Seeking Whom He May Devour

by Fred Vargas

  “Look at this, Head Deputy,” he said slowly and deliberately. “Here is a map that I found in Massart’s shack yesterday morning.”

  “Did you of your own free will enter the Massart residence in the absence of the owner?”

  “The door wasn’t locked. I was worried. Could have been dead in bed. Duty to help. There’s a witness.”

  “And you knowingly purloined this map?”

  “No. I looked at it and put it back in my pocket without realising. Later on, at home, I noticed these markings.”

  The Head Deputy pulled the map over to his side of the desk and inspected it with care. After a few minutes he pushed it back to Johnstone’s side, with no comment.

  “These five Xs mark the hamlets where the latest sheep savagings have taken place,” Johnstone explained as he pointed them out. “The Xs for Guillos and La Castille were marked before the attacks took place yesterday and last night.”

  “And then there’s a whole itinerary to England,” the Head Deputy observed.

  “Could be his way of leaving the country. The marked route stays off all main roads. He’d thought it all through.”

  “Hadn’t he just!” the gendarme laughed, leaning right back in his chair.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, M. Johnstone, that M. Massart has a kind of brother in how shall I say England, where he runs the main slaughterhouse in Manchester. The trade runs in the family. Massart had long been planning to join his brother over there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’m a Head Deputy in the gendarmerie, M. Johnstone. Anyway, it’s common knowledge in these parts.”

  “In that case, why did he work out a route on minor roads?”

  The deputy beamed even more broadly.

  “It’s quite unbelievable how much I have to teach you, M. Johnstone! Where you come from people do five hundred kilometres of motorway just to have a beer. But over here people do not necessarily go from A to B in a straight line. Massart spent twenty years as an itinerant bottomer, working the markets, with one day here and one day there. He knows hundreds of villages and thousands of people. The minor roads of France are his home patch.”

  “Why did he give up rushing chairs?”

  “He wanted to come back to his roots. He found a job at the slaughterhouse and came back here six years ago. But you can’t say people put out the flags for him. Hatred of the Massart clan has deep roots around here. It must go back to an old and ugly story that has to do with his how shall I say father, or grandfather, I don’t recall.”

  Johnstone shook his head in a way that showed his impatience.

  “And the Xs?” he asked.

  The Head Deputy smiled as he tapped the map with his fingertip.

  “This whole rectangle here – between the mountain range and the main road, and the gorges of the rivers Daluis and La Tinée – is Massart’s pick-up area for the abattoir at Digne. Saint-Victor, Pierrefort, Guillos, Ventebrune and La Castille are where you’ll find his main suppliers of lambs for the slaughter. That’s what your Xs are.”

  Johnstone folded up his map without saying a word.

  “Ignorance, M. Johnstone, is the mother of the maddest ideas.”

  Johnstone put the map back in his pocket and gathered up his documents.

  “So there’s not the faintest chance of an investigation?”

  The Head Deputy shook his head.

  “Not the faintest,” he agreed. “We’ll proceed in the normal way with a search that we’ll keep up until there’s no chance of finding him alive. But I fear that the how shall I say mountain has already had the better of him.”

  He held out his hand to Johnstone without standing up. The trapper shook it in silence and began to leave the room.

  “One moment, please,” said the Head Deputy.

  “Yes?’

  “What exactly does ‘bullshit’ mean?”

  “It means cow-crap, bison-dung, and bloody nonsense.”

  “Thank you for this information.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Johnstone opened the door and went out.

  “He’s not very civilised,” the Head Deputy remarked.

  “They’re all like that over there,” Lemirail explained to his superior. “All of them. They’re not bad folk, but they’re rough. Not refined. Not at all.”

  “Plain ignorant,” said the Head Deputy.

  XV

  CAMILLE DID NOT switch on the light. Johnstone was grabbing a bite in the greyness before setting off again to the Mercantour. Mercier was expecting him, so were Augustus and Electre, so was the whole crowd. He wanted to trap rabbits for the old paterfamilias and to see the others at sunrise. He would come back down later for the fat lady’s funeral, or so he had said. He was grim-faced and sick at heart as he chewed his sandwich.

