Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘Robert’s a new friend I’ve made in Haroncourt.’

There was no need to tell Danglard where the little village of Haroncourt was. With his compendious and encyclopedically organised memory, the commandant knew all the districts and municipalities in France, and could tell you at once who was the local police chief.

‘Had a good evening, then?’

‘Very.’

‘Is she still just good friends?’ Danglard hazarded.

‘Alas, yes. The opus spicatum , Danglard, that’s where we were.’

‘Piscatum . If you’re educating him, at least try to do it correctly.’

‘That’s why I’m calling you. Robert thinks it was just some young nutter who did the deed. But Angelbert, who’s the elder statesman round here, isn’t so sure – he thinks a young nutter can turn into an old one.’

‘And this high-level conference took place where?

‘In the café, at aperitif time.’

‘How many glasses of wine?’

‘Three. What about you?’

Danglard stiffened. The commissaire was keeping an eye on his drinking problem, and that rankled.

‘I’m not asking you about your way of life, commissaire.’

‘Yes, you are, you asked if Camille was still just a good friend.’

‘OK,’ said Danglard, giving in. ‘The opus piscatum is a way of mounting flat stones – or tiles or pebbles – obliquely so that it looks like a herringbone, hence its name, which comes from the Latin for fish. It goes back to the Romans.’

‘Ah. And then what?’

‘Then nothing. You asked me a question, I gave you the answer.’

‘But what’s it for , Danglard?’

‘Well, commissaire , what are we for? Why are we on this earth?’

When Danglard was in a bad way, the Unsolved Question of the infinite cosmos returned to plague him, as well as the fact that the sun would explode in four billion years, and that humanity was but a miserable and desperate chance occurrence on a piece of matter whirling through space.

‘Is there anything precise that’s depressing you?’ asked Adamberg, anxiously.

‘I’m just depressed, that’s all.’

‘The kids are asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go out, then, Danglard, go and find an Oswald or an Anglebert. There are plenty of them in Paris as well as here.’

‘Not with names like that, there aren’t. And anyway, what could they tell me?’

‘That cast-off antlers aren’t as highly prized as antlers from a hunted stag.’

‘I know that already.’

‘That it’s only members of the deer family that have a bone growing out of their forehead.’

‘Know that, too.’

‘That Lieutenant Retancourt is sure not to be asleep, and that it would be beneficial to go chat with her for an hour.’

‘Yes, that’s probably correct,’ said Danglard after a silence.

Adamsberg heard a little more optimism in his deputy’s voice, and hung up.

‘See, Tom,’ he said, cradling the baby’s head in his hand, ‘they put a herringbone in a wall, and don’t ask me why. We don’t need to know that, because Danglard knows all about it. Let’s give up on this book – it’s boring.’

As soon as Adamsberg put his hand round the child’s head the baby went off to sleep, as indeed did any other child. Or adult. Thomas’s eyes were closed within a few moments, and Adamsberg gently removed his hand, looking in mild puzzlement at his palm. Perhaps one day he would understand through which pores of his skin drowsiness seeped out. Not that it interested him overmuch.

His mobile rang. It was the pathologist, very wide awake, calling from the morgue.

‘Wait a minute, Ariane, I just have to put the baby down.’

Whatever the purpose of her call, and it certainly would not be a social one, the fact that Ariane was thinking about him was a distraction in his present state of having no woman on the horizon.

‘The gash on the throat – we’re talking about Diala now – is horizontal. The hand holding the blade was therefore neither high above the point of impact nor well below, or the wound would have been slanting. Like in Le Havre. You follow me?’

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg, playing with the baby’s toes, which were like little round peas in a pod. He lay down on the bed to listen to Ariane’s voice. To tell the truth, he didn’t much care about the techniques she must have used, he simply wanted to know why she was so sure it was a woman.

‘Diala stood one metre eighty-six. The base of his carotid artery would be one metre fifty-four from the ground.’

‘Well, what does that tell us?’

‘The cut would be horizontal if the aggressor’s clenched fist holding the knife was below his eyes. That would give us an aggressor of one metre sixty-six. If we do the same calculation for La Paille, where there’s a slight downward trajectory, we get a killer of between one metre sixty-four and one metre sixty-five. But perhaps one metre sixty-two, if we take high heels into account.’

‘A hundred and sixty-two centimetres,’ said Adamsberg pointlessly.

‘That’s well below the average height for a man. It’s got to be a woman, Jean-Baptiste. And as for the syringe marks on the arm, they both punctured the vein very precisely.’

‘You’re thinking it’s a professional?’

‘Yes, using a medical syringe. The very fine gauge and the angle of the insertion mean it wasn’t just any old needle.’

‘So someone injected them with something before they died?’

‘No, nothing. Nothing at all was injected.’

‘Nothing? Air do you mean?’

‘Air would definitely be something . No, this person didn’t inject them with anything, just made a jab.’

‘Without having time to finish?’

‘Or without needing to. She jabbed them after they were dead, Jean-Baptiste.’

Adamsberg hung up, thoughtfully. Thinking of old Lucio and wondering whether at this very moment Diala and La Paille were trying to scratch an unfinished injection in their dead arms.

ON THE MORNING OF 21 MARCH, THE COMMISSAIRE TOOK THE TIME TO greet every tree and little branch on his new route to work, from the house to the office. Even in the rain, which had not stopped since that hailstorm over Joan of Arc, the date deserved effort and respect. Even if, like this year, Spring was late, perhaps on account of some previous engagement. Or maybe she had slept in, as Danglard did one day in three. Spring is capricious, Adamsberg thought, you can’t expect her to arrive punctually on the morning of 21 March, when you think of the astronomical quantity of buds she has to deal with, not to mention all those larvae, roots and seeds, things you can’t see but that must certainly take up a huge amount of her energy. By comparison, the non-stop work of the Crime Squad was negligible, a joke really. A joke that gave Adamsberg a good conscience while he took his time walking through the streets.

As the commissaire strolled at a leisurely pace across the large shared hall known to the staff as the Council Chamber, to place a sprig of forsythia on the desks of the six female officers, Danglard came rushing to meet him. The commandant’s shambling body – which seemed to have melted like a candle, wiping out his shoulders, making his torso shapeless and his legs crooked – was not suited to rapid walking. Adamsberg always watched with interest when he tackled long distances, wondering whether one day he would lose one of his limbs in the process.

‘We’ve been looking for you,’ puffed Danglard.

‘I was paying homage, capitaine , and just now I’m paying my respects.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, it’s after eleven.’