by Fred Vargas
Adamsberg smiled.
‘You’re not wrong.’
He put the phone down, feeling puzzled. This Louise Chevrier, about whom so little was known, wasn’t just ‘batty’, she must be totally neurotic. That is, if she had a phobia of liquid soap, a fluid substance squirting out, a recurrent image of the rape she had suffered. He had had to deal with a number of cases of women who had been raped. He had met some who couldn’t stand to be in a room with a man, but he had never heard of terror extending to the sight of any kind of creamy liquid. Louise’s phobias really did smack of insanity. But if he could, admittedly, see the link between liquid soap and sperm, he couldn’t see how it extended to oil.
He closed his eyes for a few moments, then went and leaned his forehead against the window, looking at the lime tree. Oil. Now where had he heard the word recently? When he was crumbling the cake: ‘Your trousers will be ruined’? No. The roar of a passing motorbike drowned out the chirruping of the nestlings.
Oil, yes, good grief, oil spilled on the road, the route that the third victim, stink bug Victor Ménard, would take on his motorbike.
Adamsberg ran his hands down his cheeks. No coincidence, since Mercadet would have found out about Louise being raped sooner or later. But why had this woman, so terrified of recluses, come to live with Irène Royer? When Irène made no secret of the fact that she didn’t kill the creatures? It made no sense. Unless Louise had been lying all along the line. Unless she was really in that house precisely because she knew there would be recluse spiders there, where they were protected, like she was. Then in order to throw anyone off the scent, she pretended to be afraid of them, of being an arachnophobe. Whereas really she was an arachnophile, or even a reclusophile. He was pretty sure the latter term didn’t exist.
But how would she have heard about an investigation? Irène had kept her word, because no news of it had got out on the internet. But they had spoken on the phone, and she regularly addressed him as ‘commissaire’, which was a giveaway.
Suddenly anxious, he stiffened his arms. Then he relaxed. Irène wasn’t a man, and certainly not one of the Recluse Gang. She couldn’t be at risk. Unless. Unless Louise was getting worried about the progress of the investigation, and unless Irène started to have suspicions about her housemate, about which she might, sooner or later, tell this mysterious ‘commissaire’.
He called his arachnophile friend once more.
‘Irène, this is quite urgent. Are you alone?’
‘Élisabeth’s asleep. What’s happening?’
‘Listen carefully. Don’t phone me when Louise might be able to overhear us. Do you follow me?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Never mind, I’m just asking you to promise.’
‘But why?’
‘Has she ever asked you about me? About the man you telephone sometimes?’
‘No, never, why would she? With her spiders in the belfry, she’s not going to take much notice of anyone else, I promise you that.’
‘Well, that might change. If she does ask you about this “commissaire” you speak to, tell her this: I’m an old friend from Nîmes you met up with again by chance. And like you, I’m interested in spiders, in my spare time. I’m a zoologist manqué. That would explain our exchanges about the recluse and its latest doings. Understood?’
‘Ye-es,’ said Irène, for once at a loss for words.
‘And I’m also a collector of snowstorms.’
‘You are?’
‘Of course not, it’s a lie, Irène. You follow me?’
‘No. You’ll have to explain a bit. I’m not a mean person, like I said, but I’m not a puppet either, commissaire.’
‘I don’t think your Louise is just batty. I think she’s deeply unhinged. And,’ Adamsberg went on untruthfully, ‘she might be capable of spreading any information she picked up from you about the investigation.’
‘Oh, I see a bit better what you’re getting at.’
‘So she mustn’t on any account suspect that I think these deaths are murders. For even a whisper of that to get out on social media would be a disaster.’
‘Yes, I follow you.’
‘All right, got that, Irène? Just an old friend, a frustrated zoologist interested in spiders and snowstorms.’
