Fred Vargas - An Uncertain Place

‘Had he identified these enemies?’

‘All he would say seemed to point to some kind of gang warfare, a sort of endless vendetta. With some kind of power game thrown in.’

‘He knew their names?’

‘Yes. These weren’t enemies who changed, random demons waiting to pounce on him from round some corner. Their location inside his head never varied. He was paranoid, at least in this sense of his power and his increasing isolation. Yet everything about this war he was living was rational and realistic, and he could certainly put names and faces to his adversaries.’

‘A secret war and enemies who are fantasies. And then one night, reality strikes, walks on to his private stage, and kills him.’

‘Yes. Did he end up by threatening his “enemies” in real life? Did he speak to them, or become aggressive? You know the standard formula, I expect: paranoid people end up by creating the persecution they always suspected. His invention came to life.’

Josselin offered another drop of alcohol, which Adamsberg refused. The doctor went nimbly over to the cupboard and carefully put the bottle back.

‘I don’t imagine our paths will automatically cross again, commissaire , because I’ve told you all I know about Vaudel. But would it perhaps be too much to ask of you to come back one day?’

‘You want to look inside my head, don’t you?’

‘Yes, indeed. But we might find a less intimidating problem. No back pains? Stiffness, oppression, digestive troubles, circulation problems, sinusitis, neuralgia? No, none of those.’

Adamsberg shook his head, smiling.

The doctor screwed up his eyes.

‘Tinnitus?’ he suggested, almost like a street trader offering something for sale.

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘How did you know?’

‘No magic! The way you keep rubbing your ears!’

‘I have been to someone. Nothing to be done about it, apparently, I just have to live with it and try to forget it. Which I’m quite good at.’

‘You’re indifferent, you don’t mind too much,’ said the doctor, as he accompanied Adamsberg into the hall. ‘But tinnitus doesn’t fade away like a memory. I could help you with it. Only if you want me to, of course. Why should we carry our burdens round with us?’

AS HE WALKED BACK FROM DR JOSSELIN’S HOUSE, ADAMSBERG turned over in his pocket the squashy little silk heart. He stopped under the porch of Saint-François-Xavier’s to call Danglard.

‘ Commandant , it doesn’t make sense. That code in the love letter, it’s all wrong.’

‘What love letter, what code?’ Danglard asked cautiously.

‘The one from Vaudel. “Kiss lover”. The message for the old lady in Germany. He just wouldn’t say that. He was old, he was cut off from the world, he was a traditionalist, he used to drink Guignolet, sitting on a Louis XIII armchair, he just wouldn’t write “kiss lover” on a letter. No, Danglard, and especially not if it was a last message to be read after his death. It’s too cheap for his style. He wasn’t going to write silly slogans like you get on toy hearts.’

‘Toy hearts?’

‘Never mind, Danglard.’

‘Nobody’s above doing silly things, commissaire . Vaudel was eccentric.’

‘Silly things in Cyrillic script?’

‘If he liked secrets, why not?’

‘Danglard, this alphabet, is it only used in Russia?’

‘No, it’s used in other Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe; it’s a Slavonic alphabet, derived from ancient Greek.’

‘Don’t tell me where it comes from, just tell me if it’s used in Serbia.’

‘Yes, of course it is.’

‘You told me you had an uncle who was a Serb. Were all those cut-off feet Serbian too?’

‘I’m not sure they were my uncle’s, actually. It was your story about the bear made me think that. They could be someone else’s.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, a cousin maybe, or a man from the same village.’

‘But it is a Serbian village, isn’t it, Danglard?’

Adamsberg could hear Danglard banging his glass down on the table.

‘Serbian word, Serbian feet, are you trying to make something of it?’

‘Yes. Two Serbian signals in a few days – that doesn’t happen very often.’

‘They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Plus, you didn’t want us to have anything to do with the feet in Highgate.’

‘The wind’s changed, commandant . What can I do? And right now, it’s blowing from the east. Find out what this “kiss lover” stuff could mean in Serbian. Start by investigating your uncle’s feet.’

‘Look, my uncle didn’t know many people in France. And certainly not any rich legal eagles in Garches!’

‘Don’t shout, Danglard. I’ve got tinnitus and it hurts my ears.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since Quebec.’

‘You never said.’

‘Because before it didn’t matter. Now it does. I’ll fax you Vaudel’s letter. Think, Danglard, something starting with kiss . Anything. In Serbian.’

‘Tonight?’

‘He was your uncle, wasn’t he? We’re not going to leave him inside the bear.’

HIS FEET UP AGAINST THE BRICK FIREPLACE, ADAMSBERG WAS dozing in front of the ashes of his fire, his index finger held tightly against his ear. Not that it helped, because the noise was inside his ear, humming like high-tension cables. It must be affecting his hearing by now, and he was already absentminded, so maybe one day he would end up like a bat without radar, understanding nothing about the world. He was waiting for Danglard to get to work. By now his deputy would surely have changed out of his elegant daytime wear into the work clothes his father used to wear down the pit. Adamsberg could picture him sitting there in his vest and trousers, cursing his commissaire .

Danglard looked at the Cyrillic word from Vaudel’s letter and did indeed mutter something about his commissaire , who unlike him had not been the least bit interested in the feet when he was in London. And now, just when he, Danglard, had decided to leave them in peace, Adamsberg was suddenly opening up that can of worms again. Without saying why, in his usual impromptu and mysterious way, which was destabilising Danglard’s normal defence mechanisms – indeed, undermining them radically, if Adamsberg should turn out to be right.

Which was not impossible, he admitted to himself, as he spread out on the table the few archives he had inherited from his uncle, Slavko Moldovan. And it wouldn’t do at all – that was true at least – to leave him inside some bear, without trying to do something. Danglard shook his head in irritation, as he did whenever Adamsberg’s vocabulary infiltrated his own. He had been fond of this Uncle Slavko, his aunt’s husband, who had made up stories all day, who had put his finger to his lips to keep a secret, a finger smelling of pipe tobacco. Danglard used to believe that this uncle had been specially invented for him, to be at his service. Slavko Moldovan had never tired, or at least had never shown it, of telling him about fantastic and terrifying aspects of existence, full of mystery and weird lore. He had opened windows, shown new horizons. When he went to stay with them, the young Adrien Danglard used to follow him all round the house, his uncle in his gold-stitched moccasins with red pompoms, which he sometimes used to repair with a shiny thread. You had to take care of them, because they were for feast days back home in the village. Adrien helped him, he threaded the needle with the golden thread. So of course he was very familiar with those shoes, and then had found them ignominiously mixed up in the sacrilegious pile in Highgate. True, these pompoms could have belonged to anyone else from the same village, which was what Danglard was fervently hoping. DCI Radstock had made some progress. He had established that the collector must have gone into mortuary buildings, or funeral parlours when a body was laid out. He would take away his fetish feet, then screw down the coffin again. The feet were clean and their nails trimmed. And if this foot-chopper was French or English, which was most likely, why on earth and how the devil had he managed to find the feet of a Serb in an undertaker’s parlour? How could he have gone unnoticed in a little village? Unless, that is, he was from the village in the first place.