by Fred Vargas
After lunch? About 2.30?
Perfect. She has siesta, I clear up! Coffee hot when you arrive.
Putting away his phone, Adamsberg bit his lip, disgusted at his own hypocrisy.
* * *
*
Six hours later, he was pacing about outside the neatly kept front door of the small house in Cadeirac.
‘The last waiting room,’ he said to Veyrenc.
Irène had put on her best clothes in their honour, after her own fashion, a dress with a flowery pattern so gaudy that it could have been wallpaper. By contrast, she was still wearing the inappropriate trainers, because of her arthritis.
‘Louise has been snoring away for a good fifteen minutes,’ she said cheerfully, as she invited them to sit down.
Adamsberg sat at one end of the table, Irène on his left, Veyrenc on the bench to his right.
‘Forgive me, Irène, but I haven’t brought a present. I’m really not going to give you a present today.’
‘Goodness, commissaire, we don’t have to give each other things every time we meet. It loses its charm in the end. And you know what, your colleague who takes photos, she brought me a gift. A snowstorm from Lourdes. Religious tat, I’ve actually had enough of that in my life. But she has subtle taste, doesn’t she, that woman? You wouldn’t think so, what with her size. She’s chosen a little cherub, looks like a child playing in the snow. I’ll show you, and bet you think it’s sweet.’
Irène went to fetch the new snowstorm from the collection displayed on the sideboard. Adamsberg had not been inside before: the house was full of knick-knacks, but all very tidily arranged. A place for everything and everything in its place. ‘She was very organised and careful,’ Mathias had said, and so she had remained. Tenacious too, brave and determined.
Irène put the Lourdes globe down in front of Adamsberg, and he took his Rochefort one from his pocket.
‘Oh, you’re not going to give me it back, are you? It was a present.’
‘And I’m very fond of it. I like to watch the bubbles of snow dancing.’
‘They’re called snowflakes, commissaire, not bubbles.’
‘It was just to show you that it never leaves my pocket.’
‘But what’s the point of having it tucked away in your pocket?’
‘It helps me think. I shake it and then I look at it.’
‘Oh, well, if that’s what you like. To each his own,’ said Irène, as she poured out the hot coffee. ‘By the way,’ she said sternly, ‘I’m missing two teaspoons. And they disappeared after each visit from your woman colleague. It doesn’t matter, I’ve got plenty more. And she was very nice. But all the same, I’m missing my two spoons.’
‘She’s a bit of a kleptomaniac, Irène, you follow me? Picks up a little souvenir every place she goes. I’ll get them back from her. I’m used to it.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say no. Because it’s a set of twelve, and they have plastic handles, all different colours. So of course, it makes a gap in the set.’
‘I promise, I’ll post them to you.’
‘That’s kind of you.’
‘Today, Irène, I’m not going to be kind.’
‘Oh, really. That’s a pity. But go ahead. Coffee all right?’
‘Excellent.’
Adamsberg shook his snowstorm and watched the flakes falling around the Rochefort ship. The Trinidad was sailing through the icy cold strait. Veyrenc remained silent.
‘You too?’ said Irène, with a nod towards Veyrenc. ‘You don’t look too happy either.’
‘He’s got a headache,’ said Adamsberg.
‘You want something for it?’
‘He’s already taken a couple of pills. When he’s got a migraine, he can’t talk.’
‘Oh, you’ll find it goes over with age,’ said Irène. ‘So what are you going to be unkind to me about, Jean-Bapt?’
‘This,’ said Adamsberg, opening his bag. ‘Don’t say anything until afterwards, please. It’s quite hard enough as it is.’
He lined up on the table the photographs of the nine Miséricorde stink bugs, plus Claude Landrieu, all aged eighteen. In the chronological order of their deaths. Then he put down another row underneath the first, the photos of the same men, forty or sixty years later.
‘It looks like you’re playing patience and it’s all come out right,’ remarked Irène.
‘All dead,’ he said.
‘That’s what I said. For the killer, it came out right.’
