by Fred Vargas
‘Can you see tracks from its wheels?’
‘Yes, they go through the hall. She must have neutralised the dogs with meat laced with Novaxon. Then the tracks turn, and we can see them going along the corridor. Partly covered by the return trip.’
‘Footprints?’
‘You’re going to like this,’ said Lamarre, with the smile of a child who has been hiding a present behind his back to increase the surprise. ‘The angle of the corridor wasn’t easy to negotiate, so she had to lean hard on the trolley and pivot on her feet – see what I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the concrete floor is rough there.’
‘Yes?’
‘And just there we found traces …’
‘Of navy shoe polish,’ said Adamsberg.
‘You’ve got it.’
‘Isolated from the ground on which her crimes are committed,’ said the commissaire slowly, ‘but still leaving traces behind. Nobody can really be a Shade. We’ll get her through these blue marks.’
‘There aren’t any full prints anywhere, so we can’t be sure about the size. but it looks as if they were women’s shoes, flat-heeled and solid.’
‘Now the cupboard,’ said Justin. ‘That’s where she injected the dose of Novaxon, before shutting the door on its hook.’
‘Nothing of significance in the cupboard?’
A short silence punctuated Justin’s report.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The syringe.’
‘You can’t be serious, lieutenant! She surely didn’t leave her syringe behind?’
‘Yes, absolutely. On the floor. Wiped completely clean, of course – no prints.’
‘So now she’s signing her work,’ said Adamsberg, getting to his feet as if the nurse was openly challenging him.
‘That’s what we thought too.’
The commissaire paced around for a few moments on the grass, his hand behind his back.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘She’s crossed some kind of threshhold. She thinks she’s invincible, and she’s telling us so.’
‘Seems logical,’ said Kernorkian, ‘for someone who wants a recipe for eternal life.’
‘But she still hasn’t laid hands on the third virgin,’ said Adamsberg.
Estalère did his round of the officers, pouring coffee into the plastic cups they held out. The makeshift picnic site and the absence of milk made it impossible for him to conduct his usual complicated ceremony.
‘She’ll get there before we do,’ said Mordent.
‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Adamsberg.
He returned to the circle of officers and sat down cross-legged in the centre.
‘The quick of virgins,’ he said, ‘didn’t just mean the dead women’s hair.’
‘But Roman settled that for us,’ said Mordent. ‘We know this maniac cut off some locks of hair.’
‘If she cut off some locks of hair, it was in order to gain access.’
‘To what?’
‘To the real hair of death. To the hair that goes on growing after death.’
‘Oh, of course!’ exclaimed Danglard ruefully. ‘The quick. The part that keeps on living – and growing – even after death.’
‘That’s the reason,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘why it was essential for the nurse to come back and dig up her victims a few months later. The quick needed time to grow. And that’s what she was after, the two or three centimetres of hair growing out from the root, in the grave. It was more than a symbol of eternal life. It was a concrete example of vital resistance, life refusing to stop after death.’
‘Ugh, sickening,’ said Noël, summing up the general reaction.
Froissy packed up the food, which no longer tempted anyone.
‘But how will that help us identify the third virgin?’ she asked.
‘Now that we understand that, Froissy, the rest will follow logically: it has to be crushed with the “living cross in the heart of the eternal branches,” adjacent in equal quantity.’
‘We’d already settled that,’ said Mordent. ‘It must mean wood from the Holy Cross.’
‘No,’ said Adamsberg. ‘That doesn’t fit. Like the rest, the text has to be read absolutely literally, word for word. Christ’s cross can’t live in the heart of anything, it doesn’t make sense.’
Danglard, sitting sideways on his tyre, screwed up his eyes, on alert.
‘The recipe says,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘that it’s a living cross.’
‘That’s just what doesn’t make sense,’ commented Mordent.
‘A cross, living inside a body that represents eternity,’ said Adamsberg slowly, pronouncing every word clearly. ‘A body related to eternal branches.’
