Fred Vargas - An Uncertain Place

‘What are they going to do with them?’ asked Estalère in a shaky voice. ‘Find twenty people without feet and stick them back on? How would they do that?’

‘Ten people,’ Danglard pointed out. ‘Twenty feet, ten people.’

‘All right,’ admitted Estalère.

‘In fact, it appears there are just eighteen, so nine people.’

‘Yes. OK. But if the English had already found nine people whose feet had been cut off, they’d know about it, wouldn’t they?’

‘If they were living people, yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘But if the feet came from corpses, they might not necessarily.’

Estalère shook his head.

‘If the feet had been cut from dead bodies,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘that would mean nine corpses. The Brits may well have nine corpses somewhere without feet, but there’s no way they would know that. I wonder,’ he went on, ‘if there’s a special word for cutting off feet. We say decapitate for heads, eviscerate for innards, emasculate for testicles, but there isn’t a special word for feet, or is there?’

‘No, there isn’t,’ said Danglard. ‘The word doesn’t exist because the act doesn’t exist. Well, not until now. But one individual has just created it, on the dark continent.’

‘Like the wardrobe-eater – there isn’t a proper word for that either.’

‘A thekophagist?’ suggested Danglard.

WHEN THE TRAIN ENTERED THE CHANNEL TUNNEL, DANGLARD took a deep breath and clenched his teeth. The journey out had not relieved his apprehensions and this passage under water still seemed to him to be unacceptable, and his fellow travellers strangely insouciant. He distinctly pictured himself speeding through this conduit covered by tons of seawater overhead.

‘You can feel the weight of it,’ he said, his eyes fixed to the roof of the carriage.

‘There isn’t any weight,’ said Adamsberg. ‘We’re not under water, we’re under rock.’

Estalère asked how it was possible for the weight of the sea not to press down on the rock so hard that the tunnel collapsed. Adamsberg patiently and determinedly drew a diagram for him on a paper napkin: the water, the rock, the shorelines, the tunnel, the train. Then he did the same diagram without either the tunnel or the train, to show that their existence did not modify anything.

‘All the same,’ said Estalère, ‘the weight of the seawater must be pressing down on something.’

‘Yes, on the rock.’

‘But then the rock must be weighing on the tunnel.’

‘No,’ said Adamsberg, starting another diagram.

Danglard made a gesture of irritation.

‘It’s just that you imagine the weight. A monstrous mass of water over our heads. The idea of being swallowed up. Sending a train under the sea is a demented idea.’

‘No more than eating a wardrobe,’ said Adamsberg, perfecting his diagram.

‘What the heck has the wardrobe-eater done to get under your skin? You’ve done nothing but talk about him since yesterday.’

‘I’m just trying to imagine his thought processes, Danglard. I’m trying to see how they think, the wardrobe-eater, the foot-amputator, or that man whose uncle was eaten by a bear. The thoughts of mankind are like drills opening up tunnels under the sea that you never expected to come into existence.’

‘Who was eaten by a bear?’ asked Estalère, suddenly waking up.

‘This guy’s uncle was on an ice floe,’ Adamsberg told him. ‘About a hundred years ago. All that was left of him were his glasses and his shoelaces. And this nephew was fond of his uncle. So he flipped. He killed the bear.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ commented Estalère.

‘Yes, but then he brought the bearskin back to Geneva, and gave it to his aunt, the widow. Who put it in her sitting room. Danglard, your colleague Stock gave you an envelope at the station. His preliminary report, was it?’

‘Radstock, yes,’ said Danglard gloomily, still looking up at the ceiling of the carriage and watching out for the weight of the sea.

‘Interesting?’

‘What does it matter? They’re his feet, he can keep them.’

Estalère was twisting a paper napkin in his fingers and concentrating hard, looking down at his knees.

‘So I suppose this nephew wanted to bring some relic of his uncle back to the widow?’ he asked.

Adamsberg nodded and turned back to Danglard.

‘Tell me all the same, what does the report say?’

‘When will we get out of the tunnel?’

‘Another sixteen minutes. What did Stock find, Danglard?’

‘But logically,’ Estalère said hesitantly, ‘if the uncle was inside the bear… and the nephew…’

He stopped and looked down again, puzzled and scratching his blond head. Danglard sighed, whether for the sixteen minutes, or the ghastly feet, which he would rather leave far behind, forgetting all about the cemetery gate in Highgate. Or because Estalère, who was as slow-witted as he was curious, was the only member of the squad unable to distinguish between the valuable and the pointless among Adamsberg’s remarks. For the young officer, every word his commissaire let drop had meaning and he was now pursuing it. And to Danglard, whose elastic mind leapt over ideas extremely fast, Estalère represented a constant and irritating waste of time.

‘If we hadn’t gone for a walk with Radstock two days ago,’ Danglard said, ‘and if we hadn’t bumped into that crazy Clyde-Fox character, we wouldn’t know a thing about those revolting feet and we’d have left them to rot in peace. They belong to the Brits, full stop.’

‘There’s no rule against being interested,’ said Adamsberg, ‘when something crosses your path.’

He felt pretty sure that Danglard had not parted with the woman in London on as reassuring a note as he might have wished. So his anxiety was taking over again, slipping into the recesses of his being. Adamsberg imagined Danglard’s mind as a block of fine limestone, where rain, in other words questions, had hollowed out countless basins in which his worries gathered, unresolved. Every day, three or four of these basins were active simultaneously. Just now, the journey through the tunnel, the woman in London, the feet in Highgate. As Adamsberg had explained to him, the energy Danglard expended on these questions, seeking to empty out the basins, was a waste of time. Because no sooner had he cleared out one space than it made way for something else, for another set of agonising questions. By digging away at them, he was stopping peaceful sedimentation from taking place, and the natural filling up of the excavations, which would happen if he forgot about them.

‘Don’t worry, she’ll be in touch,’ Adamsberg told him.

‘Who?’

‘Abstract.’

‘Logically,’ Estalère interjected, still following his train of thought, ‘the nephew ought to have left the bear alive, and brought some of its droppings to the aunt. After all, the uncle was inside the bear, but not in its skin.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Adamsberg, looking satisfied. ‘It all depends on the attitude the nephew had both to the uncle and to the bear.’

‘And to his aunt,’ added Danglard, who was feeling calmer on hearing Adamsberg’s certainty about Abstract getting back in touch. ‘We don’t know the aunt’s reactions either, whether she would rather have had the bearskin or the droppings.’

‘It all depends on what was going on in the nephew’s mind. Was it that his uncle’s soul had gone into the bear, right to the tips of its fur? And what idea did the thekophagist have of the wardrobe? And what was the foot-chopper thinking about? Whose soul is inside the wooden panels, or on the ends of people’s feet? What did Stock say, Danglard?’