‘Absolutely. Starting with this one, César Missoli, who died in 1996, and ending with these two, Torrailles and Lambertin, who died last Tuesday. The first four were either shot or had fake accidents, between 1996 and 2002. The other six all died from a high dose of recluse spider venom in the last month.’
Irène imperturbably suggested another cup of coffee.
‘It’s very good for headaches,’ she said. ‘They’ve proved it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Veyrenc, holding out his cup. Then she served Adamsberg, then herself, in polite succession.
‘After 2002,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘there’s a gap of fourteen years. We must assume the murderer spent that time perfecting a new method of killing people, a very complex method, but one that suited the perpetrator infinitely better: recluse venom.’
‘Yes, that’s possible,’ said Irène, looking interested.
‘But that wouldn’t be a possibility open to just anyone. It’s a long process and an inventive one. But this killer did manage it, and executed six men one after another. You follow me?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But why choose a recluse spider, Irène? Why choose just about the most complicated method anyone could imagine?’
Irène waited for him to go on, looking him in the eye.
‘Finding the answers, that’s your job,’ she said.
‘Because only a recluse, a genuine recluse, could become a recluse spider herself, and kill with her poison. Because of this, Irène,’ said Adamsberg, bringing out a package in bubble wrap, which he opened carefully and respectfully. ‘Because of this,’ he repeated, putting on the table the white plate with blue flowers, glued together by himself.
Irène gave a thin smile.
‘This is her plate,’ he went on at once, to avoid her having to speak. ‘The one she used to eat off for five years, any food she had, whatever people gave her through the high little window, the pigeon-hole, in the old bricked-up dovecot in the Pré d’Albret. I ordered a dig there, and we’ve covered it back over. I replaced the fifty-eight roses, where she put them, month after month, against the wall.’
Veyrenc was looking down, but not Irène, whose gaze moved from the plate to the commissaire’s face.
Adamsberg felt in his bag again and put on the table two newspaper cuttings from 1967, one showing the mother and her two daughters, and another showing Enzo, hugging his sisters in his blood-soaked arms.
‘Here they are,’ he said. ‘The older one, Bernadette Seguin, and her younger sister Annette, who was raped over a period of twelve years by the stink bugs from the Miséricorde. Where the girls’ father was a janitor. And then,’ he went on, as nobody spoke, ‘they changed their names, and they disappeared from sight. It was hard to go out into the world after such suffering, so they were placed in a psychiatric clinic, where they stayed for a few years. From 1967 until some later date, I don’t know when.’
‘1980 for the younger one,’ said Irène calmly.
‘But Bernadette walled herself up in the old dovecot, which she turned into a recluse’s cell. She had a crucifix, and read the Bible. She was expelled from it after five years by the prefectoral authorities. She came back to the clinic, and this time, she was able to adapt, to learn, and read books. She found her sister, still prostrate and unable to live without Enzo’s care. But she was fading away. Nothing hel
ped. Bernadette decided to jettison her religion, which had only ever taught the girls to obey and bow the head. Her mission took shape, irrevocably. She alone would be the one who would free her sister from the men who had destroyed her. She didn’t act entirely alone though. Enzo provided her with the names.’
‘Enzo’s clever.’
‘You both are. He found out that nine of them had been in the orphanage.’
‘Where my father –’
But here, Irène interrupted herself and spat on to the immaculate tiles of the floor.
‘I’m sorry, excuse me, but it’s a vow. Every time I say “my father”, I have to spit on the floor, so that the words don’t stay in my mouth. Sorry.’
‘Go ahead, Irène.’
‘– recruited them.’
‘From a group known as the Recluse Gang. Enzo had begun searching and he finally found out everything about them, those unspeakable stink bugs, including their use of the recluse spiders.’
‘Good word for them, isn’t it? Can you imagine? Putting a spider inside a four-year-old’s shirt? Tells you a lot about the road to hell, doesn’t it? And when those snakes got into Annette’s attic, my father –’
Here she spat again.
