The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg)
Read The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg) Online
Authors: Fred Vargas
A PENGUIN MYSTERY
THE GHOST RIDERS OF ORDEBEC
Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. A historian and archaeologist by profession, she is a #1 bestselling author in France and Italy. She is the author of seven novels featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, including
Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand, This Night’s Foul Work, The Chalk Circle Man
, and
An Uncertain Place
, also available from Penguin. Her books have been published in forty countries and have sold more than ten million copies.
Praise for Fred Vargas and Her Commissaire Adamsberg Mysteries
“Spry, ironic, yet fully engaged with the horror of contemporary reality.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“It’s a full, rich, and strange plate.”
—
The Seattle Times
“Few crime stories are as apt to leave a reader wondering so ardently: Who dunnit?…Vargas’s characters are like something out of a fairy tale—eternal opposites, ever-renewing archetypes despite their fresh adventures each time. That’s why each novel’s opening feels new.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Vargas writes with the startling imagery and absurdist wit of a latter-day Anouilh about fey characters who live in a wonderful bohemian world that never was but should have been.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“Anyone who enjoys kooky characters and intricate detail will happily follow Vargas along.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
Also available in the Commissaire Adamsberg mystery series
The Chalk Circle Man
Seeking Whom He May Devour
Have Mercy on Us All
Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand
This Night’s Foul Work
An Uncertain Place
Fred Vargas
The Ghost Riders
of Ordebec
A COMMISSAIRE ADAMSBERG MYSTERY
Translated from the French by
Siân Reynolds
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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New York, New York 10014, USA
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First published in Paris as
L’armée furieuse
by Éditions Viviane Hamy 2011
First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker,
an imprint of Random House UK, 2013
Published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright © Éditions Viviane Hamy, 2011
English translation copyright © Siân Reynolds, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Vargas, Fred, author.
[Armée Furieuse. English]
The Ghost Riders of Ordebec / Fred Vargas ; translated from the French by Siân Reynolds.
pages cm
“A Penguin Mystery.”
ISBN: 978-1-101-59874-0
I. Reynolds, Siân, translator. II. Title.
PQ2682.A725A8913 2013
843’.914—dc23 2012042668
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Praise for Fred Vargas
Also by Fred Vargas
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Chapter XLVIII
Chapter XLIX
Chapter L
Chapter LI
Chapter LII
Chapter LIII
Chapter LIV
Chapter LV
Chapter LVI
Chapter LVII
Author’s Note
Translator’s Note
I
A trail of tiny breadcrumbs led from the kitchen into the bedroom, as far as the spotless sheets where the old woman lay dead, her mouth open. Commissaire Adamsberg looked down at the crumbs in silence, pacing slowly to and fro, and wondering what kind of Tom Thumb – or what ogre in this case – might have dropped them there. He was in a small, dark, ground-floor apartment, with just three rooms, in the eighteenth arrondissement, in northern Paris.
The old woman was lying in the bedroom. Her husband was in the dining room. He showed neither impatience nor emotion as he waited, just looked longingly at his newspaper, folded open at the page with the crossword puzzle, which he didn’t dare try to solve while the police were there. He had told them his brief life story. He and his wife had met at work, in an insurance company: she was a secretary, he an accountant. They had married in their careless youth, not knowing it was destined to last fifty-nine years. Then his wife had died in the night. Heart attack, according to the local commissaire, who was ill in bed and had called on Adamsberg to replace him. Just do me a favour, it won’t take more than an hour, a routine morning call.
One more time, Adamsberg walked the trail of crumbs. The flat was impeccably kept: the armchairs had antimacassars, the Formica surfaces were gleaming, the windows were spotless and the dishes washed. He went over to the bread bin, which contained part of a baguette, and a large half-loaf, wrapped in a clean tea towel and hollowed out in the middle.
He returned to the husband sitting in his armchair, and pulled up another chair alongside.
‘No good news this morning,’ the old man said, lifting his eyes from the paper. ‘And it’s so hot, the ink is smudged. Still, here we’re on the ground floor, it’s a bit cooler. That’s why I leave the shutters closed. And you have to drink plenty, that’s what they tell you.’
‘You didn’t notice anything?’
‘She seemed all right when I went to bed. I always checked, because she had heart trouble. It was only this morning that I realised she’d gone.’
‘There are breadcrumbs in her bed.’
‘Yes, she liked to nibble some bread or perhaps a
biscotte
last thing before going to sleep.’
‘I would have thought she’d clean the crumbs up afterwards.’
‘Oh yes, indeed. She cleaned things from morning to night, you’d think her life depended on it. It wasn’t so bad at first, but over the years it got to be an obsession. She’d even make things dirty, just for the pleasure of washing them. You should have seen her. Still, poor woman, it gave her something to do.’
‘But what about this bread? She didn’t sweep it up last night?’
‘No, because it was me that brought it her. She was too weak to get up. She
did
tell me to clear the crumbs away, but I couldn’t be bothered. She’d have done it in the morning. She turned the sheets every day. What for, I couldn’t tell you.’