The Chalk Circle Man (6 page)

VI

T
HE FOLLOWING
T
HURSDAY MORNING TWO CIRCLES WERE
discovered: in the rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée was the cork from a wine bottle, and in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, in the 5th
arrondissement
, lay a woman with her throat cut, staring up at the sky.

In spite of the shock, Adamsberg could not help thinking that the discovery had been made at the beginning of section two of the week, the time for unimportant things, but that the murder must have been committed at the end of the first section, the serious one.

He paced around his office, with a less vague expression than usual on his face, his chin thrust forward, his mouth open as if he was out of breath. Danglard saw that Adamsberg was preoccupied, but that he nevertheless didn’t give the impression of deep concentration. Their previous
commissaire
had been just the opposite. He had been completely tied up in his thoughts, a man of perpetual rumination. But Adamsberg was open to every wind, like a cabin made of rough planks, letting his brain receive fresh air, Danglard thought. Yes, it was true, you could imagine that everything that went in through his ears, eyes and nose – smoke, colours, paper rustling – caused a draught to whistle through his thoughts and stopped them solidifying. This man, thought Danglard, is attentive to everything, which means he pays attention to nothing. The four inspectors were even getting into the habit of walking in and out of his office without fear of interrupting any particular train of thought. And Danglard had noticed that at certain times Adamsberg was more absent-minded than at others. When he was doodling, not resting his notepad on his knee but holding a little piece of paper against his stomach, then Danglard would say to himself: ‘If I were to announce to him now that a giant fungus was about to engulf the Earth and squeeze it to the size of a grapefruit, he wouldn’t give a damn. And that would be a pretty serious matter – not room for many people on a grapefruit. As anyone can see.’

Florence was also watching the
commissaire
. Since her conversation with Castreau she had thought again, and had announced that the new
commissaire
made her think of a rather depraved Florentine prince she had seen in a picture in some book, but now she couldn’t remember which. Anyway, she would like to sit on a bench and look at him as if he were a picture in an exhibition when she’d had enough of life, enough of finding ladders in her tights, and enough of hearing Danglard tell her he didn’t know when the universe would come to an end, or indeed why it was the universe anyway.

She watched them drive off in two cars to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie.

In the car, Danglard muttered: ‘A cork and a woman with her throat cut. Can’t see the connection – it’s beyond me. I don’t understand what’s going through this character’s mind.’

‘If you look at water in a bucket,’ Adamsberg said, ‘you can see the bottom of the bucket. You can put your arm in, you can touch it. Or even a barrel, same thing. But if it’s a well, there’s no hope. Even if you chuck pebbles in to see how deep it is, it’s no use. Problem is, you keep on trying to understand. People always want to “understand”. And that way madness lies. You wouldn’t believe the number of little pebbles there are at the bottom of a well. It’s not to hear the splash that people throw them, really. No, it’s to understand. But a well is a terrible thing. Once the people who built them have died, nobody knows anything about the well. It’s beyond our reach, it’s laughing at us from deep inside its mysterious cylindrical belly, full of water. That’s what a well’s like, for me. But how much water is there? How deep does it go? You have to lean over, to find out, you have to lower ropes down inside it.’

‘You can get drowned like that,’ said Castreau.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I don’t see what this has to do with the murder,’ said Castreau.

‘I didn’t say it had anything to do with it,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Then why did you get us started on wells?’

‘Why not? The things we talk about don’t always have to be relevant. But Danglard’s right. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between a wine cork and a dead woman. But that’s exactly what’s important.’

The eyes of the murdered woman were open, with a terrified expression in them, and her mouth was open too, her jaw virtually dislocated. It almost looked as if she had been shouting the rhyme which was written all round the circle surrounding her: ‘
Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?
‘

The sound was deafening, enough to make one want to stop one’s ears, and yet the policemen standing in a group around the circle were silent.

Danglard was looking at the woman’s cheap raincoat, buttoned up tightly, at her throat which had been cut, and at the blood which had trickled as far as the door of a building. He felt sick. He had never been able to view a corpse without feeling sick, something which did not however distress him. It wasn’t unpleasant to feel sick. It made him forget his other sorrows, the sorrows of the soul, he thought bitterly.

‘She was killed by a rat, a human rat,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Rats leap at people’s throats like that.’

Then he added.

‘So who is this lady?’

