by Fred Vargas
‘Apparently,’ said Justin with his usual attention to detail, ‘it wasn’t the perv that was the problem but the lunary.’
‘But what is a lunary perv?’ asked Adamsberg.
‘Nobody knows, not even the man who said it. We asked.’
‘OK,’ said Adamsberg, already starting to doodle on the notepad he was resting on his knees. ‘And what about the little girl with the gerbil?’
‘The tribunal agreed that she can be taken in by a half-sister who lives in the Vendée. The judge ordered psychiatric counselling for the little girl. The half-sister has agreed to take the gerbil. Which is also a girl, according to the vet.’
‘Brave woman,’ pronounced Mordent, twisting his long thin neck as he did every time he passed a comment, as if to mark it. Since Mordent always looked to Adamsberg like an old heron with bedraggled plumage, this gesture reminded him of the bird swallowing a fish. If, that is, the heron was a bird and the fish a fish.
‘And the great-uncle?’
‘In detention. The charges are kidnapping, holding against her will, violence and ill-treatment. But no sexual offences, at least. The thing is, the great-uncle didn’t want anyone else to have her.’
‘Right,’ said Adamsberg, who was sketching the apple tree under which he used to eat his breakfast. Although he could barely remember the doctor’s report for more than a few seconds, every branch and twig of the apple tree remained precise and intact in his memory.
‘Now, Monsieur Tuilot, first name Julien,’ announced Noël.
‘The breadcrumb murderer.’
‘Exactly.’
‘A unique weapon,’ remarked Adamsberg, turning over another leaf in his notebook. ‘As silent and effective as a crossbow, but requiring close proximity.’
‘What’s a crossbow got to do with it?’ asked Retancourt. Adamsberg signalled to her that he’d explain later, and began to sketch a portrait of Dr Turbot.
‘He’s under arrest,’ Noël said. ‘A cousin is prepared to pay a defence lawyer, on the grounds that his wife’s tyranny made his life a misery.’
‘Madame Tuilot, Lucette.’
‘Yes. The cousin has brought him crosswords in prison. He’s only been there twelve days, and has already organised a tournament for some of the promising remand prisoners, beginner level.’
‘So he’s on good form, if I understand you.’
‘Never so blooming, according to the cousin.’
A silence fell next, as everyone looked towards Retancourt, knowing as they did, though without the details, her key role in the Clermont-Brasseur case. Adamsberg signalled to Estalère to bring them all some coffee.
‘We’re still searching for Momo,’ Adamsberg began, ‘but it wasn’t him that burnt the Mercedes.’
During Retancourt’s lengthy account – covering the first pinstripe suit of clothes, the second suit, the haircut, the chambermaid, the Labrador, the smell of petrol – Estalère served everyone coffee, and offered his colleagues milk and sugar, going round the table carefully and attentively. Lieutenant Mercadet raised his hand without speaking to refuse sugar, which mortified Estalère, who prided himself on knowing which colleagues, in this case the lieutenant, usually took sugar.
‘Given it up,’ Mercadet explained in an undertone. ‘Dieting,’ he said, patting his stomach.
Reassured, Estalère was finishing his round, while Adamsberg suddenly froze, for no reason. A question from Morel surprised him and he realised that Retancourt was finishing her recital and that he’d missed some of it.
‘Where’s Danglard?’ Morel repeated.
‘He’s taking a rest,’ Adamsberg said quickly. ‘He went under a train. He wasn’t hurt, but it’s a shock, takes some getting over.’
‘He went under a train?’ asked Froissy, with the same admiring and stupefied expression as Dr Turbot.
‘Yes, Veyrenc acted quickly and pushed him between the rails.’
‘There are twenty centimetres between the surface of a body and the underside of a train,’ Veyrenc explained. ‘He wasn’t conscious.’
* * *
Adamsberg rose clumsily to his feet, leaving his notebook on the table.
