by Fred Vargas
But today he had imagined her dead.
Adamsberg had been so shaken that he had stopped for a cup of coffee, his forehead burning, sweat running down his temples. He visualised her lying dead, having died some time ago, her body decomposing under a tombstone, and in the grave alongside her the little bundle of bones belonging to Richard III. He had tried to summon up images of the Berber camel-handler, the Dutch yachtsman and the café owner in Belleville. He had begged them all to help him reanimate her as usual in front of his eyes, to work the strings and make that tombstone vanish. But damn them all, these characters wouldn’t let themselves be summoned up. Leaving the way clear for this deathly fear to grip him. Dead, dead, dead, Camille dead. Yes, surely dead. And he had been imagining her alive all this time, even if she had been unfaithful to him with other men, just as he had been unfaithful to her with other women, even if she had expelled him from her thoughts, even if she was stroking the shoulders of the bellhop in the bed in the Cairo hotel, after he had come to her room to get rid of the cockroaches, even if she was taking photographs of all the clouds in Canada – because Camille collected clouds that looked like people’s profiles, which were not easy to come by – and even if she had forgotten Adamsberg’s face and his name, just so long as Camille was alive somewhere in this world. Because if so, everything was all right. But if Camille had died somewhere or other in this world, then everything was not all right at all. In that case, what point would there be any more in getting up in the morning and busying oneself, if she were dead, Camille, the unlikely offspring of a Greek god and an Egyptian prostitute (for that was how he saw her origins)? What would be the point after that of bothering to track down murderers, or counting the spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee, or going to bed with Christiane, or looking at the stones in every street, if Camille wasn’t somewhere on the planet, making life vibrate around her with her combination of seriousness and frivolity, the seriousness reflected on her forehead, the frivolity on her lips which met together in a perfect figure of eight, an image of the infinite? And if Camille was dead, Adamsberg would have lost the only woman who had said to him quietly one morning: ‘Jean-Baptiste, I’m going to Wahiguya. It’s on the upper reaches of the Volta.’ She had disentangled herself from his arms, had said ‘I love you,’ dressed, and left. He had thought she was going out to buy bread. But she had not come back, his petite chérie. Nine years. He wouldn’t have been entirely misleading anyone if he had said to them ‘Yes, I know Wahiguya, I even lived there for a while.’
And on top of everything, here was Christiane, quite certain that she would be making the coffee for him in the morning. While the petite chérie had died somewhere without his being able to do anything about it. And now, one day, he would die himself, without ever seeing her again. He imagined that Mathilde Forestier might be able to pull him out of this black depression, even if that wasn’t the reason he was trying to find her. But he did hope that when he saw her the film would start again, from the right moment, with the bellhop in the Cairo hotel.
Mathilde did telephone.
He told Christiane, who had quickly been disillusioned, to have an early night, since he would be late back; half an hour later, he was talking to Mathilde Forestier.
She welcomed him with a friendliness that loosened the stranglehold the world had exerted on him for the past few hours. She even gave him a kiss, not quite on the cheek and not quite on the lips. She laughed, and said yes she liked doing that, she knew exactly where to plant a kiss, she had an excellent eye for that kind of thing, but he was not to be alarmed, since she never took men her own age as lovers, it was an absolute principle, avoiding comparisons and complications. Then she took his shoulder and led him over to a table, where an old lady was playing patience and sorting the mail at the same time, and where a very tall blind man seemed to be advising her on both counts. The table was oval, and transparent, and had water and fish inside it.
‘It’s an aquarium-table,’ Matilde explained. ‘I designed it myself one evening. It’s a bit showy, a bit obvious, like me. The fish don’t like Clémence playing patience. Every time she slaps a card down on the glass, they shoot off in all directions – look.’
‘No good!’ sighed Clémence, gathering up the cards. ‘It’s a sign. I shouldn’t send a reply to the well-preserved M., 66. But he was so tempting. His ad in the paper was so good.’
‘Have you replied to many?’ asked Charles.
