The Chalk Circle Man

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Crying? Yes, I have a bit. How do you know?’

  ‘Your voice sounds a bit damp still. I can hear it perfectly.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s just that someone I love very much is leaving tomorrow. That makes me cry just now.’

  ‘Can I find out what your face looks like?’ asked Charles, stretching out his hands.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like this. You’ll see.’

  Charles stretched his fingers out to Mathilde’s face, and ran them across it like a pianist on a keyboard. He was concentrating hard. In fact, he knew perfectly well what Mathilde looked like. She probably hadn’t changed much from the seminars when he had seen her. But he wanted to touch her. It was the first time they had called each other ‘tu’.

  XX

  NEXT DAY, ADAMSBERG TOOK THE WHEEL OF THE POLICE CAR AS they headed for Montargis. Danglard sat beside him, Castreau and Deville in the back. The van was following them. Adamsberg bit his lip as he drove. Now and then he glanced across at Danglard, or sometimes, after changing gear, put his hand briefly on the inspector’s arm. As if to reassure himself that Danglard was there, alive, alongside him and that he must stay there, alive.

  Mathilde had woken early and hadn’t had the heart to follow anyone that morning. The previous day, however, she had been quite entertained by a clandestine couple at the Brasserie Barnkrug. They had obviously not known each other long. But when the man got up in the middle of the meal to make a phone call, the woman had watched him go, with a frown, and then she had snatched some of his chips on to her own plate. Delighted with her booty, she had devoured it, licking her lips after every mouthful. The man had returned and Mathilde had told herself that she knew something essential about the woman that her companion would never find out. Yes, it had been entertaining. A first section.

  But this morning she had no interest in anything. Towards the end of a first section, one shouldn’t expect too much. She thought that this was the day when Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg was going to catch the shrew-mouse, that she would struggle and make a squeaking noise, and that it was going to be the devil of a day for old Clémence, who had been so good at sorting out the slides with her gloves on, just as she had sorted out her murders. Mathilde wondered for a moment if she ought to feel responsible. If she hadn’t been showing off at the Dodin Bouffant, boasting that she knew about the chalk circle man, Clémence wouldn’t have come to lodge with her, and wouldn’t have been able to seize the opportunity to murder people. Then she told herself, no, wait a minute, the whole idea was just too far-fetched. For a woman to cut the throat of an elderly doctor just because he had once been her fiancé, and for pent-up bitterness to have done the rest.

  Too far-fetched by half. She should have told Adamsberg that. Mathilde was muttering her sentences to herself as she leaned on her aquarium-table. ‘Adamsberg, this murder is just too far-fetched.’ A crime of passion doesn’t take place in cold blood fifty years later, especially with a plan as complicated as that worked out by Clémence. How could Adamsberg be so wrong about the old woman’s motive? You’d have to be stupid to believe in a motive as far-fetched as that. And what bothered Mathilde was precisely that she considered Adamsberg to be one of the subtlest people she had ever met. Yet there was obviously something wrong about the motive they were assigning to Clémence. A woman with a blank face. Mathilde had tried to convince herself that Clémence was likeable, in order to try and like her and help her, but in fact everything about the shrew-mouse had set her teeth on edge. Everything – or rather nothing: it was as if there was no body inside her body, no expression on her face, no sound in her voice. Just nothingness.

  Last night, Charles had felt her face with his fingers. It had been rather nice, she had to admit, those long hands scrupulously exploring all the contours of her face, as if she were printed out in Braille. She had sensed that he might have liked to go further, but she had not given him any encouragement. On the contrary, she had made some coffee. Very good coffee, in fact. That was no substitute for a caress, of course. But in a way a caress is no substitute for a good cup of coffee, either. Mathilde shook herself: the comparison was silly, caresses and good cups of coffee were not interchangeable.

  ‘Right,’ she sighed out loud. With her finger she was following a two-spot Lepadogaster swimming under the glass lid. Time to feed the fish. What was she to do with Charles and his caresses? Was it time perhaps for her to go back to the sea, since she didn’t feel like following anybody this morning? What had she collected in three months? A policeman who should have been a prostitute, a malicious blind man who caressed her, a Byzantine scholar who drew chalk circles, and an old murderess. Not a bad haul, after all. She shouldn’t complain. Rather, she should write it all down. That would be more fun than writing about pectoral fins.