‘Veyrenc will take over and do the Ordebec report,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’
‘I’ll be back,’ he always said, as if it was highly possible that one day he would go away and never come back. He went out of the room with a lighter step than usual and escaped into the street. He knew that he had been struck stock-still all of a sudden, like one of the Ordebec cows, and had lost about five or six minutes of the meeting. Why, he couldn’t say, and that was what he set out to discover by walking the pavements. He wasn’t troubled by these sudden gaps in his consciousness, he was used to them. He didn’t know the reason for this one, but he knew the cause. Something had passed through his mind, like the bolt from a crossbow, so fast that he hadn’t had time to get hold of it. But it had been enough to turn him to stone. It was an experience like that time he had seen the sparkle on the waters in the port of Marseille, or the poster on a bus shelter in Paris, or when he had been unable to sleep on the Paris-Venice express. And the invisible image which had flashed across had drained the watery morass of his brain, bringing along with it other imperceptible images attached to each other as if in a magnetic chain. He couldn’t see either the beginning or the end of it, but he could see Ordebec, and more precisely a car door, the one on Blériot’s old banger, a door hanging open to which he hadn’t paid any particular attention. It was as he had said to Lucio the day before, as if there was a door somewhere that hadn’t been closed properly, a door that was banging, an insect bite that he hadn’t finished scratching.
He walked slowly through the streets, going carefully, towards the Seine, where his footsteps always took him when he was troubled. It was at such moments that Adamsberg, normally almost impervious to anxiety or any strong emotion, became as tense as a guyrope, clenched his fists and tried to recapture what he had seen without seeing it, or thought without thinking it. There was no method by which he would succeed in extracting this pearl from the shapeless heap of thoughts inside him. He simply knew that he had to do it quickly, because his mind was so made that everything disappeared in the end. Sometimes he had managed it by standing absolutely still, waiting for the faint image to come trembling back to the surface, and sometimes it was by walking, stirring up his random memories, and sometimes going to sleep and allowing the laws of gravity to operate. And he feared, if he chose a theoretical strategy in advance, that he would miss his target.
After walking for over an hour he sat on a bench in the shade, and cupped his chin in his hands. He had completely lost the thread of the discussion during Retancourt’s report. What had happened? Nothing. They had all been sitting still, listening attentively to what she was telling them. Mercadet was fighting sleep and taking notes with difficulty. Everyone had been sitting down, except one. Estalère had moved. Of course, he had been handing round coffees with his habitual punctiliousness. The young man had been a bit miffed because Mercadet had refused sugar even though he always took it, and the lieutenant had patted his stomach. Adamsberg dropped his hands from his chin on to his knees. Mercadet had made another gesture. He had lifted one hand, signifying his refusal. And it was at that moment that the shot had flashed through his brain. Sugar. Damn sugar, there’d been something about it from the very start. The commissaire lifted his hand, imitating Mercadet’s gesture. He repeated the gesture several times and saw once more the car door swinging open. Blériot, standing in front of the car when it had broken down. Blériot. Blériot had also refused sugar when Émeri offered him some. He had raised his hand silently, just like Mercadet. In the gendarmerie, the day they had been talking about Denis de Valleray. Blériot, the man whose pockets were always bulging with lumps of sugar, but who didn’t take it in his coffee. Blériot.
Adamsberg stopped moving his hand. The pearl was lying there, in the hollow of a rock. The door he hadn’t closed. Fifteen
minutes later, he stood up, gently, so as not to disturb the still unformed and as yet incompletely understood sensations in his head, and went back to his house, on foot. He hadn’t unpacked his rucksack from the day before. He picked it up, put Hellebaud inside the shoe and loaded everything as quietly as he could back into his car. He didn’t want to make any noise, fearing that speaking out loud would perturb the particles of his thoughts which were clumsily trying to assemble themselves. So he sent a simple message to Danglard on the mobile Retancourt had given him.
Going back to O: if necesary cntct same place same time. He wasn’t sure how to spell ‘necesary’ and changed it to ‘needed’: if needed cntct same place same time. Then he sent a text to Veyrenc. Come Léo house 20.30. Essential bring Retancourt + avoid being seen forest entrance bring rope + food.