‘Two thousand, three hundred and fifty-four. But it’s never any good. It’s fate. I end up telling myself, Clémence, it’s just not going to work out.’
‘Yes, it will,’ said Mathilde, to encourage her, ‘especially if Charles helps you write the replies. He’s a man, he’ll know what appeals to them.’
‘The product doesn’t seem all that easy to market, though,’ observed Charles.
‘But I’m counting on you to help me find a way,’ said Clémence, who didn’t seem to take offence whatever anyone said to her.
Mathilde took Adamsberg into her study. ‘We’ll sit at my cosmic table, if you don’t mind. I find it relaxing.’
Adamsberg examined the large table made of black glass and pierced with hundreds of luminous dots lit from below, representing all the constellations in the night sky. It was beautiful, excessively so.
‘My tables don’t seem to tempt anyone to market them,’ Mathilde commented. ‘Facing you,’ she went on, pointing with her finger at the surface, ‘you have Scorpio, the Serpent Holder, the Lyre, Hercules and the Corona Borealis. Do you like it? I like to sit here with my elbows on the south end of Pisces. And the thing is, the whole picture’s false. Because the thousands of stars we see shining have already burnt themselves out, so the sky’s out of date. You realise what that means, Adamsberg? The sky’s out of date. But does that matter, if we can still see it?’
‘Madame Forestier,’ said Adamsberg, ‘I’d like you to take me to see the chalk circle man tonight. Have you listened to the radio today?’
‘No,’ said Mathilde.
‘This morning we found a woman with her throat cut, inside one of his circles, just a couple of streets away from here, in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. A nice, ordinary, middle-aged lady, with no secret vices to explain why someone would want to kill her. The chalk circle man has moved up a gear.’
Mathilde lowered her darkened face onto her clenched fists, then stood up abruptly and fetched a bottle of Scotch and two glasses, putting them between the two of them, over Aquila, the Eagle.
‘I’m not feeling too good this evening,’ Adamsberg said. ‘Death is stalking around in my head.’
‘I can see that. Have a drink,’ said Mathilde. ‘Tell me about the woman who had her throat cut. We can talk about the other death afterwards.’
‘What other death?’
‘There must be another one,’ Mathilde said. ‘If you get this upset every time you come across a murder, you’d have left the police long ago. So there must be some other death that’s tormenting you. Do you want me to take you to the chalk circle man, so you can arrest him?’
‘It’s too soon. I just want to locate him, see him, find out about him.’
‘I feel awkward, Adamsberg. Because this man and I, we’ve sort of become accomplices. There’s a bit more between us than I told you the other day. In fact I’ve seen him about a dozen times, and from the third time on he realised that I’d spotted him. He keeps his distance, but he still lets me trail him, he glances at me, maybe even smiles, I’m not sure, he’s always been too far away to see, and he keeps his head down. But the last time, he even gave a little wave of his hand before he left, I’m convinced. I didn’t want to tell you all this the other day, because I didn’t want you to put me down as crazy. After all, the police pigeonhole us all, don’t they? But now it’s different, if the police want him for murder. Adamsberg, this man looks totally inoffensive to me. I’ve walked along streets at night enough times to be able to scent danger. But with him, no, nothing. He’s quite small,
very short for a man, slight, neatly dressed, his features are vague, they change, they’re hard to remember, but he’s not good-looking. I’d put him at about sixty-five. Before he crouches down to write on the pavement he flicks up the tails of his raincoat, so as not to get them dirty.’
‘How does he draw the circles – from the inside or the outside?’
‘From the outside. He’ll stop suddenly, in front of something on the ground, get out his chalk as if he knew right away that this was tonight’s object. He looks round, waits till the coast is clear, he certainly doesn’t want to be seen, except by me, and he seems to allow that, I don’t know why. Perhaps he thinks I understand him. His whole operation takes about half a minute. He draws a big circle round the object, then he crouches down to write his words, still looking round. Then he disappears at the speed of light. He’s as quick as a fox and he seems to know his way around. He always manages to lose me once he’s drawn the circle, and I’ve never managed to track him to his home. But anyway, if you arrest this guy, I think you’d be making a big mistake.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I need to see him first. How did you find him in the first place?’
