by Fred Vargas
‘… You are charged with the murders of Jeannine Panier, aged twenty-three, and Christiane Béladan, aged twenty-four, both mistresses of Charles André Lagarde, your husband; with encouraging and organising the escape of Claire Langevin, aged seventy-five, incarcerated at Freiburg Prison in Germany; with the murder of Otto Karlstein, aged fifty-six, warder at the same prison; with the murders of Elisabeth Châtel, aged thirty-six, secretary; of Pascaline Villemot, aged thirty-eight, shop assistant; of Diala Toundé, aged twenty-four, unemployed; of Didier Paillot, aged twenty-two, unemployed; you are further charged with the attempted murder of Violette Retancourt, aged thirty-five, police officer; with the murder of Gilles Grimal, aged forty-two, gendarme; with the attempted murder of Francine Bidault, aged thirty-five, pharmacy assistant; with the attempted murder for a second time of Violette Retancourt, in front of witnesses; with the desecration of the graves of Elisabeth Châtel and Pascaline Villemot.’
Adamsberg, dripping with sweat, put down the sheet of paper. Eight murders, three attempted murders, two exhumations.
‘Not to mention the mutilation of Narcissus, cat, aged eleven,’ he murmured, ‘or the evisceration of the Red Giant, stag, ten points, and two anonymous members of the same species. Have you heard what I’m saying, Ariane?’
‘I wonder what you are doing, that’s all.’
‘You’ve always disliked me, haven’t you? You’ve never forgiven me for invalidating your results in the Hubert Sandrin case in Le Havre.’
‘Gracious. I don’t know what’s given you that idea.’
‘When you hatched your plan, you decided to target my squad. To succeed while making me fail would be exactly what you wanted.’
‘I was assigned to your squad.’
‘Because there was a vacancy and you applied for it. You made Dr Roman ill by making him eat capsules full of pigeon shit.’
‘Pigeon shit? Really?’ asked Estalère in an undertone. Danglard shrugged to indicate he didn’t know what that meant. Ariane took a cigarette from her handbag and Veyrenc gave her a light.
‘As long as I can smoke,’ she said graciously, addressing the wall, ‘you can talk as much as you like. I was warned about you. You’re crazy. Your mother was right: everything goes in one ear and out the other.’
‘Let’s leave my mother out of it, Ariane,’ said Adamsberg evenly. ‘Danglard, Estalère and I saw you creep into Retancourt’s room at eleven tonight, with a syringe full of Novaxon. What was that for?’
Adamsberg had gone round to the wall and Ariane had immediately turned towards the desk.
‘You’ll have to ask Roman that,’ she said. ‘What he told me was that the syringe contained a powerful antidote to Novaxon, which would have helped her to recover. You and Lavoisier had said she wasn’t to have it, because it was still an experimental drug. I was just doing a good turn for Roman. I had to, because he couldn’t get to the hospital himself. I never suspected there was an affair going on between Roman and Retancourt. Or that she was drugging him, so that she would have him at her mercy. She was always round at his place, clinging on to him. I suppose he realised what she was doing, and seized the chance to get rid of her. In the state she’s in, her death would just have looked like a relapse.’
‘In the name of God, Ariane,’ cried Roman, trying to get up.
‘Let it go, mon vieux,’ said Adamsberg, returning to his seat, which had the effect of making Ariane pivot round again.
Adamsberg opened his notebook, leaned back and scribbled for a few moments. Ariane was very strong. In front of a magistrate, her version might look convincing. Who would doubt the word of the famous pathologist Ariane Lagarde, as opposed to that of the humble Dr Roman who was losing his wits?
‘You knew the nurse,’ Adamsberg began again. ‘You had often interrogated her for your research. You knew who had arrested her. It didn’t take much to send me on her track. Of course, she had to be out of prison first. So you killed the guard and got her out of jail dressed as a doctor. Then you installed yourself at the heart of the investigation, with a plausible scapegoat all ready to take the blame. All you had to do then was make up the potion, your most ambitious cocktail.’
