by Fred Vargas
‘Well, how are you going to do that?’
‘I’m going to pull it back. I get some nylon thread, fine but strong, 0.3 mm for instance, drop it through the muzzle, catch it at the breech and attach one end to the needle, which I then fill with venom. When the dart goes off, it takes let’s say sixty metres of thread which unrolls from an external reel. Yes?’
‘No. It’ll pull on the roll and slow down the trajectory.’
‘You’re right. So before I fire, I unwind sixty metres, or thirty, whatever, the distance to the target.’
‘So the thread goes off without being dragged back by the reel. OK.’
‘When the hypodermic hits the target, I immediately pull hard on the thread, to extract it from the wound. By the time the guy has looked at his sting, or bite, the needle’s vanished. Then I wind the other way, pulling the needle, and it comes back to me like a dog being whistled. What happened at Saint-Porchaire? Vessac was hit, I pulled on my thread, but the needle got stuck in the nettles. I make the reel work hard, and the thread breaks. Once Vessac’s gone indoors with Élisabeth, I run over, cut the thread and recover my hypodermic. But a little bit of fishing line stays caught up in the vegetation. Who’d notice it? Or care?’
‘You. But look Jean-Baptiste, a hypodermic needle is like a bullet, it has to fit snugly inside the barrel. With the thread there, it’s going to hinder its trajectory, and it’ll spin out of control.’
‘The kind of gun they use, they’re airguns, they have smooth barrels, so it won’t twist. But yes, if you put a size 13 mm syringe in a 13 mm barrel plus the thread, it could get stuck. So I put a size 11 mm syringe in my 13 mm barrel.’
‘With 2 mm extra, it’ll be loose. And you won’t be able to aim accurately.’
‘Not if I wind something round my needle so as to make it 12.4 mm. That’s what they used to do in olden times, with muskets and bullets that didn’t fit properly, they rolled them in a twist of paper to make them a better fit. And you oil the whole thing, to make sure. And then, trust me, it would work. It’s an old army trick. The advantage of these stun guns is they use compressed air, not gunpowder, it makes a plop, and at forty or sixty metres, or even much less, you can’t hear a thing.’
‘So how are you going to cart your gun around discreetly, even if it’s dark, on a village road, or a street in Nîmes?’
‘I use a folding model, they exist, and I carry it in a bag, with the reel and the telescopic sights.’
‘It could work.’
‘Louis, it did work. That’s how it was spat from the skies.’
XXXIX
Retancourt was waiting for them in the morning, leaning against a bright yellow hired car, with the disquieting appearance of an angry giant.
‘Ten!’ she said, without greeting them. ‘She’s knocked off all ten of them!’
‘She or he. Veyrenc sometimes thinks it could be Enzo, the brother of those sequestered girls. Did you get a chance to look at Froissy’s material?’
‘Just glanced at it, hard to read something when you’re on watch. Well, Enzo or whoever, they got all ten of them! When you’d sussed out what was happening after the first two! And the squad was on to it by number three.’
‘Part of the squad,’ Adamsberg reminded her, as Retancourt let the clutch in furiously.
‘Even so, sir. We worked on it, we checked the archives, we found the leads, we asked people, we tailed suspects, we travelled the length of the country, and this murderer’s bumped them all off, almost under our very eyes. It just makes me mad, that’s all!’
Faced with the latest failure, which had knocked out two men, Retancourt was furious, but also mortified. She’d been responsible for protecting them, and she’d failed.
‘Take a right, Retancourt, we’re going to Lédignan, and Torrailles’s house. Yes, it does make you mad. But even if we’d had ten people on to it, we’d still not have been able to prevent it.’
‘Why not? Because the murderer came flying through the air?’
‘Well, yes, in a way. My fault, I ought to have thought of this sooner.’
Adamsberg leaned back in his seat, folding his arms. If only he’d been quicker off the mark. It was four days since he’d found that scrap of nylon thread. He’d picked it up himself, he’d insisted on keeping it. So he had indeed recognised its importance. And what had he done about it? Nothing. Violent waves had crashed over his head, carrying that fragile evidence far from his thoughts. The extraction of the tooth on the Île de Ré, the elimination from his inquiries of the boys who had been bitten, Danglard’s rebellion, the discovery of that case of the girls imprisoned in Nîmes. And in all that, the little nylon thread had been forgotten.
* * *
*
‘Here we are,’ said Retancourt after a drive of forty minutes, screeching to a halt and making the handbrake squeal. ‘Look how low the hedge is. It’s the same all the way round. The street lamps were on until ten. Then their table light and the lamp over the door gave enough light to see them sitting at the table.’
‘As you already told me, lieutenant.’
‘So how did she get here then? By hot-air balloon?’
‘Almost. With a dart.’
‘You mean she fired some kind of shot?’
‘Two shots, with a rifle and a hypodermic.’
Retancourt absorbed this new information, giving herself just time to haul her evidence kitbag roughly out of the boot.
‘From how far away?’
‘Without the street lamps on, and even with some night-vision telescopic sights, I’d say thirty metres, to be on the safe side.’
