back to Adamsberg. Danglard came into the cafe, puffing, his cheeks rather flushed. The conversation went well, Adamsberg thought. She’s going to come to Paris, it’s just hit him, he’s in shock.

  ‘Anyway, all this stuff, love letters, horse shit, is beside the point,’ said Noël. ‘We’re still not getting anywhere. It’s like the dog hairs on the chair, long, white ones, Pyrenean mountain dog, the sort that slobbers all over you. And where does that leave us? Still in the dark.’

  ‘No, because it completes the information from the Kleenex,’ said Danglard.

  Silence fell once more, arms were crossed, and a few furtive glances went round. Ah, thought Adamsberg, that’s what the commotion was about this morning.

  ‘Let’s have it then,’ he said.

  ‘The tissue was recent,’ Justin explained, ‘and there were traces on it.’

  ‘A tiny speck of the old man’s blood,’ said Voisenet.

  ‘And it was a used Kleenex …’

  ‘… so it was snotty.’

  ‘In other words, all the DNA you want.’

  ‘We meant to tell you last night when it came through, and we tried again this morning, but your mobile was off.’

  ‘The battery’s run down.’

  Adamsberg looked around at their faces in turn and poured himself half a glass of wine, something he rarely did.

  ‘Look out,’ said Danglard discreetly, ‘it’s not very good.’

  ‘So let me try to understand,’ said Adamsberg. ‘This DNA on the Kleenex wasn’t from Vaudel senior, Vaudel junior, or Émile. Is that it?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Lamarre, who as a former gendarme had retained his military vocabulary. And since he was also from Normandy, he found it hard to look Adamsberg in the eye.

  Adamsberg sipped the wine and shot a glance to Danglard to confirm that yes, the wine had nothing going for it. Still, it wasn’t as awful as the stuff he had drunk through a straw from a carton the night before. He wondered in passing whether it hadn’t been that plonk that had
made him sleep so long, whereas he usually needed no more than five or six hours. He broke off a piece from a sandwich on the table – Mordent’s – and slipped it under his seat. ‘For the dog,’ he explained.

  He leaned down to check that Cupid was happy with it, then looked back at the thirteen pairs of eyes fixed on him.

  ‘So we have the DNA of some person unknown,’ he said, ‘presumably the killer. And you sent this off to the databank without thinking it would amount to anything, but you hit the jackpot. You’ve got the killer’s name and photo, because he’s on file.’

  ‘Yes,’ Danglard confirmed in a low voice.

  ‘And you know where he lives.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Danglard again.

  Adamsberg realised that this rapid conclusion was troubling his colleagues, generating a strong emotion of some kind, as if they had had to make a forced landing. But the air of general embarrassment, even guilt, disconcerted him. Somewhere the plane had gone off the runway.

  ‘So,’ he continued, ‘we know his address, maybe we know where he works, his family, friends. And you found that out less than twenty-four hours ago. So we check his whereabouts, we move in cautiously and we’ve got him.’

  As he spoke he realised that he was completely mistaken. Either they were not going to catch the suspect, or they had already lost him.

  ‘You can’t have missed him, unless he knows he’s been identified.’

  Danglard put his baggy briefcase on his knees, the one usually bulging with bottles of wine. He pulled out a sheaf of newspapers and passed one over to Adamsberg.

  ‘Yes, he does know,’ he said in a weary voice.

  XVII

  LAVOISIER, HEAD SURGEON AT THE HOSPITAL, WAS LOOKING down severely at his patient, as if he blamed him for his own condition. This sudden attack of fever wasn’t supposed to happen. It was caused by incipient peritonitis which would gravely compromise his chances of recovery. He was on powerful antibiotics, and the sheets were changed every two hours. The doctor patted Émile’s cheeks several times.

  ‘Wake up, old chap, we’re going to have to hook you up.’