by Fred Vargas
‘I hear something bad’s happened at Cérenay station,’ she said, and it was the first time he had heard her speak more than a few words since Paris, in a voice that was as humble as it was clear and calm. ‘Is it this horrible case going on? Has something happened to Mortembot?’
‘Who told you?’ asked Adamsberg.
‘Was it Mortembot?’ she insisted.
‘No, it wasn’t him.’
‘Holy Mother of god,’ she went on with a sigh. ‘Because if this goes on, we’ll all have to move away, me and my children.’
‘No, no, maman,’ said Martin automatically.
‘I know what I’m talking about, son. You none of you want to see anything, the way you are. But one of these days, someone’s going to come along and kill us all.’
‘No, forget it, maman,’ said Martin. ‘They’re all too scared of us.’
‘They don’t understand,’ the mother went on, addressing Adamsberg this time. ‘They won’t understand that people think we’re all guilty. My poor girl, if only you’d held your tongue.’
‘I didn’t have the right to,’ said Lina rather severely, without seeming to be troubled by her mother’s anxiety. ‘You know that perfectly well. You have to let the people who are seized take their chances.’
‘Well, that may be,’ said her mother, sitting back down at the table. ‘We’ve got nowhere to go, but I’ve got to protect them,’ she said, turning to Adamsberg again.
‘Maman, nobody’s going to touch us,’ said Hippolyte, lifting his two deformed hands up towards the ceiling, and everyone burst out laughing.
‘See, they don’t understand a thing,’ the mother repeated quietly, looking distressed. ‘Don’t play games with your fingers, Hippo, when someone’s been killed at Cérenay.’
‘What happened?’ Lina asked. Adamsberg tried not to look her way, since her breasts were strikingly visible through her white pyjamas.
‘Maman told you,’ said Antonin. ‘Someone threw himself under the Caen train. Suicide, that’s what she meant.’
‘How did you hear about it?’ Adamsberg asked Madame Vendermot.
‘I was down at the shops. The stationmaster was up there at a quarter to eight and he saw the police cars and the ambulance. He asked one of the paramedics.’
‘Quarter to eight? But no train stops there before eleven.’
‘The train driver had phoned through. He thought he’d seen someone or something on the track, so the stationmaster went in to check. Do you know who was killed?’
‘Did they tell you?’
‘No,’ said Hippo. ‘Perhaps it was Marguerite Vanout.’
‘Why would it be her?’ asked Martin.
‘You know what they say in Cérenay. Yttun sa a ekactiurf.’
‘Nutty as a fruitcake,’ Lina translated.
‘Oh really?’ said Antonin, looking frankly interested, as if unaware that he inclined slightly towards the fruitcake end of the spectrum himself.
‘Since her husband left her. She goes round shouting, she tears her clothes, she writes on the walls of the houses. On the walls.’
‘What does she write?’
‘Pigs. She writes it all over the village and in Cérenay they’re starting to get really fed up with her. Every day, the mayor has to get someone to clean off the graffiti she wrote in the night. And she’s got plenty of money, so she hides banknotes here and there, under stones, up trees, and next morning the village people can’t help going looking for them, like a game of hide-and-seek. Makes ’em late for work. So just this one woman, she’s got everyone running in circles. Still, it’s not a crime to hide banknotes.’
‘No, it’s funny,’ said Martin.
‘Yeah, ‘tis rather,’ Hippo agreed.
‘It’s not funny at all,’ answered their mother sharply. ‘She’s just a poor woman who’s lost her wits and is suffering.’
‘Yeah, but it’s still funny,’ said Hippo, bending down to kiss her cheek.
His mother was instantly transformed, as if she suddenly realised that any reprimand was either pointless or unfair. She patted her son’s big hand and went to sit in her armchair in the corner, from where she was unlikely to take any further part in the conversation. It was as if a character had quietly left the stage, while still remaining in sight.
‘We should send flowers to her funeral though,’ said Lina. ‘After all, we do know her aunt.’
‘I’ll go and pick some in the forest,’ suggested Martin.
‘No, you don’t send wild flowers to a funeral.’