‘In the Middle Ages,’ said Danglard, ‘the creature that signified eternity was the stag.’
Adamsberg, who up to this point hadn’t been entirely sure of his ground, smiled across at his deputy.
‘Why was that, capitaine?’
‘Because the stag’s antlers reach up to heaven. Because the antlers die and fall, then grow again every year, like the leaves of trees, with an extra point, getting more powerful, year by year. It’s an amazing phenomenon, to do with the beast’s vital force. It was once considered a symbolic representation of eternal life, always beginning again, and always growing larger, like the antlers. Sometimes one finds representation of stags with Christ on their heads, or a cross between the antlers.’
‘The stag’s antlers grow out of its skull,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Like hair.’
The commissaire ran his hand over the spring grass.
‘The eternal branches could be a metaphor for the stag’s antlers.’
‘Do they have to be in the mixture, then?’
‘No, because we need a cross. And every word in the recipe counts, like I said. The cross that lives in the heart of the eternal branches. So the cross must be inside the stag. It must be a bone, like the antlers, and incorruptible.’
‘Perhaps the bone at the base of the antlers, where it makes an angle,’ said Voisenet.
‘It doesn’t look to me as if deer’s antlers make a cross,’ said Froissy.
‘No, no,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I think the cross is somewhere else. I think it’s a secret bone that you have to know about, like the cat’s. The penile bone represents the male principle. We need something of the kind in the stag. A bone in the shape of a cross, that would represent the stag’s links with eternity, but hidden inside its body. A living bone.’
Adamsberg looked round at his colleagues, waiting for a response.
‘I don’t see it,’ said Voisenet.
‘Well, I think,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘that we’ll find this bone in the heart of a stag. The heart is the symbol of life, it beats. A cross that lives, a cross inside the heart of the stag with eternal antlers.’
Voisenet turned to Adamsberg.
‘It sounds good, commissaire,’ he said. ‘The only problem is that there isn’t a bone in the heart of a stag. Or in anyone else’s heart. Not in the shape of a cross or anything else.’
‘Well, Voisenet, there has to be something like that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because in the forest of Brétilly, and then again in the forest near Opportune, two male stags were slaughtered last month and left lying on the ground. The only thing that had been done to them was that their hearts had been cut out. These killings were carried out by the same person. They were in the same place, that is within the zone of the saint’s influence, and they were killed near the two women who were sacrificed. They must have been shot by our angel of death.’
‘That makes sense,’ said Lamarre.
‘The stags were cut open after death in a particular place. Exactly like what happened to the cat, Narcissus. They were operated on in some sense. With a definite aim, to get something out. What? The living cross in the heart. So it must be inside the stag’s heart, in some form.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Danglard, shaking his head. ‘We’d know about it.�
��
‘We didn’t know about the cat, or the pig’s snout,’ said Kernorkian.
‘Yes, I knew about those all right,’ said Voisenet. ‘But I also know there’s no bone in the heart of a stag.’
‘I’m sorry, lieutenant, but there really has to be one.’
At this point there were some mutterings and doubtful glances, as Adamsberg got up to stretch his legs, It did not seem evident to the positivists that reality should reshape itself to meet the strange ideas that the commissaire was putting forward, inventing a bone in the heart of the stag.
‘No,’ insisted Voisenet. ‘It’s the other way round. There is no bone in the heart. So we have to work around that, because it’s the truth.’
‘Voisenet, there’s got to be something, or none of these actions would make sense. And if there is, we need to watch for the next stag to be slaughtered. The third virgin the nurse has picked out will be in the nearby area. The cross in the heart must be as close as possible to the quick of the virgin. “Adjacent in equal quantity.” It doesn’t mean “joined with it,” it means “close by”.’
‘Adjacent,’ said Danglard, ‘means lying alongside, or lined up against.’
