The Ghost Riders of Ordebec: A Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Why do you call him the torturer?’

  Émeri stood up and pulled a face.

  ‘Go and see them. But first,’ he said with a smile, ‘go along the Chemin de Bonneval and pick up a bit of earth to put in your pocket. They say hereabouts that’ll protect you from Lina’s magic powers. Don’t forget that girl is the door between the living and the dead. With a handful of earth, you’ll be all right. But it’s complicated too, don’t get closer than a metre away, because they say she can smell it if you have earth from that path about you. And she doesn’t like it.’

  As he walked back to the car with Danglard, Adamsberg put his hand over his trouser pocket, and wondered what spirit had inspired him, long before all this, to pick up a bit of earth from Bonneval. And why he had brought it with him.

  XXII

  Adamsberg was waiting outside the office of the local solicitors – Deschamps and Poulain – in one of Ordebec’s steep streets. It seemed to him that wherever you stood on the upper levels of the little town, you could see cattle standing like statues under the apple trees. Lina would be out to meet him any minute, so he wouldn’t have time to see any of them move. Perhaps it would be a better strategy to fix his eyes on just one, instead of sweeping the whole field.

  He hadn’t wanted to rush things by summoning Lina Vendermot to the gendarmerie, so he had invited her ‘to the Blue Boar’, where you could have a quiet conversation under the low beams. On the phone, her voice had sounded warm, with no sign of either fear or embarrassment. By fixing his eyes on a single cow, Adamsberg was trying to eliminate his desire to view Lina’s magnificent bosom, inspired by Blériot’s spontaneous praise. He was also trying to put out of his mind the idea that if her sex life was as free as Émeri had said, it might be easy to go to bed with her. The Ordebec team, entirely composed of men, was a bit bleak, as far as he was concerned. But nobody would appreciate it if he slept with a woman at the top of the suspect list.

  His second mobile indicated a text and he went into the shade to look at it. Retancourt, at last. The idea of Retancourt plunging alone into the deep chasm of the Clermont-Brasseur household had caused him some anguish the previous night, before he fell asleep in the hollow of his soft mattress. There were so many sharks in the ocean depths. Retancourt had done some deep-sea diving at one time and she had been willing to touch the scaly skin of some of them. But human sharks were more vicious than the fishy kind. The text ran as follows: Night of fire Saviours 1 + 2 + father gala Steel Fed. Drink taken. Sv 2 drove Merc + called cops. SV 1 left early own car. Told later. Checked both suits: OK, no smell petrol + not sent cleaners. Sv 1 had 1 suit cleaned but not worn same night. Photos attached note suits + ID photos bros. Nasty to staff.

  Adamsberg looked at the photos she attached: Christian, Saviour 1, was wearing a navy suit with a fine stripe, while Christophe, Saviour 2, was wearing a navy blazer, as if he owned a yacht. Which he probably did anyway. Sharks might well own yachts so that they could rest after roaming the seas and gobbling up a few squid. Another shot showed a three-quarter view of Christian looking elegant, this time with shorter hair, and one of his brother looking podgy and graceless.

  * * *

  Maître Deschamps came out of his office before his assistant, and looked carefully right and left before crossing the narrow street and heading straight for Adamsberg: he walked hurriedly and mincingly, which fitted the way his voice had sounded on the phone that morning.

  ‘Commissaire Adamsberg,’ said the lawyer, shaking hands, ‘you’ve come to give us a hand, I see. That reassures me, yes, indeed. I’ve been very worried about Caroline.’

  ‘Caroline?’

  ‘Lina, if you prefer. In the office she’s Caroline.’

  ‘And is Lina worried?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘If she is, she’s trying not to show it. Naturally the whole story must have upset her a bit, but I don’t think she’s entirely grasped the consequences it might have for herself and her family. They could be ostracised by the townspeople, or some vengeance could be planned, or god knows what. It’s very worrying. It seems you can work miracles, since you got Léone to speak yesterday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would it be breaking confidence to tell me what she said?’

  ‘Not at all. She said “Ello”, “Fleg” and “Sugar”.’

