by Fred Vargas
‘Still alive?’ Adamsberg asked, feeling himself oddly a stranger in his own kitchen, which had been invaded by this large woman and his previously unsuspected son aged twenty-eight.
Retancourt stood up, hands on hips. ‘I don’t know if he’ll survive the night. Story so far: it took over an hour to peel the string off his legs, it’s cut right down to the bone, he must have been pecking at it for days. But it didn’t break. I’ve disinfected the wounds, and you’ll have to change the dressing every morning. There’s some gauze in here,’ she went on, tapping a little box on the table. ‘And he’s been treated with flea powder, should take care of that problem.’
‘Thanks, Retancourt. Did the young lad from forensics take the string?’
‘Yes, after a bit of fuss, because the lab isn’t paid to analyse string from pigeons. This one’s a male by the way. Voisenet identified it.’
Lieutenant Voisenet had missed his vocation as a zoologist, because his father had high-handedly decided he should join the police. Voisenet was really a specialist on fish, saltwater, and especially freshwater, and ichthyological journals were always strewn around his desk. But he knew a lot about other fauna, from insects to bats, by way of gnus, and his scientific interests sometimes distracted him from his duties. The chief superintendent, Divisionnaire Brézillon, who was well aware of this, had sent him a warning, as he already had to Mercadet, who suffered from narcolepsy. But then, Adamsberg wondered, who in his squad didn’t have some peculiarity? Apart from Retancourt, but then her capacities and energy were also a major deviation from the norm.
After she had left, Zerk stayed standing, arms dangling, and staring at the door.
‘Impressive, isn’t she?’ said Adamsberg. ‘It gets everyone that way the first time they meet her. And every other time as well.’
‘She’s really, really beautiful,’ said Zerk.
Adamsberg looked at his son in surprise, for beauty wasn’t the first thing that came to mind on meeting Violette Retancourt. Or grace, subtlety or indeed affability. In every way she was the opposite of the charming and fragile delicacy of her first name. Although she had fine features, they were framed by broad cheeks and powerful jaws, mounted on a neck like a bull’s.
‘If you say so,’ Adamsberg agreed, not wishing to argue about the tastes of this young man he didn’t really know yet.
He wasn’t even sure about his son’s level of intelligence. High? Low? One thing reassured the commissaire. Most people, including himself, were still undecided about his own level of intelligence. He didn’t query his own intellectual capacity, so why start worrying about Zerk’s? Veyrenc had assured him that the young man was talented, but Adamsberg had yet to discover at what.
* * *
‘The Curious Army. Mean anything to you?’ asked Adamsberg, as he carefully placed the basket holding the pigeon on the sideboard.
‘The what?’ said Zerk, who was laying the table, putting forks on the right, knives on the left, just like his father.
‘Never mind. We’ll ask Danglard. It’s like I told your little brother when he was seven months old. And I’d have told you the same, if I’d known you at that age. There are three rules you have to remember, Zerk, and you’ll always get by. When you can’t find your way through to the end of something, ask Veyrenc. When you can’t manage to do something, ask Retancourt. And when you don’t know something, ask Danglard. Just bear those three things in mind. But Danglard is going to be very grumpy tonight, so I don’t know if he’ll tell us. Veyrenc’s rejoining the squad and he won’t like that. Danglard is an exotic plant and like all rare objects he’s fragile.’
Adamsberg called his oldest deputy while Zerk was serving up dinner. Steamed tuna with courgettes, tomatoes and rice, followed by fruit. Zerk had asked if he could stay with his new father for a while, and the agreement was that he would look after the evening meal. It was an undemanding arrangement, since Adamsberg was fairly indifferent to what he ate and could have gone on forever swallowing identical platefuls of pasta, just as he always dressed in an identical manner, wearing a black canvas jacket and trousers, whatever the weather.
‘Does Danglard really know everything?’ the young man asked, frowning in a way that brought his eyebrows together: thick, like his father’s, they made a sort of thatch over his vague expression.
