by Fred Vargas
Veyrenc seemed to hesitate. Then he nodded silently.
‘OK,’ said Adamsberg, walking away. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour.’
‘What was all that about?’ asked Retancourt as she walked after the commissaire.
‘A war,’ replied Adamsberg shortly. ‘The war of the two valleys. Don’t get involved.’
Retancourt stopped, looking annoyed and scuffing the gravel with her shoe.
‘Serious war?’ she asked.
‘Pretty serious.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Or what will he do? You like him a lot, don’t you, Violette? Well, don’t get between the tree and the bark. Because one day you may have to choose. Between him and me.’
XV
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING THE TOMBSTONE HAD BEEN RAISED, revealing a surface of smooth compacted earth. The attendant had been quite right: the soil was intact, and covered with the blackened remains of roses. The team of police, tired and disappointed, wandered around it in perplexity. What would old Anglebert have said if he had seen their demoralised state, Adamsberg wondered.
‘Take a few photographs anyway,’ he said to the freckled photographer, a talented and friendly lad whose name he regularly forgot.
‘Barteneau,’ whispered Danglard, one of whose self-imposed jobs was to remedy the social deficiencies of the commissaire.
‘Barteneau, take some photos. Close-ups as well.’
‘I told you,’ the attendant was muttering. ‘They didn’t do anything else. Not a scratch on the earth.’
‘There’s got to be something,’ Adamsberg replied. The commissaire was sitting cross-legged on the tombstone, chin on his hands. Retancourt moved away, leaned up against a nearby memorial statue and closed her eyes.
‘She’s taking a little nap,’ the commissaire explained to the New Recruit. ‘She’s the only one in our squad who’s capable of doing this, sleeping standing up. She explained to us once how she does it, and they all had a go. Mercadet almost managed it. But as soon as he dropped off, he fell over.’
‘Anyone would, wouldn’t they?’ whispered Veyrenc. ‘So she doesn’t fall over?’
‘No, that’s just it. Take a look – she really is asleep. You can talk in a normal voice. Nothing will wake her if she’s made up her mind.’
‘It’s a question of concentration,’ said Danglard. ‘She can channel her energy in any direction she likes.’
‘Still doesn’t work for the rest of us, though,’ remarked Adamsberg.
‘Maybe all they did was piss on the grave,’ suggested Justin, who was sitting near the commissaire.
‘That’s a lot of trouble and a lot of money, just to piss on someone’s grave.’
‘Sorry, I was just trying to relieve the tension.’
‘I’m not criticising you, Voisenet.’
‘Justin.’
‘I’m not criticising you, Justin.’
‘But it didn’t relieve the tension anyway.’
‘Only two things really relieve tension, laughing or making love. We’re not doing either at the moment.’
‘So I see.’
‘What about sleeping?’ asked Veyrenc. ‘Doesn’t that relieve the tension?’
‘No, lieutenant, that just allows you to rest. There’s a difference.’
The team fell silent and the attendant asked if it was finally all right for him to leave them. Yes, it was.
‘We ought to take advantage of the lifting equipment to put the stone back,’ Danglard proposed.
‘Not straight away,’ said Adamsberg, his chin still on his hands. ‘We keep looking. If we don’t find anything, the sodding Drug Squad will have the bodies from us by tonight.’
‘We’re not going to stay here for days just to stop Drugs getting them, are we?’
‘His mother said he didn’t touch drugs.’
‘Oh, mothers,’ said Justin, with a shrug.
‘You’re relieving the tension too much there, lieutenant. One should believe mothers when they say something.’
Veyrenc was coming and going off to one side, occasionally throwing an intrigued glance at Retancourt who was indeed fast asleep. From time to time, he spoke to himself.
‘Danglard, try and hear what the New Recruit is saying.’
The commandant took a casual stroll in the alleyways and came back.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I’m sure that will relieve the tension.’
‘Well, he’s muttering some lines of poetry, beginning with “O Earth”.’
‘What comes next?’ asked Adamsberg, feeling discouraged.