‘Thank you, Danglard. For the virgin and the stag to be close together looks right: the female and male essences giving birth to life, in this case eternal life. When we find another stag with its heart cut out, we’ll know the name of the virgin out of all those you’ve got on your lists.’
‘All right,’ admitted Justin. ‘But how do we find this stag? Will we have to keep a watch on the forests?’
‘Someone’s already doing that for us.’
LIV
ADAMSBERG WAITED IN THE RAIN FOR THE ANGELUS TO BE RUNG IN THE church at Haroncourt before he pushed open the door of the café. This Sunday evening, he found the assembled men all present and correct, and about to begin the first round of drinks.
‘Ah, you’ll be wanting a drink then, man from the Béarn,’ said Robert, without letting his surprise show.
A rapid glance at Anglebert told Adamsberg that the outsider was still welcome to sit down, even if he had dug up a grave at Opportune-la-Haute eighteen days earlier. As in the past, a place was made for him alongside the elder of the tribe, and a glass pushed towards him.
‘You’ve been busy,’ observed Anglebert, pouring out the white wine.
‘Yes, I’ve had problems, police problems.’
‘Ah, that’s life,’ said Anglebert. ‘Robert’s a roofer, he gets roof problems, Hilaire’s got pork-butcher problems, Oswald’s got farmer’s problems, and I’ve got the problem of getting old. And that’s no fun, believe me. Drink up.’
‘I know now why those two women were killed,’ said Adamsberg, obeying the command. ‘And I know why their graves were opened as well.’
‘So now you’re satisfied.’
‘No, not really,’ said Adamsberg, grimacing. ‘This killer is a fiend from hell, and she hasn’t finished yet.’
‘But she’s going to?’ said Oswald.
‘Or so you think,’ punctuated Achille.
‘Yes, she does intend to finish the job,’ said Adamsberg, ‘by killing a third virgin. I’m looking for this third virgin. And I need some help.’
All eyes swivelled towards him, surprised at such an open appeal.
‘Well, not wishing to cause offence,’ said Anglebert, ‘but that’s your job.’
‘Not ours,’ punctuated Achille.
‘You’re wrong, it does concern you. Because it’s the same woman who slaughtered your stags.’
‘Told you so,’ breathed Oswald.
‘How do you know?’ asked Hilaire.
‘That’s his business,’ Anglebert interrupted. ‘If he tells you he knows, then he knows, that’s all.’
‘Stands to reason,’ punctuated Achille.
‘Both the human victims were linked with the death of a stag,’ Adamsberg went on. ‘Or, more precisely, an attack on the heart of the stag.’
‘What’s the point of that?’ asked Robert
‘To get at the bone in the heart, the bone that’s shaped like a cross,’ said Adamsberg, staking everything on this throw.
‘Ah, could be,’ said Oswald. ‘That’s what Hermance thought. She’s got one of them, Hermance has.’
‘A bone in her heart?’ asked Achille in astonishment.
‘No, in her sideboard drawer. She’s got a stag’s heartbone.’
‘Going after the cross in a stag, this day and age, you’ve got to be a bit cracked,’ said Anglebert. ‘That’s stuff they did in bygone times.’
‘Kings of France used to collect ‘em, though,’ said Robert. ‘To bring them good health.’
‘Like I said, it’s stuff from the olden days. Nobody collects them now.’
Adamsberg drank a glass to his own health, secretly celebrating the fact that there really was a bone like a cross in the heart of a stag.
‘But what did he want with the cross, this murderer of yours?’ asked Robert.
‘I told you, she’s a woman.’
‘Aargh,’ said Robert, with a look of disgust. ‘But anyway, you know why, do you?’
‘It was to put this cross alongside hair taken from the virgins.’
‘Well,’ said Oswald, ‘that proves she’s crazy. What’s that supposed to be about?’
‘It’s part of a recipe to give you eternal life.’
‘God’s sakes,’ spluttered Hilaire.