L
Adamsberg entered Ordebec discreetly, once more at two in the afternoon, a good time on a Sunday when the streets were empty. He took the path through the woods to Léo’s house, and opened up the room he considered his. Lying down in the hollow in the woollen mattress seemed to be a first priority. He placed the now tame Hellebaud on the windowsill, and curled up on the bed without sleeping, listening to the cooing of the pigeon, which seemed well satisfied to be back in its place. He let his thoughts wander as they would without trying to organise them. He had recently seen a photograph that had struck him as a clear illustration of his own idea of his brain. It showed the contents of a fishing net unloaded on the deck of a large vessel, a pile taller than the fishermen themselves, a heap of all kinds of things defying identification, in which the silvery colours of the fish mingled with the dark brown of seaweed, the grey of the crustaceans – marine ones, not that damned woodlouse – the blue of lobsters, the white of seashells, making it hard to distinguish the different elements. That was what he was always fighting, the confused, multiform and shifting mass, always ready to change or vanish, and float off again into the sea. The sailors were sorting out the pile, throwing back creatures that were too small, lumps of seaweed or detritus, and saving the familiar useful species. Adamsberg, it seemed to him, did the opposite, throwing out all the sensible items and then looking at the irrelevant fragments of his personal collection.
* * *
He went back to the beginning, to Blériot raising his hand to refuse sugar in his coffee, and allowed himself to associate freely the sights and sounds of Ordebec, the decomposed yet handsome face of Lord Hellequin, Léo waiting for him in the forest, the bonbonnière on Émeri’s Empire table, Hippo shaking out his sister’s wet dress, the mare whose nose he had patted, Mo and his coloured pencils, the ointment being rubbed into Antonin’s bony ribs, the blood on the sketch of the madonna by Glayeux, Veyrenc in a state of collapse on the station platform, the cows and the woodlouse, the bubbles of electricity, the Battle of Eylau which Émeri had managed to tell him about three times, the count’s cane tapping the old parquet floor, the sound of the crickets in the Vendermot house, the herd of wild boar on the Chemin de Bonneval. He turned over, put his hands behind his head and looked up at the beams in the roof. Sugar. Sugar, that had been irritating him all day and every day, giving him a feeling of intense annoyance, so much so that he had stopped taking it in his coffee.
* * *
Adamsberg got up after two hours, his cheeks ablaze. Now he had just one person to see: Hippolyte. He’d wait till seven in the evening, when all the inhabitants of Ordebec would be in their kitchens or taking an aperitif in the cafe. Going round the edge of the village, he could reach the Vendermot house with no risk of meeting anyone. The Vendermots would also be taking their aperitif, and perhaps they’d be finishing up the dreadful port they had bought specially to entertain him. He would gently make Hippo come round to his view, get him to go straight to the particular place he had in mind. ‘We’re nice people.’ A rather peremptory definition for a child with amputated fingers who had terrorised his classmates for years. We’re nice people. He consulted his watches. He had three calls to make to confirm things. One to the Comte de Valleray, one to Danglard and finally one to Dr Turbot. Then he’d set out in two and a half hours.
He slipped out of the bedroom and went to the cellar. There, by climbing on a cask, he could reach a dusty little window, the only one in the house that looked out on to a meadow with cows in it. He had plenty of time, he’d wait.
As he made his way cautiously towards the Vendermot house, hearing the angelus ringing, he felt satisfied. No fewer than three cows had moved. And they’d moved several metres as well. Without lifting their muzzles from the grass. Which seemed an excellent sign for Ordebec’s future.
LI
‘Couldn’t shop for food, everything was shut,’ said Veyrenc, emptying a bag of provisions on to the table. ‘Had to raid Froissy’s cupboard, we’ll have to replace this double quick.’
Retancourt was leaning against the fireplace, now containing cold ashes, her blonde head reaching far above the stone mantelshelf. Adamsberg wondered where he would be able to lodge her in this house, with its ancient beds that were too short for her outsize dimensions. She was watching Adamsberg and Veyrenc prepare sandwiches of hare pâté and truffles, with a cheerful expression. Nobody knew why some days Retancourt was amiable, other days disgruntled, and they didn’t try to find out. Even when she was smiling, this large woman’s bearing had something tough and pretty impressive about it, which dissuaded people from opening up to her or asking silly questions. Any more than you would give a friendly slap – a basic lack of respect – to an age-old giant redwood tree. Whatever her mood, Retancourt inspired deference and sometimes devotion.