‘– stayed at the door and watched.’
‘But Enzo had the list. You were going to be able to bring Annette back to life.’
‘Now look here, commissaire, don’t go bothering her. She’s got nothing to do with it. But when those accidents happened, and the first four bit the dust, she already started to feel better. And don’t you go bothering Enzo either. All he did was he gave me their names,’ she said with a smile.
‘But he knew what you were going to do with them.’
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘Well, he could see what you were doing.’
‘After the four accidents,’ Irène went on without replying to this, ‘I took some time out. Yes, I could have saved her much more quickly. But to make the recluse venom get into their bloodstream and destroy their bodies, that looked so desirable, and that’s what I had to do. I just had to, commissaire. And I promised Annette they’d all be dead within ten years. That’ll keep her hanging on in there, I thought. And you can’t get anything on her, commissaire, or on Enzo, I’ve done my homework.’
‘A person who knowingly fails to reveal a crime about to be committed, can be imprisoned. Unless that person has a direct family connection to the killer. Neither a sister nor a brother can be touched by the judicial system.’
‘There you are then,’ said Irène with a smile. ‘So it was a week ago today that Annette was finally free. And she will be even better when I’ve written the book with their names in. Enzo told me that yesterday she ate almost an entire meal. He wanted her to drink some champagne, but she wouldn’t, then in the end she did drink two-thirds of a glass. And she almost laughed. Hear that, commissaire? Laughed. One day she’ll be able to come out, and she’ll be able to speak. Maybe even drive a car.’
‘In an antalgic position.’
‘Oh, see here, commissaire, I’m no more arthritic than you or the next person! But I needed an excuse for travelling about. So I began doing that well before I started eliminating the vermin, to make it look like a regular habit, get it? Of course I had to go on a lot of pointless trips, except I’ll say this, they did help me to collect snowstorms. So I also mixed them up with real journeys like the one to Bourges, when I called you. I hadn’t been in Bourges all the time of course, I was on my way back from Saint-Porchaire.’
‘With your stun gun.’
‘It’s an excellent model. You can order them from the internet. One click. Very practical.’
‘Did Enzo do that for you?’
‘Enzo did nothing.’
There was a sound from upstairs. Louise was waking up.
‘One minute, commissaire, I’ll make her go back in her hole. Never a moment’s peace here.’
Irene climbed halfway up the stairs, lightly and without using her walking stick, and called:
‘Don’t come down, Louise, my dear! I’ve got two men here! That should do it,’ she said, as she sat down, and they heard Louise shutting her bedroom door. ‘Easy. Poor woman, don’t repeat this, but she was raped when she was thirty-eight.’
‘Yes, I know. Nicolas Carnot. Who knew Claude Landrieu. And the Recluse Gang.’
‘That was why you suspected her.’
‘You understood that, Irène.’
‘It wasn’t very difficult.’
‘It was because of her name as well: Chevrier. I thought she’d chosen it because of the story about Monsieur Seguin and his little goat.’
‘You’re allowed to spit, because you mentioned that name.’
Adamsberg obeyed.
‘Was it to take us first towards her then away from her that you left those hairs in the box room in Torrailles’s house?’
‘Yes, I wanted to send you off on a wild goose chase. Sorry, commissaire, I really like you, I do, but all’s fair in love and war.’
‘What I’ve never worked out is the business about the venom. How did you collect enough? All right, it took you fourteen years. But how? You had to find the spiders, then make them spit out their venom.’
‘Ha! Have to be pretty smart to do that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Adamsberg with a smile. ‘And the idea of the nylon thread as well. Tell me, did you really load a 13 mm rifle with 11 mm syringes? By packing them in something?’
‘Yes, of course, or they’d have got wedged. I put some sticky tape round them, then oiled them. You have to think of tricks. It’s like the recluses. Know how many I collected? Five hundred and sixty-five, counting the ones that died.’
‘But how?’ Adamsberg repeated.