‘It wasn’t rocket science. I phoned a few journalists I know who’d taken an interest in the case from the start. They gave me the names of the people who’d first reported the circles. I telephoned the witnesses. It may seem odd to you that I got involved in something that’s none of my business, but that’s because you don’t work with fish. When you spend hours of your life studying fish, you start thinking there’s something wrong with you, and perhaps it’s that you ought to spend less time on fish and more on your fellow human beings, and watch their habits as well. I’ll explain that another time. Anyway, practically all these witnesses had discovered the circles before about half past midnight, never any later. And since the chalk circle man seemed to roam all over Paris, I thought, well, he must be taking the metro, and he doesn’t want to miss the last connection, so that’s a hypothesis to test. Stupid really, isn’t it? But two circles had been found only at two in the morning, in the same area, in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and the rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne. Since they’re fairly busy streets, I thought these circles must have been drawn late at night, after the last metro. Perhaps because by then he was going home on foot, because he lived nearby. Is this getting too involved?’
Adamsberg shook his head slowly. He was full of admiration.
‘So then I thought, with a bit of luck his nearest metro station must be either Pigalle or Saint-Georges. I lay in wait four nights running at Pigalle: nothing. And yet there were two more circles on those nights in the 17th and 2nd arrondissements, but I saw nobody who fitted the bill coming in or out of the metro station between ten and when it closed. So I tried Saint-Georges. And there I noticed a small man on his own, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking at the ground, who took a train at quarter to eleven. I saw a few other people too, who might have been likely suspects. But just this one little man came back out of the metro at quarter past midnight. And four days later he did the same thing. The next Monday, the beginning of a section number one, you’ll remember, so a new age, I went back to Saint-Georges. He turned up and I followed him. That was the time with the biro. Because it was him all right, Adamsberg. Other times I would wait at the metro to try and follow him home. But at that point he always manages to give me the slip. I wasn’t going to run after him – I’m not the police.’
‘I won’t tell you that’s fantastic work, it sounds too much like police talk, but all the same, it is fantastic work.’
Adamsberg often used the word ‘fantastic’.
‘True,’ said Mathilde. ‘I did well there, better than with Charles Reyer, at any rate.’
‘You like him – Reyer?’
‘He’s a bad-tempered so-and-so, but that doesn’t bother me. He makes up for Clémence, the old woman you saw, who’s mind-numbingly good-natured. She seems to do it on purpose. Charles won’t get a rise out of her any more than with me. That’ll teach him, it’ll blunt his teeth.’
‘Her teeth are a bit funny, Clémence’s.’
‘You noticed, yes, like Crocidura russula – more like animal’s teeth, aren’t they? It must put off the lonely-hearts men she tries to date. We ought to give Charles an eye makeover and Clémence a teeth makeover – we ought to give the world a makeover, really. Then of course it would be perfectly boring. If we get a move on, we could be at Saint-Georges metro station by ten, if that’s what you want. But I’ve already told you, Adamsberg, I really don’t think it’s him you should be chasing. I think someone else used his circle afterwards. Is that impossible?’
‘It would have to be someone who was remarkably familiar with his routine.’
‘Like me.’
‘Yes, and don’t say so too loudly or you’ll be suspected of following your chalk circle man that night and then dragging your victim, whom you’d previously knocked out, of course, over to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, before cutting her throat, on the spot, right in the middle of the circle, making sure she wasn’t outside the line. But that seems pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it?’
‘No. I think that would be quite possible if you wanted to incriminate somebody else. In fact, it’s very tempting, this madman who’s been offering himself on a plate to the police and drawing his blue chalk circles two metres wide, just big enough to contain a corpse. It could have given plenty of people the idea of committing murder, if you ask me.’
