The Chalk Circle Man (7 page)

‘Madame Forestier,’ said Adamsberg, ‘I’d like you to take me to see the chalk circle man tonight. Have you listened to the radio today?’

‘No,’ said Mathilde.

‘This morning we found a woman with her throat cut, inside one of his circles, just a couple of streets away from here, in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. A nice, ordinary, middle-aged lady, with no secret vices to explain why someone would want to kill her. The chalk circle man has moved up a gear.’

Mathilde lowered her darkened face onto her clenched fists, then stood up abruptly and fetched a bottle of Scotch and two glasses, putting them between the two of them, over Aquila, the Eagle.

‘I’m not feeling too good this evening,’ Adamsberg said. ‘Death is stalking around in my head.’

‘I can see that. Have a drink,’ said Mathilde. ‘Tell me about the woman who had her throat cut. We can talk about the other death afterwards.’

‘What other death?’

‘There must be another one,’ Mathilde said. ‘If you get this upset every time you come across a murder, you’d have left the police long ago. So there must be some other death that’s tormenting you. Do you want me to take you to the chalk circle man, so you can arrest him?’

‘It’s too soon. I just want to locate him, see him, find out about him.’

‘I feel awkward, Adamsberg. Because this man and I, we’ve sort of become accomplices. There’s a bit more between us than I told you the other day. In fact I’ve seen him about a dozen times, and from the third time on he realised that I’d spotted him. He keeps his distance, but he still lets me trail him, he glances at me, maybe even smiles, I’m not sure, he’s always been too far away to see, and he keeps his head down. But the last time, he even gave a little wave of his hand before he left, I’m convinced. I didn’t want to tell you all this the other day, because I didn’t want you to put me down as crazy. After all, the police pigeonhole us all, don’t they? But now it’s different, if the police want him for murder. Adamsberg, this man looks totally inoffensive to me. I’ve walked along streets at night enough times to be able to scent danger. But with him, no, nothing. He’s quite small, very short for a man, slight, neatly dressed, his features are vague, they change, they’re hard to remember, but he’s not good-looking. I’d put him at about sixty-five. Before he crouches down to write on the pavement he flicks up the tails of his raincoat, so as not to get them dirty.’

‘How does he draw the circles – from the inside or the outside?’

‘From the outside. He’ll stop suddenly, in front of something on the ground, get out his chalk as if he knew right away that this was tonight’s object. He looks round, waits till the coast is clear, he certainly doesn’t want to be seen, except by me, and he seems to allow that, I don’t know why. Perhaps he thinks I understand him. His whole operation takes about half a minute. He draws a big circle round the object, then he crouches down to write his words, still looking round. Then he disappears at the speed of light. He’s as quick as a fox and he seems to know his way around. He always manages to lose me once he’s drawn the circle, and I’ve never managed to track him to his home. But anyway, if you arrest this guy, I think you’d be making a big mistake.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I need to see him first. How did you find him in the first place?’

‘It wasn’t rocket science. I phoned a few journalists I know who’d taken an interest in the case from the start. They gave me the names of the people who’d first reported the circles. I telephoned the witnesses. It may seem odd to you that I got involved in something that’s none of my business, but that’s because you don’t work with fish. When you spend hours of your life studying fish, you start thinking there’s something wrong with you, and perhaps it’s that you ought to spend less time on fish and more on your fellow human beings, and watch their habits as well. I’ll explain that another time. Anyway, practically all these witnesses had discovered the circles before about half past midnight, never any later. And since the chalk circle man seemed to roam all over Paris, I thought, well, he must be taking the metro, and he doesn’t want to miss the last connection, so that’s a hypothesis to test. Stupid really, isn’t it? But two circles had been found only at two in the morning, in the same area, in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and the rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne. Since they’re fairly busy streets, I thought these circles must have been drawn late at night, after the last metro. Perhaps because by then he was going home on foot, because he lived nearby. Is this getting too involved?’

Adamsberg shook his head slowly. He was full of admiration.