‘No, that’s right,’ put in Antonin, ‘you got to buy florist’s flowers. We could get some lilies.’
‘No, lilies are for weddings.’
‘Anyway, we can’t afford lilies,’ said Lina.
‘What about anemones?’ said Hippo. ‘Ton raed, senomena.’
Adamsberg had let them go on arguing about the kind of flowers they should send for Marguerite. And their conversation, unless it was being invented for his benefit by a set of geniuses, proved to him, better than anything else could, that none of the Vendermots had been involved in the Cérenay incident. Still, they were all strangely gifted, there was no getting away from that.
‘No,’ he said in the end. ‘It’s not Marguerite that’s dead.’
‘No flowers then,’ said Hippolyte emphatically.
‘But who is?’ asked Martin.
‘Nobody’s dead. The man involved lay down between the rails and the train went over him without touching him.’
‘Wow,’ said Antonin. ‘That’s what I call an artistic experience.’
As he spoke, the young man passed a large sugar lump across to his sister, and Lina understood at once and broke it in two for him. It needed strong pressure from her fingers, something Antonin didn’t want to risk. Adamsberg looked away. This constant presence of sugar lumps here, there and everywhere was giving him a strange feeling, as if he were surrounded by a multiple adversary throwing sugar bricks at him from sugar walls.
‘If someone wanted to kill himself,’ said Lina, looking at Adamsberg, ‘he’d have lain across the rails.’
‘Quite right, Lina. He didn’t want to kill himself, someone pushed him on to the line. He was my deputy, Danglard, you’ve met him. Someone tried to kill him.’
Hippolyte frowned. ‘Using a train as a weapon’s a rather risky way to do it,’ he said.
‘Yes, but if you wanted to make it look like suicide,’ said Martin, ‘it’s quite clever. People will think of suicide if someone’s killed on a railway line.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Hippolyte, pulling a face. ‘But planning that kind of thing must come from a very twisted brain. Someone ambitious but weird. Yllatot driew.’
‘Hippo,’ said Adamsberg, pushing away his cup, ‘I need to talk to you on your own. And then Lina, if possible.’
‘Driew, really driew,’ Hippo went on.
‘I do need to have a word with you,’ Adamsberg insisted.
‘I don’t know who tried to kill your deputy.’
‘No, it’s not about that. It’s about your father’s death,’ Adamsberg went on in a low voice.
‘All right then,’ said Hippo, glancing across at his mother. ‘We’d better go outside. Let me just get dressed.’
* * *
Adamsberg was presently walking along the stony little lane, alongside Hippolyte, who was a head taller than him.
‘I don’t know anything about his death,’ said Hippo. ‘He was hit on the head and in the chest with an axe, while he was asleep, that’s all.’
‘But you knew that Lina had wiped the handle.’
‘That’s what I said at the time, but I was only little.’
‘Hippo, why would Lina wipe the handle?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hippo sulkily. ‘But not because she killed him. Come on, I know my sister. Not that she couldn’t have wished him dead, we all did. But she went the other way. Stopped my dog Sooty going for his throat.’
‘She cou
ld have wiped the handle because she thought someone else in the family killed him, Martin or Antonin.’
‘But they were only six and four years old!’
‘Or you.’
‘No! We were all far too scared of him to try and do something like that. We weren’t big enough.’
‘But you did set your dog on him.’
‘Then it would have been the dog’s fault, not mine. See the difference?’
‘Yes.’
‘So then the bastard, he killed my dog. We all thought, any of us lift a finger against him, he’d be capable of killing us too, like the dog. My mother and all. Perhaps he would have too, if the count hadn’t taken me away to his place.’
‘Émeri says you weren’t scared of anything. He says you caused chaos in school when you were a kid.’
‘Yeah, I created mayhem all right,’ said Hippo, giving one of his big grins. ‘What does he say, Émeri? That I was a little shit going round terrorising everyone?’
‘Yes, that’s more or less what he said.’
