This Night's Foul Work (45 page)

‘Yes.'

‘Retancourt wondered why, and she started looking at the enlargements differently. She saw the marks on the right side of the skull, but she didn't know what they meant. It bothered her and she came back to ask you. What was it you were looking for? What had you seen? What you'd seen was that a small section of the skull had actually been scalped, but you hadn't said so. You decided to help us as much as you could,
without betraying Ariane. So you gave us the information, but you altered it a bit. You told us the hair had been cut, but not that it had been
shaved
. After all, what difference could that possibly make to our investigation? It was hair, just the same. And that way you got Ariane off the hook. By saying that you were the only person who could spot it. Your story about hair being recently cut and having different-shaped ends – that was rubbish, wasn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘You couldn't have told from an ordinary photograph a detail like the cut ends. Was he really a barber, your father?'

‘No, he was a doctor. But whether the hair was cut or shaved, I couldn't see that it made any difference. I didn't want to get Ariane into trouble, five years off retirement. I thought she'd simply made a mistake.'

‘But Retancourt wondered how Ariane Lagarde, supposedly the best forensic pathologist in the country, could have missed this finding. It seemed to her impossible that Ariane should miss it if
you
were able to guess at it just from an ordinary photo. She concluded that Ariane had not seen fit to tell us about it. But why? So, after she left you, she went round to the morgue to see Ariane and ask questions. Ariane realised the danger. It was in one of the morgue's vans that she transported Retancourt to the hangar.'

‘Put some more cold water on my head.'

Adamsberg wrung out the cloth and once more gave Roman's head a good rub.

‘There's something that doesn't fit,' said Roman from under the cloth.

‘What?' asked Adamsberg, stopping what he was doing.

‘I felt the first vapours long before Ariane took this job in Paris. She was still in Lille. So how come?'

‘She must have travelled to Paris, got inside your flat and replaced all your regular pills with whatever she used.'

‘The Gavelon, for instance.'

‘Yes, because she could inject capsules with some concoction of her
own. She's always been fond of mixing peculiar drinks, do you remember that? Then all she had to do was wait in Lille until you were too unwell to work.'

‘Did she tell you that? That she'd put me out of action?'

‘She hasn't said a word yet.'

‘How can you be so sure, then?'

‘Because it was the first thing Retancourt said to me:

It wasn't because of Camille or Corneille that she chose these lines, but because of
you
. Retancourt was thinking about you, with your vapours and your problem having enough breath to cross the room.
Roman
, that's you, made short of breath by a woman.'

‘Why did Retancourt talk in verse?'

‘Because of her partner at the office, the New Recruit, Veyrenc. His way of talking is infectious and she was very drawn to him. And because she was only half conscious with all the drugs, she regressed to being a schoolgirl, and the name “Roman” must have brought the line swimming to the surface. Lavoisier says that one of his patients spent three months repeating his times tables.'

‘I don't see what Lavoisier has to do with it. He was a chemist who was guillotined in 1793. More cold water.'

‘I'm talking about Lavoisier the doctor, who accompanied us to Dourdan,' said Adamsberg, giving Roman's head another rub.

‘He's called Lavoisier, like the chemist?' asked Roman indistinctly, from under the cloth.

‘Yes, as he never stops telling us. Once we realised that Retancourt was trying to say something about
you
, and not some Ancient Roman, and that a woman had caused your problems, the rest was easy. Ariane had put you out of action in order to take your place. I didn't ask for
her, Brézillon didn't ask for her. She applied for it herself. Why? For prestige? But she already had that.'

‘So that she could run the investigation herself,' said Roman, emerging from the cloth with his hair standing on end.

‘And, by the same token, she could engineer my fall from grace. I once humiliated her professionally, long ago. She never forgets and never forgives.'

‘Are you going to question her now?'

‘Yes.'

‘Take me with you.'

Roman had been too weak to go out for months now. Adamsberg wondered whether he could even manage the three flights of stairs to get down to the car.

‘Take me with you,' Roman insisted. ‘She was my friend. I'll have to see it to believe it.'