‘But bloody hell! We were walking round the perimeter, commissaire. How come we didn’t see her?’
‘Because she wasn’t firing from outside.’
‘From the sky then.’
‘No, from indoors, lieutenant. From the house. Where she’d gone to hide while the men were absent. She must already have been there when you came back with Torrailles and Lambertin.’
‘God Almighty!’
‘You couldn’t have stopped it. You couldn’t have seen a dark rifle barrel protruding from a darkened window.’
Retancourt nodded as she took this in, then drew the bolt to enter the courtyard. Adamsberg stopped at the table and looked up at the facade of the house.
‘She can’t have been on the ground floor, there must be a kitchen and another room. Too risky if they came inside. So she must have been upstairs, and then fired two oblique shots, on the slant, hitting them sideways on. From that room up there,’ he said, pointing to a small, dirt-encrusted window. ‘Retancourt, can you examine the whole surface that would be covered by a shot, between the house and the table?’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘A fragment of nylon thread maybe. The surface is concrete, but there’s grass and thistles growing in the cracks. Try that. I’m going up to the first floor. Have you got those wretched foot covers?’
* * *
*
Adamsberg and Veyrenc took off their shoes and equipped themselves in the entrance hall. They looked all over the first floor, sliding about like patients in hospital, and rapidly inspected the two bedrooms, bathroom, lavatory and, overlooking the garden table, a small lumber room, full of suitcases, cardboard boxes and old boots. The floor was as dusty as one could hope for, made of grey speckled ceramic tiles.
Veyrenc switched on the light bulb dangling from the ceiling and sidled along the wall to the small window.
‘Yes, opened recently,’ he said. ‘Scraps of paint here and there.’
‘And some traces of footprints. You take that bit of the floor, I’ll take the other.’
‘These dappled grey tiles don’t make it easy.’
‘Now here,’ said Adamsberg, who had crouched down near the window, ‘we have a fairly clear footprint.’
‘Basic equipment, but a bit risky because of the pattern on the sole. The ridges look quite deep. See if there are any traces of earth, grass, vegetable matter in them.’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Me neither. Except for this.’
With his tweezers, Adamsberg held up to daylight a single hair about twenty centimetres long.
‘She must have been waiting for them some time, rubbed her head or scratched it, a sign of stress. It wasn’t going to be easy, was it, with three cops in attendance.’
‘Reddish, with two centimetres of grey at the root. Curly. Permed presumably.’
‘Here’s another one. I’d be surprised if Enzo had long dyed hair, or ever had a perm.’
‘No, it’s got to be a woman,’ admitted Veyrenc, ‘and quite old.’
‘Give me the magnifier. Yeah, we’ve got the root at the end. Total of four hairs,’ he said, after they had searched some more. ‘You can close the bag, we’re rich now. Let’s try for fingerprints.’
‘Nothing on the glass, the dust there hasn’t been disturbed.’
Veyrenc passed the dusting powder along the window frame and ledge.
‘Wearing gloves,’ he said. ‘Well, who doesn’t wear gloves? There’s a scrap of paint here, on the sill. She must have rested the gun there.’
Adamsberg took two photographs, then two more of the partial footprint.
‘Let’s check the stairs,’ he said, ‘especially low down. It’s when the sole bends that it might release its secrets. Like us when we crack and give way.’
The bottom few stairs yielded three pieces of gravel. They could have come from anywhere, the cemetery or the roadside near the hedge. And one crushed clover leaf, which, although not much help, seemed to be a final little offering.
‘We’ll take it anyway,’ said Adamsberg, putting it into a last plastic bag.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m fond of clover.’
‘As you wish,’ said Veyrenc, who often answered Adamsberg with these words, not that he accepted what had been said, but when he knew it was pointless to argue.
* * *
*
‘So, Retancourt,’ said Adamsberg as he joined her in the garden, where she was sitting on one of the plastic chairs and rubbing one hand. ‘You’re sitting in the middle of the crime scene.’
‘Already checked. Nothing. No nylon thread. Nothing. And I got stung by a damn nettle.’
‘Just vegetable poison, lieutenant.’
‘So what did you get?’
‘Four hairs, with their roots, DNA-worthy. And a clover leaf.’
‘What good’s that? The clover leaf.’
‘To refresh us.’
Veyrenc took the second chair and Adamsberg sat on the ground, cross-legged.
‘So,’ he said, ‘an elderly woman, grey hair dyed red and permed. Who goes round with a folding rifle, equipped with a hypodermic, stashed away in her travelling bag. And syringes filled with the venom of twenty-two recluse spiders. A woman who was raped, either in her youth or when she was older. But it has to be over twenty years ago, because that’s when the first victim was shot in the back.’
‘Not a lot, is it?’
‘It’s getting us closer, Retancourt.’
‘Nearer the 52nd parallel. The name of the sailor, I’ve forgotten it, I mean Magellan’s real name in Portuguese.’
‘Fernão de Magalhães.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Adamsberg crossed his legs the other way and fished out two of Zerk’s cigarettes, by now almost demolished. He passed one to Veyrenc and lit one for himself.