‘You’ve never liked my cocktails, have you?’ Ariane said, indulgently.
‘No, not much. Did you copy out the recipe, Ariane? Or did you know it by heart from your childhood?’
‘Which one? Beer and crème de menthe? Coffee and grenadine?’
‘Did you know that there’s a bone in a pig’s snout?’
‘Yes,’ said Ariane, looking surprised.
‘Yes, you did know, because you left it behind in the reliquary of Saint Jerome, along with the sheep’s bones. You’d always known about the reliquary, as you had about the De reliquis. And did you know there was a bone in the penis of a cat?’
‘No, I have to confess I didn’t know that.’
‘And a bone shaped like a cross in the heart of a stag?’
‘No, I didn’t know that, either.’
Adamsberg tried another gambit and went to the door. But the pathologist just turned calmly to look at Danglard and Veyrenc, staring right through them.
‘Once you found out that Retancourt was recovering, you knew you didn’t have much time to stop her talking.’
‘A remarkable case. Apparently Dr Lavoisier doesn’t want to send her back to you. Or that’s what they say in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.’
‘How do you know what they say?’
‘Hospital gossip, Jean-Baptiste. It’s a small world.’
Adamsberg took out his mobile. Lamarre and Maurel were searching the flat Ariane had rented in Paris.
‘We’ve found the shoes,’ said Lamarre. ‘Beige espadrilles that lace up high on the ankle, and they have a big platform sole, about ten centimetres high.’
‘Yes, she’s wearing a pair like that tonight, but black.’
‘This pair was with a long grey woollen coat, carefully folded. But there isn’t any polish on the soles.’
‘That’s normal, Lamarre. The polish is part of the trick, to direct us towards the nurse. What about the potion?’
‘Nothing so far, sir.’
‘What are they doing in my flat?’ asked Ariane, looking slightly shocked.
‘They’re searching it,’ said Adamsberg, putting the mobile back in his pocket. ‘They found your other pair of espadrilles.’
‘Where?’
‘In the fuse cupboard on the landing, safe from Alpha’s eyes.’
‘Why should I put any of my things out there? The fuse cupboard on the staircase doesn’t belong to me.’
He still had no serious material evidence, Adamsberg thought, and with someone like Lagarde it would take more than her showing up in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul at night to make anything stick. There remained the slender hope of a confession, of a personality crash, as Ariane would say herself.
He rubbed his eyes.
‘Why are you wearing those shoes? Isn’t it very awkward to walk in platform soles?’
‘It makes you look slim. It’s a question of style. Not that you’d know anything about style, Jean-Baptiste.’
‘I know what you told me yourself. The dissociator isolates herself from the ground her crimes are committed on. With soles like that, you’re high up above the ground, almost as if you were on stilts, aren’t you? And it makes you look taller. The guard at Montrouge and Oswald’s nephew both saw you as a tall grey shape on the nights you were prospecting for the site of the graves, and Francine said the same thing. But it didn’t make it easy to walk. You have to go a step at a time, so it looked as though you were slipping and tottering, as all three of them said.’
Tired of going round in circles like the mirror, Adamsberg sat down at his desk again, settling for speaking to the right shoulder of the in-accessible dancer.
‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘it looked like a coincidence that took me to the village of Haroncourt. Was that a twist of fate? No, you were manipulating fate. You got Camil
le that invitation to play in the concert. She never could understand why the orchestra from Leeds asked her to join them. That way, you drew me up there too, so I was on the spot. After that, you could guide me where you wanted to, following events, and making sure you were there to prevent any accidental obstacle arising. You asked Hermance to call me in to look at the graveyard in Opportune. Then you asked her not to put me up again, in case she said too much. A woman like you can manipulate poor Hermance like putty. Because you know that area well, it’s where you grew up and spent the time of your youth, “pass and pass again”. The former priest at Le Mesnil, Father Raymond, was your cousin twice removed. Your adoptive parents brought you up in the manor at Ecalart, only four kilometres from the relics of Saint Jerome. And the old priest used to spend so much time with you, letting you look at his old books, even letting you touch Saint Jerome’s ribs, that they whispered in the village that you were his daughter, the daughter of sin. Do you remember him?’
