This Night's Foul Work (48 page)

Adamsberg realised that he had started to call Veyrenc ‘tu' without realising it. As kids do. Both of them, up on the High Meadow, were kids again.

‘We-ell,' said Veyrenc, pulling a face and not looking entirely convinced.

‘I managed to pull my penknife out of my back pocket. And because I'd seen lots of films, I tried to cut the cords. But we're never in a film, Veyrenc. If we were in a film now, Ariane would have confessed. In real life, her wall has remained intact. So I was getting nowhere, sweating away, trying to get through the cord. The blade slipped and my knife fell on the ground. When you passed out, they untied me quickly and dragged me off down the path at a run. It was a long time before I dared try and go back to the High Meadow to find my knife. Winter was over, the grass had grown. I looked everywhere but I never found it.'

‘Does that matter?'

‘No, Veyrenc. But if the story's true, there's a good chance the knife's still here, stuck somewhere in the ground. The song of the earth, remember? That's why I brought the pickaxe along. You're going to look for the knife. It should still be open, just as it fell. My initials are carved on the wooden handle, JBA.'

‘Why don't we both look?'

‘Because you're not sure if you believe me. You might still accuse me of dropping it in the earth while I was digging. No, I'm going to walk away, with my hands in my pockets and I'm going to watch you. We're going to open another grave, looking for a
living
memory. But it would surprise me if it's more than a few inches from the surface.'

‘It might not be there at all,' said Veyrenc. ‘Someone might have come along a few days later and picked it up.'

‘If they had, we'd have heard about it. Remember that the cops were looking for the fifth boy. If someone had found my knife, with my initials on it, I'd have been caught. But they didn't find the fifth boy, and I kept my mouth shut. I couldn't prove anything. If the story's true, the knife should still be there, thirty-four years later. I wouldn't ever have dropped my precious knife on purpose. If I didn't pick it up myself, it's because I couldn't. I was tied up.'

Veyrenc hesitated, then stood up and took the pickaxe while Adamsberg walked off a little distance. The surface was hard, and the
lieutenant
spent over an hour under the walnut tree, at regular intervals picking up clods of earth and crumbling them in his fingers. Then Adamsberg saw him drop the pickaxe and pick something up from the ground, wiping the earth off it.

‘Find it?' he asked, coming up. ‘Can you read anything on it?'

‘JBA,' said Veyrenc, as he finished cleaning the handle with his thumb.

He handed the knife to Adamsberg without a word. The blade was rusty, the handle's varnish worn away, and the carved initials were full of black earth – and perfectly legible. Adamsberg turned it over in his hand, his penknife, the damned penknife which hadn't managed to cut the cords, and hadn't helped him to come to the rescue of a little kid bleeding from an attack by the vicious Roland.

‘It's yours if you want it,' said Adamsberg, offering it, taking care to hold it by the blade. ‘It's a male principle, a symbol of how both of us were impotent that day.'

Veyrenc nodded and accepted it.

‘Now you owe me ten centimes,' Adamsberg added.

‘Why?'

‘It's a tradition. If you give a sharp object to anyone, the other person has to give you a coin to prevent it cutting him. I wouldn't like you to have bad luck on my account. You keep the knife, I'll take the ten centimes.'

I
N THE TRAIN ON THE WAY BACK
, V
EYRENC WAS TROUBLED BY ONE LAST IDEA
.

‘Someone who's a dissociator,' he said, looking grave, ‘doesn't know what they've done, right? They repress the memory.'

‘That's the theory, according to Ariane. We'll never know whether she was just play-acting when she refused to confess, or whether she's a genuine dissociator. Or indeed if such a thing really exists.'

‘If it did exist,' said Veyrenc, with a crooked smile, ‘would I have been able to kill Fernand and Big Georges and then wipe it from my memory?'

‘No, Veyrenc.'

‘How can you be sure?'

‘Because I checked. I got your employment records and your worksheets from Tarbes and Nevers, which was where you were at the time of the murders. The day Fernand was murdered, you were accompanying someone to London. When Big Georges was killed, you were under arrest.'

‘I was?'

‘Yes, for insulting a superior officer. What was that about?'

‘What was his name?'

‘Pleyel, like the pianos.'

‘Yes,' Veyrenc said, remembering. ‘He was someone like Devalon. We
had a scandal on our hands, political corruption. Instead of doing his job, he did what the government told him, provided false documents and got the main offender out of trouble. I wrote a few harmless lines about him, and he didn't like that.'

‘Remember them?'

‘No, not any more.'

Adamsberg got out his notebook and leafed through it.

Result, fifteen days confined to barracks.'

‘Where did you find that?' asked Veyrenc, smiling.

‘It's in the station records. Your lines saved you from killing Big Georges. You didn't kill anyone, Veyrenc.'

The
lieutenant
squeezed his eyes shut and relaxed his shoulders.

‘You still haven't given me my ten centimes,' said Adamsberg, holding out his hand. ‘I've been working hard on your behalf. You gave me a lot of trouble.'

Veyrenc dropped a copper coin into Adamsberg's hand.

‘Thank you,' said Adamsberg, pocketing the coin. ‘And when are you going to give up Camille?'

Veyrenc turned his head away.

‘OK,' said Adamsberg, leaning against the window and falling instantly asleep.

D
ANGLARD HAD TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF
R
ETANCOURT'S RETURN FROM
hospital, earlier than expected, to decree a break in honour of the third virgin, after bringing up some bottles from the basement. In the resulting festivity, only the cat remained calm, sleeping peacefully curled up on Retancourt's powerful forearm.

