Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man

‘Drawing what?’

‘The leaves on the trees and more leaves on the trees.’

‘Is that interesting? Sounds pretty boring to me.’

‘You’re interested in fish, aren’t you?’

‘What do you all have against fish? And anyway, why don’t you draw people’s faces? Wouldn’t it be more fun?’

‘Later. Later or maybe never. You have to start with leaves. Any Chinese sage will tell you.’

‘Later? But you’re already forty-five, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but I can’t believe that.’

‘Ah, that’s like me.’

And since Mathilde had a hip flask of cognac in her pocket, and since it was getting seriously cold, and since she said, ‘We’re into a section two of the week now, we’re allowed to have a drink,’ they did.

When the metal gates of the metro station closed, the chalk circle man had still not appeared. But Adamsberg had had time to tell Mathilde about the petite chérie and how she must have died somewhere out in the world, and how he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Mathilde appeared to find this story fascinating. She said that it was a shame to let the petite chérie die like that, and that she knew the world like the back of her hand, so she’d be able to find out whether the petite chérie had been buried, with her monkey, or not. Adamsberg felt completely drunk because he didn’t usually touch spirits. He couldn’t even pronounce ‘Wahiguya’ properly.

At about the same time, Danglard was in an almost identical condition. The four twins had wanted him to drink a large glass of water – ‘to dilute the alcohol,’ the children said. As well as the four twins, he had a little boy of five, just now fast asleep in his lap, a child whom he had never dared mention to Adamsberg. This last one was the unmistakable offspring of his wife and her blue-eyed lover. She had left this child with Danglard one fine day, saying that all in all it was better that the kids should stay together. Two sets of twins, plus a singleton who was always curled up in his lap, made five, and Danglard was afraid that confessing to all this would make him look a fool.

‘Oh, stop going on about diluting the alcohol,’ said Danglard. ‘And as for you,’ he said, addressing the first-born of the older set of twins, ‘I don’t like this way you’ve got of pouring white wine into plastic cups, and then pretending that you’re being sympathetic, or that it looks nice, or that you don’t object to white wine so long as it’s in a plastic cup. What’s the house going to look like with plastic cups everywhere? Did you think of that, Édouard?’

‘That’s not the reason,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s because of the taste. And then, you know, the flakiness afterwards.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Danglard. ‘And if we’re talking about flakiness, you can take a view on that when the vicomte de Chateaubriand, the greatest writer in French literature, and about ninety-nine beautiful girls, have all rejected you , and when you’ve turned into a Paris cop who may be a sharp dresser but is all mixed up inside. I don’t think you’ll ever manage that. What about a case conference tonight?’

When Danglard and his kids had a case conference, it meant they got to talk about his police work. It could last hours, and the kids adored it.

‘Well, for a start,’ said Danglard, ‘and can you beat this? St John the Baptist walked out and left us to deal with this shambles for the rest of the day. That got me so worked up that by three o’clock I was well away. And yes, it’s clear that the man who wrote that stuff on the other circles is the same one who wrote the stuff round the circle with the murdered woman in it.’

‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?’ chanted Édouard. ‘Or you might as well say “Marcel, go to hell, on your bike and ring the bell” or “Maurice, call the police, give us all a bit of peace” or-’

‘OK, OK, said Danglard, ‘but yes, “Victor, woe’s in store” does suggest something vicious: death, bad luck, a threat of some kind. Needless to say, Adamsberg was the first to get a sniff of that. But is that enough for us to charge this man? The handwriting expert’s quite positive about it: the man’s not mad, he’s not even disturbed, this is an educated person, careful about his appearance and his career, but discontented and aggressive as well as deceptive – those were his words. He also said, “This man’s getting on in years, he’s going through some crisis, but he’s in control; he’s a pessimist, obsessed about the end of his life, therefore about his afterlife. Either he’s a failure on the brink of success, or a successful man on the brink of failure.” That’s the way he is, kids, our graphologist. He turns words inside out like the fingers of a glove, he sends them one way, then the other. For instance, he can’t talk about the desire for hope without mentioning the hope for desire, and so on. It sounds intelligent the first time you hear it, but after that you realise there’s nothing there really. Except that it is the same man who’s been doing all the circles so far, a man who’s clever and perfectly lucid, and that he’s either about to succeed in life or to fail. But as for whether the dead woman was put into a circle that had already been drawn or not, the lab people say it’s impossible to tell. Maybe yes, maybe no. Does that sound like forensic science to you? And the corpse hasn’t been much help, either: this is the corpse of a woman who led a totally uneventful existence, nothing odd at all, no complicated love life, no skeletons in the family cupboard, no problems with money, no secret vices. Nothing. Just balls of wool and more balls of wool, holidays in the Loire Valley, calf-length skirts, sensible shoes, a little diary that she wrote notes in, half a dozen packets of currant biscuits in her kitchen cupboard. In fact she wrote about that in her diary: “Can’t eat biscuits in the shop, if you drop crumbs the boss notices.” And so on and so forth. So you might say, well, what on earth was she doing out late at night? And the answer is she was coming back home after seeing her cousin, who works in the ticket office at the Luxembourg metro station. The victim often used to go over there and sit alongside her in the booth, eating crisps, and knitting Inca-style gloves to sell in the wool shop. And then she would go back home, on foot, probably along the rue Pierre-et-Marie Curie.’

‘Is the cousin her only family?’

‘Yes, and she’ll inherit the estate. But since it consists of the currant biscuits plus a tea caddy with a few banknotes in, I can’t see the cousin or her husband cutting Madeleine Châtelain’s throat for that.’

‘But if someone wanted to use a chalk circle, how would they have known where there was going to be one that night?’

‘That is indeed the question, my little ones. But we ought to be able to work it out.’

Danglard got up carefully, to put Number Five, René, to bed.

‘For instance,’ he resumed, ‘take the commissaire ‘s new friend, Mathilde Forestier: it seems that she’s actually seen the chalk circle man. Adamsberg told me. Look, I’m managing to say his name again. Obviously the conference is doing me good.’

‘At the moment, I’d say it was a one-man conference,’ Édouard observed.

‘And this woman, who knows the chalk circle man, she worries me,’ Danglard added.

‘You said the other day,’ said the first-born girl of the second set of twins, ‘that she was beautiful and tragic and spoilt and hoarse-voiced, like some exotic Egyptian queen, but she didn’t worry you then.’

‘You didn’t think before you spoke, little girl. The other day, nobody had been killed. But now, I can just see her coming into the police station, on some damfool pretext, making a big fuss, getting to see Adamsberg. And then talking to him about this, that and the other, before getting round to telling him she knows this chalk circle man pretty well. Ten days before the murder – bit of a coincidence isn’t it?’