‘He was a family friend,’ she replied, smiling at the wall and at her childhood memories. ‘He was a bit boring, always going on about that old stuff. Still, I was fond of him.’
‘He was interested in the De reliquis recipe?’
‘I think that was all he was interested in. And in me. He had got it into his head that he was going to make up the potion. He was crazy, really, with all his fads. A very special man. For a start, he had a penile bone.’
‘What, the priest?’ asked Estalère, scandalised.
‘He got it from the curate’s cat,’ replied Ariane, with a near-laugh. ‘And then he wanted some stag’s bones.’
‘Which bones?’
‘From the heart.’
‘You said you didn’t know about that.’
‘I didn’t, but he did.’
‘And he got hold of them? He prepared the potion with you?’
‘No, no, the poor man was gored by the second stag. One of its antlers opened up his belly and he died.’
‘So you wanted to start again, after him?’
‘Begin what?’
‘The potion, the mixture?’
‘What mixture? Grenadine and beer?’
Back to square one, thought Adamsberg, drawing a figure eight on his notebook, as he had with the twig in the fire. A long silence followed.
‘Anyone who says Father Raymond was my father is talking rubbish,’ said Ariane unexpectedly. ‘Have you ever been to Florence?’
‘No, I go to the mountains if I need a break.’
‘Well, if you went there you would see two figures, all in red, covered with scales and boils, with drooping breasts and testicles.’
‘Maybe so.’
‘There’s no “maybe” about it, Jean-Baptiste. You’d see them, that’s all.’
‘What about them?’
‘They’re in a picture by Fra Angelico. You’re not going to argue with a picture, are you?’
‘No, OK.’
‘They’re my parents.’
Ariane gave a tremulous smile at the wall.
‘So stop harassing me about them, please.’
‘I didn’t say anything about them.’
‘That’s where they are, so leave them there.’
Adamsberg glanced at Danglard, who conveyed by signs that yes, Fra Angelico was a painter, and there were some figures in his paintings covered with pustules, but that nothing indicated they were Ariane’s parents, given that the artist had lived in the fifteenth century.
‘What about Opportune?’ Adamsberg began again. ‘You remember the people there – you know them all like the back of your hand. It was easy for you to appear in the graveyard to the impressionable young Gratien, who went up there every Tuesday and Friday evening at midnight. And easy to guess that Gratien would tell his mother, who’d tell Oswald. Easy enough to control Hermance. You took me where you wanted, sending me like a guided robot through this series of corpses that you were creating and I was finding and handing over to you, because I trusted your autopsies to be competent. But you couldn’t guess that the new priest would mention the De reliquis, or that Danglard would take a look at it. Even so, what would that matter? Unfortunately for you, Ariane, Veyrenc has a photographic memory and he remembered the whole recipe. He’s got this odd, unforeseeable but genuine gift. And you didn’t imagine that Pascaline would take her poor mutilated cat to the priest to get his blessing. That was an odd and unforeseeable act, but it happened. Nor could you have imagined that Retancourt would survive the dose of Novaxon. Her stamina was something odd and unforeseeable, too. And you couldn’t guess that the death of a stag would so distress that group of men. Or that Robert, who was particularly upset, would drag me off to see the corpse of the Red Giant, so that that stag’s heart remains engraved in my memory, and I’ve still got his antlers. The peculiarities of all these people – their talents, their interests, their unpredictable actions, – are not things you’ve ever concerned yourself with. You never suspected they could exist. You’ve only ever liked other people when they’re dead, haven’t you? Other people? What are they? Contemptible and insignificant beings, the whole negligible human race. But neglecting them was what brought about your downfall, Ariane.’