‘So then I thought, with a bit of luck his nearest metro station must be either Pigalle or Saint-Georges. I lay in wait four nights running at Pigalle: nothing. And yet there were two more circles on those nights in the 17th and 2nd
arrondissements
, but I saw nobody who fitted the bill coming in or out of the metro station between ten and when it closed. So I tried Saint-Georges. And there I noticed a small man on his own, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking at the ground, who took a train at quarter to eleven. I saw a few other people too, who might have been likely suspects. But just this one little man came back out of the metro at quarter past midnight. And four days later he did the same thing. The next Monday, the beginning of a section number one, you’ll remember, so a new age, I went back to Saint-Georges. He turned up and I followed him. That was the time with the biro. Because it was him all right, Adamsberg. Other times I would wait at the metro to try and follow him home. But at that point he always manages to give me the slip. I wasn’t going to run after him – I’m not the police.’

‘I won’t tell you that’s
fantastic
work, it sounds too much like police talk, but all the same, it is fantastic work.’

Adamsberg often used the word ‘fantastic’.

‘True,’ said Mathilde. ‘I did well there, better than with Charles Reyer, at any rate.’

‘You
like
him – Reyer?’

‘He’s a bad-tempered so-and-so, but that doesn’t bother me. He makes up for Clémence, the old woman you saw, who’s mind-numbingly good-natured. She seems to do it on purpose. Charles won’t get a rise out of her any more than with me. That’ll teach him, it’ll blunt his teeth.’

‘
Her
teeth are a bit funny, Clémence’s.’

‘You noticed, yes, like
Crocidura russula
– more like animal’s teeth, aren’t they? It must put off the lonely-hearts men she tries to date. We ought to give Charles an eye makeover and Clémence a teeth makeover – we ought to give the world a makeover, really. Then of course it would be perfectly boring. If we get a move on, we could be at Saint-Georges metro station by ten, if that’s what you want. But I’ve already told you, Adamsberg, I really don’t think it’s him you should be chasing. I think someone else used his circle afterwards. Is that impossible?’

‘It would have to be someone who was remarkably familiar with his routine.’

‘Like me.’

‘Yes, and don’t say so too loudly or you’ll be suspected of following your chalk circle man that night and then dragging your victim, whom you’d previously knocked out, of course, over to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, before cutting her throat, on the spot, right in the middle of the circle, making sure she wasn’t outside the line. But that seems pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it?’

‘No. I think that would be quite possible if you wanted to incriminate somebody else. In fact, it’s very tempting, this madman who’s been offering himself on a plate to the police and drawing his blue chalk circles two metres wide, just big enough to contain a corpse. It could have given plenty of people the idea of committing murder, if you ask me.’

‘But how could any prosecutor prove a motive, if the victim turns out to be entirely unknown to the circle man?’

‘The prosecutor would think it was a motiveless crime by a lunatic.’

‘He doesn’t look like a lunatic at all, from all the classic signs. So how could the “real” murderer, according to you, be certain that the circle man would be found guilty in his place?’

‘Well, what do you think, Adamsberg?’

‘I don’t think anything yet, Madame, to tell you the truth. But I’ve just had a bad feeling about these circles from the beginning. I don’t know, just now, whether the man who draws them killed this woman. You could be perfectly right. Perhaps the chalk circle man is just a victim himself. You seem to be much better at working things out and reaching conclusions than I am, you’re a scientist. I don’t use the same methods, I don’t do deductive reasoning. But the feeling I’ve got at the moment, very strongly, is that this circle man isn’t nice at all – even if he is your protégé.’

‘But you haven’t got any evidence?’

‘No. But I’ve been trying to find out everything about him for weeks. He was already dangerous, in my view, when he was just drawing rings round cotton buds and hairpins. So he’s still dangerous now.’

‘But good heavens, Adamsberg, you’re working backwards! It’s as if you were to say that some food was toxic because you felt sick before eating it!’

‘Yes, I know.’

Adamsberg seemed irritated with himself: his eyes were heading for dreams and nightmares where Mathilde couldn’t follow him.

‘Come on, then,’ she said, ‘let’s go to Saint-Georges. If we get lucky and see him, you’ll find out why I’m defending him against you.’

‘And why’s that?’ asked Adamsberg, standing up, with a sad smile on his face. ‘Because a man who gives you a little wave of his hand can’t be all bad?’

