by Fred Vargas
‘Yes,’ said the man, sighing casually as he filled in a few blanks in his crossword. ‘The doctor’d been round the day before, he told me she could last months. Dozens of Tuesdays having to eat sausage rolls for supper, endless recriminations, thousands of little wipes with a duster. At eighty-six, a man’s got the right to live a little. There are nights like that. When a man just gets up and takes some action.’
Tuilot got up and opened the shutters in the dining room, letting in the stifling heat of these early-August days.
‘She didn’t like having the windows open either. But I won’t say all that, commissaire. I’ll say I killed her to put an end to her suffering. With breadcrumbs, because she liked that, a final little treat. I’ve got it all worked out in here,’ he said, tapping his forehead. ‘There’s no evidence I didn’t do it as a mercy killing. Eh? An act of kindness. I’ll be acquitted, and in a couple of months, I’ll be back here, I’ll be able to put my glass on the table without a coaster and the three of us will be happy together, Toni, Marie and me.’
‘Yes, I can believe it,’ said Adamsberg, getting up quietly. ‘But it might turn out, Monsieur Tuilot, that you won’t dare put your glass down directly on the tabletop. You’ll fetch a coaster. And you’ll clean up the breadcrumbs.’
‘Why would I do that?’
Adamsberg shrugged. ‘Just that I’ve seen cases like this. It’s often the way.’
‘Don’t you worry about me, monsieur. I’m cunning.’
‘That’s very true, Monsieur Tuilot.’
* * *
Outside, the heat was forcing people to walk in the shade, hugging the walls and breathing hard. Adamsberg decided to walk on the empty pavement exposed to the sun and to head south. A long hike to rid himself of the contented and, yes, cunning face of the crossword champion. Who might, one Tuesday soon, be buying sausage rolls for his supper.
II
He was back at headquarters an hour and a half later, his black T-shirt dripping with sweat and his thoughts back in order. It was rare for an impression, good or bad, to haunt Adamsberg’s mind for very long. So much so that you wondered if he had a mind at all, as his mother had often remarked. He dictated his report for the colleague with the flu, and went to collect any messages from reception. Brigadier Gardon, who was manning the switchboard, was bending his head low to catch the breeze from a little electric fan on the floor. His fine hair was floating in the cool draught, as if under a hairdryer.
‘Lieutenant Veyrenc is waiting for you in the cafe, commissaire,’ he said without moving.
‘In the cafe or the brasserie?’
‘The cafe, the Dice Shaker.’
‘Veyrenc isn’t a lieutenant any more, Gardon. We won’t know till this evening whether he’s going to rejoin the force.’
Adamsberg looked for a moment at Gardon, wondering whether Gardon had a mind and, if so, what he kept in it.
* * *
He sat down at Veyrenc’s table and the two men greeted each other with warm smiles and a long handshake. The memory of Veyrenc’s providential appearance in Serbia during his last case still sent a shiver down Adamsberg’s spine. He ordered a salad, and ate it slowly while telling at some length the story of Madame Tuilot, Lucette; Monsieur Tuilot, Julien; Toni; Marie; their love, the half-eaten loaf, the pedal bin, the closed shutters and the sausage rolls on Tuesdays. Now and then he glanced at the cafe window. Tuilot, Lucette, would surely have made a better job of cleaning it.
Veyrenc ordered two coffees from the proprietor, a large man whose normally grumpy mood got worse in the heat. His wife, a silent little Corsican, went to and fro delivering the food like a dark fairy.
‘One day,’ said Adamsberg, gesturing towards her, ‘she’ll choke him with a couple of handfuls of bread.’
‘Quite possibly,’ Veyrenc agreed.
‘She’s still waiting on the pavement,’ said Adamsberg, looking out at the street again. ‘She’s been there getting on for an hour in this blazing sun. She doesn’t know what to do, she hasn’t decided.’
Veyrenc followed Adamsberg’s gaze, and examined the thin little woman, neatly dressed in a flowered overall, the kind you don’t find in Paris shops.
‘You can’t be sure she wants to see you. She’s not standing by the offices, she’s coming and going about ten metres away. She must be waiting for someone who hasn’t turned up.’
