by Fred Vargas
But his stay in the vault must have dealt him a blow, sending his emotional responses into turmoil, so that leaving Kisilova tugged at his heartstrings. Kisilova, the only place where he had been able to memorise new unpronounceable words, which was something rare for him.
Danica had washed and ironed the beautiful white embroidered shirt for him to take back to Paris. Everyone had lined up in front of the kruchema to say goodbye, standing stiffly to attention and smiling. Danica, Arandjel, the woman with the cart and her children, the regulars from the hotel, Vukasin, Boško and his wife, who hadn’t let him leave her side since the day before, plus a few unknown faces. Vlad was going to stay on a few days. He had carefully combed his dark hair and tied up his ponytail. Ordinarily incapable of showing affection, Adamsberg hugged them each in turn, saying that he would be back – vratiću se – that they were all his friends – prijatelji. Danica’s sadness was diluted a little, in that she now didn’t know which one she would miss most, the dancer or the enchanter. Vlad said a final ‘plog’, and Adamsberg and Veyrenc made their way to the bus which would take them to Belgrade. Their flight would see them in Paris by mid-afternoon. Vladislav had written out a sheet of phrases they would need at the airport. As they went down the path carrying a bag of provisions from Danica which would easily last them two days, Veyrenc muttered:
‘He must now leave this place and its sweet fragrant air.
He leaves broken-hearted, lamenting his fate.
And his son, whom he found, but already too late.’
‘You know, Mercadet says that you don’t observe all the rules for alexandrines properly – you don’t always have exactly twelve syllables for instance.’
‘He’s right.’
‘Something’s wrong, Veyrenc.’
‘Yes, I know, that second line doesn’t scan.’
‘No, I’m talking about the dog hairs. Your nephew had this dog, and it died a few weeks before the Garches murder.’
‘Tintin, a stray he’d taken in. His fourth. That’s what abandoned kids do, they rescue stray dogs. So what’s the problem about its hairs?’
‘They compared them with Tintin’s hairs from his flat, and they were the same.’
‘The same as what?’
The bus started its engine.
‘In the room where the Vaudel murder took place, the killer sat on this velvet armchair. A Louis XIII armchair.’
‘Why does it matter that it was Louis XIII?’
‘Because Mordent was keen on it, never mind what he’s been up to since. And the killer sat on it.’
‘To get his breath back, I suppose.’
‘Yes. He had some horse manure on his boots, and there were a few traces of that too.’
‘How many bits?’
‘Four.’
‘See, Armel isn’t keen on horses. Had a fall when he was little. He really isn’t a get-up-and-go sort of person at all.’
‘But does he ever go to the country?’
‘Well, he goes back to the village every couple of months to see his grandparents.’
‘There could be horses on some of the paths out there,’ said Adamsberg with a frown. ‘And he wears boots.’
‘Yes.’
‘To go out for walks?’
‘Yes.’
They both looked out of the window for a minute, saying nothing.
‘These hairs you were talking about, then.’
‘The killer left some on the chair. Velvet – they stick to that. So he could just have had them on the seat of his trousers, from the flat. If we imagine that someone planted the handkerchief, we’d also have to suppose that the dog hairs were planted too.’
‘I see,’ said Veyrenc dully.
‘It’s not that easy even to get someone’s handkerchief, but how do you get the hairs of his dog? By picking them up off the floor of his apartment one by one, while Zerk watches you?’
‘No, by going in when he’s out.’
‘We checked. There’s a door code, and an entryphone. So it suggests whoever it was must have known him well enough to know at least the code. OK. But then you have to get through the house door, then Zerk’s front door. No locks were forced. Worse, our friend Weill and the neighbour opposite both say Zerk didn’t have any visitors. He doesn’t have a girlfriend?’
‘Not since last year. You talking about Weill who used to be at headquarters?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s involved is he?’
‘He lives in the same building as your nephew. They get on quite well. Perhaps Zerk liked to hobnob with cops.’