  ‘Does that help you?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  It seemed to Adamsberg that the little solicitor was relieved, perhaps because Léo hadn’t mentioned Lina.

  ‘Do you think she will say any more?’

  ‘The doctor doesn’t think she’ll survive. Is this Lina?’ asked Adamsberg, as he saw the office door open again.

  ‘Yes. Treat her gently, please. She’s had a hard life, one and a half wage packets isn’t much for a family of five, with the mother’s little pension. It’s the devil’s own job to keep going – sorry, not what I meant to say, don’t misinterpret it please!’ said the solicitor, before moving off quickly, as if he were running away.

  Adamsberg shook hands with Lina.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ he said formally.

  Lina wasn’t a classical beauty, far from it. Round-shouldered and slightly buck-toothed, she was running a little to fat, and her heavy bust was out of proportion to her slim legs. But the brigadier was right, her breasts were indeed good enough to eat, like the rest of her: lovely smooth skin, round arms, a radiant face, a little broad perhaps, high cheekbones with a rosy glow, very Norman, and a dusting of freckles like specks of gold.

  ‘I’ve never heard of the Blue Boar,’ Lina was now saying.

  ‘Opposite the flower market, just round the corner. Delicious food and not dear.’

  ‘Opposite the flower market, that’s the Running Boar.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you’re right. Running.’

  ‘Not Blue.’

  ‘No, not Blue.’

  As he accompanied her through the narrow streets, Adamsberg realised that his desire to eat her was stronger than the wish to go to bed with her. This woman literally excited his appetite, suddenly reminding him of a kind of cake filled with honey, known as a kouglof, which he had once eaten as a child, when staying with his aunt in Alsace. He chose a table near the window, wondering how he was going to conduct a proper interrogation with a warm slice of honey-coloured kouglof, the exact shade of Lina’s hair which curled over her shoulders. Shoulders that the commissaire couldn’t see, because Lina was wearing a long blue silk shawl, oddly for a warm summer day. Adamsberg hadn’t prepared his opening question, preferring to wait till he saw her and then improvise. And now that he was sitting opposite Lina, with her blonde radiance shining at him, he found it impossible to associate her with the black spectres of the ghostly Riders, or to imagine that she was the one who saw horrors and transmitted them. But that’s what she had done. They ordered their food, then both waited in silence, nibbling at pieces of bread. Adamsberg glanced across at her. Her face was still open and attentive, but she made no attempt to help him. He was a cop, she had unleashed a storm on Ordebec, he suspected her, she knew people thought she was mad, and those were the simple facts of the situation. He swung round in his seat and looked over at the bar.

  ‘Looks a bit like rain,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes, threatening from the west. Might rain tonight.’

  ‘Or this evening. So. Mademoiselle Vendermot, it all started with you.’

  ‘Call me Lina.’

  ‘It all started with you, Lina. Not the rain, but the storm raging in Ordebec. And nobody knows where this storm will end, how many victims it will cause, or if it will turn against you.’

  ‘Nothing started with me,’ said Lina, gathering her shawl round her shoulders. ‘It all started with Lord Hellequin and his horde. The Riders went past and I saw them. What am I supposed to do about it? There were four people in the procession, there’ll be four deaths.’

  ‘But you told people about it.’

  ‘Anyone who sees the Ride
rs has to tell, you’ve got to. You don’t understand. Where are you from?’

  ‘From the south-west, Béarn.’

  ‘There you are, you really can’t understand. This is an army that gallops over the northern plains. The people who’ve been sighted with it might try to protect themselves.’

  ‘The ones who are “seized”, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right. That’s why you’ve got to tell. Not that they often manage to get away, but it does happen. Glayeux and Mortembot, now, they don’t deserve to live, but they still have a chance to escape and survive. They’ve got a right to that chance.’

  ‘Do you have any personal reason for disliking them?’

  Lina waited for their meal to arrive before replying. She was clearly hungry or at least wanted to eat, and eyed her food with an eager expression. Logical enough, Adamsberg thought, that such an edible woman should have a healthy appetite.

