by Fred Vargas
“Out where, Lizbeth?”
“Where you said when you rang him. Haven’t you got enough guys in the police already? Decambrais’s not in the reserve, you know.”
“But I did not ring him, Lizbeth.”
“It was one of your officers,” Lizbeth declared. “He was calling for you. I’m not crazy, it was me who took down the message with the meeting place.”
“Quai de Jemmapes?”
“Opposite number 57, at 11.30 p.m.”
Adamsberg nodded his head in the dark.
“Lizbeth, Decambrais must not leave his room, not by an inch, not for any reason whatever, no matter who says he’s calling.”
“So it wasn’t your call, right?”
“No, it wasn’t, Lizbeth. Stay with him. I’ll send you a relief officer.”
Adamsberg hung up and then called the squad.
“Brigadier Gardon here,” said the voice at the other end.
“Gardon, send a man down to Saint-Louis A & E, to stand guard on the ward where Hervé Ducouëdic is staying. And another two to relieve the team watching Marie-Belle’s flat in Rue de la Convention. No, no change, just keep close watch on the building. When she goes out in the morning, bring her in to me.”
“Remand in custody, sir?”
“No, just to help with inquiries. How’s the old lady getting on?”
“She had some kind of a discussion with her grandson, through the bars of his cell. Now she’s gone to sleep.”
“What kind of a discussion, Gardon?”
“It was a game, actually, sir. Like charades. We used to call it Chinese portraits. You ask questions like ‘If he was a colour, what colour would he be?,’ ‘If he was an animal, what animal would he be?,’ ‘If he was a noise,’ and so on. You have to guess the person being hidden behind the answers. It’s dead hard, sir.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re worried about the future, does it?”
“No, sir, no change on that. The old lady actually cheered the station up a bit. Heller-Deville is a decent fellow too, he shared his girdle cakes with us. Usually Narnie makes them with the skin of the milk, but seeing as you can’t –”
“Don’t tell me, Gardon. She uses cream. Have we got the lab results for Clémentine’s charcoal?”
“An hour ago. I’m sorry sir, it’s no go. Not a trace of apple wood. It’s ash, elm and acacia, mixed stuff you can get from any firewood supplier.”
“That’s a bugger.”
“I know, sir.”
Adamsberg began to shiver in his sticky wet clothes as he went back to the car. Estalère was at the wheel, Retancourt was in the back handcuffed to the prisoner. He leaned through the side window.
“Estalère, was it you who picked up my shoes?” he asked. “I can’t see them anywhere.”
“No, sir, I haven’t seen them.”
“Well, I’m not going to fuss about that,” said Adamsberg as he got into the front seat. “We can’t spend all night looking for them.”
Estalère drove off. The young man in the back had stopped protesting, as if the imposing mass of Retancourt had depressed his spirits.
“Drop me off at my place,” said Adamsberg. “Tell the night roster to start interviewing this Antoine Hurfin Heller-Deville Journot or whatever his name is.”
“Hurfin,” growled the back-seat passenger. “Antoine Hurfin.”
“Run an ID check, go through his flat, check his alibis, the whole works. I’m going to concentrate on this bloody charcoal.”
“Where, sir?”
“In bed.”
Adamsberg lay down in the dark and closed his eyes. Through his fatigue and the whirl of the day’s events, he saw three things outstanding, or standing out. Clémentine’s cakes, his drowned mobile and the charcoal. He put the girdle cakes out of his mind, they weren’t relevant to the investigation, even if they were the flourish that kept the monger and his forebear in a state of mental calm. His waterlogged mobile kept coming back to him, like flotsam on the rising tide, like a lost hope, like one of those wrecks that Joss Le Guern put into his Everyman’s History of France.
The good ship Adamsberg Mobilphone, long-life battery, under ballast out of Rue Delambre, struck the bank of the Saint-Martin Canal and sank at her mooring. All crew lost. Female passenger, Camille Forestier, unaccounted for.
OK, don’t ring, Camille. Off you go. Who cares anyway.
That left the charcoal.
That’s where they were at. Almost back at the beginning.
