by Fred Vargas
The last time, the day before, it had gone as follows:
‘Do you think you’re good-looking?’ Adamsberg had asked.
‘It’s hard to say no.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Can you tell me why I’m here?’
‘Yes. Because of your stepfather, of course. You did tell me you didn’t like to think of him sleeping with your mother.’
The young man shrugged.
‘Nothing I could do about it, was there? Except kill him, and I didn’t do that. But yeah, it did make me feel a bit sick. My stepfather was gross, he was hairy, he even had hair coming out of his ears, like a, well, a wild boar. Tell you the truth, monsieur, I couldn’t stomach that. Would you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. One day I walked in on my own mother in bed with one of my ex-schoolfriends. And yet, poor woman, she was faithful on the whole. I closed the door, and I remember that the only thing I thought was that the boy had an olive-green mole on his back, but perhaps my mother hadn’t seen it.’
‘Don’t see what that has to do with me,’ said the boy, sulkily. ‘If you can take that kind of thing better than me, that’s your business.’
‘Never mind – it doesn’t matter. Is your mother upset, do you think?’
‘Naturally she is.’
‘OK. Fine. But don’t go and see too much of her for now.’
And he had let the boy go.
Adamsberg walked into the station. Of his inspectors at present, his favourite was Adrien Danglard, a man who dressed impeccably in order to compensate for his un prepossessing looks and pear-shaped figure. Danglard liked a drink and didn’t seem too reliable after about four in the afternoon, or even earlier sometimes. But he was real, very real, and Adamsberg hadn’t yet found any other way of defining him to himself. Danglard had prepared a summary of the inquiry into the textile firm’s customer files.
‘Danglard, I’d like to see the stepson today – the boy, Patrice Vernoux.’
‘Again, monsieur le commissaire? Why do you keep going after the poor lad?’
‘Why do you call him a poor lad?’
‘Because he’s shy, he keeps combing his hair, he tries to help, he’s doing his best to say what you want, and when he’s waiting in that corridor and doesn’t know what you’re going to ask him next, he looks so lost that I feel sorry for him. That’s why I call him a poor lad.’
‘You didn’t notice anything else, Danglard?’
Danglard shook his head.
‘Have I told you the story about the dog that drooled?’ Adamsberg asked.
‘No, I must say you haven’t.’
‘When you’ve heard it, you’ll think I’m a mean bastard. You’ll have to sit down: I can’t talk fast, I have trouble finding the right words and I sometimes lose the thread. I’m not very articulate, Danglard. So anyway, I went out of our village very early one morning to spend the day in the mountains – this was when I was about eleven. I don’t like dogs and I didn’t like them when I was little, either. And this one, a big dog with drooling chops, was just standing in the middle of the path, looking at me. It drooled all over my feet and hands, it was just a friendly, soppy old dog. I said to it: “Look, dog, I’m going for a long walk, what I’m trying to do is get lost and then find my way back. You can come with me if you want, but stop drooling all over me, it’s disgusting.” Well, the dog seemed to understand and started following me.’
Adamsberg stopped, lit a cigarette, and took a scrap of paper out of his pocket. He crossed his legs and rested the paper on his thigh to scribble a drawing, then went on, after a glance at his colleague.
‘Can’t help it if I’m boring you, Danglard, but I do want to tell you the story about the dog. So this dog and I set off, chatting about whatever interested us – the stars in the sky or juicy bones – and we stopped at an old shepherd’s hut. And there we came face to face with half a dozen kids from another village, I knew who they were, we’d had fights in the past. They said, “This your dog?” I said: “Just for today.” Then the smallest of them got hold of the dog by its long fur, because this dog was as cowardly and soft as a hearthrug, and he pulled it to the edge of an overhang. “Don’t like your fucking dog,” he said. “Stupid fucking dog.” The big dog was whining, but it wasn’t reacting, it’s true that it was stupid. And this tiny kid gave it a big kick up the backside, and the dog went over the edge. I put my bag down slowly. I do everything slowly. I’m a slow man, Danglard.’