His
petite chérie
always said ‘lady’ and ‘gentleman’. ‘That’s a pretty lady.’ ‘That gentleman wants to go to bed with me’, and Adamsberg hadn’t been able to rid himself of the habit.

Inspecteur
Delille replied:

‘Her papers were on the body – the murderer didn’t take anything. Her name was Madeleine Châtelain, aged fifty-one.’

‘Have you searched her bag?’

‘Not thoroughly, but it doesn’t look as if there’s anything out of the ordinary.’

‘Tell me all the same.’

‘A knitting magazine, a tiny penknife, some of those little soaps you get in hotels, her wallet and keys, a pink plastic eraser and a pocket diary.’

‘Anything in the diary for yesterday?’

‘Yes, but not a rendezvous, if that’s what you were hoping. She’d written “It’s not much fun working in a knitting shop.”‘

‘Any other entries like that?’

‘Quite a few. Three days ago, for instance: “God knows why Maman’s so keen on dry Martinis.” And the week before that: “Nothing could
ever
persuade me to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.” ‘

Adamsberg smiled. The police pathologist was muttering that you couldn’t expect miracles if bodies weren’t dis covered quickly enough, that he thought she had probably been killed between ten-thirty and midnight, but that he would prefer to check the stomach contents before stating anything with confidence. The knife wound had been made with a medium-sized blade, following a massive blow to the head.

Adamsberg stopped thinking about the little entries in the diary and looked at Danglard. The inspector was pale and gave the impression of being on the point of collapse, his arms dangling at the sides of his shapeless body. He was also frowning.

‘You’ve seen what’s wrong?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘I’m not sure. What bothers me is that the trail of blood has run over the chalk circle and covered quite a bit of it.’

‘Yes, exactly, Danglard. And the lady’s hand is right up against the line. If he drew the circle after killing her, the chalk might have made a channel through the blood. And if I had been the murderer, I think I would have gone wider around the body to draw the circle. I don’t think I would have gone so close to her hand.’

‘So it’s as if the circle was drawn first, is that what you mean? And then the murderer arranged the body inside it?’

‘Looks a bit like that. But that seems stupid, doesn’t it? Danglard, would you go and check all this out with the scene-of-crime people and with the graphologist – Meunier, I think he’s called. This is where Conti’s photos are going to help us, and so will the dimensions of all the previous circles and the chalk samples you collected. We’ll have to compare them all with this new circle. We have to find out whether it’s the same man who drew it, and whether he drew it before or after the murder. Delille, can you follow up this lady’s address, her neighbours, friends and contacts? Castreau, check her place of work, if she had one, who her colleagues were, and what her income was. Nivelle, you take the family side of things, any family quarrels, inheritances, love affairs.’

Adamsberg had spoken without haste. It was the first time Danglard had seen him giving orders. He did so without seeming either self-important or apologetic about doing so. It was an odd thing, but all the inspectors seemed to be becoming porous, letting Adamsberg’s way of behaving seep into them. It was like being caught in the rain when your jacket can’t help absorbing water. The inspectors were becoming damp and without realising it they were imitating Adamsberg; their movements were slower, they smiled more, and were absent-minded. The one most altered was Castreau, who as a rule liked the gruff, manly responses their previous
commissaire
had expected of them, the military commands barked out without any superfluous commentary, the ban on looking to either side, the slamming of car doors, the fists clenched in the tunic pockets. Today, Danglard hardly recognised Castreau. He was leafing through the victim’s pocket diary, quietly reading out sentences to himself, glancing attentively at Adamsberg, apparently considering every word, and Danglard thought to himself that he might be able to confess to him his problems about corpses.

‘If I go on looking at her, I’ll be sick,’ Danglard said to Castreau.

‘It gets me in the knees. Especially women, even women like this one, nothing much to look at.’

‘What are you reading in the diary?’

‘Listen: “Had a perm, but I’m still ugly. Papa was ugly, so was Maman. Why would I be any different? A customer came in for blue mohair but I didn’t have any left. Another bad day.”‘

Adamsberg watched the four inspectors get back in the car. He was thinking about his
petite chérie
, Richard III and the lady’s diary. Once the
petite chérie
had asked him: ‘Is a murder like a packet of spaghetti that’s all stuck together? You just have to put it in boiling water for it to come untangled again? And the boiling water’s the motive?’ and he had replied: ‘No, what gets it untangled is knowledge, you just have to let the knowledge come to you.’ She had said: ‘I’m not sure I understood that’, which was fair enough, since he didn’t really understand it himself.