‘No, it’s for me, Louis, I’m sure of it. Who’d arrange a rendezvous in this street? She looks scared. That’s what bothers me.’
‘That’s because she’s not from Paris.’
‘Maybe it’s the first time she’s come here. So she must have some serious problem. But that doesn’t help us with yours, Veyrenc. You’ve had months to paddle your feet in the stream and think, and you still haven’t decided.’
‘You could extend the deadline.’
‘I’ve already done that once. You have to sign, or not sign, by six o’clock tonight. You have to decide if you’re going to be a cop again. Four and a half hours,’ said Adamsberg consulting his watch, or rather the two watches he always wore for reasons no one could quite fathom.
‘Plenty of time,’ said Veyrenc, stirring his coffee.
Commissaire Adamsberg and ex-Lieutenant Louis Veyrenc de Bilhc, from two neighbouring villages in the Pyrenees, had in common a sort of detached tranquillity, which was rather disconcerting. In Adamsberg, it came across as a rather shocking air of inattention and indifference. In Veyrenc, this detachment generated unexplained absences, a stubborn obstinacy, sometimes silent and massive, sometimes punctuated by outbreaks of rage. ‘It’s the old mountain’s fault,’ Adamsberg would say, without looking for further justification. ‘The old mountain was never going to produce frivolous, light-hearted grasses, like the ones that wave in the wind on rolling meadows.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Adamsberg brusquely, paying the bill, ‘the little woman looks like she’s leaving. See, she’s discouraged, hesitation is winning out.’
‘I’m hesitating too,’ said Veyrenc, swallowing the rest of his coffee in a gulp, ‘but you’re not helping me.’
‘No.’
‘OK. Thus the waverer wanders, amid thickets of doubt / With no one to help him find the way to get out.’
‘People have always made their minds up before they take a decision. From the start. So there’s no point asking advice. Except that I can tell you your verses irritate Commandant Danglard. He doesn’t like to see poetry massacred.’
Adamsberg bade farewell to the cafe proprietor with a discreet wave. No point saying anything, the big man didn’t like it, or rather he didn’t like being ‘nice’. He was like his cafe, lacking in comfort, aggressively proletarian and almost hostile to his customers. There was near-open warfare between this proud little bistro and the opulent brasserie across the road. The more the Brasserie des Philosophes accentuated its bourgeois pretensions, the more the Dice Shaker exaggerated the poverty of its decor, both of them engaged in a ruthless class struggle. ‘One day,’ Danglard would mutter, ‘there’s going to be a death.’ Not counting the little Corsican woman who might stuff bread down her husband’s throat.
* * *
Leaving the cafe, Adamsberg blew out his cheeks as the burning heat hit him, and cautiously approached the little woman who was still standing a few steps away from the squad’s offices. There was a pigeon in front of the door to the building, and he thought that if he made the pigeon fly away as he walked past, the woman would fly away too, in imitation. As if she were light and airy and might vanish like a straw in the wind. Seen from close up, she looked about sixty-five. She had taken the trouble to visit the hairdresser before coming to the capital: there were blonde streaks in her grey hair. When Adamsberg spoke to her, the pigeon didn’t budge and the woman turned a frightened face towards him. Adamsberg spoke slowly, asking her if she needed any help.
‘No, thank you,’ the woman said, dropping her gaze.
‘You don’t want to go inside?’ asked Adams
berg, pointing to the old building where the Serious Crime Squad worked. ‘To speak to a policeman or something? Because in this street there isn’t a whole lot else to do.’
‘But if the police don’t listen to you? Then there’s no point going to them,’ she said, taking a few steps back. ‘They don’t believe you, you know, the police.’
‘But that’s where you were going? To this station?’
The woman lowered her eyelashes; they were almost transparent.
‘Is this the first time you’ve been in Paris?’
‘Oh goodness, yes. And I have to get back by tonight, they mustn’t find out.’
‘So you did come to see a policeman?’
‘Yes. Well, maybe.’
‘I’m a policeman. I work in there.’