Damascus was a real expert on the plague and he’d made a bloody great howler. The two statements were mutually contradictory. Either Damascus knew next to nothing about bubonic plague and he’d been making a widespread and popular mistake by smearing his victims with charcoal. Or else Damascus knew what he was about, in which case he would never have dared make such a blunder. A fellow like Damascus couldn’t have done that. Not a guy who had such religious respect for historic documents that he indicated explicitly every omission he made. Damascus didn’t have to put in those points of suspension that made the town crier’s job so much harder. That was the key to it all: those dot dot dots set down to blind us and also to signal an unflinching scholarly respect for originals. The respect of a historian of the plague. Who doesn’t mess around with the words of an Authority, who doesn’t blend them to suit as if they were plain birdfeed. Who honours and respects Authority, who treats it with reverence, like a true believer who would not think of taking the Lord’s name in vain. Someone who uses dot dot dots like that wouldn’t go and smear bodies with charcoal, he wouldn’t commit a bloody great howler. It would be an offence and an insult to the scourge of the Lord in the hands of a worshipper. If you think you’re the lord of a cult then you are necessarily a follower. Damascus made use of the Journot force. He was the last man alive who would mock it.
* * *
Adamsberg got up and wandered around his two-room flat. Damascus had not fiddled his historical sources. Damascus had put in those points of suspension. Ergo, Damascus had not charcoaled the corpses.
Ergo, Damascus was not the murderer. The charcoal distinctly obscured the strangulation marks. The smearing was the final flourish, after death, and it hadn’t been done by Damascus. No charcoaling, no strangling. Nor had he undressed them. Nor had he forced the doors.
Adamsberg stood by his telephone. All that Damascus had done was to carry out what he believed in. He was a lord of the plague, he’d sent in the letters, he’d painted the 4s, he’d released plague fleas. Messages forewarning of a recurrence of a real plague which would relieve the man of his burden. Messages that set off a mass panic, reinforcing his belief that he had got his lordship back. Messages spreading confusion, leaving him with his hands free to act. The 4s to reduce the amount of damage he thought he was doing and salving the conscience of a phantom killer beset with scruples. A lord doesn’t make mistakes about who his victims are. The 4s were necessary to check the insects’ appetites, to keep the aim on target, to avoid collateral damage. No way was Damascus going to slaughter a whole block of flats for the sake of killing one of its inhabitants. For a Journot, that kind of clumsiness would have been simply unforgivable.
That’s what Damascus had done. He’d believed in what he’d done. He’d unleashed his force on the people who had destroyed him so he could be born again. He’d released harmless fleas under five front doors. Clémentine had “finished the job” by letting out fleas under the doors of the three remaining thugs. The victimless crimes of the self-mystified plague-monger added up to no more than that.
But someone was doing real murder behind Damascus’s back. Someone who’d donned the cloak of his phantom and was standing in for him, but for real. Somebody with a practical cast of mind who didn’t believe a word of the plague story and who didn’t know the first thing about the disease. Someone who believed that people who died of bubonic plague turned black. Someone who could make a bloody great howler. Someone who was pushing Damascus into the hole he’d
dug for himself, driving him inexorably into the pit. The operation looked simple enough. Damascus thought he was dealing out death, and the other man was committing murder on his behalf. The case against Damascus was overwhelming, it slotted together like a Meccano set – what with the rat fleas, the charcoal and everything else in between, the evidence alone would get him sent down for his natural life. Who would have the courage to base a counter-case on a mere handful of dot dot dots? You might as well ask a twig to stop a tidal wave. No juror was going to hang his decision on those points of suspension.
Decambrais had twigged. He’d tripped on the contradiction between the monger’s meticulous erudition and the crass mistake of his finishing touch. He’d tripped on the charcoal and he was about to deduce the only possible explanation: there were two of them. A monger and a murderer. And Decambrais talked too much down at the Viking, after dinner. The murderer had realised that. He’d seen what his howler was leading to. Only a matter of hours before the old schoolteacher would work it all out in his head and then go blab to the flics. It was staring him in the face: the old man had to be made to keep his mouth shut. No time for subtlety. So what was left? A nasty accident, falling in water, one of life’s shitty turns.
