by Fred Vargas
‘So what was this memory? The recluse you saw when you were twelve?’
Dr Martin-Robinson was a man who got straight to the point, jumping all the in-between stages. There was no pulling the wool over his eyes.
‘Yes, that was it. I couldn’t remember having seen her, I couldn’t remember anything. But whenever I heard the word “recluse”, I started to feel ill.’
‘Vertigo, dizziness?’
‘Yes, and then when my brother pulled it out . . .’
‘Because your brother was there, was he?’
‘With my mother.’
‘And your mother let you look at this recluse?’
‘No, absolutely not, she just didn’t see me creep up and take a peep, that’s all. And then it was too late.’
‘An inquisitive child, resistant to rules,’ said the doctor with a grin.
‘Then after the tooth was pulled, when it all came back, and I saw her awful face again, her rotten teeth, and breathed in that ghastly smell and heard her voice again, I passed out. Apparently when I was twelve, I passed out too. Before forgetting everything.’
‘Repressing it you mean.’
‘But I don’t want to waste your time with all that.’
‘Don’t worry about my time, my first patient this afternoon has cancelled.’
‘I’m worried about my time too,’ said Adamsberg, ‘and my murderer hasn’t cancelled. Four deaths now, and two more expected. Actually ten, all told.’
The doctor took a little time to respond, pushing the meat to one side of the plate, and tackling the rice, which he covered with cream sauce.
‘So these are the famous deaths attributed to bites from recluse spiders? They seem to be talking about the venom transmuting, because of insecticides. Personally, I don’t believe that. Well, not in such proportions, not in a single year. Although these days, who knows?’
‘I’ve just seen about a hundred dead fish floating down the Seine.’
‘There’ll be more. And we’ll see the Mediterranean full of plastic. Practical, eh? – we’ll be able to walk from Marseille to Tunis. So I suppose the fish dish wasn’t really the best choice for you.’
‘Oh, it’ll pass,’ said Adamsberg with a smile.
‘But your pulled tooth won’t. What I mean is, not as fast as you’d like. You’ll need to sleep, you must accept that. Have a good sleep. You see, my professional advice isn’t too hard to follow.’
‘But I don’t have time, doctor.’
‘Tell me about your investigation and the recluse, then ask your question.’
By now, having had plenty of practice, Adamsberg was able to give quite a succinct account of the research trail, from La Miséricorde orphanage to the fiasco of the previous day and the new hypotheses he had suggested that very morning.
‘I’m thinking it could be a woman who has been raped.’
Adamsberg broke off.
‘When I say “I’m thinking” that’s too strong a word, no, I’m stumbling about with this woman in mind, I’m blundering around empty-handed.’
‘I can imagine the way you operate, Adamsberg. And any way of operating is a form of thinking.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m thinking of a woman raped in the past, who might have somehow appropriated the power of the recluse, and in a sort of tit for tat, venom for venom, fluid for fluid, she’s injecting it into her former aggressors.’
‘Sounds a clever idea.’
‘It’s not my idea, actually, one of my lieutenants thought of it. A zoologist manqué. What I want to know, doctor, is what might drive a woman in this day and age to become a recluse. To shut herself up and disappear from the world.’
‘Will you have some wine, commissaire? Keep me company, it’s bad manners to allow a man to drink on his own.’
The doctor poured out the wine and looked at it through the clear glass.
‘Why would one want to disappear from the world? There are the usual triggers: depression, bereavement. Traumatic experiences too, including rape, which is often followed by a period of withdrawal which may last some time. But in general, that tends to come to an end. Then if we go into nervous disorders, there’s agoraphobia.’
‘Which is?’
‘A panicky fear of going outside. The state of terror can lead to staying at home all the time, except for special outings with someone reassuring.’
‘Would that trigger aggressive behaviour?’
‘No, I’d say rather the opposite.’
Adamsberg thought about Louise, shut in her bedroom, hanging on to Irène’s arm for a few outings and pursued by her fear of men.
‘This isolation can also be overcome, even if the subject still prefers on the whole to stay at home for security. But women who have actually been sequestered are very different. I’ve had to treat three cases of sequestration. Will you have a dessert?’
‘No, just a black coffee.’
‘I’ll have both,’ said the doctor, patting his stomach and laughing. ‘And to think I’m meant to advise other people. Help them regain their balance.’
‘One of my lieutenants says we are all neurotic to some extent.’
‘You didn’t know that?’
The doctor now ordered a fruit tart and two coffees, allowed himself to make a disobliging remark about the blanquette de veau, and turned back to his companion.
‘These women you treated,’ Adamsberg asked. ‘Sequestered. Did they recover?’
‘Insofar as it’s possible. Three different girls, who’d been kept locked up by their own fathers since they were children. One in a cellar, one in an attic, the third in a garden shed. And every time, there was complicity, from the mother, which adds another dramatic element.’
‘What did the mother do?’
‘Usually nothing. These young girls who are sequestered, and there are more of them than you might imagine, are the exclusive property of the father, who constantly subjects them to rape. No exceptions.’