  ‘Yes, but what?’ she said out loud, standing up abruptly. ‘What could I write? What’s the point of writing?’

  ‘ To tell the story of your life,’ she answered herself.

  Stuff and nonsense! At least when you’re dealing with pectoral fins you’ve got something to say that other people don’t know. But as for anything else, why bother? Why do anything or write anything? To attract others? Is that it? To seduce people you’ve never met, as if the ones you have met aren’t enough for you? Because you think you can capture the quintessence of the world in a few pages? What quintessence is there, anyway? What emotions are there in the world? What can you say? Even the story of the old shrew-mouse isn’t interesting enough to tell anyone. Writing is an admission of failure.

  Mathilde sat down again in a dark mood. She decided that her thinking had become muddled. Pectoral fins are absolutely fine, nothing wrong with them.

  But it’s depressing if all you write about is pectoral fins, because in the end you couldn’t give a damn about them, any more than you do about Clémence.

  Mathilde sat up and pushed her dark hair back with both hands. Right, she thought, I’m just having a little attack of metaphysics and it will pass. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she muttered again. I wouldn’t be so sad if Camille wasn’t leaving again tonight. Off again. If only she hadn’t met that slippery policeman, she wouldn’t be obliged to travel the world. And is it worth writing that down?

  No.

  Perhaps it really was time to go back to the depths of the ocean. And above all, it was forbidden to ask herself what the point of it all was.

  ‘What is the point of it all?’ Mathilde immediately asked herself.

  To do you good. To get your feet wet. Yes, that was it. To get your feet wet.

  * * *

  Adamsberg was driving fast. Danglard had gathered they were going to Montargis, but he knew no more than that. The further they travelled, the tenser the commissaire‘s features became. And the contrasts marking his face became almost unreal. Adamsberg’s face was like one of those lamps that have dimmer switches. Very odd. What Danglard did not understand at all was why Adamsberg had put a black tie on over his old white shirt. A tie for a funeral, but knotted any old how. Danglard voiced his concern.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I did put this tie on. It’s a fitting custom, isn’t it?’

  And that was all. Except for the hand which he sometimes laid on Danglard’s arm. More than two hours out of Paris, Adamsberg stopped the car on a forest track. Here the summer heat failed to penetrate. Danglard read a notice: Bertranges Forestry Estate, and Adamsberg said, ‘This is it,’ as he put on the handbrake.

  He got out of the car, took a deep breath and looked around, with a nod. Spreading a map on the bonnet, he called Castreau, Delille and the six men from the van to come over.

  ‘We’ll go this way,’ he said, pointing. ‘We take this track, then this one and the next. Then we’ll check all the paths in the southern sector. What we’re going to do is search the zone around this lodge in the forest.’

  At the same time, his finger described a circle on the map.

  ‘Circles, always circles,’ he murmured.


  He crumpled the map up clumsily and gave it to Castreau.

  ‘Get the dogs out,’ he added.

  Six Alsatians on leads jumped out of the van, barking furiously. Danglard, who didn’t greatly care for the huge beasts, kept to one side, folding his arms and keeping the folds of his floppy grey jacket pulled tight round him as his only protection.

  ‘All this palaver to track down old Clémence?’ he said. ‘But how will the dogs manage it, anyway? We don’t even have a scrap of her clothing for them to sniff.’

  ‘I’ve got what we need,’ said Adamsberg, taking a small packet from the van and putting it down in front of the dogs.

  ‘Ugh, rotten meat,’ said Delille, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Smells of death,’ said Castreau.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg.

  He jerked his head and they took the first track on the right. The dogs were pulling hard on their leads and barking. One of them had already wolfed down the piece of meat.

  ‘Dumb creature, that dog,’ said Castreau.

  ‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Danglard.

  ‘No, I thought not,’ said Adamsberg.

