Fred Vargas: This Night’s Foul Work

‘A lovers’ tiff? I’d be devastated if I’d forgotten something like that.’

‘No, it was professional.’

‘Gracious me,’ said the doctor again, frowning.

Adamsberg inclined his head, distracted by the memories that her high-pitched voice and cutting tone brought up for him. He recognised the ambiguity which had both attracted and disconcerted the young man he had been then: her severe way of dressing combined with a mane of tousled hair, her haughty manner but familiar way of speaking, her elaborate pose but spontaneous gestures. He had never been quite sure whether he was dealing with a superior but absent-minded specialist, or a workaholic who cared nothing for appearances. He even recalled the way she said ‘Gracious me!’ at the start of a sentence, without being able to work out whether this was an expression of scorn or simply a provincial mannerism. He was not the only policeman to be wary of her. Dr Ariane Lagarde was the most eminent pathologist in France, an unrivalled forensic expert.

‘So we were on first-name terms, were we?’ she went on, letting the ash from her cigarette fall to the floor. ‘Twenty-three years ago I would have been in mid-career, but you would have been just a junior policeman.’

‘As you say, a very junior policeman.’

‘Well, you surprise me. As a rule, I’m not on familiar terms with my junior colleagues.’

‘We got on pretty well. Until a big bust-up that caused a stir in a café in Le Havre. The door slammed and we never met again. I never got to finish my beer.’

Ariane stubbed out her cigarette underfoot, then sat back on the metal stool as a smile hesitantly returned to her face.

‘The beer,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t by any chance have thrown it on the floor, would I?’

‘You did indeed.’

‘Jean-Baptiste,’ she said, detaching each syllable. ‘That young idiot Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, who thought he knew better than everyone else.’

‘Yes. That’s what you said when you smashed my glass.’

‘Jean-Baptiste,’ Ariane repeated more slowly.

The doctor slipped off her stool and put her hand on Adamsberg’s shoulder. She seemed on the point of kissing him, then put her hand back in the pocket of her overall.

‘I did like you, Jean-Baptiste. You upset the apple-cart without even noticing. And according to what people say about Commissaire Adamsberg, you haven’t changed. Now I see: that was you, you’re him.’

‘Sort of.’

Ariane leaned her elbows on the dissecting table where the white corpse lay, pushing the body aside to make more room. Like most pathologists, Ariane showed little respect for the dead. On the other hand, she investigated the enigma of their bodies with unrivalled talent, thus paying homage in her own way to the immense and singular complexity of each one. Dr Lagarde’s analyses had made the corpses of some quite ordinary mortals famous. If you passed through her hands, you had a good chance of going down in history. After your death, unfortunately.

‘It was an exceptional corpse,’ she remembered. ‘We found him in his bedroom, with a sophisticated farewell letter. A local councillor, compromised and ruined, and he had killed himself with a sword, hara-kiri style.’

‘Having drunk a lot of gin first, to give himself courage.’

‘I remember it clearly,’ said Ariane, in the mild tone of someone recalling a pleasant story. ‘A straightforward case of suicide, on the part of a subject with a history of depression and compulsion. The local council was glad the matter went no further, do you remember, Jean-Baptiste? I had put in my report, which was impeccable. You were just the junior who used to make photocopies, run errands, sort out my paperwork, though you didn’t always stick to instructions. We used to go and have a drink sometimes by the harbour. I was about to be promoted, and you were daydreaming and going nowhere. In those days, I used to put pomegranate juice in beer to make it fizz.’

‘Do you still mix crazy drinks?’

‘Yes, lots,’ said Ariane, sounding disappointed, ‘but I haven’t found the perfect mixture yet. Remember the violine? An egg whipped up in crème de menthe and Malaga.’

‘Awful drink, I never went for that one.’

‘I stopped making the violine . OK for the nerves but a bit too strong. We experimented with a lot of things in Le Havre.’

‘Except one.’

‘Gracious me.’

‘A bedroom experiment. We never tried that.’

‘No, I was married in those days, and a very devoted wife. On the other hand, we worked well together on the police reports.’

‘Until the day.’

‘Until the day a little idiot of a Jean-Baptiste got it into his head that the local councillor in Le Havre had been murdered. Why? Because you found ten dead rats in a warehouse in the port.’

‘Twelve, Ariane. Twelve rats, all slashed across the belly with a blade.’

‘All right, twelve, if you say so. And you concluded that a murderer had been testing his courage before the attack. And there was something else. You thought the wound was too horizontal. You said the councillor would have had to hold the sword at more of an angle. While he was blind drunk.’

‘And you threw my glass of beer on the floor.’

‘I had a name for that beer-grenadine mixture, for heaven’s sake.’

‘La grenaille . You had me transferred away from Le Havre, and put in your report without me: suicide.’

‘What did you know about forensics? Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all,’ Adamsberg admitted.

‘Come and have a coffee. And tell me what’s bothering you about these two corpses.’

LIEUTENANT VEYRENC HAD BEEN ASSIGNED THIS MISSION FOR THE PAST THREE weeks, stuck in a broom cupboard one metre square, providing protection for a young woman whom he saw go past on the landing a dozen times a day. 1He found the young woman rather touching, and this feeling disturbed him. He shifted on his chair, trying to find another position.

He shouldn’t have been troubled by this – it was just a little grain of sand in the machinery, a splinter in the foot, a bird in the engine. The myth according to which a small bird, however exotic, could make an aeroplane engine explode was complete nonsense, one of the many ways people find to scare each other. As if there weren’t enough problems in the world already. Veyrenc expelled the bird with a twitch of his brain, took the top off his fountain pen and set about cleaning the nib. Nothing else to bloody do anyway. The building was completely silent.

He screwed the top back on, replaced it in his inside pocket and closed his eyes. It was fifteen years to the day since he had defied the old wives’ tales and gone to sleep in the forbidden shade of the walnut tree. Fifteen years of determined effort that nobody could take away from him. When he had woken up, he had used the sap of the tree to cure his allergy, and over time, he had tamed his furies, worked his way backwards through the torments he had endured, and exorcised his demons. It had taken fifteen years of persistence to transform a skinny youth, who took care to keep his hair hidden, into a sturdy body attached to a solid psyche. Fifteen years of applied energy to learn not to be tossed like a cork on the seas of love, something that had left him disillusioned with sensations and sickened with complications. When Veyrenc had straightened up under the walnut tree, he had taken the decision to go on strike, like an exhausted worker taking early retirement. From now on, he would keep away from dangerous ridges, taking care to temper his feelings with prudence and to control the intensity of his desires. He had done well, he thought, at keeping his distance from trouble and chaos, and approaching the serenity he yearned for. His relationships with people ever since that day had been non-committal and temporary, as he swam calmly towards his goal, on a course of work, study and versification – a near-perfect state of affairs.