Fred Vargas - An Uncertain Place

‘She’s got her hooks into the president of the Appeal Court, who’s bought the prosecutor, who’s bought a magistrate, who’s bought another magistrate, who’s bought Mordent. His daughter’s case comes up in a few days and the charge couldn’t be more serious.’

‘Oh hell. But what does Carnot want from Mordent?’

‘Obedience. It was him that leaked the information to the press to cover Zerk’s escape. Since the morning we discovered the murder, he’s been putting obstacle after obstacle in the way of the inquiry, and in the end he planted some stuff on Vaudel’s son, which is intended to incriminate me instead of the killer.’

‘The pencil shavings you talked about?’

‘That’s right. Emma Carnot is somehow linked to our murderer. The page in the register for her marriage has been torn out, so we have to assume that if anyone knew about this marriage, her career would be over. One of the witnesses has already been killed. They’re looking for the other. Carnot would trample on anyone to protect her interests.’ As he spoke, Adamsberg remembered the little kitten under Zerk’s boot and shivered. ‘She’s not the only one. That’s why her war machine will run smoothly, because they all get something out of it. Except Paole’s future victims, except Émile, and except me, because I’m for the high jump in three days. Like the toads. With the cigarettes.’

‘You mean the ones we used to force-feed cigarettes to, back in the days?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they analyse the pencil shavings or something?’

‘A pal of mine slowed down their trip to the lab. He faked an illness.’

‘So you’ve got what? Another couple of days?’

‘If that.’

The plane was about to take off, and they fastened their seat belts. Veyrenc waited until they had been airborne for some time before speaking again.

‘Mordent started behaving this way on the Sunday morning, as soon as the Garches murder was discovered. You’re sure about that?’

‘Yes. He was trying to get the gardener arrested, taking orders direct from the examining magistrate.’

‘But that suggests that Carnot already knew who had massacred Vaudel. On the Sunday morning. And she was already in touch with Mordent. If not, how could she have got the machinery working so fast? She’d already got to Mordent. That would mean at least a couple of days’ preparation. She must have known on the Friday.’

‘The shoes,’ said Adamsberg suddenly, drumming his fingers on the porthole. ‘It wasn’t the Garches murder that alerted Carnot. It must have been whoever cut off the feet we found in London. And some of those were far too old for Zerk to have been involved.’

‘I don’t know about all this stuff,’ said Veyrenc.

‘I’m talking about the seventeen feet cut off at the ankles that were found, still in their shoes, in front of Higg-gate Cemetery in London, ten days ago.’

‘Who told you about them?’

‘No one. I was there. With Danglard. Higg-gate belongs to Peter Plogojowitz. His body was taken there before they ever built the cemetery, to get him away from the fury of the people of Kisilova.’

The stewardess kept returning to them, evidently fascinated by Veyrenc’s striped hair. The spotlight over his head lit up all the red strands. She brought two of everything for them – champagne, chocolates, towelettes.

‘When we were in London,’ Adamsberg said, after telling Veyrenc as succinctly as he could about the whole Highgate saga, ‘there was a fat man with a cigar standing in the distance behind this lord who was fussing about his shoes. The “Cuban”, so-called, must have been Paole, is what I’m thinking. Who had just deposited his collection of feet as a sort of challenge on Plogojowitz’s territory. And he was using Lord Clyde-Fox to lure us there.’

‘But why would he do that?’

‘To make the link. Paole needs to associate his collection to the destruction of the last Plogojowitzes. He took advantage of French police being there to get us involved, knowing that the Garches murder would come to us anyway. He couldn’t have guessed that Danglard would recognise a foot from Kisilova in the pile, whether it was really his uncle’s or a neighbour’s. Danglard’s uncle by marriage was Vladislav’s dedo, that is his grandfather.’

Veyrenc put his champagne glass down, and closed his eyes with a flutter of his eyelashes, a reflex he often had.

‘Forget all that for a moment,’ he said, ‘and simply tell me how it’s going to bring anything new to bear on Armel.’

‘There were pairs of feet there that had been severed when Zerk was a child, a baby even. Whatever I might think of him, I don’t believe your nephew went round as a five-year-old robbing the back parlours of undertakers.’

‘No, that figures.’

‘And I think that what Emma Carnot knew about was a shoe,’ said Adamsberg, catching a new fish that was wriggling around in his brain. ‘A shoe with a foot in it, that she’d seen somewhere, a long time ago. And she made the connection with Higg-gate, and after that with Garches. A connection that leads to her. Because we took our eye off that one entirely.’

‘What one?’ said Veyrenc, opening his eyes.

‘The missing one. The eighteenth foot.’

ADAMSBERG HAD TELEPHONED AHEAD FROM THE AIRPORT to convene a meeting of the squad – exceptionally, given that it was a Sunday evening. Three hours on, they had all more or less assimilated the latest episodes of the inquiry, rather at random and in some confusion, rendered greater by the commissaire ’s state of exhaustion. Some people whispered during a break that it was obvious he had spent a night mummified in a freezing tomb and on the point of suffocation. His aquiline nose looked pinched, and his eyes had sunk even deeper into the distant depths. They greeted Veyrenc warmly, slapped him on the back and congratulated him. Estalère was particularly perturbed by the account of Vesna, a corpse almost three hundred years old but looking lifelike, alongside whom Adamsberg had spent the night. He was the only one in the squad who knew the story of Elizabeth Siddal, and he had remembered every detail of Danglard’s story. He was still not sure about one point. Had Dante Gabriel Rossetti opened his wife’s grave out of love, or to retrieve his poems? His answer varied depending on the day and his state of mind.

There were some gaps in the commissair e’s account of the past few days, on which he did not seem disposed to elaborate. One of them was the inexplicable presence of Veyrenc in Kisilova. Adamsberg had no intention of revealing to the squad that he had a son whom he had abandoned, that this son had suddenly turned up like a figure from hell, aka Zerk, and that everything pointed to his being the author of the atrocities in Garches and Pressbaum. Nor had he mentioned the ambiguous questions raised by the intervention of Weill. And apart from Danglard, no one in the team knew about the danger emanating from Emma Carnot. That would have obliged Adamsberg to reveal the treacherous activity of Mordent, which he was not ready to do. The daughter – Elaine, wasn’t it? – was due to stand trial in a few days. Dinh had managed to hold up the lab tests for three whole days without being disciplined. His talent for levitation, real or imagined, no doubt explained the indulgence of his colleagues.

On the other hand, Adamsberg had described in detail the enmity between the Plogojowitz and Paole families. So, not to put too fine a point on it, as Retancourt said, there was some all-out war going on between two clans of vampires, each trying to annihilate the other, after the original clash three hundred years before. And since, ahem, vampires did not exist, what were they supposed to do about it and where was the investigation heading?