‘To start with, I used a vacuum cleaner and sucked them out of their holes. What with the woodpile, the cellar, the attic and the garage, I had plenty, believe me. Then I emptied out the vacuum bag and caught them with tweezers to put into a little container, well, the proper name, you know, is a vivarium. And one vivarium each, because what do they do if you put them in together? They eat each other, that’s what. Because what do they see in anything else that moves? A meal, that’s all. No more complicated than that. Well, I had up to sixty-three little containers. I can’t show you, because I chucked out the bloody things, oops, sorry, language, I chucked them out with the rubbish. A vivarium sounds grand, but it’s just a little glass box with a lid and holes in, some earth at the bottom and bits of twig so that they can hide in there and put their cocoons in there, plus some dead insects like flies or crickets for them to eat. When the time came for mating, I put a male in with a female and hoop-la! Then I gathered the cocoons and waited for the babies to hatch out. Then I put the new ones into special little vivariums, otherwise they’d eat each other. And I’ll tell you something, commissaire: catching a baby spider without injuring it, that takes practice. What I was doing really, I was breeding them.’
‘What about the venom though, Irène?’
‘Ah now, what they do in labs is they give them an electric shock, makes them spit it out. But they have very sophisticated equipment. What I had to do was a bit of DIY. You get a torch, see, the kind you just press for half a second to make signals.’
‘I see.’
‘Good. Well, you attach some copper wire to the conductors on the battery, that’s not rocket science either. And you apply the end of the wire to the spider’s body, the cephalothorax. You follow me, Jean-Bapt?’
‘I’m listening, anyway.’
‘Then you press the switch on the torch very quickly, it sends out a tiny charge and the spider spits out the venom. But careful, you need a 3-volt battery, otherwise it’s too much, it kills them. And you only press it for a fraction of a second. I killed masses of them till I got the technique right. I put the creatures i
n a little shallow dish. I’d make, oh, let’s say a hundred of them spit venom, one after another, then I sucked it up with a syringe and stored it in tiny test tubes, well sealed. Next stop, the fridge. Well, in fact, the freezer, because you have to store it at minus 20 degrees, so you have to have a good 4-star one. Then you can preserve the venom as long as you want.’
‘Wait a second, Irène, how did you stop the recluse running away when you put it in a dish?’
‘A tiny puff of gas from the cooker, not too much. You have to have the knack, I tested it on some small house spiders, a centimetre long, and I killed a lot of them too. Well, I got the knack in the end. A teeny puff of gas, not everyone can do that, you need practice. Well, you find a way if you have to. Now my recluse is away with the fairies, she won’t budge, I make her spit. Of course, it takes thought, and it means a lot of work. I’m not saying that to boast. It took me four years before my vivariums were functioning properly. I lost a lot of spiders, sorry, I already told you that. You need to know that a recluse can replenish its venom glands in a day or two. I always preferred to wait three days, so as to be sure to get a full dose. I measured twenty-five doses per syringe, so as to be certain they’d work. So I had to prepare a hundred and fifty doses, to account for the six bastards I still had to deal with. Plus another hundred, in case I missed with the gun. Two hundred and fifty doses. Plus another two hundred and fifty kept separately, in case the freezer broke down or there was a power cut. Oh yes, you have to think of everything. So that meant five hundred doses to collect, I rounded it up to six hundred, because there’s always some dried venom you can’t get up out of the dish. So you see, Jean-Bapt, I had to think ahead about all that. I’ve got a spare freezer in the woodshed, and I kept all my vivariums with spiders in the same place, behind the logs, because who’s going to go and move a lot of lumps of wood? And my spare freezer, locked up, with its own generator, could keep going for four days. It’s just like everything else, you want to do it, you find a way.’
‘As I said, you thought fourteen years ahead.’
‘That’s why you couldn’t prevent anything, commissaire. Don’t blame yourself. But still, you did find me in the end. So bravo, congratulations! But I don’t care two hoots, let me tell you, because the job’s done! Yours is too. I like it when a job’s finished properly.’