The Chalk Circle Man

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Perhaps his suspicions have been aroused,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘Suspicions? What about? That he’d be accused of murder? Rubbish! We don’t know if he even listens to the radio. He might not even know about the murder. You already know he doesn’t go out every night, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘It’s true, he might not have heard the news yet. Or else perhaps he did hear it, and it made him wary. Since he knows someone’s watching him, he may be changing his haunts. In fact, I’m sure he will. It’s going to be the devil’s own job to find him.’

  ‘Because he’s the murderer – is that what you mean, Adamsberg?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How many times a day do you say “I don’t know,” or “Maybe”?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I know about all your famous cases so far, and how successful you are. But all the same, when you’re here in the flesh, one wonders. Are you sure you’re suited to the police?’

  ‘Certain. And anyway, I do other things in life.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as drawing.’

  ‘Drawing what?’

  ‘The leaves on the trees and more leaves on the trees.’

  ‘Is that interesting? Sounds pretty boring to me.’

  ‘You’re interested in fish, aren’t you?’

  ‘What do you all have against fish? And anyway, why don’t you draw people’s faces? Wouldn’t it be more fun?’

  ‘Later. Later or maybe never. You have to start with leaves. Any Chinese sage will tell you.’

  ‘Later? But you’re already forty-five, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Ah, that’s like me.’

  And since Mathilde had a hip flask of cognac in her pocket, and since it was getting seriously cold, and since she said, ‘We’re into a section two of the week now, we’re allowed to have a drink,’ they did.

  When the metal gates of the metro station closed, the chalk circle man had still not appeared. But Adamsberg had had time to tell Mathilde about the petite chérie and how she must have died somewhere out in the world, and how he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Mathilde appeared to find this story fascinating. She said that it was a shame to let the petite chérie die like that, and that she knew the world like the back of her hand, so she’d be able to find out whether the petite chérie had been buried, with her monkey, or not. Adamsberg felt completely drunk because he didn’t usually touch spirits. He couldn’t even pronounce ‘Wahiguya’ properly.

  At about the same time, Danglard was in an almost identical condition. The four twins had wanted him to drink a large glass of water – ‘to dilute the alcohol,’ the children said. As well as the four twins, he had a little boy of five, just now fast asleep in his lap, a child whom he had never dared mention to Adamsberg. This last one was the unmistakable offspring of his wife and her blue-eyed lover. She had left this child with Danglard one fine day, saying that all in all it was better that the kids should stay together. Two sets of twins, plus a singleton who was always curled up in his lap, made five, and Danglard was afraid that confessing to all this would make him look a fool.

  ‘Oh, stop going on about diluting the alcohol,’ said Danglard. ‘And as for you,’ he said, addressing the first-born of the older set of twins, ‘I don’t like this way you’ve got of pouring white wine into plastic cups, and then pretending that you’re being sympathetic, or that it looks nice, or that you don’t object to white wine so long as it’s in a plastic cup. What’s the house going to look like with plastic cups everywhere? Did you think of that, Édouard?’

  ‘That’s not the reason,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s because of the taste. And then, you know, the flakiness afterwards.’

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ said Danglard. ‘And if we’re talking about flakiness, you can take a view on that when the vicomte de Chateaubriand, the greatest writer in French literature, and about ninety-nine beautiful girls, have all rejected you, and when you’ve turned into a Paris cop who may be a sharp dresser but is all mixed up inside. I don’t think you’ll ever manage that. What about a case conference tonight?’

  When Danglard and his kids had a case conference, it meant they got to talk about his police work. It could last hours, and the kids adored it.

  ‘Well, for a start,’ said Danglard, ‘and can you beat this? St John the Baptist walked out and left us to deal with this shambles for the rest of the day. That got me so worked up that by three o’clock I was well away. And yes, it’s clear that the man who wrote that stuff on the other circles is the same one who wrote the stuff round the circle with the murdered woman in it.’

  ‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?’ chanted Édouard. ‘Or you might as well say “Marcel, go to hell, on your bike and ring the bell” or “Maurice, call the police, give us all a bit of peace” or—’

  ‘OK, OK, said Danglard, ‘but yes, “Victor, woe’s in store” does suggest something vicious: death, bad luck, a threat of some kind. Needless to say, Adamsberg was the first to get a sniff of that. But is that enough for us to charge this man? The handwriting expert’s quite positive about it: the man’s not mad, he’s not even disturbed, this is an educated person, careful about his appearance and his career, but discontented and aggressive as well as deceptive – those were his words. He also said, “This man’s getting on in years, he’s going through some crisis, but he’s in control; he’s a pessimist, obsessed about the end of his life, therefore about his afterlife. Either he’s a failure on the brink of success, or a successful man on the brink of failure.” That’s the way he is, kids, our graphologist. He turns words inside out like the fingers of a glove, he sends them one way, then the other. For instance, he can’t talk about the desire for hope without mentioning the hope for desire, and so on. It sounds intelligent the first time you hear it, but after that you realise there’s nothing there really. Except that it is the same man who’s been doing all the circles so far, a man who’s clever and perfectly lucid, and that he’s either about to succeed in life or to fail. But as for whether the dead woman was put into a circle that had already been drawn or not, the lab people say it’s impossible to tell. Maybe yes, maybe no. Does that sound like forensic science to you? And the corpse hasn’t been much help, either: this is the corpse of a woman who led a totally uneventful existence, nothing odd at all, no complicated love life, no skeletons in the family cupboard, no problems with money, no secret vices. Nothing. Just balls of wool and more balls of wool, holidays in the Loire Valley, calf-length skirts, sensible shoes, a little diary that she wrote notes in, half a dozen packets of currant biscuits in her kitchen cupboard. In fact she wrote about that in her diary: “Can’t eat biscuits in the shop, if you drop crumbs the boss notices.” And so on and so forth. So you might say, well, what on earth was she doing out late at night? And the answer is she was coming back home after seeing her cousin, who works in the ticket office at the Luxembourg metro station. The victim often used to go over there and sit alongside her in the booth, eating crisps, and knitting Inca-style gloves to sell in the wool shop. And then she would go back home, on foot, probably along the rue Pierre-et-Marie Curie.’

  ‘Is the cousin her only family?’

  ‘Yes, and she’ll inherit the estate. But since it consists of the currant biscuits plus a tea caddy with a few banknotes in, I can’t see the cousin or her husband cutting Madeleine Châtelain’s throat for that.’

  ‘But if someone wanted to use a chalk circle, how would they have known where there was going to be one that night?’

  ‘That is indeed the question, my little ones. But we ought to be able to work it out.’

  Danglard got up carefully, to put Number Five, René, to bed.

  ‘For instance,’ he resumed, ‘take the commissaire‘s new friend, Mathilde Forestier: it seems that she’s actually seen the chalk circle man. Adamsberg told me. Look, I’m managing to say his name again. Obvi
ously the conference is doing me good.’

  ‘At the moment, I’d say it was a one-man conference,’ Édouard observed.

  ‘And this woman, who knows the chalk circle man, she worries me,’ Danglard added.

  ‘You said the other day,’ said the first-born girl of the second set of twins, ‘that she was beautiful and tragic and spoilt and hoarse-voiced, like some exotic Egyptian queen, but she didn’t worry you then.’

  ‘You didn’t think before you spoke, little girl. The other day, nobody had been killed. But now, I can just see her coming into the police station, on some damfool pretext, making a big fuss, getting to see Adamsberg. And then talking to him about this, that and the other, before getting round to telling him she knows this chalk circle man pretty well. Ten days before the murder – bit of a coincidence isn’t it?’

  ‘You mean she’d planned to kill Madeleine, and she came to see Adamsberg so that she’d be in the clear?’ asked Lisa. ‘Like that woman who killed her grandfather but came to see you a month before, to tell you she had a “presentiment”? Remember?’

