This Night's Foul Work (3 page)

‘Were we now?' she said, without enthusiasm. ‘And what were we doing to be on such familiar terms?'

‘We had an almighty quarrel.'

‘A lovers' tiff? I'd be devastated if I'd forgotten something like that.'

‘No, it was professional.'

‘Gracious me,' said the doctor again, frowning.

Adamsberg inclined his head, distracted by the memories that her high-pitched voice and cutting tone brought up for him. He recognised the ambiguity which had both attracted and disconcerted the young man he had been then: her severe way of dressing combined with a mane of tousled hair, her haughty manner but familiar way of speaking, her elaborate pose but spontaneous gestures. He had never been quite sure whether he was dealing with a superior but absent-minded specialist, or a workaholic who cared nothing for appearances. He even recalled the way she said ‘Gracious me!' at the start of a sentence, without being able to work out whether this was an expression of scorn or simply a provincial mannerism. He was not the only policeman to be wary of
her. Dr Ariane Lagarde was the most eminent pathologist in France, an unrivalled forensic expert.

‘So we were on first-name terms, were we?' she went on, letting the ash from her cigarette fall to the floor. ‘Twenty-three years ago I would have been in mid-career, but you would have been just a junior policeman.'

‘As you say, a very junior policeman.'

‘Well, you surprise me. As a rule, I'm not on familiar terms with my junior colleagues.'

‘We got on pretty well. Until a big bust-up that caused a stir in a café in Le Havre. The door slammed and we never met again. I never got to finish my beer.'

Ariane stubbed out her cigarette underfoot, then sat back on the metal stool as a smile hesitantly returned to her face.

‘The beer,' she said. ‘I wouldn't by any chance have thrown it on the floor, would I?'

‘You did indeed.'

‘Jean-Baptiste,' she said, detaching each syllable. ‘That young idiot Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, who thought he knew better than everyone else.'

‘Yes. That's what you said when you smashed my glass.'

‘Jean-Baptiste,' Ariane repeated more slowly.

The doctor slipped off her stool and put her hand on Adamsberg's shoulder. She seemed on the point of kissing him, then put her hand back in the pocket of her overall.

‘I did like you, Jean-Baptiste. You upset the apple-cart without even noticing. And according to what people say about
Commissaire
Adamsberg, you haven't changed. Now I see: that was you, you're him.'

‘Sort of.'

Ariane leaned her elbows on the dissecting table where the white corpse lay, pushing the body aside to make more room. Like most pathologists, Ariane showed little respect for the dead. On the other
hand, she investigated the enigma of their bodies with unrivalled talent, thus paying homage in her own way to the immense and singular complexity of each one. Dr Lagarde's analyses had made the corpses of some quite ordinary mortals famous. If you passed through her hands, you had a good chance of going down in history. After your death, unfortunately.

‘It was an exceptional corpse,' she remembered. ‘We found him in his bedroom, with a sophisticated farewell letter. A local councillor, compromised and ruined, and he had killed himself with a sword, hara-kiri style.'

‘Having drunk a lot of gin first, to give himself courage.'

‘I remember it clearly,' said Ariane, in the mild tone of someone recalling a pleasant story. ‘A straightforward case of suicide, on the part of a subject with a history of depression and compulsion. The local council was glad the matter went no further, do you remember, Jean-Baptiste? I had put in my report, which was impeccable. You were just the junior who used to make photocopies, run errands, sort out my paperwork, though you didn't always stick to instructions. We used to go and have a drink sometimes by the harbour. I was about to be promoted, and you were daydreaming and going nowhere. In those days, I used to put pomegranate juice in beer to make it fizz.'

‘Do you still mix crazy drinks?'

‘Yes, lots,' said Ariane, sounding disappointed, ‘but I haven't found the perfect mixture yet. Remember the
violine?
An egg whipped up in crème de menthe and Malaga.'

‘Awful drink, I never went for that one.'

‘I stopped making the
violine
. OK for the nerves but a bit too strong. We experimented with a lot of things in Le Havre.'