He waited for the police doctor, who was still grumbling away, to finish his preliminary check of the body. The photographer and the scene-of-crime people had already left. He stood alone, looking down at the lady on the ground, with the stretcher team waiting nearby. He hoped that a little knowledge would come to him. But until he came face to face with the chalk circle man, he knew it wasn’t worth racking his brains. He just had to keep on picking up information, and for him information had nothing to do with knowledge.

VII

S
INCE
C
HARLES SEEMED TO BE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THINGS
, Mathilde decided that she could count on a peaceful quarter of an hour during which he wouldn’t try to reduce the universe to shreds, and that she would therefore be able to introduce him to Clémence that evening. She had asked the elderly Clémence to stay behind in the flat for the occasion, and had taken some pre-emptive action by warning her emphatically that the new tenant was indeed blind, but that it would not do either to exclaim, ‘Oh my sakes, what a terrible affliction!’ or to pretend complete ignorance.

Charles heard Mathilde introduce him and listened to Clémence’s greeting. From her voice, he would never have imagined the naive woman whom Queen Mathilde had described to him. He seemed to hear fierce determination, and weird but recognisable intelligence. What she actually said seemed silly, but in the intonations behind the words there was some secret knowledge, caged but breathing audibly, like a lion in a village circus. You hear it growling in the night and tell yourself this circus isn’t what you thought, it isn’t quite as pathetic as the programme might make you think. And Charles, the expert on sounds and noises, could quite distinctly hear this distant growling, a little unsettling since it was possibly concealed.

Mathilde had offered him a whisky and Clémence was telling him about the incidents in her life. Charles was troubled, because of Clémence, and happy because of Mathilde. A divine creature who was quite indifferent to his nastiness.

‘… and this man,’ Clémence was saying, ‘anyone would think he was really nice! He thought I was “interesting,” those were his very words. He never so much as
touched
me, but I guessed he would sooner or later. Because he wanted to take me on a trip to the South Seas, he wanted us to get married. Oh, my sakes, I was on cloud nine! He got me to sell my house in Neuilly, and my furniture. I put the rest of my things in two suitcases, because he said “You won’t want for
any
thing, my dear.” So I trotted along to our rendezvous in Paris, feeling so happy that I should have smelled a rat. I kept pinching myself and saying, “Clémence, old girl, it was a long time coming, but it’s happened at last, a real fiancé, and such a cultured man too, and now you’re going to see the Pacific.” Well, I didn’t see the Pacific, monsieur, I saw Censier-Daubenton metro station for eight and a half hours! I waited all day, and that’s where Mathilde found me, still at the metro station, in the evening, same place she’d seen me in the morning. She must have said to herself, my sakes, but something’s up with
that
old woman. Perhaps she’s jinxed.’

‘Clémence invents things, you know,’ Mathilde interrupted. ‘She reruns anything she doesn’t like. What really happened the night this famous fiancé stood her up at Censier-Daubenton was that in the end she went off to find a hotel, and going along my street she saw my “to let” sign. So she rang the bell.’

‘Well, maybe it could have happened that way,’ Clémence conceded. ‘But now I can’t take the metro at Censier-Daubenton, without thinking of the South Sea Islands. So there we are, I go travelling in the end. By the way, Mathilde, a gentleman telephoned twice for you. Very soft voice, I thought I’d
faint
listening to him, but I’ve forgotten his name. It was urgent, apparently. Something wrong.’

Clémence was always on the brink of fainting, but she might be right about the voice on the phone. Mathilde thought that it could have been that policeman, the half-weird, half-enchanting one she had met ten days earlier. But she could think of no reason why Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg should call her urgently. Unless he had remembered her offer to help him catch sight of the chalk circle man. She had proposed that on an impulse, but also because she would be sorry never to have an excuse in future to see this remarkable
flic
, who had been the real find of that day and who had saved the first section of her week at the last moment. She knew she would not easily forget him, that he was securely lodged somewhere in her memory, spreading his nonchalant luminosity. Mathilde found the number that Clémence had scribbled down in her cramped handwriting.

