This Night's Foul Work (6 page)

‘A
woman?'

The usually languid Danglard sat up, in shock. He hated the idea that women might be killers.

‘Has she seen the size of those two guys? Is she joking?'

‘Not so fast, Danglard. Dr Lagarde doesn't make mistakes, or hardly ever. Suggest her hypothesis to the Drug Squad, anyway – it'll keep them off our backs for a bit.'

‘You won't be able to hold Mortier off at all. He's been getting nowhere
with the dealer networks in Clignancourt-La Chapelle for months. It's not looking good and he needs results. He's called in twice already this morning. I warn you, he's screaming blue murder.'

‘Let him scream. The water will win in the end.'

‘So what are you going to do?'

‘About my nun?'

‘No, about Diala and La Paille.'

Adamsberg looked at Danglard in bewilderment.

‘Those are their names,' Danglard explained. ‘The two victims. Diala Toundé and Didier Paillot, known as “La Paille”. So should we go to the morgue tonight?'

‘No, I'm in Normandy tonight. For a concert.'

‘Ah,' said Danglard, heaving himself to his feet. ‘You're hoping for the points to change?'

‘I'm humbler than that,
capitaine
. I'm just going to look after the baby while she plays.'

‘Commandant
, I'm a
commandant
now. Don't you remember? You were at my promotion ceremony. What concert, anyway?' asked Danglard, who always took Camille's interests to heart.

‘It must be something important. It's some British orchestra with period instruments.'

‘The Leeds Baroque Ensemble?'

‘It's some name like that,' said Adamsberg, who had never managed to learn a word of English. ‘Don't ask me what she's playing, I've no idea.'

Adamsberg stood up, and flung his damp jacket over his shoulder. ‘While I'm away, can you look after the cat, and Mortier, the two bodies, and the temper of
Lieutenant
Noël, who is getting more and more difficult? I can't be everywhere, and duty calls just now.'

‘Since you're being a responsible father,' muttered Danglard.

‘If you say so,
capitaine.'

Adamsberg accepted without demur Danglard's grumbling reproaches
which he considered almost always to be justified. A single parent, the
commandant
was bringing up his five children like a mother hen, whereas Adamsberg had hardly registered that Camille's newborn baby was his. At least he had memorised his name: Thomas Adamsberg, known as Tom. That was at least one point in his favour, thought Danglard, who never completely despaired of the
commissaire
.

B
Y THE TIME HE HAD DRIVEN THE
136
KILOMETRES TO THE VILLAGE OF
Haroncourt in the
département
of the Eure, Adamsberg's clothes had dried in the car. He had only to smoothe them out by hand before putting on his jacket and finding a bar where he could wait in the warm for his prearranged rendezvous. Sitting comfortably on a battered leather banquette, with his back to the wall and a glass of beer in front of him, the
commissaire
examined the noisy group which had just taken possession of the café, rousing him from a semi-doze.

‘Want me to tell you what I think?' said a big fair-haired man, pushing his cap back with his thumb.

He's going to tell them anyway, thought Adamsberg.

‘Summat like that? Want me to tell you?' the man was repeating.

‘We need a drink first.'

‘We do at that, Robert,' said his neighbour, pouring out generous helpings of white wine into the six glasses.

So the big fair one was Robert – built like a wardrobe. And he was thirsty. It was the aperitif hour: heads sunk into shoulders, fists clenched around glasses, chins jutting at aggressive angles. The majestic hour, when the men of the village foregather and the angelus is rung, a time for sage opinions and nods of the head, a time for rural rhetoric, pompous and trivial. Adamsberg knew the score by heart. He had been
born into this music, had grown up hearing its solemn developments, its rhythms and its themes, its variations and counterpoints, and he knew the players. Robert had sounded the first note on the violin, and all the other instruments would be moving into place at once, in an unvarying order.

‘Tell you what, though,' said the man on Robert's left. ‘It's not just a drink we need after that. Makes you sick to your stomach.'

‘That it does.'