  Walking through a forest with dogs is a noisy process. Branches and twigs cracking, little creatures running from underfoot, startled bird-calls, and the constant sound of feet crunching on leaves and dogs crashing through undergrowth.

  Adamsberg was wearing his faithful black trousers. He walked along with his hands partly tucked into his belt, the tie flying back over one shoulder, saying nothing, but attending to the slightest deviation by the dogs. Three-quarters of an hour passed before two of the dogs simultaneously left the path, taking a sharp left turn. There was no track there, just undergrowth. They had to push under branches and round tree trunks, making slow progress, with the dogs pulling at the lead. A branch snapped back painfully into Danglard’s face. The leading dog, Alarm Clock by name but usually known just as ‘Clock’, stopped after they had gone about sixty metres. He turned round in his tracks, barking and raising his head, then whined and lay on the ground, his head held upright, looking pleased with himself. Adamsberg had frozen, his fingers locked on his belt. He looked at the small patch of ground where Clock was lying, a few square metres between the birches and the oaks. He reached out and touched a branch that had been broken several months earlier. Moss had grown on the broken end.

  His mouth twisted, as it always did when he felt a powerful emotion. Danglard had noticed that before.

  ‘Call the others,’ Adamsberg said.

  Then he watched, as Declerc brought up the bag of tools and signalled that they could start work. Danglard watched apprehensively as Declerc opened the bag and brought out pickaxes and shovels, which he distributed to the others.

  For an hour he had been refusing to think that this was what they were looking for. But now he could no longer escape the evidence. This was what they were looking for.

  ‘A rendezvous with someone we know,’ Adamsberg had said the day before. The black tie. So the commissaire did not shrink from symbolism, however heavy-handed.

  After that, the shovels started to make an infernal noise as metal struck on stone, a sound that Danglard had heard too many times in the past. The pile of earth alongside grew higher. He’d seen that too many times as well. The men were practised at digging. They worked quickly, bending their knees.

  Adamsberg, still gazing fixedly at the growing hole, touched Declerc on the arm.

  ‘Take it slower now. Not too hard. Use the smaller shovels.’

  They had to move the dogs away – they were making too much noise.

  ‘The mutts are getting excited,’ Castreau observed. Adamsberg nodded, continuing to stare into the hole. Declerc was directing operations. He was lifting earth gingerly with a light trowel. Suddenly he sprang back as if he had been attacked. He wiped his nose with his sleeve.

  ‘Ah, look,’ he said. ‘A hand, I think. I think it’s a hand.’

  Danglard made a prodigious effort to detach himself from the tree trunk against which he was leaning, and approached the pit. Yes, it was a hand. A ghastly, terrible hand.

  Now one man was uncovering the arm, another the head, and a third shreds of blue fabric. Danglard felt sick. He moved back, reaching behind him with his hand to find the tree trunk, his solid oak tree. He felt its bark and clung to it, as his eyes continued to see the image he had glimpsed of a horrible corpse, with black slimy skin.

  I should never have come, he thought, closing his eyes. And he did not even want to know for the moment whose corpse the ghastly thing could be, or why they had come to look for it, or where they were, and why he didn’t understand. All he knew was that the commissaire must be wrong about the rendezvous. That corpse had been there for months. So whoever it was, it couldn’t be Clémence.

  The men worked on for another hour, with the stench becoming intolerable. Danglard had not shifted an inch from his comforting oak tree. He kept his gaze fixed upwards. Between the trees you could only see a little bit of sky and this corner of the forest was dark. He heard Adamsberg say gently:

  ‘That’ll do for now. Let’s have a drink.’

  The men threw down the tools and Declerc produced a bottle of cognac from the bag.

  ‘It’s nothing fancy,’ he explained, ‘but it’ll disinfect us a bit. Just a drop each.’

  ‘Against the rules, but indispensable,’ said Adamsberg.

  The commissaire walked over to Danglard, holding a plastic cup. He didn’t say ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘Feeling better now?’ In fact, he said nothing. He knew it would be all right in half an hour, and Danglard would be able to walk again. Everyone knew about his squeamishness, and no one blamed him for it. They were quite busy enough with their own internal struggles around the foul-smelling pit.