Adamsberg raised his hand to order more coffee. Dr Martin was right: he was feeling waves of drowsiness coming over him.
‘You suddenly have a need to sleep?’ asked the doctor.
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be the extraction. You’d do better to lie down than to drink more coffee.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind when this investigation’s over.’
‘During the investigation. What happened to you wasn’t something trivial.’
‘I hear what you’re saying, doctor.’
‘That’s something. Well, in these cases of sequestration, you should know that there always comes a time when the tragedy is exposed. Some kind of liberation occurs – a brother escapes, a neighbour intervenes, the father dies. And then these poor little creatures leave their cages, much older perhaps, their eyes blinded by sunlight, terrified by the sight of the outside world, the main road, a cat. They’re often unable to lead a normal life afterwards, as you can well imagine. They may spend years in some kind of psychiatric care before they can be gradually introduced to the flow of the everyday world. But sometimes, and I’m getting to your question, this “new life” might take the form of a second sequestration. Their life becomes confined once more, they’re fearful and shut themselves in. The locked-in experience has structured their psyche and they reproduce it.’
‘Like I said, doctor, I really did see an actual recluse when I was a child. She’d shut herself up voluntarily in an ancient dovecot, like in olden times. People brought her food and water, out of the goodness of their hearts, and passed them through a little window, the only one not bricked up. That’s what I looked through to see this ghastly sight. And she stayed there five years. So what might have driven this woman to that place of reclusion? Instead of to a hospital?’
The doctor
dug into his stodgy dessert and drank off his coffee in a single gulp.
‘There aren’t a hundred answers to that one, Adamsberg. I repeat: it has to be connected to a period of sequestration by the father in childhood, with frequent rape. When the woman – or rather the grown-up child – comes out, there’s a strong risk she will reproduce the ill-treatment, the darkness, the lack of hygiene, the food eaten off the floor – the only things she has ever known, a past she has never been able to get past. She returns to the structure of her childhood, the exile from the world, and the desire for punishment and death.’
Adamsberg was taking notes and called the waiter to order a third coffee.
The doctor’s large hand landed on his arm.
‘No!’ he said authoritatively. ‘Sleep. It’s during sleep that the unconscious will do its work.’
‘It has work to do?’
‘The unconscious never stops working, especially at night,’ said the doctor with a laugh. ‘And in your case, it’s got plenty to work on.’
‘What’s it going to do?’
‘It’s going to dissolve the last traces of the damage done by the tooth extraction, tame the memory, make the recluse less threatening, and above all dissociate her from your mother. And if you don’t let it do all this, the damage will return in the form of nightmares, at night at first, but then in the daytime too.’
‘But I’ve got an investigation on my hands, doctor.’
‘Your investigation won’t succeed if you fall into a pit of your own making.’
Adamsberg nodded uneasily.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘I’m glad to hear it. But now let me ask you a question. Why do you think your female killer could be someone who has been a recluse for a while? A real one?’
‘Because of the choice of poison, the least probable in the world. I told you about the link between poisonous creatures and seminal fluid, and turning the power back on the aggressor, but I’m still not satisfied.’
‘And you think . . . ?’
‘If you can call it thinking,’ Adamsberg reminded him.
‘All right, you’re hazarding a guess that if the killer uses the recluse to kill, then she must have been a recluse herself.’
‘Not really. Because what do I know?’
‘Because you happened to see a recluse when you were a child? But why not simply stick to a matter of vengeance? The bullies in the orphanage tormented other kids with recluse spiders. And someone is making them pay for their abject doings.’
‘But the eleven kids who were bitten have been cleared.’
‘What about some other kid? In the orphanage? Isn’t there a man in the story?’
Adamsberg hesitated.
‘Who is it?’ asked the doctor.
‘Well, there’s the son of the former director. He became a child psychiatrist and he’s still obsessed with the 876 orphans that his father took charge of, to the point his own son became invisible. He’s a restless jumpy character, lives alone, eats sweet things addictively, and hates the Recluse Gang.’
‘Whom his father also hated.’
‘Yes, the father tried to get rid of them, but failed.’
‘“Get rid of them” you say. So why might the son not try to finish the job?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Adamsberg with a shrug. ‘I haven’t mentioned that lead to anyone. Until yesterday, we were just on the track of the boys who were bitten. And now, in my mind’s eye, I see a woman.’
‘A recluse. Have you talked about that to anyone?’
‘No. I did talk about a woman who’d been raped, but not about a recluse.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s still in a kind of fog in my mind. Just a bubble of gas, not a thought. And I’ve already led my team into a dead end.’
‘So you’re playing it safe now, all of a sudden.’
‘Yes. Should I stop? Or set sail, and hope for a favourable wind?’
‘Which way do you incline?’
‘I want to eliminate the recluse who’s luring me into the mists.’
‘Waste of time.’
The doctor pulled out his mobile, looked at it and burst out laughing again. Adamsberg liked people who could do that. He was incapable of it.
‘The gods are with us today. My second patient has cancelled. Let me tell you something. I am very drawn to minds in which proto-thoughts are to be found.’