Adamsberg turned to have a better view of the last speaker, who had the humble but essential task of punctuating every turn in the conversation, as if on a double bass. He was small and thin, the least robust-looking of the group. That figured.

‘Whoever did that,' said a tall stooped individual at the end of the table, ‘he's no human being.'

‘No, he's an animal.'

‘Worse than an animal.'

‘That he is.'

The first subject had been introduced. Adamsberg got out his notebook, still warped with rain, and started sketching the faces of the actors in the little drama. These were Norman heads, no mistake about it. He realised that they looked like his friend Bertin, a descendant of the god Thor, wielder of thunderbolts, who kept a café on a square in Paris. Square-jawed and high-cheekboned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with an elusive expression in them. It was the first time Adamsberg had set foot among inland Normandy's damp woods and fields.

‘What I think,' Robert was saying, ‘is it's some young fellow. Some nutter.'

‘Nutters aren't all young.'

This contrapuntal interjection came from the oldest speaker at the head of the table. Alerted, the other faces turned his way.

‘Because when a young nutter grows up, he turns into an old one.'

‘Dunno about that,' grunted Robert.

So Robert had the difficult but also essential task of contradicting the elder of the tribe.

‘I'm telling you they do,' the older man said. ‘But say what you like, whoever did that, crazy's the word all right.'

‘A savage.'

‘Stands to reason.'

Recapitulation and development of the first subject.

‘'Cos there's killing and killing,' said Robert's neighbour, a man with hair less fair than the rest.

‘Dunno about that,' said Robert.

‘Yes, I'm telling you there is,' said the old man. ‘Whoever did that, they were just out to kill, nothing else. Two shots in the ribs, and that's it. Didn't even do anything with the remains. Know what I call that?'

‘Cold-blooded murder.'

‘That it is.'

Adamsberg had stopped sketching and started listening. The older man half-turned towards him, with a sideways look.

‘Then again,' Robert was saying, ‘where's Brétilly? Not our neck of the woods – thirty kilometres away. So why should we care?'

‘'Cos it's shameful, Robert, that's why.'

‘I don't even think it was someone from Brétilly. I'll bet it was a Parisian. Anglebert, what do you think?'

So the old man who dominated the group from the top of the table was Anglebert.

‘Yes, Parisians now, they can be crazy,' he said.

‘The life they lead.'

Silence fell around the table and a few faces turned furtively towards Adamsberg. When men foregather for a drink in the evening, the newcomer is inevitably spotted, weighed up and rejected or accepted. In Normandy, like everywhere else, and possibly a bit more so than anywhere else.

‘What makes you so sure I'm a Parisian?' Adamsberg asked calmly.

The old man jerked his chin at the book on the commissaire's table, next to his glass of beer.

‘The metro ticket,' he said. ‘You've marked your page with a Paris metro ticket. Easy to spot.'

‘But I'm not a Parisian.'

‘Not from Haroncourt, though, are you?'

‘No, I'm from the Pyrenees, from the mountains.'

Robert raised one hand and let it fall heavily on the table.

‘A Gascon!' he concluded as if a sheet of lead had fallen on the table.

‘I'm from the Béarn,' Adamsberg said pointedly.

The weighing-up process began.

‘People from the mountains, they've been trouble,' said Hilaire, a balding but slightly less old elder statesman, at the other end of the table.

‘When was that?' asked the not-so-fair one.

‘Don't you bother asking, Oswald, it was way back.'

‘Well, what about the Bretons? Man from the Pyrenees, at least he's not going to try and take the Mont Saint Michel away from us.'

‘That's true enough,' said Anglebert, nodding.

‘Well,' hazarded Robert, looking at the newcomer, ‘you don't look to me like you're descended from the Vikings. So where do people in the Béarn come from, then?'

‘Straight out of the mountain,' Adamsberg replied. ‘Stream of lava came down the mountainside and when it hardened, it turned into us.'

‘Stands to reason,' said the one who punctuated every stage in the conversation.

The men sat waiting, silently asking to be told what had brought this stranger to Haroncourt.

‘I'm looking for the chateau.'

‘That's easy. There's a concert on there tonight.'