‘Eternal life, eh?’ observed Anglebert. ‘All right for some, but then again, you wouldn’t really want it, would you?’
‘Why not?’
‘C’m on, Hilaire, just think if you had to live for ever. What on earth would you do all day? You can’t sit around drinking for thousands of years.’
‘That’s a long time, all right,’ said Achille.
‘She plans to kill the next woman,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘after she’s killed the next stag. Or maybe the other way round, I don’t know. But all I can do is follow the cross in the heart. So that’s why I want you to tell me as soon as another stag is found dead.’
An ominous silence suddenly fell, such as only Normans can create or tolerate. Anglebert poured another round of drinks, making the neck of the bottle clink against each glass.
‘Well, my friend, it’s already happened,’ said Robert.
There was another silence, while everyone swallowed a mouthful, except Adamsberg who was staring at Robert with a stricken expression.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘About six days back.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
‘You didn’t seem interested any more,’ said Robert sulkily. ‘All you cared about was Oswald’s ghost.’
‘Where was this?’
‘At Le Bosc des Tourelles.’
‘Was it killed the same way as the others?’
‘Yeah, just the same. Heart on the ground beside it.’
‘Which are the nearest villages to it?’
‘Campenille, Troimare, Louvelot. Then a bit further away, Longeney one way and Coucy the other. Couple more. Plenty of choice.’
‘And no woman has been killed or had an accident round there?’
‘No.’
Adamsberg breathed in relief and took another sip of wine.
‘Well, there was that old Yvonne who fell over on the bridge,’ said Hilaire.
‘Is she dead?’
‘You’ve got death on the brain as usual,’ said Robert. ‘No, she broke her hip.’
‘Can you take me there tomorrow?’
‘Where? To see Yvonne.’
‘No, the stag.’
‘He’s already been buried.’
‘Who’s got the antlers?’
‘Nobody, he’d already lost ‘em.’
‘I’d still like to see the spot.’
‘Could be done,’ said Robert, holding out his glass for a third helping. ‘But where will you sleep? In the hotel, or at Hermance’s?’
‘Be
st be the hotel,’ said Oswald quietly.
‘Yes, that’d be best,’ said the punctuator.
Nobody expained why it was no longer possible to stay with Oswald’s sister.
LV
WHILE HIS COLLEAGUES WERE CHECKING THE AREA SURROUNDING LE BOSC des Tourelles, Adamsberg had been hospital visiting. He had seen both Veyrenc, who was now hobbling around at Bichat, and Retancourt, who was still asleep at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. Veyrenc was due to be discharged the next day, and Retancourt’s sleep appeared to be more like a natural state. She’s returning to the surface quite fast, Lavoisier had said. He was taking quantities of notes on the polyvalent goddess. Veyrenc, once he had been brought up to date on the rescue of the lieutenant and the cross inside the stag, had formulated some advice which Adamsberg was chewing over as he walked back to the headquarters.
Her strength brought from the brink one who was close to death.
But another’s weakness threatens her every breath.
Make haste, the time draws near. The great stag died at last,
The virgin is at risk, her hour is almost past.
‘We’ve got a Francine Bidault here,’ said Mordent, passing over an index card to Adamsberg. ‘Aged thirty-five. Lives outside Clancy, a hamlet, population two hundred, seven kilometres from the edge of the Bosc des Tourelles. The other two nearest women live fourteen or nineteen kilometres away, and they’re both closer to another forest, La Chataigneraie, which is big enough to have deer in it. Francine lives alone, in an isolated farmhouse, almost a kilometre away from the nearest neighbours. Her garden wall is easy to climb, and the house is very old. Rickety wooden doors, simple locks, easy to force.’
‘Right,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Does she go out to work? Does she have a car?’
‘She’s got a part-time job, cleaning in a pharmacy in Evreux. She goes there by bus every day except Sunday. Any attack would most likely come between seven at night and one the next afternoon, which is when she leaves home.’