Adamsberg had gone home to wait for a call from Mathilde Forestier. The day had started out typical of the aftermath of a murder, a day of silent, sweaty activity by the lab technicians, of stuffy offices with plastic cups all over the tables. The graphologist had arrived and had started delving into the piles of snapshots taken by Conti. And over it all loomed a sort of trembling, of apprehension perhaps, into which this out-of-the-ordinary event had thrown the 5th
arrondissement
police station. Whether it was the apprehension of failure, or the apprehension of a weird and monstrous killer, Adamsberg had not tried to work out. To escape having to witness it all, he had gone for a walk in the streets all afternoon. Danglard had stopped him at the door. It wasn’t yet midday, but Danglard had already had too much to drink. He said it was irresponsible to walk out like that, on the day they’d had a murder. But Adamsberg couldn’t admit that nothing removed his powers of thought so effectively as watching a dozen other people thinking. He needed the temperature at the station to drop, it was probably an undulant fever anyway, and it was essential that nobody should be expecting anything from him for Adamsberg to be able to harness his own ideas. And for the moment the suppressed excitement in the police station had scattered his ideas all over the place, like panicking soldiers in the thick of the battle. Adamsberg had long ago noted that when there are no combatants left, the fighting stops, so when he had no ideas he stopped working and didn’t try to winkle them out of the cracks to which they had retreated. It had always turned out to be a waste of time.

Christiane was waiting at his front door.

Just his bad luck. This was one evening when he would have preferred to be alone. Or else perhaps to spend the night with his neighbour, a young woman whom he had met several times on the stair and once at the post office, and who was definitely appealing.

Christiane announced that she had come from Orleans to spend the weekend with him.

He was wondering whether the young neighbour, when she had given him that look at the post office, had meant ‘I’d like to go to bed with you’ or ‘I’d like a chat, I’m bored.’ Adamsberg was a docile man. He tended to go to bed with any girl who wanted to: sometimes that seemed exactly the right thing to do, since it apparently kept everyone happy, other times it seemed pointless. But in any case, there was no way of knowing what it was that the girl downstairs had wanted to convey to him. He had tried thinking about that, but had put it off until later. What would his youngest sister have said? His little sister was a powerhouse of thought, enough to drive him mad. She gave her opinion of any girlfriend of his she met. Of Christiane, her judgement had been: ‘B minus. Lovely body, very entertaining for an hour, medium-serious brain, centripetal mind with concentric thoughts, three key ideas, gets bored after a couple of hours, goes to bed, is extremely self-denying and biddable in love, same again next day. Overall verdict: don’t get hooked, move on if a better prospect turns up.’

But that wasn’t why Adamsberg wanted to avoid Christiane that evening. Perhaps it was because of the look that girl in the post office had given him. Perhaps it was simply because he had found Christiane waiting for him, so sure that he would smile when he saw her, so sure that he would open the door, and then unbutton his shirt, and then turn down the sheets, and so sure that she would be making the coffee in his kitchen next morning. Absolutely confident of all that. Whereas for Adamsberg, the more certain other people’s expectations were of him, the more oppressed he felt. It gave him an irresistible urge to disappoint them, to let them down. And then again, he had been thinking a bit too much about his
petite chérie
lately, and would go on doing so, on the slightest pretext. Especially since he had realised during his walk that afternoon that it was nine years now, not eight, since he had last seen her. Nine years, good God! And all at once it had seemed to him that this wasn’t normal. He had felt alarmed.

Until now, he had always imagined her travelling the world, in a yacht with some flying Dutchman perhaps, or riding a Berber camel, learning to throw a spear under the guidance of an African tribesman, eating croissants in the Café des Sports et des Artistes in Belleville, or chasing cockroaches in a hotel bedroom in Cairo.

But today he had imagined her dead.