Yes, Danglard felt like saying, I had noticed. A vague man, a slow man. But he couldn’t say that, since Adamsberg was his new boss. And anyway, he respected him. Danglard, like everyone else, had heard rumours of Adamsberg’s famous cases and, like everyone else, he admired the way he had solved them, something which today seemed to him incompatible with the man himself, as he had turned out on his arrival in Paris. Now that he had seen him in the flesh, he was surprised, and not only by his slow movements and way of talking. He was also disappointed by the unimpressive appearance of Adamsberg’s small, thin, yet compact body, and by the generally casual manner of this person who had not even turned up at the appointed time to meet the staff and who, when he did, had evidently hastily knotted on a necktie over a shapeless shirt stuffed negligently into the waistband of his trousers.
And then Adamsberg’s charm had started to work, rising like the water level. It had started with his voice. Danglard liked to listen to him: it calmed him – indeed, almost put him to sleep. ‘It’s like a caress,’ Florence had said, but then Florence was a woman, and anyway she was responsible for her choice of words. Castreau had snorted: ‘Don’t go telling us next that he’s good-looking.’ Florence had looked puzzled. ‘Wait a bit, I need to think about that,’ she had said. As she always did. She was a scrupulous person who took time to think before she spoke. Not feeling sure, she had murmured, ‘No, but it has to do with a kind of grace. I’ll think some more about it.’ When the other colleagues had laughed at her serious expression, Danglard had said, ‘Yes, Florence is right, it’s obvious.’ Margellon, a young officer, had seized the opportunity to call Danglard a poof. Margellon had never made an intelligent remark in his life. And Danglard needed intelligence as much as he needed drink. He had shrugged his shoulders, thinking briefly that it was a pity Margellon wasn’t right, because he had always had bad luck with women, and perhaps men would have been less fussy. He had heard it said that men were bastards, because once they had slept with a woman they passed judgement on her, but women were worse, because they refused to sleep with you unless everything was exactly right. So not only were you weighed up and judged, but you never got to sleep with anyone.
Sad, really.
Yes, women were complicated. And in Danglard’s life there had been plenty of women who had found him wanting. To his considerable distress at times. But at any rate, he knew that serious-minded Florence was right about Adamsberg, and Danglard had so far allowed himself to succumb to the charm of this little man a foot shorter than himself. He was beginning to understand how the vague desire to unburden yourself to him might explain why so many murderers had told him about their crimes: absent-mindedly, almost. Just like that. In order to chat to Adamsberg.
Danglard, who had a reputation for being handy with a pencil, did caricatures of his colleagues. So he knew something about faces. He had got Castreau off to a T, for instance. But he knew in advance that he would never be able to pin Adamsberg down, because it was as if sixty faces had been mingled to make one. The nose was too big, the mouth was crooked, mobile, and no doubt sensual, the eyes were vague and elusive, the jawbone was too prominent, so it looked as if it would be easy to caricature this mixed-up face, thrown together with disregard for classical harmony. It was as if God had run out of raw materials when he had made Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg: he had had to look in the back of the drawer and put together features that should never have been combined if he’d had more choice. But after that, it looked as if God had been aware of the problem and had taken spec
ial care, a great deal of care, in fact, and in the end had created an inexplicable masterpiece out of this face. And Danglard, who could not remember ever having seen a face like it, considered that trying to make a rapid sketch of it would be a travesty, that swift pencil strokes would not bring out its originality: on the contrary, a sketch would destroy all its grace.
So at that moment, Danglard was wondering what sort of things God kept in the back of the drawer.
‘Are you listening, or have you gone to sleep?’ Adamsberg asked. ‘Because I’ve noticed that I sometimes send people to sleep, really, they do go to sleep. Perhaps I don’t speak loudly enough, or fast enough, I don’t know. Remember where we’d got to? The dog had gone over the edge. I took my tin water bottle off my belt and banged the little kid hard on the head.
