Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘Yes.’

‘You couldn’t have told from an ordinary photograph a detail like the cut ends. Was he really a barber, your father?’

‘No, he was a doctor. But whether the hair was cut or shaved, I couldn’t see that it made any difference. I didn’t want to get Ariane into trouble, five years off retirement. I thought she’d simply made a mistake.’

‘But Retancourt wondered how Ariane Lagarde, supposedly the best forensic pathologist in the country, could have missed this finding. It seemed to her impossible that Ariane should miss it if you were able to guess at it just from an ordinary photo. She concluded that Ariane had not seen fit to tell us about it. But why? So, after she left you, she went round to the morgue to see Ariane and ask questions. Ariane realised the danger. It was in one of the morgue’s vans that she transported Retancourt to the hangar.’

‘Put some more cold water on my head.’

Adamsberg wrung out the cloth and once more gave Roman’s head a good rub.

‘There’s something that doesn’t fit,’ said Roman from under the cloth.

‘What?’ asked Adamsberg, stopping what he was doing.

‘I felt the first vapours long before Ariane took this job in Paris. She was still in Lille. So how come?’

‘She must have travelled to Paris, got inside your flat and replaced all your regular pills with whatever she used.’

‘The Gavelon, for instance.’

‘Yes, because she could inject capsules with some concoction of her own. She’s always been fond of mixing peculiar drinks, do you remember that? Then all she had to do was wait in Lille until you were too unwell to work.’

‘Did she tell you that? That she’d put me out of action?’

‘She hasn’t said a word yet.’

‘How can you be so sure, then?’

‘Because it was the first thing Retancourt said to me:

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

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

It wasn’t because of Camille or Corneille that she chose these lines, but because of you . Retancourt was thinking about you, with your vapours and your problem having enough breath to cross the room. Roman , that’s you, made short of breath by a woman.’

‘Why did Retancourt talk in verse?’

‘Because of her partner at the office, the New Recruit, Veyrenc. His way of talking is infectious and she was very drawn to him. And because she was only half conscious with all the drugs, she regressed to being a schoolgirl, and the name “Roman” must have brought the line swimming to the surface. Lavoisier says that one of his patients spent three months repeating his times tables.’

‘I don’t see what Lavoisier has to do with it. He was a chemist who was guillotined in 1793. More cold water.’

‘I’m talking about Lavoisier the doctor, who accompanied us to Dourdan,’ said Adamsberg, giving Roman’s head another rub.

‘He’s called Lavoisier, like the chemist?’ asked Roman indistinctly, from under the cloth.

‘Yes, as he never stops telling us. Once we realised that Retancourt was trying to say something about you , and not some Ancient Roman, and that a woman had caused your problems, the rest was easy. Ariane had put you out of action in order to take your place. I didn’t ask for her, Brézillon didn’t ask for her. She applied for it herself. Why? For prestige? But she already had that.’

‘So that she could run the investigation herself,’ said Roman, emerging from the cloth with his hair standing on end.

‘And, by the same token, she could engineer my fall from grace. I once humiliated her professionally, long ago. She never forgets and never forgives.’

‘Are you going to question her now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take me with you.’

Roman had been too weak to go out for months now. Adamsberg wondered whether he could even manage the three flights of stairs to get down to the car.

‘Take me with you,’ Roman insisted. ‘She was my friend. I’ll have to see it to believe it.’

‘Well, all right,’ said Adamsberg, lifting him up under the arms. ‘Hold on to me. If you go to sleep at the office, there are some cushions upstairs, for the benefit of Mercadet.’

‘Does Mercadet eat pills full of unspeakable things, then?’

ARIANE’S BEHAVIOUR WAS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY THAT ADAMSBERG HAD ever seen in an arrested suspect. She was sitting on the other side of his desk, and should have been facing him. But she had turned her chair through ninety degrees and was looking at the wall, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. So Adamsberg had gone round to the wall to face her, whereupon she had immediately turned her chair through a right angle again, to face the door. This was neither fear, nor provocation, nor ill will on her part. But just as one magnet repulses another, so the commissaire’s approach made her swivel round. It was just like a toy one of his sisters had had, a little dancer who could be made to turn around when you put it close to a mirror. It was only later that he had understood that two contrary magnets were hidden, one inside the dancer’s pink tights and one behind the mirror. So Ariane was the dancer and he was the mirror. A reflective surface that she was instinctively avoiding, so as not to see Omega in Adamsberg’s eyes. As a result, he was obliged to keep moving round the room, while Ariane, oblivious of his movements, spoke into empty space.

It was equally clear that she did not understand what she was being accused of. But without asking questions or rebelling, she sat, docile and almost consenting, as if another part of her knew perfectly well what she was doing and accepted this for the moment, a mere twist of fate which she could handle. Adamsberg had had time to skim some of the chapters in her book and recognised in this conflicted yet passive attitude the disconcerting symptoms of the dissociated criminal. A split in the individual, which Ariane knew so well, having spent years exploring it with fascination, without realising that her own case had been the motive behind her research. Faced with an interrogation by the police, Ariane understood nothing, and Omega was prudently lying low, waiting for conciliation and a way out.

Adamsberg imagined that Ariane must be a hostage to her incalculable pride: this woman, who had never forgiven even the offence of the twelve rats, had been unable to bear the humiliation caused by the paramedic who had tempted her husband away so publicly. That or something else. One day the volcano had erupted, setting free a torrent of rage and punishments in a sequence of unbridled attacks. Ariane the pathologist remained ignorant of these murderous outbreaks. The paramedic had died a year later, in a climbing accident, but the husband had not returned to his wife. He had found a new partner, who in turn died on a railway line. Murder after murder: Ariane was already on her way to her ultimate aim, acquiring powers superior to those of all others of her sex. An eternal dominion which would preserve her from the threatening encirclement of her fellow women. At the centre of this journey lay an implacable hatred of other people which no one would understand – unless Omega revealed it one day.

But Ariane had had to bide her time for ten years, since the recipe in the De sanctis reliquis was clear: ‘Five times cometh the age of youth, till the day thou must invert it, pass and pass again.’

On this point, Adamsberg and his colleagues had made a serious miscalculation, by choosing to take fifteen as the age to be multiplied five times. Having identified the district nurse as their suspect, they had all interpreted the text to correspond to the seventy-five years of her age. But at the time the De reliquis was being copied, fifteen was seen as adulthood, when a girl could already be a mother and a boy ride on horseback. Twelve was when young people left behind the age of their youth. So the time to reverse the approach of death and escape its grasp came at the age of sixty. Ariane had been on the eve of her sixtieth birthday when she had embarked upon the series of crimes she had long been planning.