‘That’s exactly what he said. But Émeri was no angel either. And he didn’t have any excuse. He was properly looked after, his family was well off. Before Régis’s gang of villains got going, there was this other boy, Hervé, who persecuted me. And let me tell you, Émeri wasn’t backward when they were all dancing round me and hitting me. No, commissaire, I don’t regret anything, I had to defend myself. All I had to do was wave my hands in the air at them, and they’d run away squealing. It was fun for me. But it was their fault, they started it. They said I had devil’s hands, and I was a cripple from hell. I wouldn’t have thought of that kind of thing if it wasn’t for them. So I made use of it. No, if there’s one thing in my life I’m sorry about, it’s that I’m the son of the biggest fucking bastard in the region.’
By now Lina had got dressed, in a tight-fitting T-shirt, giving Adamsberg a fresh thrill. Patting her arm, Hippolyte left her to walk back with the commissaire.
‘It’s all right, little sis, he won’t eat you. But you have to watch out for him. He likes to know where people have hidden their dirty linen, it’s not a nice job.’
‘He saved Léo,’ said Lina, frowning at her brother.
‘But he’s wondering whether I killed Herbier and Glayeux. He’s poking about in my dirty linen. Aren’t you, commissaire?’
‘It’s normal if he’s asking questions,’ Lina retorted. ‘I hope you were polite at least.’
‘Very,’ said Adamsberg with a smile.
‘But since Lina has no dirty linen to hide, I can safely leave her with you,’ said Hippo, walking away. ‘But mind, tnod hcout a riah fo reh daeh.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t touch a hair of her head,’ said Lina. ‘I’m sorry, commissaire, it’s the way he is. He feels responsible for all of us. But we’re nice people, you know.’
‘We’re nice people.’ The simple-minded motto of the Vendermots. So naive and simple-minded that Adamsberg was half inclined to believe it. Their idea of themselves, their watchword to the world: ‘We’re nice people.’ And what were they hiding behind that? Émeri would have said. A man as intelligent as Hippolyte, and that was an understatement, a guy who could talk backwards as if he were playing marbles, couldn’t just be ‘nice’.
‘Lina, I’m going to ask you the same thing as Hippolyte. When you found your father had been killed, why did you wipe the handle of the axe?’
‘Just a reflex, I suppose, for something to do.’
‘Lina, you’re not eleven years old any more. You can’t think an answer like that is good enough. Did you wipe it to remove the fingerprints of one of your brothers?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t think Hippo could have hit him on the head? Or Martin?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘We were all too scared to go into his bedroom. We didn’t even dare go up there. It was forbidden.’
Adamsberg stopped in the middle of the lane, faced Lina and drew his finger down her pink cheek, in all innocence, like Zerk stroking the pigeon.
‘Well then, who were you protecting, Lina?’
‘The killer,’ she said suddenly, looking up. ‘And I didn’t know who it was. I wasn’t shocked when I found him lying there, covered in blood. I just thought that someone, at last, had put a stop to him, and he would never come back, and it was a big relief. I wiped the prints off the axe so whoever did it would never be punished. Whoever it was.’
‘Thank you, Lina. Tell me, Hippo, when he was in school, was he a holy terror?’
‘He was protecting us. Because my brothers, the little ones, in the infants’ playground, they were being bullied too. When Hippo was brave enough to face them out with his poor deformed hands, we had a bit of peace at last. We are nice people, but Hippo had to protect us.’
‘He told them he was the devil’s disciple and he could curse them.’
‘Yes and it worked!’ she said with a laugh, showing no regret. ‘They would run away when we came. And then we were in heaven. We were like kings. Only Léo warned us. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, she used to say, but I didn’t understand that at the time. And now,’ she said, looking more serious, ‘we’re paying for it. With people remembering Hippo the devil, and Hellequin’s Horde, I understand why my mother is anxious for us. In 1777, you know, they killed this man, François-Benjamin, he was a pig farmer, with pitchforks.’
‘Yes, I was told that. Because he saw the Riders.’