The woman looked at Adamsberg’s casual clothing and seemed disappointed or sceptical.
‘So you must know them, the people in there?’
‘Yes.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’
The woman opened a large, shabby, brown leather handbag, and took out a piece of paper which she carefully unfolded.
“‘Monsieur le Commissaire Adamsberg”,’ she read out painstakingly. ‘You know him?’
‘Yes. Have you come a long way to see him?’
‘From Ordebec,’ she replied, as if the confession cost her something.
‘I don’t know where that is.’
‘Near Lisieux.’
Ah, Normandy, thought Adamsberg, that could explain her reluctance to talk. He had met several Normans in his time, taciturn people who had taken days to loosen up. As if saying a few words were the equivalent of giving away a gold sovereign, without feeling it was deserved. Adamsberg started walking, encouraging the woman to accompany him.
‘There are plenty of police stations in Lisieux,’ he said. ‘And even in Ordebec, I dare say. You have your local gendarmes, don’t you?’
‘They wouldn’t listen to me. But the curate in Lisieux knows the priest in Mesnil-Beauchamp and he said this commissaire here might listen to me. It cost a lot of money to come.’
‘Is this about something serious?’
‘Yes, of course it’s serious.’
‘A murder?’ Adamsberg pressed.
‘Maybe. Or maybe not. People are going to die. I ought to tell the police, shouldn’t I?’
‘People are going to die? Have they had death threats?’
This man reassured her a little. Paris was a scary place and her decision to come even more so. Leaving stealthily, lying to her children. What if the train didn’t get her back in time? What if she missed the bus? This policeman had a soft voice, almost as if he were singing. Certainly not anyone from her area. No, he was a little man from southern France, with his dark complexion and drawn features. She would have told him the whole story, but the priest had made it very clear. She should speak to Commissaire Adamsberg and nobody else. And the priest wasn’t just anyone, he was a cousin of the former chief prosecutor in Rouen who knew a lot about the police. He had only given her Adamsberg’s name reluctantly, advising her preferably not to say anything, and looking as if he didn’t expect her to make the trip. But she couldn’t stay back home when these things were happening. What if any harm came to her children?
‘I can only talk to the commissaire.’
‘I am the commissaire.’
The little woman seemed on the point of arguing, frail though she looked.
‘Why didn’t you say so right away, then?’
‘Well, I don’t know who you are either.’
‘Oh, no. You tell someone your name and next thing everyone can repeat it.’
‘What does that matter?’
‘It would bring trouble. Nobody must know.’
A busybody, a troublemaker, Adamsberg thought. Who would end up one day with bread stuffed down her throat. But a troublemaker who was scared stiff about something precise, which still preoccupied him. People are going to die.
They had turned back and were now walking towards the station.
‘I only wanted to help you. I’d been watching you for a while.’
‘And that man over there? He’s with you? Was he watching me too?’
‘Which man?’
‘The one with funny hair, orange stripes in it, is he with you?’
Adamsberg looked up and saw Veyrenc a few metres away, leaning against the doorway of the building. He hadn’t gone in, but was waiting, alongside the pigeon, which hadn’t moved either.
‘Ah,’ said Adamsberg, ‘that man, when he was a kid someone attacked him with a knife, and where he had scars, the hair grew back ginger like that. I advise you not to mention it.’
‘I didn’t mean any harm. I’m not good with words. I hardly ever say anything in Ordebec.’
‘Never mind, no harm done.’
‘But my children talk a lot.’
‘Right.’
‘What the devil’s the matter with the pigeon anyway?’ muttered Adamsberg to himself. ‘Why doesn’t it fly away?’
* * *
Weary of the little woman’s indecision, Adamsberg left her and headed towards the pigeon, which was standing still, while Veyrenc came to meet him with his heavy tread. Fine, Veyrenc could take care of this woman, if it was worth bothering about. He could handle it perfectly well. Veyrenc’s solid face was convincing, persuasive, and had the great advantage of a charming smile that made his top lip lift to the side. An advantage Adamsberg had once hated, and which had pitted them against each other as fierce rivals. Each of them was now trying to efface the last traces of their enmity. As Adamsberg lifted the pigeon up, cupped in his hands, Veyrenc came unhurriedly towards him, followed by the transparent little woman, who was breathing fast. In fact she was so slight that Adamsberg might not have noticed her at all if it weren’t for the flowered overall that gave her body a shape. Perhaps she would be completely invisible if it weren’t for the overall.