After their hasty meal – but Froissy’s pâté was undeniably very succulent – Adamsberg drew the layout of the site for them. From Léo’s house, they would take a path south-east, then cut across some fields, find a path called the Chemin de la Bessonnière and follow it to the old well.
‘It’s a bit of a hike, six kilometres. The old well was the best place I could find. The Oison Well. I noticed it when I took a walk along the Touques.’
‘The Touques?’ asked Retancourt, always needing exact information.
‘The river here. The well’s on the land of the next parish, it’s been abandoned for forty years, and it’s about twelve metres deep. It would be easy, and tempting, to tip a man in.’
‘If the man was leaning over the edge,’ said Veyrenc.
‘That’s what I’m counting on. Because the killer’s already done a manoeuvre like that by tipping Denis’s body out of the window. He knows how to do it.’
‘You mean Denis didn’t kill himself?’ said Veyrenc.
‘No, he was killed, he was the fourth victim.’
‘And not the last?’
‘No.’
Adamsberg put down his pencil and explained his final arguments – if that was the word for them. Retancourt wrinkled her nose several times, disconcerted as always by the commissaire’s methods of reaching his objective. But he had reached it, she had to admit that.
‘That explains how he never left a single clue,’ commented Veyrenc, looking thoughtful on hearing the new elements.
Retancourt by contrast was more concerned with the practical side of the action.
‘Is it wide? The coping round the well?’
‘No, thirty centimetres or so. And it’s low, that’s crucial.’
‘Could work,’ agreed Retancourt.
‘And the diameter of the well?’
‘Enough.’
‘How will we operate?’
‘Twenty-five metres away there’s an old farm building, a barn, and it has two big wooden doors, very dilapidated. We can hide in there, no way of getting any nearer. Be careful. Hippo’s a big lad. It’s very risky.’
‘It’s dangerous,’ said Veyrenc. ‘We’re putting a life at stake.’
‘We’ve got no choice, there’s no evidence except for a few old sugar wrappers, and no context for them.’
‘You kept them?’
&
nbsp; ‘Yes; they’re in a barrel in the cellar.’
‘They might have fingerprints. It hasn’t rained for weeks.’
‘But that wouldn’t prove anything either – sitting on a tree trunk eating sugar isn’t against the law.’
‘There are Léo’s words.’
‘The words of a very old woman in a state of shock. And I was the only person who heard them.’
‘Danglard did too.’
‘He wasn’t paying attention.’
‘No, there’s no case there,’ agreed Retancourt. ‘The only way is to catch him in the act.’
‘Dangerous,’ Veyrenc repeated.
‘That’s why we’ve got Retancourt here, Louis. She’s quicker and more accurate. She’ll catch him if he starts to fall. And she’ll have the rope if we need it.’
Veyrenc lit a cigarette, shaking his head without protesting. Placing Retancourt’s abilities higher than his own was something so obvious you didn’t argue about it. She would probably have been able to hoist Danglard on to the station platform.
‘If we screw up,’ he said, ‘a man could die, and us with him.’
‘We won’t screw up,’ said Retancourt calmly. ‘If this plan happens at all.’
‘Yes. It’ll happen,’ Adamsberg assured them. ‘He has no choice. And to kill this particular man would give him a lot of satisfaction.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Retancourt, holding out her glass for a refill.
‘Violette,’ said Adamsberg gently, while obeying her request, ‘that’s your third glass. We need all our strength.’
Retancourt shrugged, as if the commissaire had made a remark so stupid as to be unworthy of comment.
LII
Retancourt had taken up position behind the left-hand door of the barn, the two men on the right. Nothing must impede her passage towards the well. In the dim light, Adamsberg held up both hands to his colleagues, all ten fingers splayed: ten minutes to go. Veyrenc crushed out his cigarette and put his eye to a large slit in the wooden wall. Solidly built, the lieutenant was flexing his muscles ready to move, while Retancourt, leaning on the door jamb and in spite of the fifteen metres of mountaineering cord coiled round her torso, gave an impression of total relaxation. Adamsberg was rather concerned at this, given the three glasses of wine.