‘Proto-thoughts?’
‘Thoughts before they are thoughts, what you called bubbles of gas. Embryos that wander about, take time to develop, come and go, live or die. I like people who give them their chance. As for your recluse, if she’s destined to fade away, then she will.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. But note I said “if she’s destined to”. So keep going with her, keep looking, because that’s what your heart is telling you to do. Follow where the sails take you, even if they quiver and shake.’
‘Because they’re likely to?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the doctor, with his fourth hearty laugh.
On the way back, Adamsberg again followed the Seine, and found himself on the stone bench near the statue of Henri IV, where he had once sat talking with Maximilien Robespierre. He lay down on it, sent a message to the team putting the meeting off until 6 p.m. and closed his eyes. Doctor’s orders. Go to sleep.
‘And as for your recluse, keep looking, because that’s what your heart is telling you to do.’
XXXIII
Adamsberg dared not refuse the coffee brought him by Estalère as they began the second meeting of the day. It would have upset the young man greatly.
‘Anything new, commissaire?’ Mordent enquired with interest. ‘Since you postponed the start?’
‘I merely went to sleep, on my doctor’s advice. Mercadet, did you get anything on Nicolas Carnot?’
‘Yes, sir!’
Putting the meeting back two hours had allowed Mercadet to finish his rest cycle, and he was grinning broadly, as though sitting on an egg about to hatch.
‘Apart from Carnot’s chaotic case history, pickpocketing, car thefts – vans in fact – and minor drug dealing, I tried his school records, family, friends, and found – guess what?’
Yes, Adamsberg thought, Mercadet really was sitting on a big egg.
‘He went to Louis Pasteur High School in Nîmes, where he was in the same class as guess who?’
‘Claude Landrieu,’ Adamsberg suggested.
‘And therefore,’ Mercadet continued, ‘we’ve got a link between the gang of rapists from the orphanage with a second group of potential rapists in Nîmes, well, not a gang but a pair, Landrieu–Carnot.’
‘Excellent work, Mercadet.’
‘It gets better. I looked again at the Landrieu case, because he was an outsider when he met up with the Recluse Gang. How did they connect up? We hadn’t worked that out.’
Oh, two eggs. The lieutenant had a clutch of two eggs and was beaming with pride.
‘Go on, tell us!’ said Adamsberg with a smile.
‘This time, you’ll never guess, sir.’
‘No.’
‘Landrieu’s father, what do you think his job was?’
‘Go on,’ Adamsberg repeated.
‘He was a janitor at La Miséricorde orphanage.’
The silence that followed enabled Mercadet to enjoy the full value of his findings. Commandant Mordent stretched out his neck, looking satisfied, but then frowned. He was a stickler for detail.
‘That doesn’t necessarily make him responsible for the sins of his son,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but listen to this, commandant. The father was a totally despicable adult stink bug. During World War II, Landrieu père lined up and shot fourteen Senegalese riflemen from his own battalion, and he’s known to have r
aped women during the Allied advance into Germany.’
‘So it was him!’ Adamsberg murmured. ‘He was the one who opened the door at night to let them out on their spider trips, and later on their sex prowls. Excellent, Mercadet, now we know how these bullies managed to get into all the buildings free as air. And how the Recluse Gang could meet up with Landrieu’s son and Nicolas Carnot.’
‘Just doing my job,’ said Mercadet modestly, though in fact he was as proud as Punch, or as the male blackbird in the courtyard. ‘Shall I keep digging?’
‘Just on one point. Let’s concentrate on any girls who were raped, and who spent some time in a psychiatric hospital afterwards. A long time.’
‘Why’s that?’
Adamsberg did not at this stage propose to give up the bubble of gas, the quivering proto-thought as Dr Martin-Robinson described it, which had prompted him to think that in order to choose the extraordinary difficulty of getting recluse venom you had to have been a recluse yourself. And in order to turn into a recluse, you had to have been sequestered. And probably helped by a stay in a psychiatric hospital. No, he wouldn’t reveal this yet, in the atmosphere Danglard had rendered so toxic and which was still fragile.
‘I’ll explain later, lieutenant,’ he said. ‘We need to hear what Danglard’s going to tell us. Froissy, anything on Louise Chevrier?’
‘Well, it’s a bit odd. Nothing. We find her in Strasbourg, eleven years after the rape, working as a childminder. Then four years later, she vanishes. Before turning up back in Nîmes. She was fifty-three by then, and she took another job as childminder. But I can’t find her birth certificate from 1943.’
‘Is Chevrier her maiden name?’
‘It must be, because in Strasbourg she says she’s unmarried.’
‘Are you thinking she might have been using a false name?’
‘Not necessarily, she could have been born abroad.’
‘Keep digging, Froissy, and check the psychiatric hospitals too.’
Adamsberg paused briefly, then smiled.
‘Now,’ he went on, ‘regarding these women recluses of the Middle Ages, I’m well aware that you might not see the interest in them. Let’s just say it’s a matter of the word, the name. Recluse. It intrigues me. You’re all free to stay or go, I know it’s getting late.’