Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘Yes, too much, in fact it’s impossible. But it is polish all the same. Only not from the soles of the shoes.’

‘Do you think she’s just signing it?’ asked Mordent. ‘Like with the syringe? Does she spread the shoe polish around, so as to leave her mark?’

‘Something like that, to pull us along in her wake. To guide us.’

‘Along the wrong track, you mean?’ asked the doctor, blinking her eyes.

‘Precisely, Ariane. Like wreckers who used to imitate lighthouses, to lure ships on to the rocks. We’ve got a false lighthouse here.’

‘A lighthouse that’s sending us to the nurse?’ said Ariane.

‘Yes, that must be what Retancourt meant. “Tell him not to give a damn.” She must have meant about the blue shoes. That they don’t matter.’

‘How is she?’ asked Ariane.

‘She’s recovering quite quickly. Enough to tell us that it didn’t matter, anyway.’

‘You mean the shoes and all the rest of it?’ asked Ariane.

‘Yes. The injections, the scalpel, the shoe polish. It’s a plausible trail, but it’s false. A real decoy. For weeks now, this killer’s been playing games with us. And all of us, myself included, have been stupidly chasing after this lantern that someone is waving in the woods ahead of us.’

Ariane folded her arms and dropped her chin. She hadn’t had time to put on her full make-up, and Adamsberg found her more beautiful than ever.

‘It’s all my fault,’ she said. ‘It was me that said it could be a case of dissociation.’

‘Yes, but I was the one who identified the nurse as our suspect.’

‘Yes, but I went along with it,’ Ariane insisted. ‘I told you a lot of back-up stuff about psychological profiling.’

‘Well, this killer certainly knows all about female psychology. Everything was set up so we would make this mistake, Ariane. And if the murderer wanted us to think it was a woman, then it must be a man. A man who took advantage of Claire Langevin’s escape to push us towards her. He knew I’d react to the hypothesis that it was the nurse. But it isn’t her. And that’s why these murders don’t correspond to her psychology, the angel of death. You said so yourself, Ariane, that night after Montrouge. There wasn’t a second lava-flow out of the volcano. It must be a quite different volcano.’

‘Well, if so, it’s someone very clever,’ sighed the doctor. ‘The wounds on Diala and La Paille really do indicate a killer who isn’t tall. But I suppose it would always be possible to fake that. A man of average height could always calculate how to angle the knife to make it look that way. Of course, he’d really have to know what he was doing.’

‘The syringe in the hangar was already over the top,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I should have reacted sooner.’

‘A man,’ said Danglard, sounding discouraged. ‘We’ll have to start all over. From the beginning.’

‘No, Danglard, that won’t be necessary.’

Adamsberg saw a rapid and focused look cross his deputy’s face, then an expression of resigned sadness. Adamsberg gave him a slight nod. Danglard knew. As he did himself.

WITHOUT STARTING THE CAR, ADAMSBERG SAT ALONGSIDE DANGLARD AS THEY both watched the wipers try to deal with the torrential rain battering the windscreen. Adamsberg liked the regular sound they made as they groaned against the deluge.

‘I think we’re thinking the same thing, capitaine,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Commandant,’ corrected Danglard gloomily.

‘To try and send us on the trail of the nurse, the killer must have known a lot about me. He had to know I’d arrested her, and that I’d be upset to learn she was out of jail. And he also had to be able to follow the investigation, step by step. To know that we were looking for navy-blue shoes and traces of polish from the soles. He also had to be well-informed about Retancourt’s movements. He must have wanted to destroy me. He provided everything – the syringe, the shoes, the scalpel, the shoe polish. An extraordinary manipulation of the inquiry, Danglard, carried out by someone of remarkable intelligence and efficiency.’

‘By a man in our squad.’

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg sadly, leaning back in his seat. ‘By one of our own, a black ibex on the mountain.’

‘What’s it got to do with an ibex?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘I don’t want to believe this.’

‘We didn’t want to believe there was a bone in a pig’s snout, but there is one. Like there’s a bone in the squad, Danglard. Stuck in its throat.’

The rain slackened off and Adamsberg slowed the pace of the wind-creen wipers.

‘I did tell you he was lying,’ Danglard went on. ‘Nobody could have remembered that text from the De reliquis unless they already knew it. He must have known the recipe for the potion by heart.’

‘But in that case, why did he tell us it?’

‘Provocation. He thinks he’s invincible.’

‘The child on the ground,’ murmured Adamsberg. ‘The lost vineyard, poverty, years of humiliation. I used to see him around, Danglard. He used to pull a beret right down to his nose to cover up the ginger streaks. He used to limp after the accident with the horse, he would blush to meet people, and he skulked along by the walls, with other boys calling him names.’

‘He can still get to you, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s the child that touches you. And the adult has grown up twisted. He’s trying to turn the tables on you, because you were the little gang-leader of the village, responsible for his tragic lot, as he would put it in his verses. He’s making the wheel of fortune spin round. It’s your turn to fall, while he’s moving up the ranks. He’s turning into what he spouts about all day long, a Racinian hero, caught in a torrent of hate and ambition, plotting the deaths of other people and the day of his own apotheosis. From the start, you knew he’d come here to get his revenge for the fight between the two valleys.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s put his plan into action, one thing after another, driving you in the wrong direction, sending the investigation off track. He’s killed seven times now: Fernand, Big Georges, Elisabeth, Pascaline, Diala, La Paille, Grimal. He almost killed Retancourt. And he’s going to kill the third virgin.’

‘No, Francine’s safe enough.’

‘So you think. But this man’s tough. He’ll kill Francine, then he’ll get you, once you’ve been disgraced. He hates you.’

Adamsberg lowered the window and stretched his arm out of the car palm up, as if to catch the rain.

‘You’re unhappy about it,’ said Danglard.

‘Yes, I am rather.’

‘But you know we’re right.’

‘When Robert called me about the second stag, I was tired and couldn’t really be bothered. It was Veyrenc who offered to drive me up there. And in the cemetery at Opportune it was Veyrenc who pointed out the short grass on Pascaline’s grave. He encouraged me to open it, just as he’d encouraged me to carry on in Montrouge. And he intervened with Brézillon, so that we could continue our investigation. So that he could keep track of it, while I was getting deeper and deeper in the shit.’

‘And,’ Danglard pointed out gently, ‘he took Camille from you. That’s high-level vengeance, like in a play by Racine.’

‘How did you know about that, Danglard?’ said Adamsberg, clenching his fist in the rain.

‘When I had to take over the listening device in Froissy’s cupboard, I had to play a bit of the previous tape to get the soundtrack tuned. I did warn you about him. Intelligent, strong and dangerous.’

‘All the same, I liked him.’

‘Is that why we’re sitting here in Clancy in this car? Instead of getting back to Paris?’