‘Except one.'

‘Gracious me.'

‘A bedroom experiment. We never tried that.'

‘No, I was married in those days, and a very devoted wife. On the
other hand, we worked well together on the police reports.'

‘Until the day.'

‘Until the day a little idiot of a Jean-Baptiste got it into his head that the local councillor in Le Havre had been murdered. Why? Because you found ten dead rats in a warehouse in the port.'

‘Twelve, Ariane. Twelve rats, all slashed across the belly with a blade.'

‘All right, twelve, if you say so. And you concluded that a murderer had been testing his courage before the attack. And there was something else. You thought the wound was too horizontal. You said the councillor would have had to hold the sword at more of an angle. While he was blind drunk.'

‘And you threw my glass of beer on the floor.'

‘I had a name for that beer-grenadine mixture, for heaven's sake.'

‘La grenaille
. You had me transferred away from Le Havre, and put in your report without me: suicide.'

‘What did you know about forensics? Nothing.'

‘Nothing at all,' Adamsberg admitted.

‘Come and have a coffee. And tell me what's bothering you about these two corpses.'

L
IEUTENANT
V
EYRENC HAD BEEN ASSIGNED THIS MISSION FOR THE PAST THREE
weeks, stuck in a broom cupboard one metre square, providing protection for a young woman whom he saw go past on the landing a dozen times a day.
¹
He found the young woman rather touching, and this feeling disturbed him. He shifted on his chair, trying to find another position.

He shouldn't have been troubled by this – it was just a little grain of sand in the machinery, a splinter in the foot, a bird in the engine. The myth according to which a small bird, however exotic, could make an aeroplane engine explode was complete nonsense, one of the many ways people find to scare each other. As if there weren't enough problems in the world already. Veyrenc expelled the bird with a twitch of his brain, took the top off his fountain pen and set about cleaning the nib. Nothing else to bloody do anyway. The building was completely silent.

He screwed the top back on, replaced it in his inside pocket and closed his eyes. It was fifteen years to the day since he had defied the old wives' tales and gone to sleep in the forbidden shade of the walnut
tree. Fifteen years of determined effort that nobody could take away from him. When he had woken up, he had used the sap of the tree to cure his allergy, and over time, he had tamed his furies, worked his way backwards through the torments he had endured, and exorcised his demons. It had taken fifteen years of persistence to transform a skinny youth, who took care to keep his hair hidden, into a sturdy body attached to a solid psyche. Fifteen years of applied energy to learn not to be tossed like a cork on the seas of love, something that had left him disillusioned with sensations and sickened with complications. When Veyrenc had straightened up under the walnut tree, he had taken the decision to go on strike, like an exhausted worker taking early retirement. From now on, he would keep away from dangerous ridges, taking care to temper his feelings with prudence and to control the intensity of his desires. He had done well, he thought, at keeping his distance from trouble and chaos, and approaching the serenity he yearned for. His relationships with people ever since that day had been non-committal and temporary, as he swam calmly towards his goal, on a course of work, study and versification – a near-perfect state of affairs.

His goal, which he had now achieved, was to be posted to the Paris Crime Squad under
Commissaire
Adamsberg. Veyrenc was satisfied with this, but it had surprised him. An unusual microclimate reigned in the squad. Under the almost imperceptible leadership of their chief, the officers allowed their potential to develop unchecked, indulging in humours and whims unrelated to precise objectives. The squad had achieved undeniable results, but Veyrenc remained highly sceptical. Was this efficiency the result of Adamsberg's strategy, or was it simply the benevolent hand of providence? Providence seemed to have turned a blind eye, for example, to the fact that Mercadet had put down cushions on the first floor and went to sleep there for several hours a day; to the abnormal office cat, which defecated on reams of paper; to
Commandant
Danglard's practice of concealing his bottles of wine in a cupboard in the basement; to the papers, quite unrelated to any
investigations, that lay about on tables: estate agents' prospectuses, race cards, articles on ichthyology, private notes, international newspapers, colour spectra – to name only those he had noticed in one month. This state of affairs did not seem to trouble anyone, except perhaps
Lieutenant
Noël, a cussed character who found fault with everyone. And who, the second day he was there, had made an offensive remark about Veyrenc's hair. Twenty years earlier, it would have provoked tears, but nowadays he couldn't care less – well, not much less. Veyrenc folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. Unshakeable strength allied to a solid physique.

