The Chalk Circle Man

by Fred Vargas

  And he would gesture helplessly, and collapse in a heap, while trying all the same to maintain some presence. Not much was left of the eminent professor at the Collège de France, just an old man who seemed at his wits’ end, who was desperately trying to fight off an apparently inevitable condemnation. A thousand times or more he repeated: ‘But how could it have been me? I loved Delphie.’

  Danglard, increasingly shaken himself, kept up his barrage, sparing Le Nermord none of the small details which incriminated him. He had even allowed some information to leak out to the press, which had headlined it. The old man had hardly touched any of the food he was brought, in spite of encouragement from Margellon, who could be kind-hearted when he wanted to be. Le Nermord had not shaved either, even when he was allowed home overnight. What astonished Adamsberg was the sudden capitulation of this old man, who must after all have had a good enough brain with which to defend himself. He had never seen such a rapid destabilisation.

  By the Thursday morning Le Nermord’s legs were genuinely shaking and he was in a pitiful state. The prosecuting magistrate had asked for him to be charged, and Danglard had just told him of the decision. At this point, Le Nermord said nothing for a long time, just as he had the other night in his house, seeming to weigh up arguments for and against. As before, Adamsberg signalled to Danglard above all not to intervene.

  Then Le Nermord said:

  ‘Give me a piece of chalk. Blue chalk.’

  Since nobody moved, he found a little authority from somewhere and added:

  ‘Come on. I asked for some chalk.’

  Danglard went out and found some in Florence’s desk – a repository for everything.

  Le Nermord got up with all the precautions of an invalid and took the chalk. Standing against the white wall, he took some time to think again. Then very quickly, he wrote in large letters: ‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?’

  Adamsberg did not move a muscle. He had been expecting this since the previous day.

  ‘Danglard,’ he said, ‘go and get Meunier. I think he’s around somewhere.’

  While Danglard left the room, the chalk circle man turned to Adamsberg, determined to look him in the face.

  ‘Well met at last,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I’ve been looking for you for a long time.’

  Le Nermord did not reply. Adamsberg looked at his unattractive face, which had regained a little firmness since this confession.

  Meunier, the handwriting specialist, followed Danglard into the room. He considered the large writing which covered the entire length of the wall.

  ‘Nice souvenir for your office, Danglard,’ he murmured. ‘Yes, that’s the writing. It couldn’t be imitated.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the chalk circle man, handing the chalk back to Danglard. ‘I can fetch more proof if you want it. My notebooks, the times when I went out, and my street map, which is covered with crosses, my list of objects. Anything you like. I know I’m asking too much, but would it be possible for this to be kept quiet? I would dearly like it if my students and colleagues didn’t find out. But I imagine that’s not possible. Still, it puts a different complexion on things, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Danglard admitted.

  Le Nermord got up, finding more strength, and accepted a glass of beer. He paced from the window to the door, going to and fro in front of his line of graffiti.

  ‘I had no choice, I had to tell you. There was too much evidence piling up against me. But now I’ve told you, it alters things, doesn’t it? Do you think that if I’d really wanted to kill my wife, I’d have done it in one of my own circles? Without even bothering to disguise my handwriting? I hope we can please agree about that, at least.’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Of course, there’s no point now in hoping to be elected to the Academy. Or preparing my lectures for next year. The Collège won’t want to have anything to do with me after this. Perfectly understandable. But I didn’t have any choice. I had to go for the lesser of two evils, because the murder charge was so serious. It’s up to you to find out what’s really been happening. Who’s been using me? Ever since the first murder victim was found in one of my circles, I’ve been trying to understand – I felt I’d been caught in some sort of ghastly trap. I was very frightened when I heard about that first murder. As I told you, I’m not a brave man. In fact, frankly, I’m a coward. I racked my brain trying to understand. Who could have done it? Who’d been following me? Who’d put that woman’s body in my circle? And if I went on drawing circles after that, it wasn’t, as the press said, to tease the police. No, not at all. It was in the hope of finding out who was dogging my steps, who was the murderer, and to give myself some chance of proving my own innocence. I took a few days to reach that decision. You don’t easily decide to tempt a murderer to follow you at night, especially if you’re as cowardly as me. But I thought that once you found out who I was, I’d certainly be accused of murder. And that’s what the murderer must have been thinking: he was hoping that I‘d pay for his crimes. So it was a sort of struggle between him and me. The first real struggle I’d had in my life. And in that sense, I don’t regret it. But the only thing I didn’t for a moment imagine was that he would attack my own wife. All night, after you came to see me, I sat up asking myself why he had done that. I could think of only one explanation. The police had still not identified me with the circles, and that was spoiling the murderer’s plans. So he did this, he murdered my own Delphie, so that you’d come straight to me, and then he would be left in peace. Am I right?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘But he was mistaken in one thing: any of your shrinks will tell you that I’m perfectly sane, I haven’t lost my mind. I suppose a lunatic might kill two strangers and then his own wife. But not me. I’m not insane. And I would never have killed Delphie and dragged her into one of my circles. Delphie. If it hadn’t been for my damned circles, she’d still be alive.’