  “That stupid Head Deputy is too big for his bloody boots,” he muttered to himself. “He can’t bear anyone knowing more than he does. Can’t stomach an ignorant Canadian having anything at all to teach him about a local. Because he thinks all Canadians are ignorant and smear themselves with bear-fat. But he stinks of sweat.”

  “Maybe things will ease off,” Camille said.

  “Things aren’t going to ease off at all. Only after Massart has had his wolf savage a dozen women – if he doesn’t manage to murder them with his own bare hands – will they get off their backsides and do something.”

  “I think he’ll stick to sheep,” Camille said. “He killed Suzanne in self-defence. Maybe he’ll make a beeline for Manchester and stop. It was village life that made him go crazy.”

  Johnstone looked at her and stroked her hair.

  “You’re really weird,” he said. “You see no evil anywhere. I’m afraid you’re blind.”

  “Could be,” Camille shrugged, sounding ruffled.

  “Haven’t you understood what’s going on? Have you really not understood?”

  “I’ve understood as much as you have.”

  “No, you haven’t, Camille. You haven’t understood a thing. You haven’t twigged that Massart murdered only female sheep. He never touched a wether or a lamb, and certainly never any tetchy rams. Camille, he only ever goes for ewes. But that passed you by completely.”

  “It could have,” said Camille, who was in fact beginning to grasp what had quite passed her by.

  “And the reason you missed it is because you’re not a ram. You don’t see the female in a ewe. So you aren’t aware of the sexual violence in the savagings. You think Massart’s going to stop. My poor darling. Massart can’t stop. Don’t you see that the stupid slaughterer is basically a rapist?”

  Camille nodded. She was beginning to see.

  “Now that he’s upgraded from ewes to women, do you really think he’s going to calm down when he gets to Manchester? For heaven’s sake, he’s not going to slack off one bit! He’s not got the slightest chance of a spot of peace. He’ll go on seeking whom he may devour. Massart may have no body hair and he may not be carrying a cutting tool, but he’s got his wolf with him, and the wolf is a hundred times hairier than any man, and has jaws ten times sharper than any knife. He’ll let his own beast lose on the women he chooses and watch it gnaw their flesh in his stead.”

  Johnstone stood up and shook his hair with a jerk, as if to dispel all that violence. He smiled as he put his arms around Camille.

  “That’s how it is,” he whispered. “Animal life.”

  Johnstone disappeared from sight down the road, but Camille went on sitting where she was for another fifteen minutes, deep in silent thought, besieged by unpleasant images.

  Music time. She switched on the synthesiser and put on the headphones. She still had two themes to come up with before she could finish episode eight of the romantic soap.

  The only way she could compose music of this kind to order was to bury herself in the emotional lives of the characters in the soap, but given the silliness of the scrapes they got into, that was no easy task. T
he plot was based entirely on the dramatic friction between two dilemmas. On the one hand you had a middle-aged aristocrat recently retired from the military who had sworn never to remarry because of some unexplained tragedy in his past; and on the other, a much younger female classics teacher who’d sworn never to love another man because of a similarly unidentified upset in her past. The aristocrat spends his time giving an education to his two children within the confines of his estate with its castle in the valley of the Loire (it wasn’t clear why these kids couldn’t go to school). Which is how he comes across the classics teacher. Fine. From which there arises an unspoken, unexpected, and irresistible physical attraction between the squire and the schoolmarm, putting the protagonists’ oaths of celibacy to a pretty demanding test.