‘I’d like one too,’ said Retancourt.
‘I thought you didn’t smoke?’
‘But these are stolen ones, if I’ve understood that right?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Then I’ll have one.’
They sat there, all three, in silence, smoking their cigarettes half empty of tobacco, in the early-morning sunshine.
‘That was nice,’ said Adamsberg, as he got out his mobile.
‘Irène, did I wake you up?’
‘I’m just drinking my coffee.’
‘Have you heard? Two more, at the same time?’
‘Just seen it on social media. That’s infuriating.’
‘Yes,’ he said, picking up the same reaction of irritated anger as in Retancourt. ‘All the more so as I had three officers on guard duty, keeping an eye on them at their garden table. They saw nothing.’
‘I’m not going to be rude about the police, mind, I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m not saying you haven’t worked hard, commissaire, but there we are, he’s got them all now. And we still don’t know who’s doing it. Infuriating. I’m not going to say these men were nice guys, from what you tell me they weren’t, but still, all the same, it makes you mad.’
‘Tell me, Irène, are you alone at the moment?’
‘Yes, because Louise has her breakfast in her bedroom. She doesn’t know yet about these last two, so I’ve got a bit of peace for the moment. And Élisabeth’s still asleep.’
‘I’m going to bother you again with some questions, about your Louise. Try and answer right away without thinking.’
‘That’s not my way, commissaire.’
‘So I’ve noticed. What time did Louise go to her room last night?’
‘Oh, she wasn’t hungry after that funeral. The atmosphere. She had a bowl of soup at five and I didn’t see her again.’
‘Do you know if she went out after that?’
‘What would she do that for?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Well, she does sometimes go and walk in the street when she can’t sleep. Since there’s no one about in our village then, she’s not afraid of meeting a man, see.’
‘Yes. So? Last night?’
‘Hard to say, though it does get on my nerves. The thing is, she gets up practically every three hours to go . . .’
‘To the bathroom?’ said Adamsberg.
‘Yes, you understand. And the door creaks, so it wakes me up.’
‘And you heard the door creak last night?’
‘I’m trying to tell you, commissaire, same as every night. But as for knowing if she went outside because she couldn’t sleep, that I can’t tell you.’
‘OK, forget it, Irène. I’m going to send you someone, a woman. She’d like to photograph all the little lairs where recluse spiders hide in your house.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘For my report to the top brass. They want to know everything, check everything, it’s the way they are. They want some visual proof that recluse spiders hide away.’
‘So what?’
‘So, if you follow me, the thicker the file, the better it is. And since the investigation has been a failure, I need to prove I’ve done a lot of work on the ground.’
‘Ah, all right, I see.’
‘Can I send her over?’
‘But, oh! I didn’t tell you!’ said Irène, her voice suddenly rising an octave. ‘I’ve got another one!’
‘Another visitor?’
‘Noooo! Hiding inside a roll of kitchen paper, I found it this morning in the kitchen.’
‘A recluse, you mean?’
‘Commissaire, who else would hide in the kitchen roll? Of course a recluse. A beauty! Adult female, but I’ll have to get her outside, before she starts laying eggs. What if Louise was to see her? It’d be the end of the world.’
‘Could you please not take it outside just yet? Wait for the photographer.’
‘All right, I see, but hurry, because Louise now, she’s into everything. And she uses the kitchen roll a lot.’
‘In an ho
ur and a quarter, OK?’
‘Perfect, I’ll be ready, because it’s important I’m ready.’
‘Of course.’
‘Is she nice, this woman?’
‘Very.’
‘And what am I going to do with Louise while she takes photos?’
‘Nothing at all, you invite her to have some coffee with the photographer, that’ll distract her.’
‘She only drinks tea.’
‘All right, tea.’
‘And what about the photos then?’
‘You can tell her she’s come to check on the disinfestation. That’ll reassure Louise.’
‘Because I’ve had the pest control round?’
‘Exactly. Under pressure.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Early this morning.’
‘Well, if you say so. It would calm her down, yes, I hadn’t thought of that.’
Adamsberg ended the call, got up, rubbed the seat of his trousers, and smiled at Retancourt.
‘I’m guessing this one’s for me,’ she said.
‘Yes. A visit to my fellow cop and arachnologist in Cadeirac, Irène.’
Adamsberg explained briefly what her mission would be as a post-disinfestation photographer.
‘But what really interests you is Louise Chevrier. You’re going to have a cup of tea with her.’
‘Is the tea compulsory? Can’t I have coffee?’
‘Yes, of course. Now I want to know three things: first does she look her age? Seventy-three. Or more like sixty-eight?’
‘Not so easy if it’s only five years’ difference.’
‘No, I know. Second, has she got hair dyed reddish, with grey roots showing, about two centimetres, and permed. Like these hairs,’ he added, taking out the plastic evidence bag. ‘Take a good look.’
‘Understood.’
‘And third, what are her front teeth like? Her own or false? You’ll have to find a way, make her laugh or smile anyway. This is very important. Joking about Irène’s collection might do the trick. Louise thinks it’s hideous.’
‘What’s Irène’s collection?’