Adamsberg walked slowly acros the room, feeling awkward, as usual when there was some kind of celebration. He took the glass that Estalère held out for him as he passed, pulled out his mobile and called Robert's number. In the café in Haroncourt, the second round of drinks had just begin.

‘It's the Béarnais cop,' Robert announced to the evening assembly, covering the telephone with his hand. ‘He says his troubles are over and he's going to have a drink and think of us.'

Anglebert considered his reply.

‘You can tell him that's fine by us.'

‘He says he's found two of Saint Jerome's bones in a flat in Paris in a toolbox,' reported Robert, covering the phone again. ‘And he'll come and put them back in the reliquary at Le Mesnil. Because he doesn't know what else to do with ‘em.'

‘Well, neither do we, for God's sake,' said Oswald.

‘He says we should tell the priest anyway.'

‘Makes sense,' commented Hilaire. ‘Just because Oswald can't be
bothered with them, don't mean to say the priest won't. Got his own worries, the priest, hasn't he? Got to reckon with that.'

‘You can tell him that will be fine by us,' Anglebert commanded. ‘When's he coming?'

‘Saturday.'

Robert returned to the telephone, and concentrated in order to transmit the response of the elder of the tribe.

‘Now he's saying he's got some stones from his river back home, and he wants us to have them, if we've no objection.'

‘What the heck are we supposed to do with them?'

‘I get the feeling it's like the antlers of the Red Giant. It's sort of an honour in return.'

Undecided faces turned to Anglebert.

‘If we refuse,' said Anglebert, ‘he might be offended.'

‘Stands to reason,' punctuated Achille.

‘You can tell him that's fine by us too.'

Leaning against the wall, Veyrenc watched as the members of the squad circulated. This evening they had been joined by Dr Roman, who had also returned to earth, and Dr Lavoisier, who was closely monitoring Retancourt's case. Adamsberg was walking quietly from place to place, here now, then absent, like a lighthouse going on and off. The strain of his long pursuit of Ariane, the Shade, had left dark traces on his face. He had spent three hours walking in the waters of the Gave and picking up pebbles before he'd joined Veyrenc to take the train back to Paris.

The
commissaire
took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and motioned to Danglard to come over. Danglard well knew that smile and that twitch of the head. He went across, looking suspicious.

‘Veyrenc would say that fate likes to play games with us. You know that there are ironies of fate, and that's how we recognise it.'

‘Veyrenc's going away, it seems.'

‘Yes, he's going back to his mountains. He's going to have a think with his feet in the river and his hair blowing in the wind, to work out whether he'll come back to us or not. He hasn't decided.'

Adamsberg held out the paper.

‘Got that this morning.'

‘I can't understand a word of it,' said Danglard looking down.

‘Naturally – it's in Polish. Apparently it informs us that the district nurse has just died,
capitaine
. It was a straightforward road accident. She was knocked over by a car in Warsaw. Squashed flat by a driver who didn't stop at the lights and couldn't tell the road from the pavement. And we know who the driver was.'

‘A Pole, I presume.'

‘Yes, but not just any Pole.'

‘A Pole who was drunk?'

‘No doubt. But what else?'

‘I don't know what you're getting at.'

‘An
old
Pole. Ninety-two years old. The woman who killed old people was killed by one of them.'

Danglard thought for a moment.

‘That makes you laugh?'

‘Yes, Danglard.'

Veyrenc saw Adamsberg grip the
commandant's
shoulder, he saw Lavoisier fussing over Retancourt, he saw Roman coming back to life, Estalère running round filling glasses, Noël bragging about his blood donation. None of it concerned him. He hadn't come to Paris to get interested in people's lives. He had come to sort out once and for all the matter of his hair. Which he had.

Yes, why not? Veyrenc drew on his cigarette and watched as Adamsberg left the hall, discreet and light-footed, carrying the great stag's antlers, one in each hand.

Adamsberg walked home along the darkened streets. He would not tell Tom a word about Ariane's atrocities. He had no wish that such horrors should reach the child so early in life. In any case, there was no such thing as a dissociated ibex. Only human beings have a talent for bringing about this kind of calamity. Whereas ibex can make their horns grow out of their skulls, just like stags. That's something humans can't do. So we'll stick to stories about the ibex.

Then the wise old chamois who'd read lots of books realised that he had made a big mistake. But the ginger ibex never found out that the wise chamois had thought he was wicked. And then the ginger ibex realised that he'd made a big mistake too and that the brown ibex wasn't wicked, either. Right you are, said the brown ibex, that's ten centimes you owe me.

In the little garden, Adamsberg put the antlers down while he looked for his keys. Lucio appeared immediately from the darkness and joined him under the hazel tree.

‘All right,
hombre?'

Lucio slipped across to the hedge without waiting for a reply and came back with two beers, which he opened. His radio was hissing away in his pocket.

‘This woman,' he said, passing Adamsberg a bottle. ‘The one who hadn't finished her task. You gave her the potion?'

‘Yes.'

‘And she drank it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good.'

Lucio took a few mouthfuls, before pointing to the ground with the tip of his walking stick.

‘What's that you're carrying around?'

‘A ten-pointer from Normandy.'

‘Live or cast?'

‘Live.'

‘Good,' said Lucio again. ‘But don't separate them.'

‘Yes, I know.'

‘You know something else too?'

‘Yes, Lucio, the Shade has gone. Dead, finished, out of the way.'

The old man stood for a moment without speaking, tapping the top of the little bottle against his teeth. He looked at Adamsberg's house, then turned to the
commissaire
.

‘How?'

‘Guess.'

‘They used to say she could only be killed by an old man.'

‘Well, that's what happened.'

‘Tell me.'

‘It happened in Warsaw,'