Fred Vargas - An Uncertain Place

Sitting down with a contented sigh, he tucked his napkin familiarly into his collar, as Émile might have done. Ten minutes later, the conversation had become as relaxed as his practised gestures.

‘The concierge thinks you’re a guru,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He says you’ve got golden fingers, can put anything right.’

‘Not at all,’ replied Josselin with his mouth full. ‘Francisco likes to believe in something beyond him, and that’s understandable, given that his parents were “disappeared” under the dictators.’

‘The sons-of-bitches-God-damn-them-to-hell.’

‘Just so. I’m spending a lot of time trying to settle the trauma, but he keeps blowing a fuse all the time.’

‘He’s got a fuse?’

‘Everyone does, more than one as a rule. In his case it’s F3. It’s a sort of safety valve, like in a security system. It’s just science, commissaire . Structure, agency, networks, circuits, connections. Bones, organs, connective tissue, the body works like a machine, you understand?’

‘No.’

‘Take this boiler,’ said Josselin, pointing to the wall. ‘Is it just a set of distinct elements, tank, water pipes, pump, joints, burner, safety valve? No, it’s a synergetic whole. If the pump gets furred up, the valve flips, and the burner goes out. You see? It’s all connected, the movement of each element depends on all the others. Well, so if you sprain your ankle, the other leg tries to compensate, you put your back out, your neck gets stiff and gives you a headache, next thing you know you feel sick and lose your appetite, your actions slow down, anxiety creeps in, the fuses blow. I’m simplifying of course.’

‘Why did Francisco’s fuse blow?’

‘He’s got a blocked zone,’ said the doctor, pointing to the back of his own head. ‘It’s his father. That box is shut, the basal-occipital won’t move. More salad?’

He served Adamsberg without waiting for an answer, and refilled his glass.

‘And Émile?’

‘His mother,’ said the doctor, munching noisily, and pointing to the other side of his head. ‘Acute sense of injustice. So he goes round bashing other people. But much less these days.’

‘And Vaudel?’

‘Ah, we’re getting to the point.’

‘Yes.’

‘Since the press has revealed so many details, the police can’t keep it a secret any more. Can you tell me about it now? Vaudel was horribly chopped up, is what they seem to say. But how, why, what was the killer after? Did you discover any logic, some sort of ritual?’

‘No, just a sort of unending panic, a fury that couldn’t be resolved. There must be a system there somewhere, but what it is we don’t know.’

Adamsberg got out his notebook and drew from memory the diagram showing the points the murderer had attacked most fiercely.

‘You’re good at drawing,’ said the doctor, ‘I can’t even draw a duck.’

‘Ducks are difficult.’

‘Go on, draw me one. I’ll be thinking about this diagram and the system while you do it.’

‘What sort of duck – flying, roosting, diving?’

‘Wait,’ said the doctor, smiling. ‘I’ll fetch some proper paper.’

He came back with some sheets of paper and moved the plates aside.

‘A duck in flight.’

‘Male or female?’

‘Both if you can.’

Then he asked Adamsberg to draw a rocky coastline, a pensive woman and a Giacometti sculpture, if possible. He waved the drawings about to dry the ink, and propped them up under the lamp.

‘Now you really have got golden fingers, commissaire . I would like to examine you. But you don’t want that. We’ve all got closed rooms we don’t want strangers to walk into, don’t you think? Don’t worry, I’m not a clairvoyant, I’m just a pragmatic practitioner with no imagination. You’re different.’

Carefully putting the drawings on the windowsill, the doctor carried the bottle and glasses through to his sitting room, along with the Vaudel diagrams.

‘What did you make of this?’ he asked, pointing with his large fingers at the elbows, ankles, knees and skull on the diagram.

‘Well, we thought the killer destroyed what made the body work, the joints, the feet. But it doesn’t take us very far.’

‘But also the brain, liver and heart. He was also intent on demolishing the soul, don’t you think?’

‘That’s what my deputy thought. More than a murderer, he’s a destroyer, a Zerquetscher , as the Austrian policeman said. Because he destroyed someone else, outside Vienna.’

‘Someone related to Vaudel, by any chance?’

‘Why?’

The doctor hesitated, then, noticing the wine was finished, took out a green bottle from a cupboard.

‘Some poire eau de vie – like a drop?’

No, he wouldn’t like a drop, after such a long day, but it would spoil the atmosphere, if he let Josselin drink the liqueur alone, so Adamsberg watched him fill two small glasses.

‘It wasn’t a single blocked zone I found in Vaudel’s skull, it was much worse.’

The doctor fell silent, hesitating again, as if wondering whether he should go on, then raised his glass and put it down again.

‘So what was there inside his skull?’

‘A hermetically sealed cage, a haunted room, a black dungeon. He was obsessed with what was in there.’

‘And that was…?’

‘Himself. With his entire family and their secret. All locked up inside there, silent, away from the rest of the world.’

‘He thought someone was locking him in?’

‘No, you don’t understand. He locked himself in, he was hidden away, removed from anyone’s view. He was protecting the other occupants of the cell.’

‘From death?’

‘From annihilation. There were three other clear factors in his case. He was fanatically attached to his name, his family name. And an unresolved tension over his son: he was torn between pride and rejection. He loved Pierre, but he didn’t want him to have been born.’

‘He didn’t leave his property to him, he left it to the gardener.’

‘Logical. If he left him nothing, then he had no son.’

‘I don’t think Pierre junior saw it that way.’

‘No, of course not. And thirdly, Vaudel was full of boundless arrogance, so total that he generated a feeling of invincibility. I’ve never seen anything like it before. That’s what I can tell you as a doctor, and you’ll understand perhaps why I was so interested in this patient. But Vaudel was very strong-minded, and he resisted my treatment fiercely. He didn’t mind if I treated him for a stiff neck or a sprain, and he was even very pleased when I helped him get rid of vertigo and helped with his approaching deafness. Here,’ the doctor said, tapping his ear. ‘The little bones in his middle ear were blocked solid. But he hated it if I tried to get near to the black dungeon and the enemies he thought were all around.’

‘And who were these enemies?’

‘All those who wanted to destroy his power.’

‘He was afraid of them?’

‘On the one hand, he was afraid enough not to want any children, so as not to expose them to danger. On the other hand, he wasn’t personally afraid at all, because of that sense of superiority I told you about. It was a sense he had in his dealings with the law courts, when he seemed to have the power of life and death over people. Be careful, commissaire , what I’m saying here isn’t objective reality, it’s what he saw as reality.’

‘Was he mad?’

‘Totally, if you consider that it’s mad to live by a logic that’s different from the logic of the rest of the world. But not at all, in the sense that within his own scheme of things he was completely rigorous and coherent, and he was able to make it fit inside the basic framework of the general social order.’