‘Well, all right,' said Adamsberg, lifting him up under the arms. ‘Hold on to me. If you go to sleep at the office, there are some cushions upstairs, for the benefit of Mercadet.'

‘Does Mercadet eat pills full of unspeakable things, then?'

A
RIANE'S BEHAVIOUR WAS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY THAT
A
DAMSBERG HAD
ever seen in an arrested suspect. She was sitting on the other side of his desk, and should have been facing him. But she had turned her chair through ninety degrees and was looking at the wall, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. So Adamsberg had gone round to the wall to face her, whereupon she had immediately turned her chair through a right angle again, to face the door. This was neither fear, nor provocation, nor ill will on her part. But just as one magnet repulses another, so the commissaire's approach made her swivel round. It was just like a toy one of his sisters had had, a little dancer who could be made to turn around when you put it close to a mirror. It was only later that he had understood that two contrary magnets were hidden, one inside the dancer's pink tights and one behind the mirror. So Ariane was the dancer and he was the mirror. A reflective surface that she was instinctively avoiding, so as not to see Omega in Adamsberg's eyes. As a result, he was obliged to keep moving round the room, while Ariane, oblivious of his movements, spoke into empty space.

It was equally clear that she did not understand what she was being accused of. But without asking questions or rebelling, she sat, docile and almost consenting, as if another part of her knew perfectly well what she was doing and accepted this for the moment, a mere twist of
fate which she could handle. Adamsberg had had time to skim some of the chapters in her book and recognised in this conflicted yet passive attitude the disconcerting symptoms of the dissociated criminal. A split in the individual, which Ariane knew so well, having spent years exploring it with fascination, without realising that her own case had been the motive behind her research. Faced with an interrogation by the police, Ariane understood nothing, and Omega was prudently lying low, waiting for conciliation and a way out.

Adamsberg imagined that Ariane must be a hostage to her incalculable pride: this woman, who had never forgiven even the offence of the twelve rats, had been unable to bear the humiliation caused by the paramedic who had tempted her husband away so publicly. That or something else. One day the volcano had erupted, setting free a torrent of rage and punishments in a sequence of unbridled attacks. Ariane the pathologist remained ignorant of these murderous outbreaks. The paramedic had died a year later, in a climbing accident, but the husband had not returned to his wife. He had found a new partner, who in turn died on a railway line. Murder after murder: Ariane was already on her way to her ultimate aim, acquiring powers superior to those of all others of her sex. An eternal dominion which would preserve her from the threatening encirclement of her fellow women. At the centre of this journey lay an implacable hatred of other people which no one would understand – unless Omega revealed it one day.

But Ariane had had to bide her time for ten years, since the recipe in the
De sanctis reliquis
was clear: ‘Five times cometh the age of youth, till the day thou must invert it, pass and pass again.'

On this point, Adamsberg and his colleagues had made a serious miscalculation, by choosing to take fifteen as the age to be multiplied five times. Having identified the district nurse as their suspect, they had all interpreted the text to correspond to the seventy-five years of her age. But at the time the
De reliquis
was being copied, fifteen was seen as adulthood, when a girl could already be a mother and a boy ride on
horseback.
Twelve
was when young people left behind the age of their youth. So the time to reverse the approach of death and escape its grasp came at the age of sixty. Ariane had been on the eve of her sixtieth birthday when she had embarked upon the series of crimes she had long been planning.

Adamsberg had started the tape officially recording the interrogation of Ariane Lagarde on 6 May at one o'clock in the morning: she was being held on suspicion of premeditated homicide and attempted homicide, in the presence of officers Danglard, Mordent, Veyrenc, Estalère and Dr Roman.

‘What's all this about, Jean-Baptiste?' asked Ariane amiably, speaking to the wall.

‘I'm reading you the charge in its first draft,' Adamsberg explained gently.