  That was where Camille was up to and much of the time she felt stuck. She was as sick of the squire pacing back and forth before the flaming logs in the baronial fireplace as she was of the teacher standing at the blackboard, both of them visibly holding themselves back with clenched fists from their natural inclinations. Camille detested the pair of them. The best mental trick she had found for allowing herself to compose a halfway decent sound-track was to replace the laird and the lady teacher with Mother Water Rat and Father Water Rat from the storybooks she loved as a child, when she still believed in love. She could close her eyes and summon up an image of Father Rat dressed in workman’s overalls standing proudly on his firm hind legs and gazing amorously at Mother Rat in her red blouse, while the two Baby Rats gambolled at their feet gobbling up Greek verbs. She could work better with that in her mind. She could create suspense and tension over an unexplained absence of M. or Mme Rat just as she could warm up the emotions when they got back together again. The producers had so far expressed satisfaction with the tapes she was sending in. Very good fit with the subject, they said.

  The death of Suzanne had made it damn hard to bother about Mummy Water Rat, Daddy Water Rat and their two juniors getting all tangled up over nothing at all.

  Camille paused quite often with her fingers at rest on the keyboard. To her mind, what had really upset Johnstone as far as Massart was concerned was not just the horrible savagings, but the fact that he was making use of a wolf. He was bringing the beasts into disrepute, he was demeaning them, he was cheapening them. Massart had done more harm to the cause of the wolves in a week than sheep farmers had done in six years’ lobbying. Johnstone would never forgive the man for that.

  But there was nothing that could be done about it now. Massart was on the road, the gendarmes were looking for his remains on Mont Vence, Johnstone was back up in the Mercantour, and Camille was once more confronted with a quartet of weepy mammals.

  It was only one in the morning, but she took off her headphones, closed her manuscript book, lay down on the double bed and opened The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft at the page describing an Emery grinder Ø125mm 850W with left and right handles & worn brush safety cut-out. Now that would have sorted out a lot of the classics teacher’s little problems, if only she had taken the trouble to find out about it.

  There was a gentle knock at the door, twice over. Camille sat up with a start. She kept dead still and waited. Then two more knocks as well as rustling from the other side of the wooden panel. No sound of voice, nobody calling. Another short interval, then two more knocks. Camille saw the door latch going down then coming back up again. She slipped out of bed with her heart pounding. She had the door locked from the inside, but anyone who really wanted to get in could easily shove a shoulder through the windowpane. Massart? Massart could have seen them when they went into his shack. Or even when they went to talk to the police. Who’s to say that Massart hadn’t waited for Johnstone to leave before coming to deal with her, in the dark, man to woman? With the wolf?

  She made herself take deep breaths and tiptoed over to her toolbag. Dear lovely old bag, with your hammers, your heavy-duty universal pliers, your metal oil-squirter and its reservoir of engine oil. She took the oilcan in her left hand and a mallet in her right, and moved carefully towards the telephone. She imagined the hairless man was there on the other side of that door, quietly seeking a means of entering the room.

  “Camille?” Soliman called out suddenly. “Are you there?”

  Camille dropped her arms and opened the door. In the shadows she could make out the young man’s silhouette and the bewilderment on his face.

  “Were you mending something?” he asked. “At this time of night?”

  “Why didn’t you say it was you?”

  “I didn’t know if you were awake or not. Why didn’t you answer the knock?” Sol stared at the oilcan and the mallet. “I gave you a scare, right?”

  “Maybe,” Camille said. “Now come on in.”

  “I’m not on my own.” Sol hesitated. “Watchee’s with me.”

  Camille raised her eyes and made out the silhouette of the ancient, straight-backed shepherd standing four paces behind the young man. Watchee’s being down in the village and not up on the sheep farm meant that something quite exceptional was under way.

  “What on earth has happened?” she whispered.

  “Nothing’s happened. We want to see you.”

  Camille drew back to let Sol and Watchee come in. The old man greeted her stiffly, with a nod of the head. Camille put down the oilcan and the mallet, though her hands were still shaking, and waved them to a seat. The old man’s stare made her feel awkward. She got out three glasses and filled them to the brim with a brandy that had no grapes in it. There had not been any grapes since Suzanne died.

  “What were you scared of?” Soliman asked.

  Camille shrugged.

  “Nothing. I just got the shivers, that’s all.”