‘O Earth, when I query, why disdain to reply?
And of this night’s foul work all knowledge now deny?
Has the key been withheld, or are my ears too weak
To hear of thy suff’ring, a sin too great to speak?
And so on. I can’t remember it all. I don’t know who it’s by.’
‘That’s because it’s by him. He speaks in verse as easily as other people blow their noses.’
‘Odd,’ said Danglard, with a perplexed frown.
‘It runs in the family, like all odd things. Tell me the lines again, capitaine.’
‘They’re not very good.’
‘At least they rhyme. And they’re saying something. Tell me again.’
Adamsberg listened attentively, then stood up.
‘He’s right, the earth does know and we don’t. Our ears are too weak to hear what it’s telling us, and that’s the problem.’
The commissaire returned to the graveside, with Danglard and Justin at his sides.
‘If there’s a sound to be heard, and we’re not hearing it, it means we’re deaf. The earth isn’t dumb, but we’re not skilled enough. We need a specialist, an interpreter, someone who can hear the sound of the earth.’
‘What do you call one of those?’ asked Justin, anxiously.
‘An archaeologist,’ said Adamsberg, taking out his telephone. ‘Or a shit-stirrer, if you prefer.’
‘You’ve got one in the team?’
‘I have,’ Adamsberg started to say, as he tapped in the number, ‘a specialist who’s excellent at discovering …’ The commissaire paused, looking for the right word.
‘Fleeting traces of the past,’ suggested Danglard.
‘Exactly. You couldn’t put it better.’
It was Vandoosler Senior, a cynical retired detective, who picked up the phone. Adamsberg quickly explained the situation.
‘Stymied and snookered, are you?’ asked Vandoosler, with his cackling laugh. ‘Out for the count?’
‘No, Vandoosler, since I’m calling you. Don’t play games with me, I’m short of time today.’
‘OK. Which one do you want this time? Marc?’
‘No, I need the prehistoric expert.’
‘He’s in the cellar, working on arrowheads.’
‘Tell him to get up here as fast as he can, the cemetery in Montrouge. It’s urgent.’
‘Given that he’s working on something from 12,000 BC, he’ll tell you nothing’s urgent. It’s very hard to tear Mathias away from his flints.’
‘Look, it’s me, Adamsberg, Vandoosler. Don’t give me grief like this. If you don’t help me, the case is going over to Drugs.’
‘Oh, that’s different. I’ll send him right away.’
XVI
‘WHAT DO WE EXPECT HIM TO DO? ASKED JUSTIN, WARMING HIS HANDS ON a cup of coffee in the keeper’s lodge.
‘What the New Recruit said. We want him to find out the secret of the earth. Your twelve-syllable verses sometimes make sense, Veyrenc.’
The daytime attendant looked at Veyrenc with curiosity.
‘He makes up poetry,’ Adamsberg explained.
‘On a day like this?’
‘Especially on a day like this.’
‘Right,’ said the keeper, accepting it. ‘Poetry – that complicates things, doesn’t it? But perhaps if you complicate things, you understand them b
etter. And if you understand, you simplify. In the end.’
‘Yes,’ said Veyrenc, surprised.
Retancourt was back with them, looking rested. The commissaire had woken her simply by touching her shoulder, as if he was pressing a button. Through the window of the lodge, she watched as a blond giant crossed the street: he had shoulder-length hair, was wearing very few clothes, and his trousers were held up with string.
‘Here comes our interpreter,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He smiles a lot, but it’s not always easy to say why.’
Five minutes later, Mathias was kneeling alongside the grave, looking at the earth. Adamsberg signalled to his team to keep quiet. The earth doesn’t speak loudly, so you have to listen very carefully.
‘You haven’t touched anything?’ Mathias asked. ‘Nobody has moved the rose stems?’
‘No,’ said Danglard, ‘and that’s what’s so mysterious. The family scattered roses all over the grave, and the tombstone was placed on top. That proves the soil hasn’t been disturbed.’
‘There are stems and stems,’ said Mathias.