‘I'm with one of the musicians.'

Oswald brought out the local paper from his inside pocket and unfolded it carefully. ‘Here's a picture of the orchestra,' he said.

That constituted an invitation to approach their table. Adamsberg crossed the room, holding his beer in his hand, and observed the page that Oswald held out to him.

‘Here,' he said, pointing. ‘That one, the viola player.'

‘The pretty girl?'

‘That's her.'

Robert served another round of drinks, as much to mark the significance of the pause as to absorb more alcohol. An archaic problem now tormented the gathering. What was this woman to the intruder? Mistress? Wife? Sister? Girlfriend? Cousin?

‘And you're with her?' Hilaire asked.

Adamsberg nodded. He had been told that Normans never ask a direct question, a myth, as he had thought, but in front of him he had a clear example of their proud silence. If you ask too many questions you reveal yourself, and if you reveal yourself you're less of a man. Ill at ease, the group turned to the elder statesman. Angelbert tilted his unshaven chin, scratching it with his fingers.

‘Because she's your wife,' he asserted.

‘Was,' said Adamsberg.

‘But you're still coming along with her.'

‘A question of consideration.'

‘Stands to reason,' said the punctuator.

‘Women,' Anglebert said in a low voice. ‘Here one day, gone the next.'

‘You don't want ‘em when you got ‘em,' commented Robert. ‘Then when they've gone, you do.'

‘You lose them,' Adamsberg agreed.

‘Dunno how it is,' said Oswald.

‘Lack of consideration,' Adamsberg explained. ‘Or at least it was that in my case.'

Here was someone who didn't make a secret of things, and who'd had woman trouble, which chalked up two good points in this male gathering. Anglebert pointed to a chair.

‘You've got time to sit down, pal, haven't you?'

The familiar tone meant he had been provisionally accepted in this assembly of Normans from the flatlands. A glass of white wine was pushed towards him. This evening the assembly had a new member, and there would be plentiful comment on him next day.

‘Who's been killed, then? In Brétilly?' Adamsberg asked, after drinking the requisite number of mouthfuls.

‘Killed? Massacred more like! Shot down like, well, like vermin.'

Oswald brought another paper out of his pocket and handed it to Adamsberg, pointing to a photograph.

‘What it is,' said Robert, who had not lost the thread of the previous conversation, ‘you'd do better to be not so considerate first, and more considerate after. With women. Less trouble that way.'

‘Never know where you are with ‘em,' agreed the old man.

‘Never do,' said the punctuator.

Adamsberg was looking at the newspaper article with a frown. A russet-coloured beast was lying in a pool of blood under the headline ‘Odious massacre at Brétilly'. He turned the paper over to see that it was a monthly magazine, the
Western France Hunting Gazette
.

‘You a hunter?' asked Oswald.

‘No.'

‘Well, you won't understand, then. Stag like that, eight points, you just don't shoot ‘im like that. Diabolical.'

‘Seven points,' corrected Hilaire.

‘'Scuse me,' said Oswald, an edge to his voice, ‘but that one there, he's got eight points.'

‘Seven.'

Quarrel imminent. Anglebert took control. ‘You can't tell from the picture,' he said. ‘Seven or eight.'

Everyone took a drink, feeling relieved. Not that a little discord was unwelcome and indeed necessary in the evening concert. But tonight, with an intruder present, there were other priorities.

‘See that?' said Robert, pointing with his large finger at the photo. ‘That's no hunter's doing. That fellow, he hasn't touched the carcass, he hasn't taken the pieces, or the honours or anything.'

‘The honours?'

‘The antlers and the hoof, front right. What he's done, he's slit it open, just out of cussedness. A maniac. And what have the Evreux cops done about it? Nothing, that's what. They couldn't give a toss.'

‘'Cos it's not a murder for them,' a voice said.

‘Want me to tell you what I think? When someone kills an animal like that, he's wrong in the head. Who's to say after that he won't go off and kill a woman? Murderers, they practise on animals, then go on …'

‘True enough,' said Adamsberg, thinking of the twelve rats in Le Havre.