  “But you’re not a scaredy-cat, usually.”

  “Sometimes I am.”

  “What were you scared of?” Soliman insisted.

  “Wolves. I was frightened of the wolves. Satisfied?”

  “Do you know any wolves who knock twice at the front door?”

  “All right, Sol. What’s it matter to you, anyway?”

  “You were scared of Massart.”

  “Massart? The one who is lost on Mont Vence?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why should I be scared of him? Apparently he’s come a cropper on the mountainside and the gendarmes are out searching for him.”

  “You were scared of Massart, that’s all there is to it.”

  Soliman swallowed a slug of brandy and Camille squinted at him.

  “How come you know so much?”

  “On the village square they’re talking about nothing else,” Sol answered tensely. “Seems you and the trapper went to Puygiron to tell the flics that Massart was a werewolf, that he’d savaged the sheep, murdered my ma, and was on the run.”

  Camille said nothing. She and Johnstone had overtaken the locals and made an accusation against one of their number. There had obviously been a leak. And they were going to pay for that. She gulped down a mouthful of spirits and looked up at Soliman.

  “It was supposed to be confidential.”

  “Well, the confidence was broken. It’s the sort of leak a plumber can’t fix.”

  “Well, that’s just tough, Soliman,” she said, standing up. “It’s true. Massart is a murderer. It was he who drew Suzanne into the trap. I don’t give a damn whether it suits you or not, it’s the truth.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Watchee said, all of a sudden. “The truth it is.”

  His voice was muffled and guttural.

  “It is the truth,” Soliman repeated, leaning forward towards Camille, who sat down again in some doubt. “He saw through it all, he did,” the young man went on, gabbling. “The trapper knows about animals and he knows about men. The wolf would not have attacked my ma, my ma would never have cornered a wolf, and Massart’s mastiff is supposed to have come back down from the mountain. Massart has run away with his dog because Massart killed my ma, because she knew who he was.”

&nb
sp; “A werewolf!” said Watchee, slapping the table with the flat of his hand.

  Soliman was getting steadily more excited.

  “And they’re saying the flics won’t even investigate, they didn’t believe a word the trapper said. Is that true, Camille?”

  Camille nodded.

  “No two ways? They really won’t lift a finger?”

  “Not a pinkie,” Camille confirmed. “They’re looking for him dead or alive on Mont Vence, and when they don’t find him in a few days’ time they’ll call off the search and close the case.”

  “Do you know what he’s going to do next, Camille?”

  “I suppose he’ll follow the road until he gets to England, killing a few ewes as he goes.”

  “But I reckon he’s going to kill a lot more than a few ewes.”

  “Aha. You think so too?”

  “Who else thinks that, then?”

  “Lawrence.”

  “M. Johnstone is right.”

  “Because Massart is a werewolf!” Watchee proclaimed, bringing the flat of his hand down on the table again.

  Soliman finished his glass.

  “Camille,” he said, “am I the sort of guy who would let his mother’s murderer get away to England?”

  Camille looked at Soliman with his dark, shining eyes and his quivering lips.

  “No, you don’t really look the part,” she conceded.

  “Do you know what happens to the poor souls who’ve been killed without being avenged?”

  “No, Sol. How am I supposed to know that?”

  “They rot in the stinking crocodile swamp, and never can their spirit pull itself out of the mud.”

  Watchee put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Can’t be sure it’s quite like that,” he pointed out, in a whisper.

  “All right,” Soliman said. “I’m not even sure they’re in a swamp.”

  “Don’t make up any of your African stories, Sol,” said Watchee, still whispering. “It’ll confuse things for the young lady.”

  Soliman turned his eyes back to Camille.

  “So, do you know what we’re going to do, Watchee and me?”

  Camille raised her eyebrows and waited for the rest of it. Soliman was overexcited, and that worried her. He was usually a quiet young man. Last Sunday he had locked himself in the toilet; this evening he was out and about but almost beside himself. Suzanne’s death had unhinged the youngster and shaken the old man.