‘No, there are plenty of things he doesn’t know. He has no idea how to find a woman, although, just now, he’s had this lady friend for two months, which is an exceptional event. He can’t divine water, but he’s good at sniffing out white wine. He can’t control his anxiety or forget the mass of questions that he keeps circling around, like a rat in a maze. He’s no good at running, he doesn’t know how to sit and watch the rain fall or the river flow, he has no idea how to ignore the cares of life and, worse still, he manufactures them ahead of time so that they won’t take him by surprise. But he knows absolutely everything that doesn’t look useful at first sight. All the libraries in the world have found their way inside Danglard’s head and there’s still plenty of room. It’s something colossal, unprecedented, and I can’t describe it to you.’
‘But what’s the point, if it isn’t useful at first sight?’
‘Well, obviously, it does become useful at second or sixth sight.’
‘OK,’ said Zerk, apparently satisfied with the answer. ‘I don’t know what I know. What do you think I know?’
‘Same as me?’
‘And what’s that?’
‘No idea, Zerk.’
Adamsberg raised a hand to indicate that he had finally got through to Danglard.
‘Danglard? Everyone asleep at your place now? Can you pop over here?’
‘If it’s for that pigeon, forget it. It’s covered in fleas and I have very bad memories of fleas. Plus I don’t like their expression under the microscope.’
Zerk consulted his father’s two watches to find out the time. Violette had ordered him to give the pigeon something to eat and drink every hour. He soaked a few fragments of biscotte, filled the water dropper, including the drop of tonic, and set about his task. The bird’s eyes were closed but it accepted the food the young man put into its beak. Zerk lifted the pigeon up gently as Violette had shown him. This woman had given him a shock. He would never have imagined that such a creature could exist. He could still see her large hands deftly dealing with the pigeon, and the blonde curls falling on the golden feathery down that covered her strong neck, as she lean over the table.
‘Zerk’s taking care of the pigeon. Anyway, it doesn’t have fleas any more, Retancourt’s sorted it.’
‘So, what do you want?’
‘Something’s bothering me, Danglard. That little woman in the flowery overall who was in the office today, did you notice her?’
‘I suppose so. Strangely inconsistent, physically evanescent. If you blew on her she’d fly away like the achenes of a dandelion clock.’
‘The what, Danglard?’
‘You know, dandelion seeds, with fluffy parachutes. Didn’t you blow on them when you were little?’
‘Yes of course, everyone does, but I didn’t know they were called achenes.’ ‘Well, they are.’
‘Anyway, apart from her fluffy parachute, this woman was paralysed with fear.’
‘Didn’t notice that.’
‘Yes, she was, Danglard. Pure terror, terror from deep inside some well of horror.’
‘Did she tell you why?’
‘It was as if she wasn’t allowed to say. On pain of death perhaps. But she whispered something to me. Her daughter had seen the Curious Army go past. Do you know what she meant?’
‘No.’
Adamsberg was bitterly disappointed, almost humiliated, as if he had just carried out a failed experiment in front of his son, and not lived up to the promise he had just made. Meeting Zerk’s anxious expression, he signalled to him that the demonstration wasn’t over yet.
‘Veyrenc seemed to know something about it,’ Adamsberg went on. ‘He sugges
ted I consult you.’
‘Oh, he did, did he?’ said Danglard more sharply, as the name of Veyrenc seemed to operate on him like the buzzing of a hornet. ‘And what did he hear her say, exactly?’
‘That her daughter saw this Curious Army go past in the night, and among this band of people, the daughter – Lina, her name is – saw this hunter and three other men. And since then the hunter has been missing for over a week, and the little woman thinks he’s dead.’
‘Where? Where did she see this?’
‘On some road near where they live, somewhere near Ordebec, in Normandy.’
‘Ah,’ said Danglard, now really animated, as always when his knowledge was requested, and as ever when he could plunge into his vast reservoir of information and bask in it. ‘Ah. You mean the Furious Army, not the Curious Army.’
‘Sorry. Furious, yes.’
‘That was what she said? Hellequin’s Horde?’
‘Yes, she did say some name like that.’