  ‘A personal reason, no,’ she said, attacking her food. ‘But everyone knows they both have blood on their hands. People try to avoid them, and it didn’t surprise me to see them among the Riders.’

  ‘Like Herbier?’

  ‘Herbier was a disgusting human being. He was always shooting things. But he had a screw loose as well. Glayeux and Mortembot aren’t like that. They killed because it suited them. Worse than Herbier, probably.’

  Adamsberg forced himself to eat more quickly than usual to keep up with the young woman. He didn’t want to find himself facing her with his plate half full.

  ‘But in order to see the Riders, people say you have to have a screw loose too. Or else to be lying.’

  ‘It’s up to you, if you think that. I see them, and I can’t help it. I see them on the path, I’m on the path, and my bedroom is three kilometres away.’

  Lina was using her fork to plunge slices of potato into a creamy sauce, devoting surprising energy and concentration to the task. Her eagerness was almost upsetting.

  ‘Or else it could be a vision,’ Adamsberg went on. ‘A vision, personal to you, into which you put people you don’t like. Herbier, Glayeux, Mortembot.’

  ‘I’ve seen doctors, you know,’ said Lina, savouring her mouthful. ‘They put me through a battery of tests at the hospital in Lisieux, physiological and psychiatric tests, two years’ worth. I was an interesting case, because of St Teresa of Lisieux, of course. You’re looking for some kind of reassuring explanation, but I’ve been there too. There isn’t one. They couldn’t find any lithium deficiency or anything else that makes you see the Virgin Mary here and there, or hear voices. They said I was perfectly well balanced, stable, and even that I seem to be a very reasonable person. And they let me go home without giving me any diagnosis.’

  ‘So what is the diagnosis, Lina? That these ghostly horsemen really exist, that they really come galloping along the Chemin de Bonneval, and that you really see them?’

  ‘I can’t tell you if they exist, commissaire. But I can tell you I’ve seen them. As far back as people can remember there’s always been someone here who sees the Riders of Ordebec go past. Perhaps there’s an ancient cloud round here, some mist, a disturbance, a memory still hanging in the air. And I just walked into it like walking into a fog bank.’

  ‘So what does he look like, this Lord Hellequin?’

  ‘Oh, very striking,’ Lina replied at once. ‘A grand majestic head, and he has long blond hair, kind of bedraggled, flowing to his shoulders, over his armour. But terrifying. Well,’ she added hesitantly and in a much lower voice, ‘it’s because his skin isn’t normal.’

  Lina interrupted herself, in order to clear her plate, well ahead of Adamsberg. Then she leaned back in her chair looking even more glowing and relaxed after eating her fill.

  ‘Enjoy the food?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘Fantastic,’ she replied sincerely. ‘I’ve never been here before. Can’t afford it.’

  ‘We’ll order some cheese and dessert,’ said Adamsberg, hoping that the young woman would reach a state of complete relaxation.

  ‘Finish your dish first,’ she said kindly. ‘You don’t eat fast, do you? And people say policemen do everything in a rush.’

  ‘I’m incapable of doing anything in a rush. Even when I run, I run slowly.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Lina was saying, ‘to prove I’m telling the truth, the first time I saw the Riders, nobody’d ever told me about them.’

  ‘But I hear that in Ordebec everyone knows about them, even without being told. Apparently people drink it in with their mothers’ milk.’

  ‘Not in our house. My parents always lived a bit away from everyone. I bet you’ve been told that people didn’t want to know my father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s quite true. When I told my mother what I’d seen – I was crying and screaming back then – she thought I was ill, nervous exhaustion, as they used to say in those days. She’d never heard of Hellequin and his Riders, nor had my father. And he used to come back late from hunting, by the Chemin de Bonneval. But everyone who knew about this legend, they took good care not to go down that path after nightfall. Even people who don’t believe it avoid going there.’

  ‘So when was the first time you saw the Riders?’

  ‘I was eleven. It was just two days after my father had been killed – his skull was split open with an axe. I’ll have some floating islands, with a lot of flaked almonds please,’ she said to the waitress.

