Fred Vargas - This Night’s Foul Work

‘Apparently, Charles is still in love with you.’

‘Gracious. Still, that wouldn’t surprise me – he’s so pathetic.’

‘Apparently, he has realised that the paramedics aren’t a patch on you.’

‘Obviously. You’re not going to compare me with fat sows like that, are you, Jean-Baptiste?’

Estalère leaned towards Danglard.

‘Is there a bone in the snout of a sow?’ he whispered.

‘Suppose so,’ said Danglard, indicating that this wasn’t the moment.

‘Apparently, Charles wants to get back together with you,’ Adamsberg was saying. ‘At least, that’s what the gossip is in Lille.’

‘Gracious.’

‘But are you perhaps afraid that you’ll be too old, when he does come back?’

Ariane gave a small, almost flirtatious laugh.

‘Ageing, Jean-Baptiste is a perverse idea, arising in God’s vicious imagination. How old do you think I am? Sixty?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that,’ said Estalère spontaneously.

‘Shut up,’ said Danglard.

‘See? Even that youngster knows.’

‘What?’

Ariane took another cigarette, and the veil of smoke protected her once more from Omega.

‘You came to my new house,’ Adamsberg continued, ‘just before I moved in, to check it out and unblock the door to the attic. You gave quite a scare to the old man, Lucio Velasco. What did you put on your face? A mask? A stocking?’

‘Who’s Lucio Velasco?’

‘My neighbour. He’s Spanish. Once you had the attic door unblocked, you could get in there whenever you wanted. You sometimes came at night and walked about up there, then you got out quickly.’

Ariane let her ash fall to the floor.

‘You’ve heard footsteps in your attic?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was her, Jean-Baptiste. Claire Langevin. She’s after you.’

‘Yes, that’s what you wanted us to think. I was supposed to tell people about these nightly sounds, to foster the myth of this nurse prowling about ready to strike. And she would have, in the end, by your hand, with a syringe and a scalpel. But do you know why it didn’t worry me? No, you can’t know that.’

‘You should worry. She’s dangerous, as I have told you many times.’

‘Well, you see, Ariane, I already had a ghost in the house, Saint Clarisse. How peculiar is that?’

‘Killed by the tanner in 1771,’ said Danglard.

‘With his bare hands,’ Adamsberg added. ‘Don’t lose the thread, Ariane – you don’t know everything in this world. I thought it was Clarisse walking about in the attic. Well, to be honest, I really thought old Lucio was on his rounds, checking up. He has a sort of special aura too. He used to worry about the ghost when I had little Tom staying overnight. But it wasn’t him I could hear. It was you, up there.’

‘No, it was her.’

‘You’re not going to talk, are you, Ariane? About Omega?’

‘Nobody talks about Omega. I thought you had read my book.’

‘In some dissociators, you wrote, a crack can open up.’

‘Only if they’re flawed.’

Adamsberg pursued the interrogation until far into the night. Roman had been allowed to stretch out on the cushions in the coffee-machine room and Estalère on a camp bed. Danglard and Veyrenc backed up the commissaire with their cross-questioning. Ariane, although tired, remained steadfastly in Alpha mode, without resisting the endless session or abandoning her stance of denying or claiming not to understand anything about Omega.

At four-forty in the morning, Veyrenc staggered to his feet and fetched four coffees.

‘I take my coffee with a drop of barley-water,’ Ariane explained politely, without turning to face the desk.

‘We don’t have any,’ said Veyrenc. ‘We can’t make cocktails here.’

‘Pity.’

‘I don’t think there’ll be any barley-water in prison,’ murmured Danglard. ‘The coffee’s undrinkable. And the food’s fit for animals. It’s really filthy stuff, what they give the prisoners.’

‘And why in the name of all that’s holy are you talking to me about prison?’ asked Ariane, with her back to him.

Adamsberg closed his eyes and prayed to the third virgin to come to his assistance. But just then the third virgin was fast asleep in the hotel in Haroncourt between clean, pale blue sheets, and blissfully ignorant of the troubles of the man who’d saved her. Veyrenc gulped his coffee and put the cup down, with a discouraged shrug.

‘Cease the struggle, my lord!

With cunning and brute strength you have fought the good fight;

Ramparts and battlements have fallen to your might .

But the wall that resists, the prize you cannot claim ,

Will block you for ever, for madness is its name.’

‘I agree, Veyrenc, said Adamsberg, without opening his eyes. ‘Take her away, with her wall and her cocktails and her hatred. Get her out of my sight!’

‘Six syllables,’ Veyrenc noted. ‘Get her out of my sight . A hemistich. Not bad.’

‘At that rate, Veyrenc, all cops would be poets.’

‘If only,’ muttered Danglard.

Ariane snapped her cigarette lighter shut and Adamsberg opened his eyes.

‘I need to go to my flat, Jean-Baptiste. I don’t know what you’re up to, or why, but I’m professional enough to guess. You’re holding me for more questioning, aren’t you? So I need to get my things.’

‘We’ll fetch anything you need.’

‘No. I want to look for them myself. I don’t want your men putting their great paws all over my clothes.’

For the first time, Ariane’s expression, which Adamsberg could see only in profile, became set and anxious. She would herself have diagnosed this as Omega moving on to the attack. Because Omega needed to do something vital.

‘They’ll have to come with you, while you pack a case. But they won’t touch anything.’

‘I don’t want them to be there, I want to be on my own. It’s private, it’s intimate. You can understand that, surely, can’t you? If you’re scared I’ll try to escape, you can station as many fuckwits as you like outside.’

As many fuckwits as you like . Omega was coming to the surface. Adamsberg watched Ariane’s profile, her eyebrow, her lip, her chin, and detected there a tension caused by some fresh thought.

No cordials in prison, just piss-awful coffee. No more cocktails in prison, neither the violine nor the grenaille , no crème de menthe, no marsala. Above all, no magic potion. But the mixture was almost ready. All she needed was the quick of the third virgin and the wine of the year. Well, the matter of wine could easily be fixed, it was simply there to bind the mixture together, and water would do at a pinch. The third virgin was out of reach, of course, so there was no question of eternity. But since the mixture was almost complete, it might provide long life. How much? A hundred years? Two hundred? A thousand? That would keep you going in prison, without needing to worry or start over. But where was the mixture? It was the fear of never being able to drink it that was making her clench the cigarette between her teeth. Between Ariane and the hard-won treasure there were now several ranks of policemen.

And the treasure was the only proof of the murders. Ariane would never confess. The mixture, the mixture alone, with its hairs from the heads of Pascaline and Elisabeth, its remains of cat, stag and human bones, would demonstrate that Ariane had followed the dark path of the De reliquis . To get hold of it now was as essential for her as it was for the commissaire . Without the potion, he wouldn’t have much chance of making a charge stick. These are just the fantasies of a cloud shoveller, the examining magistrate would say, and Brézillon would back him up. Dr Lagarde was so famous that the threads painfully pulled together by Adamsberg would look flimsy indeed.