  The nine men sat a little way from the excavation, near Danglard who remained standing. The doctor, who had been prowling round the pit, came to join them.

  ‘So, Dr Death,’ said Castreau, ‘what does all this tell you?’

  ‘It tells me that it was a woman, elderly, sixty or seventy perhaps. And she was killed by a wound to the throat, getting on for six months ago, I’d say. It’s going to be hard work identifying her, lads.’ (The pathologist often said ‘lads’, as if he were teaching a class.) ‘The clothes look like ordinary mass-produced stuff, they won’t help us. I don’t think we’ve got any personal items in the grave, either. And there’s not much hope the dental records will give us anything. She had perfect teeth, like you and me, no fillings, no dental work at all, as far as I can see. That’s what it tells me, lads. So you’re going to be hard put to it to find out who she is.’

  ‘She’s Clémence Valmont,’ Adamsberg said quietly. ‘Domiciled in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Aged sixty-four. Let me have another drop of cognac, Declerc. It’s not marvellous, you’re right, but it hits the spot.’

  ‘No!’ said Danglard, more vehemently than they would have expected, though without budging from his tree. ‘No! It can’t be! The doctor’s just told us that this woman’s been dead for months. And Clémence only left the rue des Patriarches in Paris a month ago, alive and well. So how can it be her?’

  ‘You didn’t listen,’ Adamsberg said. ‘I said Clémence Valmont, domiciled in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Not domiciled in the rue des Patriarches.’

  ‘So what do you mean?’ asked Castreau. ‘Are there two of them? Two people with the same name? Or twins?’

  Adamsberg shook his head, swirling the cognac round the bottom of the cup.

  ‘There was only ever one,’ he said. ‘Clémence Valmont who lived in Neuilly and who was murdered five or six months ago. That’s her,’ he said, jerking his chin at the grave. ‘And then there was someone else who had been living for two months at Mathilde Forestier’s house in the rue des Patriarches, under the name of Clémence Valmont. Someone who had killed Clémence Valmont.’

  ‘But who?’ asked Delille.

  Adamsberg glanced at Danglard before replying, as if to ap
ologise.

  ‘A man,’ he said. ‘The chalk circle man.’

  They had moved away from the open grave, so as to breathe more freely. Two men took it in turns to do the work. They were now waiting for the technical team to arrive, and the local commissaire from Nevers. Adamsberg had sat down with Castreau beside the van, and Danglard had gone for a walk.

  He walked around for half an hour, letting the sun warm his back and restore his lost strength. So the shrew-mouse had been the chalk circle man. The same man who had cut the throats in turn of Clémence Valmont, Madeleine Châtelain, Gérard Pontieux and finally his own wife. Inside his rat-like brain, he had worked out his infernal plan. First of all the circles. Plenty of circles. Everyone thought they were the work of a lunatic. A pathetic maniac who was exploited by a killer. Everything had happened the way he had planned. He had been arrested, and ended up confessing to his mania for doing circles. Just as he had planned. Then he had been released, and everyone had gone chasing after Clémence. The guilty party he had been grooming. Clémence, who had been dead for months, and whom they would have gone on searching for indefinitely, until they had to abandon the case as unsolved. Danglard frowned. Too many things seemed inexplicable.

  He rejoined the commissaire who was silently munching some bread with Castreau, both of them seated at the edge of the track. Castreau was trying to attract a hen blackbird with a few breadcrumbs.

  ‘Why is it,’ Castreau was saying, ‘that the females are always duller-looking than the males? Hen birds are all brown or beige, or some other boring colour. As if they couldn’t care less. But the males are red and green and gold. Why on earth should that be? It looks the wrong way round.’

  ‘What they say is,’ said Adamsberg, ‘that the males need to make all that fuss to attract a mate. They have to keep on inventing stuff. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, Castreau. All the time, inventing new stuff. Exhausting.’

  The hen blackbird flew off.

  ‘Well, the female’s got enough to do, inventing eggs and bringing them up, hasn’t she?’ said Delille.