  ‘You remember that dreadful woman? Not an Egyptian princess at all, and as slimy as a reptile. She nearly got away with it. It’s the classic trick of the murderer who telephones to say they’ve found a body, only more elaborate. So, well, yes. Mathilde Forestier turning up like that does make you think. I can just imagine what she’d say: “But commissaire, I’d hardly have come and told you I knew all about the chalk circle man if I was intending to use him to cover up a murder!” It’s a dangerous game, but it’s bold, and it could be just her style. Because she is a bold woman, you’ve probably gathered that.’

  ‘So did she have a motive for killing poor fat Madeleine?’

  ‘No,’ said Arlette. ‘This lady, Madeleine, must just have been unlucky, picked by chance to start a series, so they’d pin it on the circle maniac. The real murder’ll happen later. That’s what papa is thinking.’

  ‘Yes, maybe that is what he’s thinking,’ Danglard conceded.

  VIII

  NEXT MORNING, MATHILDE CAME ACROSS CHARLES REYER AT THE foot of the stairs, fumbling with his door. In fact she wondered whether he hadn’t been waiting for her, and pretending not to find the keyhole. But he said nothing as she went past.

  ‘Charles,’ said Mathilde, ‘you’re putting your eye to keyholes now, are you?’

  Charles straightened up, and his face looked sinister in the dark stairwell.

  ‘That’s you, is it, Queen Mathilde, making cruel jokes?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Charles. I’m getting my retaliation in first. You know what they say: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”‘

  Charles sighed.

  ‘Very well, Mathilde. In that case, please help a poor blind man put the key in the lock. I’m not used to this yet.’

  ‘Here you are,’ said Mathilde, guiding his hand. ‘Now it’s locked. Charles, what did you think of that cop who came round last night?’

  ‘Nothing. I couldn’t hear what you were saying, and anyway I was distracting Clémence. What I like about Clémence is that she’s got a screw loose. Just to know there are people like that in the world does me good.’

  ‘Today my plan’s to follow someone else like that, a man who’s interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, goodness knows why. It could take me all day and the evening as well. So if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to go and see the policeman for me. It’s on your way.’

  ‘What are you up to, Mathilde? You’ve already got what you were after, whatever that was, by getting me to come and live here. You want me to get my eyes sorted out, you get me to babysit Clémence for a whole evening, and now you’re flinging me into the arms of this policeman. Why did you come looking for me? What are you trying to do with me?’

  Mathilde shrugged.

  ‘You’re making too much of it, Charles. We met in a cafe, that’s all. Unless it’s to do with underwater biology, my impulses generally don’t have any particular reason. And listening to you, I’m sorry I don’t have more of a reason for them. Then I wouldn’t be standing here, stuck on the stairs, having my morning spoiled by a blind man with a bad temper.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mathilde. What do you want me to say to Adamsberg?’

  Charles called his office to tell them he would be late. First, he wanted to run the errand for Queen Mathilde and go to the police station; he wanted to help her out, to do something to please her. And this evening he would like to be friendly, to admit that he had placed his hopes in her, and tell her, perfectly courteously, that he had carried out the errand perfectly courteously. He didn’t want to murder Mathilde, that was the last thing in the world he wanted. For now, he wanted to cling on to Mathilde, doing his best not to let go of her, not to spin round and slap her in the face. He wanted to go on listening to her talking, about anything and everything, with her husky voice and her tightrope-walking ways, always on the brink of missing her step. Perhaps he should bring her some jewellery this evening, a gold brooch? No, not a gold brooch, a cooked chicken with tarragon, she would surely prefer some chicken with tarragon. And then he could listen to the sound of her voice, and drop off to sleep with warm champagne in his pyjama pockets, if he had had pyjamas. Or pockets. Certainly not tear her eyes out, not massacre her, absolutely not, no, he would buy her a cooked chicken. With tarragon.