As for the
commissaire
himself, Veyrenc had taken some time to identify him. Seen from a distance, Adamsberg looked nondescript. Several times in the corridor, Veyrenc had passed this small man, a slow-moving bundle of tension, whose face was curiously angular and whose clothes and demeanour were dishevelled, without realising that he was one of the most famous figures, for good or ill, in the Serious Crime Squad. Even his eyes did not seem to be much use. Veyrenc had been waiting for his official interview since his first day on the job. But Adamsberg had never even noticed him, going round as he did in a daze of either profound or vacant thought. Perhaps it was possible that a whole year would go past before the
commissaire
noticed that his team had acquired a new member.

The other officers, however, had not missed the considerable opportunity offered by the arrival of a New Recruit. Which was why Veyrenc found himself stuck here in the broom cupboard on the seventh floor of a building, carrying out an excruciatingly boring surveillance duty. Normally, he should have been relieved regularly, and at first that had happened. Then the relief had become more erratic, with the excuse that X was depressive, Y might fall asleep, Z suffered from claustrophobia, or irritation or backache. As a result, he was now the only officer still mounting guard from morning to night, sitting on a wooden chair.

Veyrenc stretched out his legs as best he could. Newcomers usually
get treated this way, and he was not particularly downcast. With a pile of books at his feet, a pocket ashtray in his jacket, a view of the clouds through the skylight and his pen in working order, he could almost have been happy here. His mind was at rest, his solitude was overcome, his objective reached.

D
R
L
AGARDE HAD MADE LIFE COMPLICATED BY ASKING FOR A DROP OF
barley water in her café au lait, but at last the drinks had arrived at their table.

‘What's the matter with Dr Roman?' she asked as she stirred the frothy liquid.

Adamsberg made a gesture of ignorance. ‘An attack of the vapours, he says. Like ladies in the nineteenth century.'

‘Gracious me. What kind of a diagnosis is that?'

‘His own. He's not suffering from depression, no serious symptoms. But all he can do is drag himself from one sofa to another, between a siesta and the crossword.'

‘Gracious me,' said Ariane again, with a frown. ‘But Roman's a tough guy, and a very competent pathologist. He loves his work.'

‘Yes, but there it is, he's suffering from an attack of the vapours. We hesitated a long time before getting a replacement.'

‘And why did you ask for me?'

‘I didn't ask for you.'

‘I was told the Serious Crime Squad of Paris was clamouring for me.'

‘Well, it wasn't at my request. But I'm glad you're here now.'

‘To get these two guys away from the Drug Squad.'

‘According to Mortier, they aren't just two guys. They're two villains,
and one of them's black. Mortier's head of the Drug Squad. We don't get on.'

‘Is that why you're refusing to hand these bodies over?'

‘No, I'm not chasing after bodies for the sake of it. It's just that those two should come to me.'

‘As you said before. So tell me about it.'

‘We don't know anything about them. They were killed some time in the night between Friday and Saturday, at the Porte de la Chapelle. To Mortier, that means only one thing: dope. According to him, blacks do nothing all day long but deal drugs, that's all their life consists of. And there was a syringe mark on the inside elbow in both cases.'

‘I saw that. The routine analysis didn't turn anything up. So what do you want me to do?'

‘Take a look and tell me what was in the syringe.'

‘Why don't you buy the drugs hypothesis? No shortage of narcotics round La Chapelle.'

‘The mother of the big black guy tells me her son never touched the stuff. Didn't use it, didn't deal it. The other one's mother doesn't know whether he did or not.'