  ‘Well, if you’re as sane as you say,’ asked Danglard, ‘why on earth did you draw those damned circles?’

  ‘So that lost things would belong to me, would be grateful to me. No, I’m not putting this very well.’

  ‘No, you’re not – I don’t get it at all,’ said Danglard.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said Le Nermord. ‘I’ll try to write it down, that might work better.’

  Adamsberg was thinking of Mathilde’s description: ‘A little man who’s lost everything and is greedy for power, how will he get out of this?’

  ‘Please find him,’ Le Nermord begged, in distress. ‘Find this killer. Do you think you can find him? Really?’

  ‘If you help us,’ said Danglard. ‘For instance, did you ever see anyone following you when you went out?’

  ‘Nothing clear enough to help you, unfortunately. At the beginning, two or three months ago, this woman sometimes followed me. It was long before any murder, and it didn’t bother me. I found her odd, but somehow friendly. I had the feeling that she was encouraging me from a distance. At first I was a bit scared of her, then I got to like seeing her. But what can I say? I think she was fairly tall, dark hair, good-looking and perhaps not young. But I can’t give you more detail than that. Still, I’m certain it was a woman.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Danglard, ‘we know about her. How many times did you see her?’

  ‘About a dozen times.’

  ‘And after the first murder?’

  Le Nermord hesitated, as if he didn’t wish to remember something.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘After that I did see someone twice, but it wasn’t the dark woman. Someone else. Because I was scared, I hardly turned to look and ran off once I’d done my circle. I didn’t really have the guts to follow through on my plan, which was to try and see the face of the person. It was quite a small figure. Could have been a man or a woman, a peculiar outline. See, I can’t help you much.’

  ‘Why did you always have your bag with you?’ Adamsberg interrupt
ed.

  ‘My briefcase?’ said Nermord. ‘With my papers? After I’d drawn my circle, I would go away quickly, usually by metro. I was so nervous that I needed to read, get back to my notes and return to being a professor. I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can explain it better than that. What will happen to me now?’

  ‘Well, we’ll probably let you go for now,’ said Adamsberg. ‘The magistrate won’t want to risk a false murder charge.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Danglard. ‘This does somewhat change things.’

  Le Nermord looked a little better. He asked for a cigarette and packed the tobacco into his pipe.

  ‘It’s a pure formality, but I would still like to visit your house, if I may,’ said Adamsberg.

  Danglard, who had never seen Adamsberg bother to carry out pure formalities, looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Le Nermord. ‘But what are you looking for? As I said, I’ll bring you all the proof you need.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And I’ll trust you to do that. I’m not looking for anything concrete. Meanwhile, can you go over all that with Danglard, and make a statement.’

  ‘Can you be frank with me, commissaire? As the “chalk circle man,” what kind of sentence will I get?’

  ‘I can’t think the charge will be serious,’ said Adamsberg. ‘There was no disturbance, no offence against public order in the strict sense. If you inspired someone with the idea of committing a murder, that’s not your fault. You can’t be held responsible for giving other people ideas. Your peculiar habit has caused three deaths, but we can hardly blame you for them.’

  ‘I would never have imagined this. I’m truly sorry,’ murmured Le Nermord.

  Adamsberg went out without another word, and Danglard felt annoyed at him for not having shown a little more humanity. He had previously seen the commissaire go to great lengths to be kind, to win over various strangers and even imbeciles. But today he hadn’t offered the tiniest crumb of humanity to the old man in front of them.

  Next day, Adamsberg asked to see Le Nermord again. Danglard was sulking. He didn’t want them to harass the old man any further. And here was Adamsberg choosing the last minute to call him in, when he’d hardly said a word to him the previous days.

  So Le Nermord was convoked once more. He came into the police station timidly, still looking shaken and pale. Danglard considered him.

  ‘He’s changed,’ he whispered to Adamsberg.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Adamsberg replied.

  Le Nermord sat on the edge of a chair and asked if he could smoke his pipe.

  ‘I was thinking, last night,’ he said, feeling in his pocket for matches. ‘All night, in fact. And now I’ve decided that I don’t care if everyone finds out the truth about me. I’ll just have to accept that I’m the pathetic chalk circle man, as the press calls me. At first when I started doing it, I had the feeling that it was making me incredibly powerful. In fact, I suppose, I was being arrogant and grotesque. And then it all went so wrong. Those two murders. And my Delphie. How could I possibly hope to hide all that from myself? What would be the point of trying to hide it from other people, and trying to salvage my career, which I’ve completely destroyed, however you look at it? No. I was the circle man. If I have to live with that, so be it. Because of all this, because of my “frustration” as that man Vercors-Laury would call it, three people have died. Including my Delphie.’

  He plunged his head in his hands and Danglard and Adamsberg waited in silence, without looking at each other. The elderly Le Nermord wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his raincoat, like an old tramp, as if he were abandoning the prestige he had spent years acquiring.