‘The Ghost Riders? The Great Hunt?’
‘Yes, that too,’ said Adamsberg with a triumphant wink at Zerk, like someone who has just managed to land a huge swordfish.
‘And this Lina, she saw the hunter with this troop?’
‘Correct. He was shrieking, apparently. So were the others. The group was apparently alarming in some way, the little woman with the dandelion parachute seems to think these men are under threat.’
‘Alarming,’ said Danglard, allowing himself a brief laugh. ‘That’s hardly the word for it, commissaire.’
‘That was what Veyrenc said too. That this wretched band was somehow indicating some kind of disaster.’
Adamsberg had mentioned Veyrenc once more deliberately, not with the intention of wounding Danglard, but to try and get him used to the idea that the lieutenant with the ginger stripes in his hair would be back in the squad, to vaccinate him so to speak, by injecting Veyrenc’s name in gentle repeated doses into his conversation.
‘Just some kind of internal disaster,’ said Danglard, more evenly. ‘Nothing urgent.’
‘Veyrenc couldn’t tell me anything else. Come round and have a drink, Zerk’s been laying in stocks for you.’
Danglard didn’t like to agree immediately to Adamsberg’s summonses, quite simply because he always accepted, and this lack of willpower humiliated him. He put up some muttered resistance for a few minutes, while Adamsberg, well used to the commandant’s reluctance, went on insisting.
‘Off you go, son,’ said Adamsberg, putting the phone down. ‘Go and get some white wine from the corner shop. Don’t mess about, get the best, we can’t serve any old plonk to Danglard.’
‘Can I have a drink with you?’ Zerk asked.
Adamsberg looked at his son without knowing what to say. Zerk hardly knew him, he was twenty-eight years old, he didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission, least of all Adamsberg’s.
‘Of course,’ he said automatically. ‘As long as you don’t knock it back like Danglard,’ he added, and the paternalism of this remark surprised him. ‘There’s some money on the sideboard.’
They both looked across at the basket. A maxi-punnet for strawberries, which Zerk had emptied to make a cosy bed for the pigeon.
‘How does he seem?’ Adamsberg asked.
‘He’s shivering, but he’s alive,’ his son replied cautiously.
Surreptitiously, the young man stroked the bird’s feathers with a finger on his way out. Well, he’s good at that, at least, thought Adamsberg, watching his son go, he’s got a talent for stroking birds, even one as ordinary, dirty and unprepossessing as this one.
V
‘It’ll go quickly,’ said Danglard, and Adamsberg didn’t know at first whether he was talking about the Furious Army or the wine, since his son had brought only one bottle back from the shop.
Adamsberg took a cigarette from Zerk’s packet, a gesture which irresistibly reminded him of how they had first met, during a particularly gruesome case. Since that time, he had been smoking again, usually Zerk’s cigarettes. Danglard was attacking his first glass.
‘I presume the dandelion woman didn’t want to talk to the capitaine of gendarmes in Ordebec?’
‘She refuses to consider it.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me, he wouldn’t appreciate it. And you, commissaire, you’ll be able to forget it all afterwards too. Do we know anything about this hunter who’s disappeared?’
‘He’s a brutal hunter of game, and worse, he mostly kills females and young animals. The local hunting league has expelled him, and nobody wants to go out shooting with him now.’
‘Bad guy then? Violent? A killer?’ asked Danglard, taking a mouthful of wine.
‘Looks like it.’
‘That fits. This Lina, she lives in Ordebec then?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Have you really never heard of this little place, Ordebec? A great composer lived there for a while.’
‘That’s irrelevant, commandant.’
‘But at least it’s a positive note. The rest is more disquieting. This army. Did it go past on the Chemin de Bonneval?’
‘Yes, that was the name she mentioned,’ Adamsberg replied in surprise. ‘Did you hear her say that?’
‘No, but it’s a well-known grimweld, it goes through the Forest of Alance. You can be sure anyone who lives in Ordebec will be well aware of it, and that they often talk about this story, even if they’d prefer to forget it.’