‘No, no. It was me, through Weill, that got him the flat when he went to live in Paris. But I didn’t know they actually met socially.’
‘Well, they do. And Weill seems to be fond of him. At any rate, he’s defending him.’
‘Was it him that called you yesterday when you were still getting your foot back to life. On your other phone?’
‘Yes, he’s been involved from the start. He says he’s keeping tabs on the hierarchy. He gave me that phone and made me take out my GPS when I left,’ Adamsberg said after a moment.
‘Pity he did that.’
‘Plog,’ said Adamsberg.
‘What does “plog” mean?’
‘It’s a word Vlad uses, but it can mean different things in context. It can mean “yes”, “precisely”, “I understand”, or sometimes “rubbish”. It’s a sort of drop of truth falling.’
The lunch Danica had provided was so copious that it was spread out on a large table in the cafe at Belgrade airport, accompanied by beer and coffee. Adamsberg munched his kajmak sandwich and was reluctant to pursue his thoughts.
‘One has to say,’ Veyrenc began carefully, ‘that if we have Weill in the picture, that would solve that entryphone question. He lives in the building, he’s got keys to it, he knows Armel. And he’s intelligent and sophisticated, unquestionably bossy, the sort of person who could well acquire a hold over someone like Armel.’
‘The front door hadn’t been forced.’
‘No, but Weill’s a cop, he’ll have pass keys. Easy lock?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he ever go to see Armel?’
‘No, but we’ve only got Weill’s own word for it. On the other hand, Zerk quite often went round on Wednesday evenings when Weill held open house.’
‘So he could quite easily have got hold of a handkerchief and some dog hairs. Not the boots with dung on, though.’
‘Yes, he could. The concierge polishes the stairs, and she doesn’t like people going up and down with muddy boots. So she gets people to put any dirty shoes in a little cupboard under the stairs on the ground floor. They all have keys to it. Shit, Veyrenc, Weill was at headquarters for twenty years.’
‘Weill couldn’t care less about the police, he likes being provocative, he likes cooking, he likes art, and not just classic art either. Have you ever been to his flat?’
‘Yes, several times.’
‘So you know what it’s like, it’s splendid and over the top, unforgettable once you’ve seen it. The statue of the man with a top hat and an erection, juggling bottles? The mummified ibis? The self-portraits? Kant’s couch?’
‘Kant’s valet’s couch.’
‘All right, Lampe the valet. The chair the bishop died in. The yellow plastic cravat from New York. In a bazaar like that, knocking out the Plogojowitz clan by an old eighteenth-century Paole might look like an artistic happening. As Weill says himself, art’s a dirty business but someone has to do it.’
Adamsberg shook his head.
‘But he’s the one who’s investigating the rungs of the hierarchy that leads to Emma Carnot.’
‘The vice-president of the Council of State?’
‘The same.’
‘What on earth has she got to do with all this?’
‘She’s got her hooks into the president of the Appeal Court, who’s bought the prosecutor, who’s bought a magistrate, who’s bought another magistra
te, who’s bought Mordent. His daughter’s case comes up in a few days and the charge couldn’t be more serious.’
‘Oh hell. But what does Carnot want from Mordent?’
‘Obedience. It was him that leaked the information to the press to cover Zerk’s escape. Since the morning we discovered the murder, he’s been putting obstacle after obstacle in the way of the inquiry, and in the end he planted some stuff on Vaudel’s son, which is intended to incriminate me instead of the killer.’
‘The pencil shavings you talked about?’
‘That’s right. Emma Carnot is somehow linked to our murderer. The page in the register for her marriage has been torn out, so we have to assume that if anyone knew about this marriage, her career would be over. One of the witnesses has already been killed. They’re looking for the other. Carnot would trample on anyone to protect her interests.’ As he spoke, Adamsberg remembered the little kitten under Zerk’s boot and shivered. ‘She’s not the only one. That’s why her war machine will run smoothly, because they all get something out of it. Except Paole’s future victims, except Émile, and except me, because I’m for the high jump in three days. Like the toads. With the cigarettes.’