‘Some nasty little kid has tied its feet together,’ he said to Veyrenc, looking at the bird, which was filthy.
‘Do you look after pigeons too?’ asked the woman without a trace of irony. ‘I’ve seen a whole lot of pigeons here, it’s not hygienic -’
‘Well, this one,’ Adamsberg interrupted her, ‘isn’t a whole lot, it’s just the one, one solitary pigeon. Makes all the difference.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said the woman.
So, she was understanding and, after all, doing no harm. Perhaps he was wrong and she wouldn’t end up choked to death with bread. Perhaps she wasn’t a troublemaker, but really had something serious to report.
‘Do you like pigeons?’ she asked him now. Adamsberg looked up absent-mindedly.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I don’t like some sadistic kid tying their feet together either.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘I don’t know if this kind of thing goes on where you live, but in Paris it happens. They catch a bird, tie its feet together with a bit of string. Then it can only take tiny steps and can’t fly at all. It dies slowly from hunger and thirst. Just a game. But I hate it, and I intend to catch the kid who thought it was funny.’
* * *
Adamsberg went in through the large entrance to the squad’s offices, leaving the woman and Veyrenc outside on the pavement. The woman was gazing spellbound at Veyrenc’s hair, with its conspicuous ginger stripes.
‘Will he really try to take care of that bird?’ she asked, puzzled. ‘It’s too late, you know. Your commissaire had fleas jumping all over his arms. That means the pigeon hasn’t got the strength to look after itself any more.’
Adamsberg took the bird to the squad’s giantess, Lieutenant Violette Retancourt, whom he trusted blindly to care for it. If Retancourt couldn’t save the pigeon, nobody could. Retancourt, an impressively tall and well-built woman, pulled a face: not a good sign. The bird was in a bad way. The skin of its feet had been pierced by its efforts to peck off the string, which was now embedd
ed in its flesh. It was hungry and dehydrated, but she finally said she’d see what she could do. Adamsberg nodded, pinching his lips together, as he did whenever he encountered cruelty. Which that bit of string represented.
Following Veyrenc in, the little woman walked past the imposing Violette Retancourt with instinctive deference. The lieutenant was deftly wrapping the pigeon in a damp cloth. She’d tackle its claws later, she told Veyrenc, to try and get the string off. Held in her large hands, the pigeon did not attempt to move. It allowed her to handle it, as anyone would, anxious but impressed.
The little woman, seeming somewhat calmer, sat down in Adamsberg’s office. She was so thin that she took up only half a chair. Veyrenc stood in a corner of the room, examining the surroundings that had once been so familiar to him. He had three and a half hours in which to make up his mind. It was, according to Adamsberg, already made up, but Veyrenc didn’t know that yet. As he had walked through the large communal office, he had met the hostile gaze of Commandant Danglard, who was rummaging through a filing cabinet. It wasn’t only Veyrenc’s verses that Danglard disliked, it was the man himself.
III
The woman had finally agreed to give her name and Adamsberg was noting it down on a scrap of paper – a sign of negligence that worried her. Perhaps this commissaire really had no intention of listening to her.
‘Valentine Vendermot, with an o and a t,’ he repeated, since he always had difficulty with new words, especially proper names. ‘And you’re from Ardebec?’
‘Ordebec. It’s in the Calvados.’
‘And you have children?’
‘Four. Three sons and a daughter. I’m a widow.’
‘So what happened, Madame Vendermot?’
The woman fished about again in her big bag and took out a local newspaper. She unfolded it, with slightly trembling hands, and put it on the table.
‘It’s this man. He’s disappeared.’
‘And what’s his name?’
‘Michel Herbier.’
‘A friend of yours? A relative?’
‘No, no. Quite the opposite.’
‘What do you mean?’