Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘But that wouldn’t make sense,’ said Noël, stopping short.

‘Why not? She meets the requirements of the recipe.’

Noël looked across at Adamsberg through the darkness.

‘Well, for a start, commissaire , Retancourt would have to be a virgin.’

‘Yes, well, I think she is.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You’d be the only one to think that, Noël.’

‘I don’t think. I know. She’s not a virgin. Not at all.’

Noël sat down on the bench, looking pleased with himself, while Adamsberg in turn started walking round the garden.

‘Surely you’re the last person Retancourt would take into her confidence.’

‘We yell at each other so much that we end up telling each other the story of our lives. She’s not a virgin, full stop.’

‘So that means that there is a third virgin. Somewhere else. And that Retancourt did understand something we didn’t.’

‘And before we find that out,’ said Noël, ‘a lot of water’s going to flow under the bridge.’

‘We’ll have to wait a month for her to recover properly, according to Lariboisier.’

‘Lavoisier,’ said Noël. ‘Maybe a month for someone normal, but probably a week for Retancourt. Funny to think of your blood and mine circulating through her veins.’

‘And the blood of the third donor.’

‘Who’s the third donor, anyway?’

‘He’s a cattle farmer, I believe.’

‘That’ll be a weird mixture,’ said Noël, with a pensive shake of his head.

In his chilly hotel bed, Adamsberg could not close his eyes without seeing himself once more lying wired up alongside Retancourt and going back over the vertiginous thoughts that had flashed through his head during the transfusion. Retancourt’s dyed hair, the quick of virgins, the horns of the ibex. There was a persistent alarm bell ringing through this combination of ideas, which would not be silenced. It must be something to do with the blood passing from him into her, recharging her heartbeats, rescuing her from the clutches of death. It must be something to do with the virgin’s hair, of course. But what was the ibex doing there? That reminded him that the horns of the ibex were simply the same thing as hair in a very compressed form, or, looking at it another way, that his own hair was simply a very dispersed kind of horn. They were all the same thing. But so what? He would have to try and remember tomorrow.

A PEAL OF CHURCH BELLS WOKE ADAMSBERG AT MIDDAY. N O PEACE FOR the wicked , his mother used to say. He called the hospital at once and listened as Lavoisier gave a positive report.

‘She’s talking?’ he asked

‘No, she’s sleeping soundly now,’ said the doctor, ‘and probably will for some time. Remember, she’s also got concussion.’

‘Is she saying anything in her sleep?’

‘Yes, she mutters stuff from time to time. But it’s not really conscious or even intelligible. Don’t get excited.’

‘I’m quite calm, doctor. But I just want to know what she says.’

‘She keeps saying the same thing over and over. A bit of poetry that everyone knows.’

Poetry? Was Retancourt dreaming about Veyrenc? Or had he somehow infected her? Seducing all the women into his entourage one after the other?

‘So what poetry would that be?’ asked Adamsberg, with some annoyance.

‘Lines by Corneille we all learned at school:

To see the last Roman, as he draws his last breath,

Myself to die happy, as the cause of this death.’

They were indeed two of the few lines of verse that even Adamsberg knew by heart.

‘That’s not her style,’ he muttered. ‘Is that really what she’s saying?’

‘Oh, if you heard what people sometimes say under sedatives or anaesthetic, you’d be astonished. I’ve heard blameless people come out with unbelievable obscenities.’

‘Is that what she’s doing?’

‘Like I said, she recites Corneille. Nothing surprising about that. Mostly people in her state say things they remember from their childhood, especially stuff they learned at school. She’s just going back to what she was made to learn for homework, that’s all. Once I had a government minister who was in a coma for three months, and he went through his primary education, multiplication tables and all. He could still remember it pretty well.’

As he listened to the doctor, Adamsberg was staring at a sentimental picture over his hotel bed, a forest glade in which a mother deer was being followed by a cute little fawn through the ferns. ‘An accompanied hind,’ Robert would call her.

‘I’ve got to go back to Paris today, to my own hospital team,’ the doctor was saying. ‘It won’t hurt to move her now, so I’m taking her in the ambulance. We’ll be at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Hospital by this evening.’

‘Why are you taking her with you?’

‘Because it’s such an extraordinary case, commissaire . I’m going to see this one through.’

Adamsberg hung up, still looking at the painting. The tangled skein was in there too, the quick of virgins and the ‘living cross from the heart of the eternal branches’. He looked for a long time at the hind as if hypnotised, trying to touch something just beyond his reach. An element he still had not grasped. There’s a bone in the snout of a pig, and a bone in the penis of a cat . And if he was not much mistaken, and unlikely though that seemed, maybe there was a bone in the heart of a stag . A bone in the form of a cross, which would take him straight to the third virgin.

THE TEAM HAD BEEN WORKING IN THE HANGAR SINCE TEN IN THE morning, with the help of two technicians and a photographer recruited from the local force at Dourdan. Lamarre and Voisenet had been in charge of searching the surrounding area, looking for tyre tracks in the field. Mordent and Danglard had each taken half the hangar. Justin was checking the tool cupboard where Retancourt had been found. Adamsberg joined them as they were starting a picnic lunch, sitting in the field under a pleasant April sun: sandwiches, fruit, beer, and hot drinks from a thermos, all impeccably organised by Froissy. There were no chairs in the hangar, so they sat on old car tyres, forming a curious circular convention in the field. The cat, which had not been allowed to travel in the ambulance, was curled up at Danglard’s feet.

‘The vehicle must have come in this way,’ explained Voisenet, his mouth full, pointing to a gap leading from the road. ‘It stopped by the side door at the end of the hangar, after reversing to have the boot facing the entry. There are plants everywhere, it’s impossible to find tracks. But judging by the way the grass is crushed down, it would be some kind of transit van, probably with a capacity of nine cubic metres. I don’t think the nurse has anything like that. She must have hired it. We might be able to trace it via agencies specialising in freight vehicles. An old woman renting a big van can’t be that common.’

Adamsberg had sat down cross-legged in the warm grass, and Froissy had laid out an ample supply of food beside him.

‘The transport of the body was carefully organised,’ said Mordent, taking over. Perched on a large tyre, he looked more than ever like a heron on its nest. ‘The nurse must have had a trolley, or hired it with the van. It looks as if there was a ramp you could let down. All she had to do was roll the body down the slope and put it on the trolley. Then she pushed the trolley through the hangar to the tool cupboard.’

‘Can you see tracks from its wheels?’

‘Yes, they go through the hall. She must have neutralised the dogs with meat laced with Novaxon. Then the tracks turn, and we can see them going along the corridor. Partly covered by the return trip.’