‘You mean the ones we used to force-feed cigarettes to, back in the days?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they analyse the pencil shavings or something?’
‘A pal of mine slowed down their trip to the lab. He faked an illness.’
‘So you’ve got what? Another couple of days?’
‘If that.’
The plane was about to take off, and they fastened their seat belts. Veyrenc waited until they had been airborne for some time before speaking again.
‘Mordent started behaving this way on the Sunday morning, as soon as the Garches murder was discovered. You’re sure about that?’
‘Yes. He was trying to get the gardener arrested, taking orders direct from the examining magistrate.’
‘But that suggests that Carnot already knew who had massacred Vaudel. On the Sunday morning. And she was already in touch with Mordent. If not, how could she have got the machinery working so fast? She’d already got to Mordent. That would mean at least a couple of days’ preparation. She must have known on the Friday.’
‘The shoes,’ said Adamsberg suddenly, drumming his fingers on the porthole. ‘It wasn’t the Garches murder that alerted Carnot. It must have been whoever cut off the feet we found in London. And some of those were far too old for Zerk to have been involved.’
‘I don’t know about all this stuff,’ said Veyrenc.
‘I’m talking about the seventeen feet cut off at the ankles that were found, still in their shoes, in front of Higg-gate Cemetery in London, ten days ago.’
‘Who told you about them?’
‘No one. I was there. With Danglard. Higg-gate belongs to Peter Plogojowitz. His body was taken there before they ever built the cemetery, to get him away from the fury of the people of Kisilova.’
The stewardess kept returning to them, evidently fascinated by Veyrenc’s striped hair. The spotlight over his head lit up all the red strands. She brought two of everything for them – champagne, chocolates, towelettes.
‘When we were in London,’ Adamsberg said, after telling Veyrenc as succinctly as he could about the whole Highgate saga, ‘there was a fat man with a cigar standing in the distance behind this lord who was fussing about his shoes. The “Cuban”, so-called, must have been Paole, is what I’m thinking. Who had just deposited his collection of feet as a sort of challenge on Plogojowitz’s territory. And he was using Lord Clyde-Fox to lure us there.’
‘But why would he do that?’
‘To make the link. Paole needs to associate his collection to the destruction of the last Plogojowitzes. He took advantage of French police being there to get us involved, knowing that the Garches murder would come to us anyway. He couldn’t have guessed that Danglard would recognise a foot from Kisilova in the pile, whether it was really his uncle’s or a neighbour’s. Danglard’s uncle by marriage was Vladislav’s dedo, that is his grandfather.’
Veyrenc put his champagne glass down, and closed his eyes with a flutter of his eyelashes, a reflex he often had.
‘Forget all that for a moment,’ he said, ‘and simply tell me how it’s going to bring anything new to bear on Armel.’
‘There were pairs of feet there that had been severed when Zerk was a child, a baby even. Whatever I might think of him, I don’t believe your nephew went round as a five-year-old robbing the back parlours of undertakers.’
‘No, that figures.’
‘And I think that what Emma Carnot knew about was a shoe,’ said Adamsberg, catching a new fish that was wriggling around in his brain. ‘A shoe with a foot in it, that she’d seen somewhere, a long time ago. And she made the connection with Higg-gate, and after that with Garches. A connection that leads to her. Because we took our eye off that one entirely.’
‘What one?’ said Veyrenc, opening his eyes.
‘The missing one. The eighteenth foot.’
XLII
ADAMSBERG HAD TELEPHONED AHEAD FROM THE AIRPORT to convene a meeting of the squad – exceptionally, given that it was a Sunday evening. Three hours on, they had all more or less assimilated the latest episodes of the inquiry, rather at random and in some confusion, rendered greater by the commissaire’s state of exhaustion. Some people whispered during a break that it was obvious he had spent a night mummified in a freezing tomb and on the point of suffocation. His aquiline nose looked pinched, and his eyes had sunk even deeper into the distant depths. They greeted Veyrenc warmly, slapped him on the back and congratulated him. Estalère was particularly perturbed by the account of Vesna, a corpse almost three hundred years old but looking lifelike, alongside whom Adamsberg had spent the night. He was the only one in the squad who knew the story of Elizabeth Siddal, and he had remembered every detail of Danglard’s story. He was still not sure about one point. Had Dante Gabriel Rossetti opened his wife’s grave out of love, or to retrieve his poems? His answer varied depending on the day and his state of mind.
