Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘If everyone who’s ever been murdered was still trailing around in the ether,’ Adamsberg said, ‘how many ghosts would I have on my hands in this building? Saint Clarisse, plus her seven victims. Plus the two your father knew, plus Madeleine. That makes eleven. Any more?’

‘No, no, it’s just Clarisse,’ Lucio pronounced. ‘Her victims were all too old, they didn’t come back. Unless they went to their own houses – that’s possible.’

‘OK.’

‘And the other three women, they’re different. They weren’t murdered, they were possessed. But Saint Clarisse hadn’t finished her life when the tanner beat her to death. Now do you see why the house was never demolished? Because if it had been, Clarisse would have moved somewhere else. To my house, for instance. And round here, we’d rather know exactly where she is.’

‘Right here.’

Lucio agreed with a wink. ‘And here, so long as nobody comes to disturb her, there’s no harm done.’

‘She likes the spot, you’re saying.’

‘She doesn’t even go into the garden. She just waits for her victims up there in your attic. But now she’s got company again.’

‘Me.’

‘You,’ Lucio agreed. ‘But you’re a man, so she won’t trouble you much. It’s the women she drives crazy. Don’t bring your wife here. Take my advice. Or else just sell up.’

‘No, Lucio, I like this house.’

‘Pig-headed, aren’t you. Where are you from?’

‘The Pyrenees.’

‘High mountains,’ said Lucio, with respect. ‘So it’s no good my trying to convince you.’

‘You know the Pyrenees?’

‘I was born the other side of them, hombre . In Jaca.’

‘And the bodies of the seven old women? Did they look for them when they held the trial?’

‘No, in the century before the one before, the police didn’t search the way they do now. I dare say the bodies are still under there,’ said Lucio, pointing to the garden with his stick. ‘That’s why people haven’t dug it too deeply. You wouldn’t want to disturb the devil.’

‘No, no point.’

‘You’re like Maria,’ said the old man, with a smile. ‘You think it’s funny. But I’ve seen her often, hombre . Mist, vapour, then her breath, cold as winter on the high peaks. And last week I was out taking a leak under the hazel tree in my garden one night, and I really saw her.’

Lucio drained his glass of Sauternes and scratched the spider’s bite.

‘She’s got a lot older,’ he said, almost with disgust.

‘It is a long time, after all,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Yes. Well, Sister Clarisse’s face is as wrinkled as a walnut.’

‘And where was she?’

‘On the first floor. She was walking up and down in the upstairs room.’

‘That’s going to be my study.’

‘And where will you sleep?’

‘The room next to it.’

‘You’re not easily scared, are you?’ said Lucio, getting to his feet. ‘I hope you don’t think I was too blunt? Maria thinks I’m wrong to come in and tell you all this straight off.’

‘No, not at all,’ said Adamsberg, who had unexpectedly acquired seven corpses in the garden and a ghost with a face like a walnut.

‘Good. Well, perhaps you’ll manage to calm her down. Though they say that only a very old man can get the better of her now. But that’s just fancy. You don’t want to believe everything you hear.’

Left to himself, Adamsberg drank the dregs of his lukewarm coffee. Then he looked up at the ceiling, and listened.

AFTER A PEACEFUL NIGHT SPENT IN THE SILENT COMPANY OF SAINT CLARISSE, Commissaire Adamsberg pushed open the door of the Medico-Legal Institute, which housed the pathology lab. Nine days earlier, at Porte de la Chapelle, in northern Paris, two men had been found a few hundred metres apart, each with his throat cut. According to the local police inspector, they were both small-time crooks, who’d been dealing drugs in the Flea Market. Adamsberg was keen to see them again, since Commissaire Mortier from the Drug Squad wanted to take over the investigation.

‘Two lowlifes who got their throats cut at La Chapelle? They’re on my patch, Adamsberg,’ Mortier had declared. ‘And one of them’s black, what’s more. Just hand them over. What the devil are you waiting for?’

‘I’m waiting to find out why they’ve got earth under their fingernails.’

‘Because they didn’t take a bath too often.’

‘Because they’d been digging somewhere. And if there’s digging going on, it’s a matter for the Crime Squad.’

‘Have you never seen these characters hide drugs in window boxes? You’re wasting your time, Adamsberg.’

‘That’s OK by me. I like wasting time.’

The two bodies were stretched out, unclothed, alongside each other: one very big white man, one very big black man, one with a hairy torso, the other smooth, both harshly illuminated by the strip lighting in the morgue. With their feet neatly together and their hands at their sides, they seemed in death to have turned abruptly into docile schoolboys. In fact, Adamsberg thought, as he considered their sober appearance, the two men had led lives of classic regularity, since there’s not a great deal of originality in human existence. Their days had followed an unchanging pattern: mornings asleep, then afternoons devoted to dealing, evenings to women, and Sundays to their mothers. On the margins of society, as elsewhere, routine imposes its rules. Their brutal murder had cut abnormally short the thread of their uneventful lives.

The pathologist was watching Adamsberg as he walked round the two bodies.

‘What do you want me to do with them?’ she asked, her hand resting negligently on the black corpse’s thigh, idly patting it as if in ultimate consolation. ‘Two dealers from the wrong side of town, slashed with a knife – looks like the Drug Squad had better take care of it.’

‘Yes, they’re shouting for them.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Me. I’ m the problem. I don’t want to hand them over. And I’m hoping you’ll help me hang on to them. Find some excuse.’

‘Why?’ asked the pathologist. Her hand was still resting on the black corpse’s thigh, signifying that for the moment the man was still under her jurisdiction, in a free zone, and she alone would make any decision about sending him either to the Drug Squad or the Crime Squad.

‘They had newly dug earth under their fingernails.’

‘I expect the drugs people have their reasons too. Do they have files on these two?’

‘No, not at all. So these two are mine, full stop.’

‘They told me about you,’ said the pathologist calmly.

‘What did they tell you?’

‘That you’re sometimes on a different wavelength from everyone else. It causes trouble.’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time, would it, Ariane?’

With her foot the doctor pulled over a stool. She sat down on it and crossed her legs. Twenty-three years earlier, Adamsberg had thought her a beautiful woman and, at sixty, she still was as she posed elegantly on her perch in the mortuary.

‘Gracious me!’ she said. ‘You know my name.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I don’t know you.’

The doctor lit a cigarette and thought for a few seconds.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t say I remember you. I’m sorry.’

‘It was twenty-three years ago, and we were only in contact for a few months. I remember your surname and your first name, and indeed that we were on first-name terms.’

‘Were we now?’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘And what were we doing to be on such familiar terms?’

‘We had an almighty quarrel.’