‘But how could any prosecutor prove a motive, if the victim turns out to be entirely unknown to the circle man?’
‘The prosecutor would think it was a motiveless crime by a lunatic.’
‘He doesn’t look like a lunatic at all, from all the classic signs. So how could the “real” murderer, according to you, be certain that the circle man would be found guilty in his place?’
‘Well, what do you think, Adamsberg?’
‘I don’t think anything yet, Madame, to tell you the truth. But I’ve just had a bad feeling about these circles from the beginning. I don’t know, just now, whether the man who draws them killed this woman. You could be perfectly right. Perhaps the chalk circle man is just a victim himself. You seem to be much better at working things out and reaching conclusions than I am, you’re a scientist. I don’t use the same methods, I don’t do deductive reasoning. But the feeling I’ve got at the moment, very strongly, is that this circle man isn’t nice at all – even if he is your protégé.’
‘But you haven’t got any evidence?’
‘No. But I’ve been trying to find out everything about him for weeks. He was already dangerous, in my view, when he was just drawing rings round cotton buds and hairpins. So he’s still dangerous now.’
‘But good heavens, Adamsberg, you’re working backwards! It’s as if you were to say that some food was toxic because you felt sick before eating it!’
‘Yes, I know.’
Adamsberg seemed irritated with himself: his eyes were heading for dreams and nightmares where Mathilde couldn’t follow him.
‘Come on, then,’ she said, ‘let’s go to Saint-Georges. If we get lucky and see him, you’ll find out why I’m defending him against you.’
‘And why’s that?’ asked Adamsberg, standing up, with a sad smile on his face. ‘Because a man who gives you a little wave of his hand can’t be all bad?’
He looked at her, his head on one side, his lips curled into a lopsided grin, and he looked so charming that Mathilde felt once more that with this man life was a little better. Charles needed new eyes, Clémence needed a new set of teeth, but this policeman needed a total face makeover. Because his face was crooked, or too small, or too big, or something. But Mathilde would not have let anyone touch it for the world.
‘Adamsberg,’ she said, ‘you’re just too cute. You’ve no business being a policeman, you should have been a streetwalker.’
‘Well, I am a streetwalker as well, Madame Forestier. Like yo
u.’
‘That must be why I like you so much. But that won’t stop me proving to you that my intuition about the chalk circle man is as good as yours. And watch it, Adamsberg, you’re not going to lay a finger on him tonight, not in my company. Give me your word.’
‘I promise. I won’t lay a finger on anyone at all,’ said Adamsberg.
At the same time, he was thinking that he would try to keep his word on this in relation to Christiane, who was lying waiting for him, naked, in bed, back at his flat. And yet who would turn down an offer from a naked girl? As Clémence would say, perhaps the evening was jinxed. Clémence seemed to be a bit jinxed herself, in fact. As for Charles Reyer, it was worse than a jinx: he was teetering on the edge of an internal explosion, a major cataclysm.
When Adamsberg followed Mathilde back into the big room with the aquarium, Charles was still talking to Clémence, who was listening attentively and amiably, puffing at a cigarette as if she was new to smoking. Charles was saying:
‘My grandmother died one night, because she had eaten too many spice cakes. But the real sensation was next day, when they found my father at the table eating the rest of the cakes.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Clémence, ‘but now I’d like you to help me write my letter to my M., 66.’
‘Night-night, children,’ said Mathilde on the way out.
She was already in action, striding towards the stairs, in a hurry to be off to the Saint-Georges station. But Adamsberg had never been able to hurry.
‘Saint George,’ Mathilde called to him, as they scanned the street for a taxi. ‘Isn’t he the one who killed the dragon?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Adamsberg.
The taxi dropped them at the Saint-Georges metro station at five past ten.
‘It’s OK,’ said Mathilde. ‘We’re still in time.’
By half past eleven, the chalk circle man had still not shown up. There was a pile of cigarette ends around their feet.
‘Bad sign,’ said Mathilde. ‘He won’t come now.’