  ‘An axe?’ said Adamsberg, somewhat stunned. ‘Was that how your father died?’

  ‘Yep, felled like a pig,’ said Lina and calmly mimed the action, bringing down the edge of her hand on the tabletop. ‘He was struck on the head and chest.’

  Adamsberg observed this lack of emotion and reflected that his honey kouglof was perhaps without a soft centre.

  ‘After that I had nightmares for ages, and the doctor gave me sedatives. Not because of my father being chopped in two, but because I was terrified of seeing those horsemen again. You have to realise they’re all rotten, decayed, like Lord Hellequin’s face. Decomposed,’ she added with a shudder. ‘They don’t have all their limbs, the men or the horses, they make this horrible noise, but the cries of the living creatures they take away with them, they’re even worse. Well. Luckily nothing happened after that for about eight years, and I thought I was out of it and it had just been, you know, some nervous thing when I was little. But then when I was nineteen, I saw them again. You do understand, don’t you, commissaire, this isn’t a nice story, it’s not one I’m making up to show off. It’s ghastly, it’s a burden, it’s my fate, and I even tried to kill myself twice. Then this psychiatrist from Caen, he managed to make me accept I’ve got to live with the Riders. They scare me and I don’t want to see them, but at least now they don’t stop me living my life more or less normally. Could I have a few more almonds please?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Adamsberg, raising his hand to call the waitress over.

  ‘It’s not going to cost too much?’

  ‘The police will pay.’

  Lina laughed, as she waved her spoon. ‘For once the police will pay to make amends.’

  Adamsberg looked blank.

  ‘Amends, almonds, just a joke.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m a bit slow on the uptake. Would you mind telling me a bit more about your father? Did they find out who killed him?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Was anyone suspected?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me,’ said Lina, smiling again. ‘I heard this yelling and I ran upstairs, and I found him in his bedroom, covered in blood. My brother Hippo, who was only eight, saw me holding the axe. And he told the gendarmes. He didn’t mean any harm, he was just answering their questions.’

  ‘What do you mean, you were holding the axe?’

  ‘I picked it up. The gendarmes thought I’d wiped the handle, because they didn’t find any fingerprints on it except mine. In the end, after Léo and the count came along and helped us, they l
eft me in peace. The window was open, it would have been easy for the killer to get away. Nobody liked my father, just like nobody liked Herbier. Whenever he had one of his violent turns, people said it was the bullet shifting inside his head. I didn’t understand what they meant when I was little.’

  ‘Neither do I. What was shifting?’

  ‘The bullet. My mother says before the Algerian war, when she married him, he was more or less OK. But when he was over there, he got this bullet lodged in his brain and they couldn’t get it out. He was taken off active service and they put him on to interrogations. Torturing people. I’m going to leave you for a few minutes, I’m going outside for a smoke.’

  Adamsberg joined her, taking out a half-crushed cigarette from his pocket. He had a close-up view of the honey-coloured hair, unusually thick for a woman from Normandy, and the freckles on her gleaming shoulders when the shawl slipped, though she quickly twitched it back.

  ‘Did he beat you?’

  ‘Did yours?’

  ‘No. He was a shoemaker.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, he never touched me. But he beat my brothers to pulp. When Antonin was a baby, he picked him up by his heels and threw him downstairs. Just like that. Fourteen fractures. He was in plaster from head to foot for a year. And Martin wouldn’t eat his food. He used to secretly put stuff from his plate into the hollow leg of the table. One day my father saw him, and he made him get it back out of the table leg with a hook and eat it all. It was rotten of course. Stuff like that, that’s how he was.’

  ‘What about Hippo?’

  ‘Even worse.’

  Lina ground out her cigarette underfoot and pushed the stub neatly into the gutter. Adamsberg got out his mobile – the second secret one – feeling it vibrate in his pocket.

  Arriving tonite, address svp. LVB

  Veyrenc. Veyrenc would snatch his lovely kouglof from under his nose, with his tender face and his girlish mouth.

  No! all OK here, he texted back.

  All not OK. Address svp.

  Phone me.