‘And then I set off to find the stupid dog. It took me three hours to reach it. And by then it was dead, anyway. The point of this story, Danglard, is the evidence of cruelty in that little kid. I’d known for a long time before this happened that there was something wrong with him, and that was what it was: cruelty. But I can assure you his face was quite normal, he didn’t have wicked features at all. On the contrary, he was a nice-looking boy, but he oozed cruelty. Just don’t ask me any more, I can’t tell you any more. But eight years later, he pushed a grandfather clock over on top of an old woman and killed her. And most premeditated murders require the murderer not only to feel exasperation or humiliation, or to have some neurosis, or whatever, but also cruelty, pleasure in inflicting suffering, pleasure in the victim’s agony and pleas for mercy, pleasure in tearing the victim apart. It’s true, it doesn’t always appear obvious in a person, but you feel at least that there’s something wrong, that something else is gathering underneath, a kind of growth. And sometimes that turns out to be cruelty – do you see what I’m saying? A kind of growth.’
‘That’s against my principles,’ said Danglard, a bit stiffly. ‘I don’t claim my principles are the only ones, but I don’t believe there are people marked out for this or that, like cows with tags on their ears, or that you can pick out murderers by intuition. I know, I’m saying something boring and unexciting, but what we do is we proceed by following clues, and we arrest when we’ve got proof. Gut feelings about “growths” scare me stiff. That way you start off following hunches, and end up with arbitrary sentences and miscarriages of justice.’
‘You’re speechifying, Danglard. I didn’t say you could see it in someone’s face, I said it was something monstrous that was gathering inside someone. It’s a kind of secretion, Danglard, and sometimes I sense it oozing out. I’ve seen it on the lips of a young girl, just as clearly as I might see a cockroach run across this table. I can’t help sensing when something’s not right. It might be enjoyment of crime, but it could be other things, less serious things. Some people secrete their boredom or their unhappy love lives, Danglard, and it can be sensed, whether it’s the one or the other. But when it’s something else, you know, the crime thing, well, I think I know that too.’
Danglard looked up and his posture was less shambling than usual.
‘Yes, but you still believe you can see something by looking at people, that you can see cockroaches on their lips, and you think these impressions are revelations because they’re yours, you think other people are oozing pus, and it’s not true. The truth is boring and banal: it’s that all human beings can have hate inside them, like they all have hair on their heads, and anyone can make a false step and kill someone. I’m certain of that. All men are capable of rape and murder, and all women are capable of slashing someone’s legs with a razor, like that one in the rue Gay-Lussac the other week. It just depends what sort of life you’ve had, it depends how much you want to plunge into the swamp and take other people with you. You don’t have to be oozing pus from birth to want to suppress the whole world because you’re sick of it.’
‘I did tell you, Danglard,’ said Adamsberg, frowning, as he stopped his drawing, ‘that when I’d told you the story of the big dog you’d think I was a mean bastard.’
‘Dangerous, let’s say,’ muttered Danglard. ‘You shouldn’t think you’ve got some superior powers.’
‘There’s nothing superior about being able to see cockroaches. What I’m telling you about is something that I can’t help. In fact, it gives me enormous trouble in my life. If only I could be wrong about someone once in a while, about whether he was an upright citizen or not, or sad, or intelligent, or untruthful, or troubled, or indifferent, or dangerous, or timid – all that, do you see, if I could just be wrong one time, for a change? Can you imagine what a drag it is? I sometimes pray that people will surprise me when I start to predict how it will all end. All my life I’ve always had beginnings, and I’ve been full of hope. And then, very soon, I start to see what’s going to happen, like in some suspense film where you guess who’s going to fall in love with whom, or who’s going to have an accident. You go on watching all the same, only it’s too late – it’s just depressing.’
‘OK, let’s admit you have some special intuition,’ said Danglard. ‘You’re a policeman with flair, that’s as far as I’ll go. But even then it’s not right to use it, it’s too risky, it’s wicked. No, even after twenty years you can never know everything about another person.’
Adamberg rested his chin on his palm, smoke from his cigarette making his eyes water.