  He should have arrived at the police station by now, but he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t one of the buildings whose location he had managed to map in his head. He would have to ask. Hesitating, he scraped the pavement ahead of him with his stick, walking slowly. He was lost in this street, obviously. Why had Mathilde sent him here? He began to feel desperately tired. And when he felt that way, anger was sure to follow, welling up in lethal pulses from his stomach into his throat, until it invaded his whole head.

  Danglard, feeling seedy and with a blinding headache himself, was just arriving for work. He saw the very tall blind man standing stock-still near the door of the station, an expression of arrogant despair on his face.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Danglard asked. ‘Are you lost?’

  ‘ Are you?’ Charles asked.

  Danglard ran his hand through his hair.

  What a mean question. Was he lost?

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Wrong,’ said Charles.

  ‘Is that any of your business?’ said Danglard.

  ‘Is my standing here any of your business?’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said Danglard. ‘Suit yourself. Stay lost if you’re lost.’

  ‘I’m looking for the police station.’

  ‘Well, you’re in luck, I work there. I’ll take you in. What do you want the police station for?’

  ‘It’s about the chalk circle man,’ Charles said. ‘I’ve come to see Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. He’s your boss, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Danglard. ‘But I don’t know if he’s here yet. He could still be wandering around somewhere. Are you coming to tell him something, or to ask him for something? Because I have to tell you that the boss doesn’t give out precise information, whether you ask him for it or not. So if you’re a journalist, you’d do better to go and join your colleagues over there. There are plenty of them about.’

  They were arriving at the entrance to the station. Charles stumbled against the step and Danglard had to catch him by the arm. Behind his glasses, in his dead eyes, Charles felt a brief spasm of rage.

  He said quickly: ‘No, I’m not a journalist.’

  Danglard frowned and rubbed a finger over his forehead, although he knew perfectly well that you couldn’t cure a hangover by rubbing your head.

  Adamsberg was there. Danglard could not have said afterwards whether he was in the office or even sitting down. He had perched there, too light for the big armchair and too dense for the white and green furnishings.

  ‘Monsieur Reyer wants a word with you,’ said Danglard.

  Adamsberg looked up. He was more
struck than he had been the previous day by Charles’s face. Mathilde was right: the blind man was spectacularly good-looking. And Adamsberg admired beauty in others, although he had given up wishing for it himself. In any case, he couldn’t remember ever having wanted to be anyone else.

  ‘You stay too, Danglard,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen you for some time.’

  Charles felt around for a chair and sat down.

  ‘Mathilde Forestier can’t come to the Saint-Georges metro station with you tonight as she had promised. That’s the message. I’m just dropping in to deliver it to you.’

  ‘How am I supposed to find him without her, this circle man, since she’s the only one who knows who he is?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘She thought of that,’ said Charles, with a smile. ‘She said I could do it, because she thinks the man leaves a vague smell of apples behind him. She says all I have to do is wait with my nose in the air and breathe deeply, and I’d be pretty good at sniffing out the smell of rotten apples.’

  Charles shrugged.

  ‘It wouldn’t work, of course. She can be very perverse.’

  Adamsberg looked preoccupied. He had swivelled sideways, putting his feet on top of the plastic waste bin, and was resting a piece of paper on his thigh. He seemed to want to start drawing as if he was entirely unconcerned, but Danglard thought this was far from the case. He could see that Adamsberg’s face was darker than usual: the nose seemed sharper and he was clenching and unclenching his jaw.

  ‘Yes, Danglard,’ he said rather quietly. ‘We can’t do anything if Madame Forestier isn’t there to guide the way. Odd, don’t you think?’

  Charles made as if to leave.

  ‘No, Monsieur Reyer, don’t go,’ said Adamsberg, still in a quiet voice. ‘An annoying thing happened – I had an anonymous phone call this morning. A voice that said: “Did you see an article two months ago in the local newsletter, The Fifth Arrondissement in Five Pages? Why don’t you question the people who actually know something, commissaire?” Then they hung up. Here’s the paper, I had someone find it for me. Just the local rag, but a lot of people get to see it. Here, Danglard, can you read this bit out, top of page two. You know I’m no good at reading out loud.’