‘Well, what I could do then,’ said Irène, who seemed to have regained a little of her verve, ‘I could buy two snowstorms here in Rochefort. And then when I get home, I could tell her I bought one for me, one for you, and that we met up in a souvenir shop. In Pau, for example. I’ve got a Pau snowstorm. That way it’s me telling the lie.’
‘That’s perfect. And if you have a text message for me that mentions anything sensitive, send it then delete it.’
‘I follow you. You think she might look on my phone?’
‘And your computer.’
‘Oh, well, in that case, we could take advantage of it. I could send you false messages! About snowstorms, with a photo, saying: “Have you got this one?” As if we were rival collectors. And then about the spiders, I could talk to you about house spiders, garden spiders and black widows, why not? Since you’re a frustrated arachnologist, there’s no reason you’d only be interested in recluses.’
‘Yes. Excellent, do that, Irène.’
‘There’s a hitch though. If we’re old friends who’ve met up again, and I like that idea, why would I call you “commissaire”?’
Adamsberg considered this for a moment, with a clear impression that Irène was a quicker thinker than he was.
‘Well, say it’s a joke. That you used to call me Jean-Baptiste, but when we met up again you learned I’d become a commissaire in the police, so you got in the habit of calling me that, just for a laugh.’
‘That’s not brilliant, commissaire.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘I think I’ll take turns. Sometimes I’ll say “commissaire” and sometimes “Jean-Baptiste”. Or even “Jean-Bapt”, it’s more friendly, sounds more convincing.’
‘You should have been a cop, Irène.’
‘And you should have been an arachnologist, Jean-Bapt. Sorry, I’m just getting into practice.’
XXXI
‘As I was saying, before our voyage to the Pacific,’ Adamsberg began, once they were all back in their seats in the council chamber, ‘we need to find another channel.’
‘At the 52nd parallel,’ said Mercadet seriously, and to himself.
‘Commandant Danglard thinks we’ve nothing to get our teeth into. That’s not quite true. Something else has been going on under our very eyes since the beginning. Something we haven’t been looking at.’
‘What?’ asked Estalère.
‘Not what, Estalère, who?’
‘This is about the killer?’
‘I think it’s a woman.’
‘A woman?’ said Mordent. ‘A woman? Who’s supposed to have killed eight men over a period of twenty years? What’s taken you in this direction, or rather into this . . . channel, commissaire?’
‘The Recluse Gang mutated into the Rapists’ Gang, we know that. Mercadet has been tracing cases of rape from when these boys reached adulthood until, let’s say, the age of about sixty-five. Over a period of fifty years. It’s a long job, and they could have been active further afield than the Gard département. Froissy will give him a hand.’
Adamsberg was trying to speak in a neutral way, to calm down the whole squad, but Danglard’s attack had hit him hard. He was conscious that the commandant was on the edge of his own depressive abyss, and that his suicidal aggression could grow like briars over a demolition site. All the same, it was the first time Danglard had insulted him and knowingly spoken to him with such scorn in front of everyone. Adamsberg’s natural suppleness inclined him to forget the incident. But it had cut him to the quick. Instinctively, what he wanted to do was leave the me
eting and go for a walk. Not to have Danglard within sight, not to have to struggle to organise and justify arguments about the way of exploring this new but so far meagre lead. It was time to hand over to Veyrenc, who was quite at home in matters of logic.
‘Any idea who this woman might be?’ asked Froissy, who had been shocked by Danglard’s intervention and intimidated by that of Noël, and now had her hands laid flat across her keyboard. Good posture against arthritis, Adamsberg thought.
‘Just a few thoughts, nothing very original. But it’s best to go back to the beginning when you’ve missed one way through.’
‘Missed the straits you mean,’ said Justin.
