Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘Back to base,’ said Retancourt, putting her jacket back on. ‘Only another day and a half before the drugs people grab the case from us.’

IN THE LITTLE ROOM WITH THE DRINKS MACHINE, ADAMSBERG HAD FOUND on the floor two big foam cushions covered with an old blanket, creating a makeshift bed and transforming the area into a refuge for the homeless. It was no doubt the work of Mercadet, who was bordering on the narcoleptic, and whose need for sleep was agonising to his professional conscience.

Adamsberg served himself a coffee from the kindly machine and decided to try out the bed. He sat down, pushed a cushion behind his back and stretched out his legs.

Yes, one could have a nap there, no doubt about it. The warm foam wrapped itself round one’s body insidiously, almost giving the feeling of having company in bed. Perhaps one could do some thinking there, but Adamsberg was only capable of thinking when he was out for a stroll. If you could call it thinking. He had long ago been forced to the conclusion that in his case it did not correspond to the normal definition of thought: to shape and combine ideas and judgements. It was not for want of trying: sitting on a proper chair, elbows leaning on a table, without distractions, pen and paper to hand, pressing his fingers to his forehead. An approach which merely succeeded in disconnecting his logical circuits. His unstructured mind was like an unreadable map, a magma in which nothing clear emerged to be identified as an Idea. Everything always seemed to be linked to everything else, in a network of little pathways where sounds, smells, flashes of light, memories, images, echoes and grains of dust mingled together. And that was all he had at his disposal to act as Commissaire Adamsberg, running the twenty-seven officers in his outfit and obtaining, as his divisionnaire was always reminding him, Results. He ought to have been anxious. But that day, other floating bodies were taking up all the space in his mind.

He stretched out his arms, then folded them behind his head, appreciating the initiative of his drowsy colleague. Outside, rain and shadows. Which had nothing to do with each other.

Danglard stopped short before operating the machine when he found the commissaire asleep, and tiptoed backwards out of the room.

‘I’m not asleep, Danglard,’ Adamsberg said, without opening his eyes. ‘Go ahead and get your coffee.’

‘This bedding’s Mercadet’s is it?’

‘I imagine so, capitaine . I’m trying it out.’

‘You may have some competition there.’

‘Or multiplication. Another six couches in the corners if we don’t watch out.’

‘There are only four corners,’ objected Danglard, hoisting himself on to one of the high bar stools and swinging his legs.

‘Well, it’s more comfortable than those damn bar stools. I don’t know who produces them but they’re too tall. I can’t even reach the foot rest. We look like a lot of storks on chimney pots.’

‘They’re Swedish.’

‘The Swedes must be taller than us. Do you think that makes a difference?’

‘What?’

‘Size. Do you think it makes a difference if your head is nearly two metres above your feet? If the blood has such a long way to go up and down all the time? Do you think it makes the thought process purer if the feet are too far away to matter? Or would a little man think better, because the circulation would be more rapid and concentrated?’

‘Immanuel Kant,’ said Danglard without enthusiasm, ‘was only one metre fifty tall. He was all thought, impeccably constructed.’

‘What about his body?’

‘He never bothered to use it.’

‘But that’s no good either,’ murmured Adamsberg, closing his eyes again.

Danglard considered it more prudent and useful to head back to his office.

‘Danglard. Can you see it?’ said Adamsberg in a level tone of voice. ‘The Shade?’

The commandant turned back, and looked towards the rain which darkened the window. But he was too much of a connoisseur of Adamsberg to think the commissaire was talking about the weather.

‘It’s there, Danglard. It’s hiding the light. Feel it? It’s surrounding us, looking at us.’

‘A dark presence?’ he suggested.

‘Something like that. All round us.’

Danglard took time to think, rubbing the back of his neck. What Shade could this be? When and how had ‘it’ appeared? Since the traumatic events which had befallen Adamsberg in Quebec and had forced him to take more than a month’s leave to recover, Danglard had been watching him closely. He had been following his quick return to form after the shocks which had almost stripped him of his reason. And it seemed to Danglard that everything had gone back to normal fairly quickly, or at any rate to what passed for normal in Adamsberg’s case. He felt his fears creeping up again. Perhaps Adamsberg wasn’t so far away from the abyss into which he had almost fallen.

‘Since when?’ he asked.

‘A few days after I got back,’ replied Adamsberg, suddenly opening his eyes and sitting up straight. ‘Perhaps it was waiting, prowling around us.’

‘Us?’

‘The Squad. Our base. That’s the Shade’s territory too. When I go away – when I went to Normandy, for instance – I don’t sense it any more. When I get back, there it is again, quiet and grey. Perhaps it’s the Silent Sister.’

‘And who might that be?’

‘Sister Clarisse, the nun who was killed by the tanner.’

‘You believe in her?’

Adamsberg smiled.

‘I heard her the other night,’ he said, quite cheerfully. ‘She was walking about in the attic, with a sound like a robe sweeping the ground. I got up and went to have a look.’

‘And there was nothing there?’

‘No, stands to reason,’ said Adamsberg, with a fleeting memory of the punctuator of Haroncourt.

The commissaire looked all round the little room.

‘And does she bother you?’ asked Danglard carefully, feeling he was stepping into a minefield.

‘No, but this isn’t a friendly ghost, Danglard, bear that in mind. Not there to help us.’

‘Since you got back, nothing special’s happened, except we’ve got this New Recruit.’

‘Veyrenc de Bilhc.’

‘Does he bother you? Did he bring the Shade with him?’

Adamsberg thought over Danglard’s suggestion.

‘Well, he does bother me a bit. He comes from the valley next to mine. Did he tell you about it? The Ossau valley? And about his hair?’

‘No. Why should he?’

‘When he was a little kid, five other boys attacked him. They slashed his stomach and cut up his scalp.’

‘And?’

‘And these boys came from my village, and he knows that. He pretended he was only just discovering it, but he was perfectly aware of it before he got here. And if you ask me, that’s why he’s here at all.’

‘But why?’

‘Chasing memories, Danglard.’

Adamsberg lay back again on the cushions.

‘Remember that woman we arrested a couple of years ago? The district nurse? I’d never had to arrest an old woman before. I hated that case.’

‘She was a monster,’ said Danglard in a shocked voice.

‘According to our pathologist, she was a dissociated killer. With her Alpha self, which went about its everyday business, and her Omega self, which was an angel of death. What are Alpha and Omega, anyway?’

‘Letters from the Greek alphabet.’

‘If you say so. She was seventy-three years old. Remember what she looked like when we arrested her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not a happy memory was it, capitaine? Do you think she’s still spying on us? Do you think she could be the Shade? Cast your mind back to the case.’