Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

Nobody expained why it was no longer possible to stay with Oswald’s sister.

WHILE HIS COLLEAGUES WERE CHECKING THE AREA SURROUNDING LE BOSC des Tourelles, Adamsberg had been hospital visiting. He had seen both Veyrenc, who was now hobbling around at Bichat, and Retancourt, who was still asleep at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. Veyrenc was due to be discharged the next day, and Retancourt’s sleep appeared to be more like a natural state. She’s returning to the surface quite fast, Lavoisier had said. He was taking quantities of notes on the polyvalent goddess. Veyrenc, once he had been brought up to date on the rescue of the lieutenant and the cross inside the stag, had formulated some advice which Adamsberg was chewing over as he walked back to the headquarters.

Her strength brought from the brink one who was close to death .

But another’s weakness threatens her every breath .

Make haste, the time draws near. The great stag died at last ,

The virgin is at risk, her hour is almost past .

‘We’ve got a Francine Bidault here,’ said Mordent, passing over an index card to Adamsberg. ‘Aged thirty-five. Lives outside Clancy, a hamlet, population two hundred, seven kilometres from the edge of the Bosc des Tourelles. The other two nearest women live fourteen or nineteen kilometres away, and they’re both closer to another forest, La Chataigneraie, which is big enough to have deer in it. Francine lives alone, in an isolated farmhouse, almost a kilometre away from the nearest neighbours. Her garden wall is easy to climb, and the house is very old. Rickety wooden doors, simple locks, easy to force.’

‘Right,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Does she go out to work? Does she have a car?’

‘She’s got a part-time job, cleaning in a pharmacy in Evreux. She goes there by bus every day except Sunday. Any attack would most likely come between seven at night and one the next afternoon, which is when she leaves home.’

‘And she’s a virgin? They’re sure about that?’

‘Well, according to the priest at Otton, yes. “A little cherub,” he calls her. Pretty, childlike, not quite all there, according to some other reports. Mind you, the priest says there’s nothing really wrong with her head, but she’s afraid of almost everything, specially creepy-crawlies. She was brought up by her father after her mother died, and he was a brute. He died a couple of years back.’

‘There’s a problem,’ said Voisenet, whose positivist credentials had been been severely dented when Adamsberg had guessed at the existence of a bone in the heart of a deer, simply by shovelling clouds. ‘Devalon’s found out we’re operating in Clancy, and why. He’s looking bad, because he failed to spot that Elisabeth and Pascaline had been murdered. He’s insisting that his outfit take charge of protecting Francine Bidault.’

‘All the better,’ said Adamsberg. ‘As long as Francine’s under police guard, that’s all we’re asking. Call him, Danglard. Tell Devalon he’s got to have three men in shifts, armed, between seven at night and one p.m. next day, without leaving her unprotected for a moment. They should begin tonight. The guard should be inside the house and, if she doesn’t object, in the bedroom. We’ll send Evreux a photograph of the nurse. Who’s been checking the van-hire firms?’

‘I did,’ said Justin, ‘with Lamarre and Froissy. Nothing so far in the whole Ile-de-France region. Nobody remembers a woman of seventy-five hiring a van that big. They’re quite positive.’

‘And the blue stains?’

‘Yes, they’re definitely shoe polish.’

‘Retancourt came out with something else this afternoon,’ said Estalère, ‘but it didn’t amount to much.’

Intrigued faces turned towards him.

‘Did she quote Corneille again?’ Adamsberg asked.

‘No, she talked about shoes. She said, “Send some shoes to the caravan.” ’

The men looked at each other in puzzlement.

‘The big girl’s losing it again,’ said Noël.

‘No, Noël. She promised this lady, who lives in a caravan, that she’d give her another pair of shoes to replace the blue ones she took away, the nurse’s. Lamarre, can you take care of that? You’ll find the address in Retancourt’s files.’

‘After all she’s been through, that’s the first thing she thinks about telling us?’ said Kernorkian.

‘That’s the way she is,’ said Justin with a shrug. ‘Nothing else?’

‘Yes, she said: “But he needn’t give a damn. Tell him that. He needn’t give a damn.” ’

‘Does she mean about this lady? And her shoes?’

‘No, no,’ said Adamsberg. ‘She wouldn’t say that about the lady.’

‘Who’s “him”?’

Estalère jerked his chin towards Adamsberg.

‘Yeah, probably,’ said Voisenet.

‘But what?’ murmured Adamsberg. ‘What is it that I needn’t give a damn about?’

‘Well, I reckon she’s losing it,’ said Noël, anxiety in his voice.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE, AND FOR TWENTY-TWO DAYS NOW, Francine had not been pulling the blankets over her face at night. She went to sleep with her head calmly resting on the pillow, which was much more comfortable than being curled up under her sheets with a tiny opening to breathe through. Not only that, but she had been making only the most cursory checks on the woodworm holes, hardly bothering to count the new perforations moving towards the south end of the beam, and not worrying about what the nasty little creatures looked like.

This police protection was a gift from the gods. Three men came in turns every night and watched over her, even in the morning, until she went to work. It was a dream come true. She had asked no questions about the reason why she was under guard, for fear her curiosity might annoy the gendarmes and then they would abandon their bright idea. From what they had given her to understand, it was something to do with recent burglaries, so Francine didn’t find it at all odd that the gendarmes should be keeping an eye on all the women locally who lived alone. Others might have protested, but she was far from doing so. On the contrary, she gratefully cooked supper every evening for the gendarme on duty, and a much better supper than she had ever made for her father.

The rumours of these good suppers – and of Francine’s pretty face – had spread in the Evreux brigade, so although Devalon did not know why, there was never any problem finding volunteers to guard Mademoiselle Bidault. Devalon had no time at all for the cock-and-bull investigation being led by Adamsberg, which he thought was a complete waste of time. But there was no way this Paris police chief, who had already demolished the Evreux reports on Elisabeth Châtel and Pascaline Villemot because of a bit of lichen on a stone, was going to trespass on his patch. His men would be the ones to guard the farm, and not a single cop from Adamsberg’s outfit would set foot there. Adamsberg had had the cheek to insist that the men doing shifts would have to be sitting up and awake. Well, he could stuff that. He wasn’t going to have his team short-manned for this ridiculous enterprise. He would send his men over to Francine’s after their normal day’s work, with orders to eat and sleep there, without trying to stay awake.

During the night of 3 May, at three-thirty-five in the morning, only the woodworms were awake in the bedrooms where Francine and Brigadier Grimal were sleeping. The insects were quite uninhibited by the presence of an armed man in the house as they munched their thousandth of a millimetre of wood. Woodworms being deaf, they did not react to the creak of the scullery door. Grimal, who was sleeping in the bedroom of Francine’s late father, tucked in under a purple eiderdown, sat up in the dark, unsure what kind of sound had woken him, or whether his gun was on the left or right of the bed, on the chest of drawers or on the ground. He felt blindly on the table, then crossed the room, wearing only his T-shirt and shorts, and opened the door leading to Francine’s bedroom. Empty-handed, he watched as a long grey shadow approached him in a strangely slow and silent way, without stopping when the door opened. The shadow didn’t approach normally, it slid and stumbled, passing over the floor in a hesitant but unstoppable progress. Grimal had just time to shake Francine awake, without knowing whether he was trying to save her or to ask her for help.