Adamsberg stretched out his arms and closed his eyes, realising that Ariane’s incredulity and refusal to speak were creating impenetrable barriers between them. Their conversation was running along two parallel tracks that never met.
‘Tell me about your husband,’ he said, putting his elbows on the table. ‘What’s become of him?’
‘Charles?’ said Ariane, raising her eyebrows. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. And the less I see of him, the better, actually.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Quite sure. Charles is a failure who just chases paramedics in skirts. As you know.’
‘But you didn’t marry again after he left you. No boyfriends?’
‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’
The first crack in Ariane’s façade. Her voice had dropped in register and she wasn’t censoring her speech. Omega was advancing along the top of the wall.
‘Apparently, Charles is still in love with you.’
‘Gracious. Still, that wouldn’t surprise me – he’s so pathetic.’
‘Apparently, he has realised that the paramedics aren’t a patch on you.’
‘Obviously. You’re not going to compare me with fat sows like that, are you, Jean-Baptiste?’
Estalère leaned towards Danglard.
‘Is there a bone in the snout of a sow?’ he whispered.
‘Suppose so,’ said Danglard, indicating that this wasn’t the moment.
‘Apparently, Charles wants to get back together with you,’ Adamsberg was saying. ‘At least, that’s what the gossip is in Lille.’
‘Gracious.’
‘But are you perhaps afraid that you’ll be too old, when he does come back?’
Ariane gave a small, almost flirtatious laugh.
‘Ageing, Jean-Baptiste is a perverse idea, arising in God’s vicious imagination. How old do you think I am? Sixty?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that,’ said Estalère spontaneously.
‘Shut up,’ said Danglard.
‘See? Even that youngster knows.’
‘What?’
Ariane took another cigarette, and the veil of smoke protected her once more from Omega.
‘You came to my new house,’ Adamsberg continued, ‘just before I moved in, to check it out and unblock the door to the attic. You gave quite a scare to the old man, Lucio Velasco. What did you put on your face? A mask? A stocking?’
‘Who’s Lucio Velasco?’
‘My neighbour. He’s Spanish. Once you had the attic door unblocked, you could get in there whenever you wanted. You sometimes came at night and walked about up there, then you got out quickly.’
Ariane let her ash fall to the floor.
‘You’ve heard footsteps in your attic?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was her, Jean-Baptiste. Claire Langevin. She’s after you.’
‘Yes, that’s what you wanted us to think. I was supposed to tell people about these nightly sounds, to foster the myth of this nurse prowling about ready to strike. And she would have, in the end, by your hand, with a syringe and a scalpel. But do you know why it didn’t worry me? No, you can’t know that.’
‘You should worry. She’s dangerous, as I have told you many times.’
‘Well, you see, Ariane, I already had a ghost in the house, Saint Clarisse. How peculiar is that?’
‘Killed by the tanner in 1771,’ said Danglard.
‘With his bare hands,’ Adamsberg added. ‘Don’t lose the thread, Ariane – you don’t know everything in this world. I thought it was Clarisse walking about in the attic. Well, to be honest, I really thought old Lucio was on his rounds, checking up. He has a sort of special aura too. He used to worry about the ghost when I had little Tom staying overnight. But it wasn’t him I could hear. It was you, up there.’
‘No, it was her.’
‘You’re not going to talk, are you, Ariane? About Omega?’
‘Nobody talks about Omega. I thought you had read my book.’
‘In some dissociators, you wrote, a crack can open up.’
‘Only if they’re flawed.’
Adamsberg pursued the interrogation until far into the night. Roman had been allowed to stretch out on the cushions in the coffee-machine room and Estalère on a camp bed. Danglard and Veyrenc backed up the commissaire with their cross-questioning. Ariane, although tired, remained steadfastly in Alpha mode, without resisting the endless session or abandoning her stance of denying or claiming not to understand anything about Omega.
At four-forty in the morning, Veyrenc staggered to his feet and fetched four coffees.