Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘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.

‘But the cops are so dumb they can’t see it when it’s staring them in the face. Stupid bastards.’

‘It’s only a stag, though,’ objected the objector.

‘You’re stupid too, Alphonse. If I was a cop, I’d get going after this so-and-so – and quickly, too.’