He moved his hand quickly from rose to rose, going round the grave on his knees and feeling the soil in various places, like a weaver testing the quality of silk. Then he raised his head and smiled at Adamsberg.
‘See it?’ he asked.
Adamsberg shook his head.
‘Some of the rose stems move if you just touch them lightly, but others are embedded well in. All the ones here are still where they were left,’ he said, pointing to the flowers at the bottom end of the grave. ‘But these ones are just loose on the surface – they’ve been moved. See?’
‘I’m listening,’ said Adamsberg, with a frown.
‘What it means is that someone has dug into the grave,’ said Mathias, carefully removing the flowers from the head of the grave, ‘but only part of it. Then the withered flowers were put back over the top, to make it look as if the earth hadn’t been disturbed. But, you know,’ he went on, standing up in a single movement, ‘it still shows. A man can move a rose stem and a thousand years later you can still tell he did it.’
Adamsberg nodded, impressed. So if he touched the petal of a flower tonight, in the dark, without telling anyone, a thousand years in the future some guy like Mathias would know all about it. The idea that all his actions might leave their ineradicable traces behind seemed a little alarming. But he was reassured by looking at the prehistorian, who was taking a trowel out of his back pocket and cleaning it with his fingers. Experts like Mathias didn’t grow on trees.
‘It’s very difficult,’ said Mathias, pursing his lips. ‘It’s a hole that’s been filled in again with exactly the same earth. It’s invisible. So someone dug a hole, but where?’
‘You can’t find it?’ asked Adamsberg, suddenly anxious.
‘Not by looking.’
‘How, then?’
‘With my fingers. When you can’t see anything, you can always feel. But it takes longer.’
‘Feel what?’ asked Justin.
‘The edges of the trench, the gap between its edge and the surrounding area. Where one bit of earth meets another. There’s got to be a line, and it’s just a matter of finding it.’
Mathias ran his fingers over the apparently uniform surface of the soil. Then he seemed to dig his fingertips into a phantom crack, which he slowly followed. Like a blind man, Mathias was not actually looking at the ground, as if the illusion provided by his eyes might have spoiled the search; he was concentrating entirely on his sense of touch. Gradually he traced the outline of a rough circle about one metre fifty across, which he then redrew with the tip of the trowel.
‘I’ve got it now, Adamsberg. I’m going to dig it out myself, so that I can follow the sides of the hole, if you can get your men to take the earth away. That’d be quicker.’
Eighty centimetres down, Mathias looked up, pulled off his shirt, and put his hands over the sides of the hole.
‘I don’t think whoever it was was burying anything. We’re too deep now. He was trying to reach the coffin. There were two people.’
‘Correct.’
‘One was digging and the other was emptying the bucket. At this point, they swapped over. No two people handle a pickaxe the same way.’
Mathias took up the trowel again and plunged into the hole. They had borrowed spades and buckets from the keeper, and Justin and Veyrenc were emptying the soil out. Mathias held out some gravel to Adamsberg.
‘When they filled it in, they picked up a bit of gravel from the alleyway. The one with the pickaxe was getting tired, his strokes are less straight. They haven’t buried anything in here – the hole’s quite empty.’
The young man continued to dig for an hour in silence, breaking it only to say: ‘They’ve swapped over again’ and ‘They’ve changed the pickaxe for something smaller.’ Finally, Mathias stood up and leaned his elbows on the edge of the hole, which was now more than waist-deep.
‘By the state of the roses,’ he said, ‘I suppose the man in the grave hasn’t been there long.’
‘Three and a half months. And it’s a woman.’
‘Well, this is the parting of the ways, Adamsberg. I’ll leave the rest to you.’
Mathias pressed his hands on the edges of the hole and jumped out.
Adamsberg looked in.
‘You haven’t reached the coffin. They stopped before it?’
‘I’ve reached the coffin. But it’s open.’
The men of the squad exchanged glances. Retancourt moved forward. Justin and Danglard stepped back.
‘The wood of the lid has been forced in with a pick and pulled off. More earth has fallen inside. You called me to explore the earth, not the corpse. I don’t want to see it.’