Adamsberg had been so shaken that he had stopped for a cup of coffee, his forehead burning, sweat running down his temples. He visualised her lying dead, having died some time ago, her body decomposing under a tombstone, and in the grave alongside her the little bundle of bones belonging to Richard III. He had tried to summon up images of the Berber camel-handler, the Dutch yachtsman and the café owner in Belleville. He had begged them all to help him reanimate her as usual in front of his eyes, to work the strings and make that tombstone vanish. But damn them all, these characters wouldn’t let themselves be summoned up. Leaving the way clear for this deathly fear to grip him. Dead, dead, dead, Camille dead. Yes, surely dead. And he had been imagining her alive all this time, even if she had been unfaithful to him with other men, just as he had been unfaithful to her with other women, even if she had expelled him from her thoughts, even if she was stroking the shoulders of the bellhop in the bed in the Cairo hotel, after he had come to her room to get rid of the cockroaches, even if she was taking photographs of all the clouds in Canada – because Camille collected clouds that looked like people’s profiles, which were not easy to come by – and even if she had forgotten Adamsberg’s face and his name, just so long as Camille was alive somewhere in this world. Because if so, everything was all right. But if Camille had died somewhere or other in this world, then everything was not all right at all. In that case, what point would there be any more in getting up in the morning and busying oneself, if she were dead, Camille, the unlikely offspring of a Greek god and an Egyptian prostitute (for that was how he saw her origins)? What would be the point after that of bothering to track down murderers, or counting the spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee, or going to bed with Christiane, or looking at the stones in every street, if Camille wasn’t somewhere on the planet, making life vibrate around her with her combination of seriousness and frivolity, the seriousness reflected on her forehead, the frivolity on her lips which met together in a perfect figure of eight, an image of the infinite? And if Camille was dead, Adamsberg would have lost the only woman who had said to him quietly one morning: ‘Jean-Baptiste, I’m going to Wahiguya. It’s on the upper reaches of the Volta.’ She had disentangled herself from his arms, had said ‘I love you,’ dressed, and left. He had thought she was going out to buy bread. But she had not come back, his
petite chérie
. Nine years. He wouldn’t have been entirely misleading anyone if he had said to them ‘Yes, I know Wahiguya, I even lived there for a while.’

And on top of everything, here was Christiane, quite certain that she would be making the coffee for him in the morning. While the
petite chérie
had died somewhere without his being able to do anything about it. And now, one day, he would die himself, without ever seeing her again. He imagined that Mathilde Forestier might be able to pull him out of this black depression, even if that wasn’t the reason he was trying to find her. But he did hope that when he saw her the film would start again, from the right moment, with the bellhop in the Cairo hotel.

Mathilde did telephone.

He told Christiane, who had quickly been disillusioned, to have an early night, since he would be late back; half an hour later, he was talking to Mathilde Forestier.

She welcomed him with a friendliness that loosened the stranglehold the world had exerted on him for the past few hours. She even gave him a kiss, not quite on the cheek and not quite on the lips. She laughed, and said yes she liked doing that, she knew exactly where to plant a kiss, she had an excellent eye for that kind of thing, but he was not to be alarmed, since she never took men her own age as lovers, it was an absolute principle, avoiding comparisons and complications. Then she took his shoulder and led him over to a table, where an old lady was playing patience and sorting the mail at the same time, and where a very tall blind man seemed to be advising her on both counts. The table was oval, and transparent, and had water and fish inside it.

‘It’s an aquarium-table,’ Matilde explained. ‘I designed it myself one evening. It’s a bit showy, a bit obvious, like me. The fish don’t like Clémence playing patience. Every time she slaps a card down on the glass, they shoot off in all directions – look.’

‘No good!’ sighed Clémence, gathering up the cards. ‘It’s a sign. I shouldn’t send a reply to the well-preserved M., 66. But he was so tempting. His ad in the paper was so good.’

‘Have you replied to many?’ asked Charles.

‘Two thousand, three hundred and fifty-four. But it’s never any good. It’s fate. I end up telling myself, Clémence, it’s just
not
going to work out.’

‘Yes, it will,’ said Mathilde, to encourage her, ‘especially if Charles helps you write the replies. He’s a man, he’ll know what appeals to them.’

‘The product doesn’t seem all that easy to market, though,’ observed Charles.

‘But I’m
counting
on you to help me find a way,’ said Clémence, who didn’t seem to take offence whatever anyone said to her.

Mathilde took Adamsberg into her study. ‘We’ll sit at my cosmic table, if you don’t mind. I find it relaxing.’

Adamsberg examined the large table made of black glass and pierced with hundreds of luminous dots lit from below, representing all the constellations in the night sky. It was beautiful, excessively so.

‘My tables don’t seem to tempt anyone to market them,’ Mathilde commented. ‘Facing you,’ she went on, pointing with her finger at the surface, ‘you have Scorpio, the Serpent Holder, the Lyre, Hercules and the Corona Borealis. Do you like it? I like to sit here with my elbows on the south end of Pisces. And the thing is, the whole picture’s false. Because the thousands of stars we see shining have already burnt themselves out, so the sky’s out of date. You realise what that means, Adamsberg? The sky’s out of date. But does that matter, if we can still see it?’