‘Well, if it’s a gift take it away from me, Danglard. Get rid of it. I’d like nothing better.’
‘People aren’t insects,’ Danglard went on.
‘No, they’re not. I like people, and I don’t give a damn about insects, don’t care what they want or what they think. Still, insects want things too, no reason they shouldn’t.’
‘True,’ said Danglard.
‘Danglard, have you ever been party to a miscarriage of justice yourself?’
‘Have you read my file?’ said Danglard, with a sideways glance at Adamsberg who was still smoking and doodling.
‘If I say no, you’ll accuse me of claiming supernatural powers. But no, I haven’t read it. What happened?’
‘It was this teenage girl. There’d been a break-in at the jeweller’s shop where she worked. I was absolutely convinced it was an inside job, done with her collusion. Everything seemed to point to it. Her prevarications, her mannerisms, all that set off my policeman’s intuition, OK? She got three years, and she committed suicide in her cell two months later, in a particularly ghastly way. But in fact she hadn’t been involved in the robbery, as we discovered not long afterwards. So now do you see why I won’t have anything to do with your blasted hunches and cockroaches on women’s lips? Finito. After that, I decided guesswork and intuition were no match for doubt and ordinary police routine.’
Danglard stood up.
‘Wait,’ said Adamsberg. ‘The stepson, Vernoux – don’t forget to bring him in.’
Adamsberg fell silent. He was embarrassed. His decision was awkward coming after this kind of discussion. He went on in a lower voice.
‘Pull him in for questioning for twenty-four hours.’
‘You’re not serious, commissaire,’ said Danglard.
Adamsberg bit his lower lip.
‘His girlfriend’s protecting him. I’m convinced they weren’t actually together in the restaurant on the evening of the murder, even if their two versions tally. Question them again, separately. How long between the starter and the main course? Did a guitarist come and play? Where was the wine, on the left or the right of the table? What kind of wine was it? What did the glasses look like, or the tablecloth? And so on – every little detail you can think of. They’ll end up saying different things, you’ll see. And then check out the boy’s shoes. You can ask the cleaning woman who comes in and looks after him – his mother pays her. There’ll be a pair missing, the ones he wore on the night of the murder, because round the warehouse the ground’s very muddy, what with the building site alongside it, and the mud there is clay – it sticks like glue.
He’s not stupid, our young man, he’s probably chucked the shoes away. Have someone check the drains near where he lives. He could have walked back the last stretch in his socks, between the drain and his front door.’
‘If I understand what you’re saying,’ Danglard said, ‘the poor lad, as I call him, is oozing something.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Adamsberg quietly.
‘And what is he supposed to be oozing?’
‘Cruelty.’
‘And to you that’s obvious?’
‘Yes, Danglard.’
But the last two words were almost inaudible.
Once the inspector had left, Adamsberg pulled across his desk the pile of newspapers that had been prepared for him. He found what he was after in three of them. The phenomenon hadn’t reached the headlines yet, but it was surely only a matter of time. Clumsily, he tore out one short article and put it on the desk in front of him. He always needed to concentrate hard in order to read, and if he had to do it out loud it was even worse. Adamsberg had never shone at school, since he couldn’t really understand why they were making him turn up there at all, but he had tried to give the impression of being conscientious so as not to upset his parents, and in particular so that they would never find out that he didn’t really care for book learning.
Is this a practical joke, or the work of some half-baked philosopher? Whatever it is, the blue chalk circles are still sprouting like night-time weeds on the capital’s pavements, and they’re starting to attract the attention of Parisian intellectuals. The circles are turning up at an increasing rate. Sixty-three have been spotted since the first ones were found four months ago in the 12th arrondissement. This new distraction, the equivalent of an urban parlour game, has provided plenty of material for the chattering classes, of whom there is no shortage. So the circles are the talk of every café in town …
Adamsberg stopped reading and jumped to the end to read the byline. ‘That pretentious prat,’ he muttered. ‘What can you expect?’