Magellan’s voyage had certainly made an impression on them, giving them something of a heroic cast of mind which seemed to inspire them now. Despite the disastrous context of a voyage that had gone in entirely the wrong direction, Adamsberg noted that people were sitting up straighter than they had been when the meeting started, their attitudes looked more determined and their eyes turned now and then to the world map. Some of his officers were perhaps even imagining themselves far away from this room with its plastic chairs, hauling instead on the rigging during a storm, hanging on to the masts, plugging holes in the timbers and eating rotten ship’s biscuit. Who knew? Some of them certainly looked as if they were somewhere else.
‘Well, she has been on this killing spree for twenty years,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘with eight victims so far. Crimes like this, pursued over a long period, a programme of annihilation planned neurotically as a vital objective, must have their roots in childhood. There are no impulsive events, no slip-ups. So whoever this unknown killer is, she must have suffered very badly. That’s the first and not very original idea I’m putting forward. It was something in her youth that transformed her into a determined criminal.’
‘A difficult childhood,’ remarked Justin. ‘That won’t help us narrow down the field much.’
‘No, it won’t. But we know she has been raped, which similarly does not help us much. Whether it was reported or not, followed up or not, this woman is carrying out her own justice. There is one element that might help us find her, and that is this bizarre choice of the recluse spider’s venom. When she started, she didn’t think about a spider. She used various means as they came to hand: shooting, interfering with equipment, a motorbike accident, and finally the poisonous mushrooms. That was probably the tipping point, when the idea began to take shape. For the fourth murder, she’d chosen a venomous substance. The name of the mushroom is significant: commonly called a death cap, but the Latin name is Amanita phalloides, so the phallic reference matters. And it links the two kinds of poison, one from fungi and one from spiders.’
‘Correct,’ said Voisenet, ‘changing from a vegetal toxin to an animal one.’
‘But collecting spider venom is a very different matter from finding death cap mushrooms in the woods. So she must have spent fourteen years with the obsessive desire to find a new type of poison. Remember what Voisenet told us about the links between venomous fluid and power. This woman has managed to dominate the spider and take over its powers. Since she was forcibly injected herself with animal fluid from a man, to devastating effect, she’s turning it back as a lethal attack on her aggressor.’
‘Yes, her aggressor,’ Mordent repeated. ‘So why not just take it out on the one man? Why go for the whole gang?’
‘We don’t know what has happened to her. She could have been raped more than once.’
‘By the ten stink bugs?’ asked Lamarre.
‘The stink bugs, who were the ones who first managed to get the recluse to hurt people, are still our best lead. If this woman was raped by one of them – or even two or three, because we know they went in for gang rapes – she might have applied her vengeance to all of them.’
‘Love is a nettle that must be harvested every moment if one wishes to sleep in its shade,’ murmured Danglard. ‘Pablo Picasso. Love, or passion.’
All eyes turned towards the commandant, since they had not expected him to speak at all. Was he coming back to them, beginning to rejoin his fellows? No, not at all. His pale face remained stony. Danglard was speaking only to himself.
‘Well,’ Kernorkian went on, ignoring the interruption, ‘she would need to have known there was a gang, and their names.’
‘Yes, obviously.’
‘And also that they had this past history with recluse spiders,’ Kernorkian persisted.
‘Yes, that must be true,’ said Veyrenc. ‘One of them must have talked.’
Here the commissaire got to his feet, already feeling tired of sitting down, and began as usual to pace round the room.
‘One rape case does interest me,’ he said, ‘though it has no direct connection to La Miséricorde.’
‘I thought we had to stick to the orphanage,’ said Noël.
‘Well, I’m not forgetting it. But we’re still in Nîmes, here’s the story. The woman is called Louise Chevrier. She was raped in Nîmes in 1981, aged thirty-eight, and they caught the man. His name is Nicolas Carnot, and he’s never been anywhere near the orphanage. They gave him fifteen years and he got out in 1996. Did he nevertheless have some connection with the gang? Mercadet’s following this up. Froissy, can you check out Louise Chevrier? We need to know all we can about her. Meet back here at four.’
‘With respect, sir, we won’t have anything more by four,’ said Justin.
