Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man

He told Christiane, who had quickly been disillusioned, to have an early night, since he would be late back; half an hour later, he was talking to Mathilde Forestier.

She welcomed him with a friendliness that loosened the stranglehold the world had exerted on him for the past few hours. She even gave him a kiss, not quite on the cheek and not quite on the lips. She laughed, and said yes she liked doing that, she knew exactly where to plant a kiss, she had an excellent eye for that kind of thing, but he was not to be alarmed, since she never took men her own age as lovers, it was an absolute principle, avoiding comparisons and complications. Then she took his shoulder and led him over to a table, where an old lady was playing patience and sorting the mail at the same time, and where a very tall blind man seemed to be advising her on both counts. The table was oval, and transparent, and had water and fish inside it.

‘It’s an aquarium-table,’ Matilde explained. ‘I designed it myself one evening. It’s a bit showy, a bit obvious, like me. The fish don’t like Clémence playing patience. Every time she slaps a card down on the glass, they shoot off in all directions – look.’

‘No good!’ sighed Clémence, gathering up the cards. ‘It’s a sign. I shouldn’t send a reply to the well-preserved M., 66. But he was so tempting. His ad in the paper was so good.’

‘Have you replied to many?’ asked Charles.

‘Two thousand, three hundred and fifty-four. But it’s never any good. It’s fate. I end up telling myself, Clémence, it’s just not going to work out.’

‘Yes, it will,’ said Mathilde, to encourage her, ‘especially if Charles helps you write the replies. He’s a man, he’ll know what appeals to them.’

‘The product doesn’t seem all that easy to market, though,’ observed Charles.

‘But I’m counting on you to help me find a way,’ said Clémence, who didn’t seem to take offence whatever anyone said to her.

Mathilde took Adamsberg into her study. ‘We’ll sit at my cosmic table, if you don’t mind. I find it relaxing.’

Adamsberg examined the large table made of black glass and pierced with hundreds of luminous dots lit from below, representing all the constellations in the night sky. It was beautiful, excessively so.

‘My tables don’t seem to tempt anyone to market them,’ Mathilde commented. ‘Facing you,’ she went on, pointing with her finger at the surface, ‘you have Scorpio, the Serpent Holder, the Lyre, Hercules and the Corona Borealis. Do you like it? I like to sit here with my elbows on the south end of Pisces. And the thing is, the whole picture’s false. Because the thousands of stars we see shining have already burnt themselves out, so the sky’s out of date. You realise what that means, Adamsberg? The sky’s out of date. But does that matter, if we can still see it?’

‘Madame Forestier,’ said Adamsberg, ‘I’d like you to take me to see the chalk circle man tonight. Have you listened to the radio today?’

‘No,’ said Mathilde.

‘This morning we found a woman with her throat cut, inside one of his circles, just a couple of streets away from here, in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. A nice, ordinary, middle-aged lady, with no secret vices to explain why someone would want to kill her. The chalk circle man has moved up a gear.’

Mathilde lowered her darkened face onto her clenched fists, then stood up abruptly and fetched a bottle of Scotch and two glasses, putting them between the two of them, over Aquila, the Eagle.

‘I’m not feeling too good this evening,’ Adamsberg said. ‘Death is stalking around in my head.’

‘I can see that. Have a drink,’ said Mathilde. ‘Tell me about the woman who had her throat cut. We can talk about the other death afterwards.’

‘What other death?’

‘There must be another one,’ Mathilde said. ‘If you get this upset every time you come across a murder, you’d have left the police long ago. So there must be some other death that’s tormenting you. Do you want me to take you to the chalk circle man, so you can arrest him?’

‘It’s too soon. I just want to locate him, see him, find out about him.’

‘I feel awkward, Adamsberg. Because this man and I, we’ve sort of become accomplices. There’s a bit more between us than I told you the other day. In fact I’ve seen him about a dozen times, and from the third time on he realised that I’d spotted him. He keeps his distance, but he still lets me trail him, he glances at me, maybe even smiles, I’m not sure, he’s always been too far away to see, and he keeps his head down. But the last time, he even gave a little wave of his hand before he left, I’m convinced. I didn’t want to tell you all this the other day, because I didn’t want you to put me down as crazy. After all, the police pigeonhole us all, don’t they? But now it’s different, if the police want him for murder. Adamsberg, this man looks totally inoffensive to me. I’ve walked along streets at night enough times to be able to scent danger. But with him, no, nothing. He’s quite small, very short for a man, slight, neatly dressed, his features are vague, they change, they’re hard to remember, but he’s not good-looking. I’d put him at about sixty-five. Before he crouches down to write on the pavement he flicks up the tails of his raincoat, so as not to get them dirty.’

‘How does he draw the circles – from the inside or the outside?’

‘From the outside. He’ll stop suddenly, in front of something on the ground, get out his chalk as if he knew right away that this was tonight’s object. He looks round, waits till the coast is clear, he certainly doesn’t want to be seen, except by me, and he seems to allow that, I don’t know why. Perhaps he thinks I understand him. His whole operation takes about half a minute. He draws a big circle round the object, then he crouches down to write his words, still looking round. Then he disappears at the speed of light. He’s as quick as a fox and he seems to know his way around. He always manages to lose me once he’s drawn the circle, and I’ve never managed to track him to his home. But anyway, if you arrest this guy, I think you’d be making a big mistake.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I need to see him first. How did you find him in the first place?’

‘It wasn’t rocket science. I phoned a few journalists I know who’d taken an interest in the case from the start. They gave me the names of the people who’d first reported the circles. I telephoned the witnesses. It may seem odd to you that I got involved in something that’s none of my business, but that’s because you don’t work with fish. When you spend hours of your life studying fish, you start thinking there’s something wrong with you, and perhaps it’s that you ought to spend less time on fish and more on your fellow human beings, and watch their habits as well. I’ll explain that another time. Anyway, practically all these witnesses had discovered the circles before about half past midnight, never any later. And since the chalk circle man seemed to roam all over Paris, I thought, well, he must be taking the metro, and he doesn’t want to miss the last connection, so that’s a hypothesis to test. Stupid really, isn’t it? But two circles had been found only at two in the morning, in the same area, in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and the rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne. Since they’re fairly busy streets, I thought these circles must have been drawn late at night, after the last metro. Perhaps because by then he was going home on foot, because he lived nearby. Is this getting too involved?’

Adamsberg shook his head slowly. He was full of admiration.

‘So then I thought, with a bit of luck his nearest metro station must be either Pigalle or Saint-Georges. I lay in wait four nights running at Pigalle: nothing. And yet there were two more circles on those nights in the 17th and 2nd arrondissements , but I saw nobody who fitted the bill coming in or out of the metro station between ten and when it closed. So I tried Saint-Georges. And there I noticed a small man on his own, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking at the ground, who took a train at quarter to eleven. I saw a few other people too, who might have been likely suspects. But just this one little man came back out of the metro at quarter past midnight. And four days later he did the same thing. The next Monday, the beginning of a section number one, you’ll remember, so a new age, I went back to Saint-Georges. He turned up and I followed him. That was the time with the biro. Because it was him all right, Adamsberg. Other times I would wait at the metro to try and follow him home. But at that point he always manages to give me the slip. I wasn’t going to run after him – I’m not the police.’