Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man

Adamsberg got out of bed, cursing.

He paced up and down in his flat. Yes, he was on a slippery slope. If only Mathilde had not told him that Camille was her daughter, she would not have come back into his life with a reality that he had kept at bay for years.

No. That wasn’t right. It had started with that sudden feeling she was dead. That was when Camille had re-emerged from the far-off horizons where he had imagined her, fondly but distantly. But he had already made the acquaintance of Mathilde by then, and her Egyptian profile must have suggested Camille to him more strongly than before. That was how it had begun. Yes, that had been the start of the dangerous series of sensations resounding inside his head, as his memories were being prised up like slates in a high wind, opening gaps in a roof which had previously been carefully maintained. The slippery slope, dammit. Adamsberg had always placed little hope or expectation in love, not that he was opposed to feelings, which would have been pointless, but they weren’t the central thing in his life. That was just how it was, a deficiency on his part, he sometimes thought, or an advantage, as he thought at other times. And he never questioned this absence of belief in them. Nor was he about to do so tonight, more than any other night. But as he paced round the flat, he realised that he would have liked to hold Camille in his arms, if only for an hour. Being unable to do so frustrated him; he closed his eyes to imagine it, which didn’t help. Where was Camille? Why wasn’t she here, to lie in his arms until morning? Realising that he was a prisoner of a desire that could never be fulfilled, not now, not ever, exasperated him. It wasn’t so much the desire itself, since Adamsberg never allowed himself to be the prisoner of pride. It was the impression he had of wasting his time and his dreams in a futile and recurrent fantasy, knowing that life would have become much easier long ago if he had been able to forget it. And that was exactly what he had been unable to do. What wretched bad luck it had been to run into Mathilde.

Unable to get back to sleep, he walked through the office door at five past six in the morning. So he was there to take the call ten minutes later from the police station in the 6th arrondissement . A circle had been spotted on the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the long and deserted rue du Val-de-Grace. In its centre lay a pocket English-Spanish dictionary. Feeling out of sorts after his bad night, Adamsberg seized the opportunity to go back into the fresh air. A uniformed policeman was already there, guarding the blue chalk circle as if it were the holy shroud. The man was standing stiffly to attention beside the small dictionary. A ridiculous sight.

‘Am I going down some blind alley?’ Adamsberg wondered.

Twenty metres further down the boulevard, a café was already open. It was seven o’clock. He sat at an outside table and asked the waiter if the establishment stayed open late, and if so who was on duty between eleven-thirty and half past midnight. He thought that in order to get to the Luxembourg station the chalk circle man would have had to go past this café, that is if he was still using the metro. The proprietor came out to speak to him in person. His attitude was rather aggressive until Adamsberg showed him his card.

‘I recognise that name,’ the café owner said. ‘You’re a famous detective.’

Adamsberg let this pass without comment. It made it easier to talk informally.

‘Yes,’ the café owner said after hearing him out. ‘Yes, I did see someone a bit suspicious who could be the one you’re after. It would have been just after midnight, he went past here, trotting along rather fast, when I was moving the tables on the terrace and shutting up shop. See these plastic chairs? They’re awkward, they fall over, they catch on things. One of them fell on its side, and he tripped up on it. I went over to help him up, but he pushed me away without a word, and off he went fast as he came, with a sort of satchel under his arm, that he kept tight hold of.’

‘Sounds like him,’ said Adamsberg.

The sun was just reaching the terrace. He stirred his coffee. Things were looking up. Camille was returning to her place in the far distance.

‘Did he remind you of anything?’ he asked.

‘No. Yes… I did think, poor old sod, I say that because he was a skimpy little chap. I thought there goes some poor bloke who’s been out for a drink, and he’s scurrying home, because his wife’s going to tear him off a strip.’

‘Male solidarity,’ Adamsberg muttered to himself, with a sudden feeling of distaste for the man. ‘Why did you think he’d been drinking? Because he wasn’t too steady on his legs?’

‘No, that’s not it, because now I think about it he was quite nimble, not clumsy. Perhaps he smelled of drink, though again, I can’t say I noticed that at the time. It’s just coming back to me, now you mention it. Second nature to me, of course, the smell of drink, my work. You can show me anyone and I can tell you how many he’s had. But this little chap the other night, I’d say he’d had a few shorts. Yes, you could smell it all right.’

‘What? Whisky? Wine?’

‘N-no.’ The man hesitated. ‘Neither of those. Sweeter than that. Something like those little glasses of liqueur that you see old codgers knocking back over a game of cards. Just a nip at a time, doesn’t look much, but it hits the spot in the end.’

‘Calvados? Poire?’

‘Oh, now you’re asking, I’ll start making things up if you carry on like that. I didn’t have any reason to smell his breath, after all.’

‘So maybe it was some fruit liqueur…?’

‘Does that tell you anything?’

‘Yes, it does, a lot,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Would you be good enough to go round to the station sometime today, and get someone to take a statement from you? Here’s the address. And above all, don’t forget to tell my colleague about the fruity smell.’

‘I said drink, not fruit.’

‘As you like. Doesn’t matter.’

Adamsberg smiled, feeling satisfied. He thought once more of his petite chérie but now it was as if she were a bird flying past in the distance, nothing more. Relieved, he left the café. Today he would send Danglard round to Mathilde’s to try to winkle out of her the address of the restaurant where she had seen the sad man in the raincoat and with papers strewn on the table. You never know.

But he would prefer not to meet Mathilde himself today.

As for the blue circle man, he was still chalking away, not far from the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. Still at it, still holding this one-sided conversation.

And he, Adamsberg, was waiting for him.

DANGLARD HAD MANAGED TO EXTRACT THE ADDRESS OF THE restaurant in Pigalle from Mathilde, but it had closed down two years earlier.

Throughout the day, Danglard kept a watchful eye on Adamsberg’s changing moods. Danglard felt that the investigation was dragging. But he recognised that there was not much to be done about it. He had devoted himself to going through Madeleine Châtelain’s life with a toothcomb, without finding the least irregularity anywhere. He had also been to see Charles Reyer, to ask him to explain why he had been so curious about the article in the newsletter. Reyer was both taken aback and put out, and above all vexed that his attempt to conceal anything from Adamsberg had been so ineffective. But Reyer was rather taken with Danglard, and the deep and languid tones of this weary man, whom he imagined to be tall, disturbed him less than the too-gentle voice of Adamsberg. His answer to Danglard was simple. As a student of animal anatomy, he had had occasion to attend some of Madame Forestier’s seminars in the past. That could be checked out. At the time, he had not had any grudge against anyone, and he had appreciated Madame Forestier for what she was: intelligent and attractive, and he had never forgotten a word of the lectures she had given. Afterwards, he had wanted to wipe this whole period out of his life. But when the client in the hotel foyer had mentioned ‘the lady who goes deep-sea diving’ the memory of those days had been pleasant rather than otherwise, so he had wondered if the article was about her, and if so what she was being accused of. Reyer gathered that Danglard was prepared to accept this version of events. Danglard nevertheless asked him why he hadn’t said all that to Adamsberg the day before, and why he hadn’t told Mathilde that he had already realised who she was, on the occasion of their ‘chance’ meeting in the rue Saint-Jacques. Reyer had replied to the first question that he didn’t want Adamsberg to complicate life for him, and to the second that he didn’t want Mathilde to think of him as one of those eternal students who as they get older are still acolytes of their professor. Which he had no desire to be.