There were some gaps in the commissaire’s account of the past few days, on which he did not seem disposed to elaborate. One of them was the inexplicable presence of Veyrenc in Kisilova. Adamsberg had no intention of revealing to the squad that he had a son whom he had abandoned, that this son had suddenly turned up like a figure from hell, aka Zerk, and that everything pointed to his being the author of the atrocities in Garches and Pressbaum. Nor had he mentioned the ambiguous questions raised by the intervention of Weill. And apart from Danglard, no one in the team knew about the danger emanating from Emma Carnot. That would have obliged Adamsberg to reveal the treacherous activity of Mordent, which he was not ready to do. The daughter – Elaine, wasn’t it? – was due to stand trial in a few days. Dinh had managed to hold up the lab tests for three whole days without being disciplined. His talent for levitation, real or imagined, no doubt explained the indulgence of his colleagues.
On the other hand, Adamsberg had described in detail the enmity between the Plogojowitz and Paole families. So, not to put too fine a point on it, as Retancourt said, there was some all-out war going on between two clans of vampires, each trying to annihilate the other, after the original clash three hundred years before. And since, ahem, vampires did not exist, what were they supposed to do about it and where was the investigation heading?
At this point, the antagonism which divided the members of the squad resurfaced: the materialist positivists were seriously annoyed by Adamsberg’s vague wanderings, sometimes to the point of rebellion, while the more conciliatory group did not object to a spot of cloud-shovelling from time to time. Retancourt, who had at first beamed with pleasure on finding Adamsberg alive, had gone into a sulk at the first mention of vampiri and the place of uncertainty. She had had to admit, as Adamsberg pointed out, that there were a lot of Plogs in the surnames of the victims and their entourage. And that Vaudel senior, who was the authen
tic grandson of an Andras Plog, had written to Frau Abster, a half-Plogerstein, to warn her and to keep Kisilova free from attack – in other words to protect the Plogojowitz family. And that he, Adamsberg, had been well and truly locked in the vault holding Plogojowitz’s nine victims. That the severed feet in London – feet cut off to prevent the dead coming back to life – had been deposited in Plogojowitz’s English domain, Highgate Cemetery. That one of those pairs of feet belonged to a certain Mihail Plogodrescu. That the massacre of Pierre Vaudel/Plog and Conrad Plögener corresponded strictly to the method of exterminating a vampire; as had already been ascertained, they hadn’t just been killed but annihilated, and more especially their thumbs, teeth and feet. That their functional, spiritual and manducatory organs had been systematically destroyed. That everything indicated that this triple destruction was meant to prevent any possible reconstitution of the body from a single fragment and the recomposition of the accursed whole. As the dispersal of the fragments showed, comparable to the practice of placing a vampire’s head between its feet. That Arandjel, the Danglard of Serbia, as Adamsberg called him to provide authority for his remarks, had identified the family of the soldier Arnold Paole as being the tragic and unquestionable victims of Peter Plogojowitz.
The positivists were shattered, while the conciliatory group were acquiescent and were taking notes. Estalère was following Adamsberg’s pronouncements with passionate intensity. He had never missed a word his boss let drop, whether pragmatic or irrational. But during these moments of confrontation between the commissaire and Retancourt, a woman he idolised, his mind was divided into two warring halves.
‘We’re not looking for a vampire, Retancourt,’ said Adamsberg firmly, ‘we’re not going out into the streets to search for some creature who got a stake through his heart in the early eighteenth century. Surely that’s clear enough for you, lieutenant.’