Mathias put his trowel back in his pocket and rubbed his large hands on his trousers.
‘Marc’s uncle’s expecting you for supper some day, you know,’ he said to Adamsberg.
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t have much money these days. Let us know ahead of time, so Marc can pinch a bottle and something to eat. Rabbit, shellfish? Would that do you?’
‘That would be perfect.’
Mathias shook hands with the commissaire, smiled briefly at the others, and loped off, carrying his shirt over his arm.
XVII
DANGLARD WAS EXAMINING HIS DESSERT, AN EXPRESSION OF SHOCK ON HIS pale face. He had a horror of exhumations and other atrocious aspects of the profession. The idea that some diabolical grave-robber should be forcing him to look into an open coffin was driving him to the edge of psychic collapse.
‘Eat up, Danglard,’ Adamsberg insisted. ‘You need some sugar. And drink your wine.’
‘Hell’s bells, they must be seriously sick to want to put something in a coffin,’ Danglard muttered.
‘To put something in, or perhaps to take something out.’
‘Whatever. Surely there are enough hiding places in the world not to go poking about there.’
‘Maybe this person was in a hurry. Or perhaps they’d put something into the coffin before they screwed it down.’
‘Must be something very precious if he had the stomach to go and fetch it three months later,’ commented Retancourt. ‘Money or drugs, perhaps – it always comes back to that.’
‘What doesn’t fit,’ Adamsberg said, ‘is not so much whether this individual is sick. It’s that he chose the head of the coffin and not the foot. After all, there’s less room at the head, and it’s much more distressing.’
Danglard nodded silently, still contemplating his dessert.
‘Unless whatever it was was already in the coffin,’ said Veyrenc. ‘If he didn’t put it there himself, he didn’t have any choice.’
‘For instance?’
‘Earrings, maybe, or a necklace belonging to the dead woman.’
‘Jewel robberies are deeply uninteresting,’ muttered Danglard.
‘People have been robbing tombs since the beginning of time, capitaine, and precisely for stuff
like that. We’re going to have to find out if this woman was rich. Anything on the register?’
‘Elisabeth Châtel, unmarried, no children, born at Villebosc-sur-Risle, near Rouen,’ Danglard reeled off.
‘What is it with these people from Normandy? I can’t seem to get away from them. What time are we expecting Ariane?’
‘Who’s Ariane?’
‘The pathologist.’
‘Six o’clock.’
Adamsberg pushed his finger round the rim of his wineglass, producing a painful whine. ‘Eat the damn pudding, capitaine. You don’t have to stick around for the rest of this.’
‘If you’re staying, I’m staying.’
‘Sometimes, Danglard, you have a medieval way of carrying on. Hear that, Retancourt? I stay, he stays.’
Retancourt shrugged, and Adamsberg once more made a strident noise with his wineglass. The television set in the café was transmitting a rowdy football match. The commissaire stared for a while at the figures running all over the pitch, their movements followed with fascination by the dining customers, whose heads were all turned towards the screen. Adamsberg had never been able to understand this passion for football matches. If some fellows liked kicking a ball into a goal mouth, which he could well understand, why give yourself the bother of having to do it against another lot of characters who were determined to stop you? As if the world wasn’t full enough already of people who stopped you kicking the ball where you wanted it to go.
‘What about you, Retancourt?’ Adamsberg asked. ‘Are you staying? Veyrenc can go home, he’s exhausted.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Retancourt rather sulkily.
‘How long for, Violette?’
Adamsberg smiled. Retancourt untied and redid her ponytail, then got up to go to the washroom.
‘Why are you bugging her?’ Danglard asked when the other two were out of earshot.
‘Because she’s getting away from me.’
‘Where to?’
‘To the New Recruit. He’s powerful – he’s going to drag her off.’
‘If he wants to.’
‘That’s just it, we don’t know what he wants. It’s going to be a worry. He’s trying to place his kick somewhere, but what kind of a kick and where? This isn’t the kind of game where we can afford to be caught off guard.’