‘And he could name three victims, but couldn’t recognise the fourth, just like me. The crowd attacked him after the second victim died, and they were two hours at it, spilling his guts And François-Benjamin passed the gift on to his nephew Guillaume, who passed it to his cousin Élodine, then it went on to Sigismond the tanner, then to Hébrard, then to Arnaud the cloth merchant, then to Louis-Pierre who played the harpsichord, and then to Aveline, and then to Gilbert. And apparently Gilbert passed it on to me, when I was baptised. Did your deputy know something, is that why someone tried to kill him?’
‘No idea.’ He went off all alone, with a heart full of bile, Adamsberg said to himself, surprised to find this little line of Veyrenc’s verse resurfacing.
‘Don’t worry looking in that direction,’ she said, suddenly sounding determined. ‘It wasn’t him they wanted to kill, it was you.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Because you may not know anything today, but you’ll end up knowing everything tomorrow. You’re much more dangerous than Émeri. Your time’s running out.’
‘Mine?’
‘Yours, commissaire. You’d better get going and run. Nothing stops the Lord and his troops. Don’t stand in his way. You can believe me or not, I’m trying to help you.’
This pronouncement was so harsh and weird that Émeri would probably have arrested her on the spot for less. Adamsberg didn’t move.
‘I’ve got to protect Mortembot,’ he said.
‘Mortembot killed his own mother. He’s not worth bothering about.’
‘That’s not my problem, Lina, you know that.’
‘You don’t understand. He’ll die whatever you do. You’d better get away before that.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘I mean, when will he die?’
‘Hellequin will decide. Just go away. You and your men.’
XXXVII
Adamsberg walked slowly into the courtyard of the hospital, which was becoming as familiar to him as the bar opposite his Paris office. Danglard had refused to wear the regulation blue hospital gown, made of disposable tissue, and was sitting on his bed wearing his suit, crumpled and dirty as it was. The nurse had strongly disapproved, saying it was unhygienic. But since this was a case of attempted suicide and since he had been under a train and survived – something which commanded respect – she hadn’t dared insist.
‘I need some proper clothes,’ was the first thing Danglard said. At the same time, his eyes were directed
at the cream-coloured walls, not wanting to meet Adamsberg’s expression where he would see reflected his own shame, disgrace and depression. Dr Turbot had filled him in briefly on the sequence of events, without making any comment, and Danglard now didn’t know how to live with himself. He had been unprofessional, he’d been grotesque and, worse than everything, stupid. Him, Danglard, the mighty brain. Basic jealousy, his burning desire to best Veyrenc, hadn’t left a corner in his mind for dignity and intelligence. Well, maybe, in some remote recess a tiny voice had indeed tried to tell him something, but he hadn’t listened, hadn’t wanted to know. Like the worst of idiots, the kind that leads to destruction. And it was the very man he had wanted to humiliate who had protected him, and had almost been killed himself under the wheels of the train. It was Louis Veyrenc de Bilhc who had had the reflexes, the courage and the strength, to lie him down between the rails. Whereas he, himself, he reflected, would certainly not have had those three qualities. He wouldn’t have thought of moving the body; in any case, he wouldn’t have had the physical strength; and perhaps, worst of all, he would have tried to save his own skin first, by scrambling back on to the platform.
The commandant’s face was grey with distress. He looked like a cornered rat, not one cheerfully sitting inside a loaf of bread in the kitchen of Tuilot, Julien.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked Adamsberg.
‘Only if I turn my head.’
‘Apparently you weren’t conscious of the train going over you,’ said Adamsberg, without letting any note of consolation enter his voice.
‘No. Pretty annoying to have that happen and not remember it, isn’t it?’ said Danglard, trying to introduce a little irony to his tone.
‘That’s not what’s annoying.’
‘And I wasn’t even as sloshed as usual.’
‘No, indeed not, Danglard. On the contrary, you took care not to drink too much at Émeri’s so as to have a clear head for your one-man expedition.’
Danglard looked up at the cream-painted ceiling and decided to keep looking. He had glimpsed Adamsberg’s expression and seen the gleam in his eyes. A gleam that carried far, and one that he wanted to avoid. It was a rare kind of gleam, one that only appeared when the commissaire was very angry, deeply interested, or had suddenly had an idea.