He looked at her, his head on one side, his lips curled into a lopsided grin, and he looked so charming that Mathilde felt once more that with this man life was a little better. Charles needed new eyes, Clémence needed a new set of teeth, but this policeman needed a total face makeover. Because his face was crooked, or too small, or too big, or something. But Mathilde would not have let anyone touch it for the world.

‘Adamsberg,’ she said, ‘you’re just too cute. You’ve no business being a policeman, you should have been a streetwalker.’

‘Well, I am a streetwalker as well, Madame Forestier. Like you.’

‘That must be why I like you so much. But that won’t stop me proving to you that my intuition about the chalk circle man is as good as yours. And watch it, Adamsberg, you’re not going to lay a finger on him tonight, not in my company. Give me your word.’

‘I promise. I won’t lay a finger on anyone at all,’ said Adamsberg.

At the same time, he was thinking that he would try to keep his word on this in relation to Christiane, who was lying waiting for him, naked, in bed, back at his flat. And yet who would turn down an offer from a naked girl? As Clémence would say, perhaps the evening was jinxed. Clémence seemed to be a bit jinxed herself, in fact. As for Charles Reyer, it was worse than a jinx: he was teetering on the edge of an internal explosion, a major cataclysm.

When Adamsberg followed Mathilde back into the big room with the aquarium, Charles was still talking to Clémence, who was listening attentively and amiably, puffing at a cigarette as if she was new to smoking. Charles was saying:

‘My grandmother died one night, because she had eaten too many spice cakes. But the real sensation was next day, when they found my father at the table eating the rest of the cakes.’

‘Very interesting,’ said Clémence, ‘but now I’d like you to help me write my letter to my M., 66.’

‘Night-night, children,’ said Mathilde on the way out.

She was already in action, striding towards the stairs, in a hurry to be off to the Saint-Georges station. But Adamsberg had never been able to hurry.

‘Saint George,’ Mathilde called to him, as they scanned the street for a taxi. ‘Isn’t he the one who killed the dragon?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Adamsberg.

The taxi dropped them at the Saint-Georges metro station at five past ten.

‘It’s OK,’ said Mathilde. ‘We’re still in time.’

By half past eleven, the chalk circle man had still not shown up. There was a pile of cigarette ends around their feet.

‘Bad sign,’ said Mathilde. ‘He won’t come now.’

‘Perhaps his suspicions have been aroused,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Suspicions? What about? That he’d be accused of murder? Rubbish! We don’t know if he even listens to the radio. He might not even know about the murder. You already know he doesn’t go out every night, it’s as simple as that.’

‘It’s true, he might not have heard the news yet. Or else perhaps he did hear it, and it made him wary. Since he knows someone’s watching him, he may be changing his haunts. In fact, I’m sure he will. It’s going to be the devil’s own job to find him.’

‘Because he’s the murderer – is that what you mean, Adamsberg?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How many times a day do you say “I don’t know,” or “Maybe”?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I know about all your famous cases so far, and how successful you are. But all the same, when you’re here in the flesh, one wonders. Are you sure you’re suited to the police?’

‘Certain. And anyway, I do other things in life.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as drawing.’

‘Drawing what?’

‘The leaves on the trees and more leaves on the trees.’

‘Is that interesting? Sounds pretty boring to me.’

‘You’re interested in fish, aren’t you?’

‘What do you all have against fish? And anyway, why don’t you draw people’s faces? Wouldn’t it be more fun?’

‘Later. Later or maybe never. You have to start with leaves. Any Chinese sage will tell you.’

‘Later? But you’re already forty-five, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but I can’t believe that.’

‘Ah, that’s like me.’

And since Mathilde had a hip flask of cognac in her pocket, and since it was getting seriously cold, and since she said, ‘We’re into a section two of the week now, we’re allowed to have a drink,’ they did.

When the metal gates of the metro station closed, the chalk circle man had still not appeared. But Adamsberg had had time to tell Mathilde about the
petite chérie
and how she must have died somewhere out in the world, and how he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Mathilde appeared to find this story fascinating. She said that it was a shame to let the
petite chérie
die like that, and that she knew the world like the back of her hand, so she’d be able to find out whether the
petite chérie
had been buried, with her monkey, or not. Adamsberg felt completely drunk because he didn’t usually touch spirits. He couldn’t even pronounce ‘Wahiguya’ properly.