‘No, I know, that’s not what we’re going to discuss. At four o’clock, Commandant Danglard is going to give us a brief lecture on medieval recluses. The women, that is.’
‘Medieval women recluses?’ said Lamarre, looking stupefied.
‘Yes indeed. Commandant, would that suit you?’
Danglard nodded. Four o’clock. That would give him time to pack up his things.
* * *
*
Adamsberg met Froissy as he crossed the courtyard.
‘I’m going for a walk, lieutenant.’
‘Yes, I understand, sir.’
‘Walking, shaking the body as your feet hit the ground, shifts the tiny little bubbles of gas in the brain. They bump into each other. And when you want to get some ideas, that’s what you have to do.’
Froissy hesitated.
‘There aren’t any tiny bubbles of gas in our brains, sir.’
‘Well, since they aren’t thoughts, what do you call them?’
Froissy did not answer.
‘See, they are tiny bubbles of gas.’
XXXII
Adamsberg walked as far as the Seine, something he was in the habit of doing. In the city, he sorely missed the clear water of the Gave de Pau. He went down on to the quayside, to sit among the walkers, students and occasional strollers like himself. And like him, everyone was staring in consternation at about a hundred dead fish, floating belly-up on the slow-flowing grey-green waters of the river.
Feeling upset, Adamsberg went back up the steps and then along the embankments until he was level with Saint-Germain. As he walked, he put in a call to a psychiatrist he knew, Dr Martin-Robinson – by good fortune he had remembered his double-barrelled name. Adamsberg had met him as an expert witness on the degree of mental responsibility in a previous case. The doctor was at first sight what people tend to describe as ‘a big teddy bear’, with his beard and flowing hair, but in reality he was a man with inner depths, a professional who could be calm or talkative, jovial or sad, according to circumstances, or to whether the natural rotation of his soul showed you his beaming face or his overcast one.
‘Dr Martin-Robinson? This is Commissaire Adamsberg. Remember me? The Franck Malloni case?’
‘Yes, of course. Nice to hear from you.’
‘I’d like to see you.’
‘Another expert witness job?’
‘No, I want your opinion about recluses, women who cut themselves off from
the world.’
‘In the Middle Ages? Not my field, Adamsberg.’
‘I’ve got someone in my squad who knows about the Middle Ages. But not about in our own time.’
‘There aren’t any recluses around today.’
‘I came across one when I was twelve years old. And I may be on the track of another.’
‘Commissaire, I’m fighting a lonely battle with an over-fatty blanquette de veau, and I’m bored, which is not good for me. I’m in a little café on Place Saint-André-des-Arts, to the left of the tobacconist’s.’
‘I can get there in about ten minutes.’
‘Shall I order you something to eat? I’ve only just started.’
‘Yes, thank you, doctor, just choose for me.’
Adamsberg walked briskly along the quai de la Tournelle and the quai de Montebello, and up the rue de la Huchette to find the café, where the burly doctor stood up to welcome him with open arms. Adamsberg remembered that he always greeted you warmly, whether he was in an up or down phase.
‘Hake with Normandy sauce all right?’
Adamsberg did not dare tell him that after what he had just seen in the Seine, eating dead fish did not greatly tempt him. He smiled and sat down and the doctor observed him with a quizzical look.
‘Things not going so well? For you?’
‘I’ve got this investigation that’s taking us into the depths of the past and of the mind. Very difficult and I’ve just run headlong into the sands.’
‘No, I’m talking about you personally. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve just had a bad experience. Very recently.’
‘Yes, you’re right, it was yesterday, but never mind about that.’
‘But I do mind. I’ll understand better why you’ve turned up here in such a hurry with your questions. So what happened to you yesterday?’
‘My brother carried out the extraction of a tooth in my memory, on the Île de Ré. And this tooth was deeply embedded. It hadn’t given me any pain until last week. But it’s over now, it’s OK.’