She knew everything and knew nothing, and her gaze, if one managed to catch it, was difficult to bear, both pleasant and arrogant, understanding and vindictive, as Alpha and Omega battled it out. An unconscious gaze, which disconcerted her questioners, referring them to their own demons and the intolerable idea that perhaps behind their own walls there lurked monsters of which they were unaware, ready to burst open the swelling crater of an unsuspected volcano inside them. As Adamsberg read out the long charge sheet of her crimes, he watched for any quiver, any sign that one of them might elicit a response from Ariane's imperial expression. But Omega was far too cunning to reveal herself. Hidden behind her impenetrable veil, she waited, smiling in the shadows. Only the rather stiff and mechanical smile hinted at her secret existence.

‘… You are charged with the murders of Jeannine Panier, aged twenty-three, and Christiane Béladan, aged twenty-four, both mistresses of Charles André Lagarde, your husband; with encouraging and organising
the escape of Claire Langevin, aged seventy-five, incarcerated at Freiburg Prison in Germany; with the murder of Otto Karlstein, aged fifty-six, warder at the same prison; with the murders of Elisabeth Châtel, aged thirty-six, secretary; of Pascaline Villemot, aged thirty-eight, shop assistant; of Diala Toundé, aged twenty-four, unemployed; of Didier Paillot, aged twenty-two, unemployed; you are further charged with the attempted murder of Violette Retancourt, aged thirty-five, police officer; with the murder of Gilles Grimal, aged forty-two, gendarme; with the attempted murder of Francine Bidault, aged thirty-five, pharmacy assistant; with the attempted murder for a second time of Violette Retancourt, in front of witnesses; with the desecration of the graves of Elisabeth Châtel and Pascaline Villemot.'

Adamsberg, dripping with sweat, put down the sheet of paper. Eight murders, three attempted murders, two exhumations.

‘Not to mention the mutilation of Narcissus, cat, aged eleven,' he murmured, ‘or the evisceration of the Red Giant, stag, ten points, and two anonymous members of the same species. Have you heard what I'm saying, Ariane?'

‘I wonder what you are doing, that's all.'

‘You've always disliked me, haven't you? You've never forgiven me for invalidating your results in the Hubert Sandrin case in Le Havre.'

‘Gracious. I don't know what's given you that idea.'

‘When you hatched your plan, you decided to target my squad. To succeed while making me fail would be exactly what you wanted.'

‘I was assigned to your squad.'

‘Because there was a vacancy and you applied for it. You made Dr Roman ill by making him eat capsules full of pigeon shit.'

‘Pigeon shit? Really?' asked Estalère in an undertone. Danglard shrugged to indicate he didn't know what that meant. Ariane took a cigarette from her handbag and Veyrenc gave her a light.

‘As long as I can smoke,' she said graciously, addressing the wall, ‘you can talk as much as you like. I was warned about you. You're crazy. Your
mother was right: everything goes in one ear and out the other.'

‘Let's leave my mother out of it, Ariane,' said Adamsberg evenly. ‘Danglard, Estalère and I saw you creep into Retancourt's room at eleven tonight, with a syringe full of Novaxon. What was that for?'

Adamsberg had gone round to the wall and Ariane had immediately turned towards the desk.

‘You'll have to ask Roman that,' she said. ‘What he told me was that the syringe contained a powerful
antidote
to Novaxon, which would have helped her to recover. You and Lavoisier had said she wasn't to have it, because it was still an experimental drug. I was just doing a good turn for Roman. I had to, because he couldn't get to the hospital himself. I never suspected there was an affair going on between Roman and Retancourt. Or that she was drugging him, so that she would have him at her mercy. She was always round at his place, clinging on to him. I suppose he realised what she was doing, and seized the chance to get rid of her. In the state she's in, her death would just have looked like a relapse.'

‘In the name of God, Ariane,' cried Roman, trying to get up.

‘Let it go,
mon vieux,'
said Adamsberg, returning to his seat, which had the effect of making Ariane pivot round again.

Adamsberg opened his notebook, leaned back and scribbled for a few moments. Ariane was very strong. In front of a magistrate, her version might look convincing. Who would doubt the word of the famous pathologist Ariane Lagarde, as opposed to that of the humble Dr Roman who was losing his wits?