  ‘So it’s pointless of me to beg you not to let the press know,’ he continued with an effort. ‘I get the impression that it would be better if I just accept what I am and what I’ve done, instead of trying to hide behind my wretched professorial identity. But since I’m a coward, I’d prefer to get away from Paris, now that everything will come out. I meet too many people in the street, you see. If you give me permission, I’d like to retreat to the countryside. Not that I like the countryside. We bought a little house there for Delphie to use. It could be my refuge from the world for now.’

  Le Nermord waited for their reply, rubbing the bowl of his pipe against his cheek, an anxious and miserable expression on his face.

  ‘You’re quite free to do that,’ said Adamsberg, ‘so long as you keep us informed of your whereabouts. That’s all we will ask.’

  ‘Thank you. I think I could move down there in a couple of weeks. I’m going to clear everything out. Byzantium’s finished for me now.’

  Adamsberg let another pause go past before he asked:

  ‘You aren’t by any chance diabetic, are you?’

  ‘What a strange question, commissaire. No, I’m not diabetic. Is that … er … important?’

  ‘Well, it is quite. I’m going to trouble you again one last time, although it’s about something trivial. But this trivial thing is hard to explain, and I hoped you might be able to help me. All the witnesses who saw you have spoken of a smell you left behind. A smell of rotten apples, one said, vinegar or a liqueur of some sort, others said. So I thought at first that you might be suffering from diabetes, since as you may know diabetes is associated with a slight aroma of fermentation. However, I don’t detect anything like that about you – just your pipe tobacco. So I thought possibly the smell they spoke of might have come from your clothes, or from a clothes cupboard. And yesterday I looked in your wardrobes and cupboards, and sniffed at the clothes. Nothing. Just a smell of wooden furniture, dry cleaning, pipe tobacco, books, even chalk, but nothing acid or alcoholic. I was disappointed.’

  ‘I don’t really know what to say,’ said Le Nermord, looking rather disorientated. ‘What exactly are you asking me?’

  ‘Well, how do you explain it?’

  ‘I don’t know! I never realised I left any smell behind me. It’s rather humiliating, in fact, to learn this.’

  ‘I have a suggestion. Perhaps it comes from outside your house, from some other cupboard where you used to leave the clothes you wore when you were being the circle man.’

  ‘My clothes when I was “being the circle man”? But I didn’t wear anything special! I wasn’t demented enough to dress up for my outings! No, commissaire. Your witnesses will surely have said that I was dressed in ordinary clothes, like I am today. I wear practically the same things every day: flannel trousers, white shirt, tweed jacket, raincoat. I hardly ever dress any differently. Why on earth would I go out wearing a tweed jacket and go “somewhere else” to put on another tweed jacket, especially one that smelled odd?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I was wondering.’

  Le Nermord was looking miserable again and Danglard felt vexed with Adamsberg once more. In the end the commissaire wasn’t so bad at torturing his suspects.

  ‘I do want to help you,’ said Le Nermord, his voice on the point of breaking, ‘but that’s asking too much. I don’t understand this business of a smell and why it’s so interesting.’

  ‘It may not be as interesting as all that.’

  ‘Perhaps, you know, it might have something to do with nervousness, because these circles were a very emotional thing for me. Maybe I was giving off a sort of “smell of fear”? I suppose it’s possible. When I was in the metro afterwards, I’d be dripping with sweat.’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ said Adamsberg, scribbling on the table. ‘Forget it. I get these ideas fixed in my head and they don’t mean anything. I’ll let you go, Monsieur Le Nermord. I hope you find some peace in the countryside. People say it’s possible.’

  Peace in the countryside indeed! Danglard, infuriated, gave a snort of exasperation. Everything about the commissaire was getting on his nerves this morning, his aimless meanderings, his pointless questions and his banal remarks. Oh, for a glass of white wine. Too early, much too early, control yourself for heaven’s sake.

 
Le Nermord gave a tragic smile and Danglard tried to cheer him up a bit by shaking his hand warmly. But Le Nermord’s hand remained limp. A lost soul, Danglard thought.

  Adamsberg stood up and watched Le Nermord go down the corridor, stooping slightly and looking thinner than ever.

  ‘Poor sod,’ said Danglard. ‘He’s finished now.’

  ‘I’d have preferred it if he had been diabetic,’ was Adamsberg’s only reply.

  Adamsberg spent the rest of the morning reading Ideology and Society under Justinian. Danglard, feeling almost as exhausted as his victim after the long joust with the chalk circle man, would have liked Adamsberg to stop thinking about him and move the investigation on in some other direction. He felt so saturated with Augustin-Louis Le Nermord that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was read a line he had written. Out of every page, the cloudy blue gaze of the Byzantine scholar would have seemed to stare at him, reproaching him for his persecution.

  Danglard came to find Adamsberg at one o’clock. He was still plunged in his book. Danglard remembered that the commissaire had told him that he read slowly, one word after another. He did not look up as he heard Danglard come in.

  ‘Do you remember that fashion magazine we found in Madame Le Nermord’s handbag, Danglard?’

  ‘The one you were looking at in the van? Must still be in the lab.’

  Adamsberg called the lab and asked for the magazine to be sent down if they had finished with it.

  ‘What’s bothering you now?’ asked Danglard.