‘I don’t know what that means, Danglard: grimweld.’
‘It’s the name they give a road where Hellequin’s Horde goes past – the Furious Army if you prefer, or they sometimes call it the Great Hunt, or the Ghost Riders. Only a very few men or women have ever seen it. One man is quite well known. He saw it going to Bonneval, like your Lina. Gauchelin, his name was, a priest.’
Danglard swallowed another two large mouthfuls of wine and smiled. Adamsberg tapped his cigarette ash into the cold fireplace and waited. The slightly provocative smile creasing the commandant’s jowly cheeks was not a good sign, except that it meant Danglard was now completely at ease.
‘It happened in early January in the year 1091. Good choice of wine, Armel, but there won’t be enough for three of us.’
‘In the year what?’ said Zerk, moving his stool closer to the fireplace and preparing, elbows on knees, and glass in hand, to pay close attention to the commandant.
‘The end of the eleventh century. Five years before the First Crusade.’
‘Oh, for god’s sake,’ said Adamsberg to himself, suddenly having the unpleasant impression that this little woman from Ordebec, fragile dandelion clock or not, had been leading him on a wild goose chase.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Danglard. ‘A lot of fuss about nothing, commissaire. But you do still want to know why she was afraid, don’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘In that case, you ought to know the story about Gauchelin. But we’ll need another bottle,’ he repeated. ‘There are three of us.’
Zerk jumped up. ‘I’ll go back to the shop,’ he said.
Before he went out, Adamsberg saw him pass a finger lightly over the pigeon’s feathers. And Adamsberg repeated mechanically, like a father: ‘There’s some money on the sideboard.’
Seven minutes later, Danglard, reassured by the presence of a second bottle, poured himself another glass, and began to tell Gauchelin’s story, then broke off, frowning up at the low ceiling.
‘But maybe it would be clearer if I told you about Hélinand de Froidmond, from the early thirteenth century,’ he wondered. ‘Give me a minute to remember it, it’s not a text I look at every day.’
‘Whatever you like,’ said Adamsberg, now completely lost. Since learning that they were off into the mists of the Middle Ages, abandoning Michel Herbier to his fate, the story of the little woman and her panic now seemed of little consequence to him.
He stood up, poured himself a little wine, and took a look at the pigeon. The Furious Army didn’t
concern him, and he had obviously been mistaken about the evanescent Madame Vendermot. She didn’t need his help. She was simply an inoffensive woman with mental problems, who was afraid bookshelves might fall on her head, even those of the eleventh century.
‘It was his uncle Hellebaud who told the tale,’ Danglard went on, now addressing the young man only.
‘Hélinand de Froidmond’s uncle?’ asked Zerk, concentrating hard.
‘Precisely, his paternal uncle. And this was what he said: “When towards midday we approached this forest, my servant, who was ahead of me, riding fast to make the lodgings ready for my arrival, heard a great tumult in the woods, like the whinnying of many horses, the clash of arms and the shouts of men on the attack. He and his horse being terrified, he came back towards me, and when I asked him why he had turned round, he said, My horse would by no means go forward even when I whipped or spurred him, and I was so frightened myself, I was unable to move. I have heard and seen the most astounding things.’”
Danglard held out his glass towards the young man.
‘Armel,’ he said – since Danglard absolutely refused to call the young man by his nickname, Zerk, and regularly criticised Adamsberg for using it – ‘Armel, please refill my glass and I’ll tell you what this young woman Lina saw. Then you’ll know why she suffers these night terrors.’
Zerk poured the wine, with the eagerness of a child who’s afraid he won’t hear the end of the story, and sat back down again alongside Danglard. He had grown up without a father, nobody had ever told him stories. His mother had worked nights as a cleaner in a fish-gutting factory.
‘Thanks, Armel. So the servant went on: “The forest is full of dead souls and demons. I heard them talking and shouting: We have caught the Provost of Arques, and now we shall capture the Archbishop of Reims. And I replied, Let us make the sign of the cross on our foreheads and go forward in safety.’”