Hurfin. He must have hated Damascus badly enough to want to bring him down. Who’d got close to Marie-Belle just so as to pump the dim sister for information. His face was weak and lifeless, it made him look easy to push around, but underneath he was fearless and decisive, and could chuck an old man in a lake without a second thought. A quick and brutal killer. But if that’s what he was, why hadn’t he dealt with Damascus directly in the first place? Why kill five others beforehand?
Adamsberg went over to the window, leaned his forehead on the pane, and looked down on the street in darkness.
What if he got a new mobile but kept the old number?
He went through the pockets of his sopping-wet jacket, got out the gizmo and took it apart to let its inner organs dry out. You never know.
But what if the killer just could not kill Damascus? Because he would get lumbered with the crime straight away? The way a penniless husband is automatically fingered if his wealthy wife gets done in? That had to mean that Hurfin was Damascus’s husband. The penniless husband of an heiress called Damascus.
Or the heir. To the Heller-Deville millions.
Adamsberg called the squad on his land line.
“What’s he coughed up?” he asked.
“He’s sticking to the old man attacking him and legitimate self-defence. He’s a tough bugger. Very tough.”
“Keep on at him. Is that Gardon on the line?”
“Lieutenant Mordent, sir.”
“He’s our man, Mordent. He strangled the four blokes and the girl.”
“That’s not what he’s saying, sir.”
“But it’s what he did. Has he got an alibi?”
“At home, sir, at Romorantin.”
“Take it to pieces, Mordent. Get right to the bottom of the Romorantin story. Look for the link between Hurfin and Heller-Deville’s money pile. Hang on a minute, lieutenant. Remind me of his first name.”
“Antoine.”
“Old man Heller-Deville was called Antoine. Wake up Danglard, get him down to Romorantin at the double. He’s got to start poking around down there at first light. Danglard knows all there is to know about how families function, especially when they don’t. Tell him to find out whether Antoine Hurfin isn’t one of Heller-Deville’s sons. Illegitimate. Or paternity denied.”
“Why should he do that, sir?”
“Because that’s who he is, lieutenant.”
When he woke up Adamsberg cast his eye on his gutted mobile phone, all undressed and dry. He used his home phone to ring the twenty-four hour answering service for nuisance callers of all kinds, and asked for a replacement handset on his old washed-out number.
“Can’t do that, sir,” a weary female voice replied.
“You can. The electronic bit has dried out. All I have to do is put it into another handset.”
“Sorry, sir, we can’t do that. It’s not a piece of laundry, it’s an electronic chip which cannot be –’
“Enough of this nonsense, miss. I need a new handset with my old number on it.”
“Why don’t you want to have a new number?”
“Because I’m expecting an urgent call within the next ten to fifteen years.” Then he added, “Brigade criminelle”.
“Oh, I see,” said the voice, clearly impressed. “I’ll have it brought over within the next hour.”
He hung up, hoping his phone chip would turn out less soggy than Damascus’s ineffectual plot.
XXXVII
DANGLARD CALLED WHEN Adamsberg was just finishing getting dressed. He’d put on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt that were almost identical to what he’d been wearing the day before. Adamsberg was well on the way to developing a uniform wardrobe that allowed no room for selection or for doubt, so he wouldn’t ever have to bother his head about matching or even choosing what to wear. On the other hand he hadn’t managed to track down an equivalent pair of shoes in the back of the cupboard. All he’d got were hiking boots, not suitable for clumping around the streets of Paris, so he ended up putting on a pair of leather sandals, which he wore without socks.
“I’m down at Romorantin,” said Danglard, “and I’m half asleep.”
“You can sleep for a week when you’ve finished going through the place. We’re nearly there, Danglard, we’re almost touching the wire. Don’t let the Hurfin trail go cold.”
“I’ve finished with Hurfin. I’m going to have a nap, and then get on the road back to Paris.”
“Later. Have a triple espresso and carry on.”
“I’ve carried on and I’ve come to the end of it. All I had to do was interview the mother, she’s completely open about the fact that Antoine Hurfin is Heller-Deville’s son, eight years younger than Damascus, paternity denied. Heller-Deville has –”
“Lifestyle, Danglard? Rolling in it?”
“No, sir, very modest, down-at-heel. Antoine works at a locksmith’s and he has a room over the shop. Heller-Deville has –”
“Perfect. Get in the car, you can tell me the rest when you get here. Did you get anywhere with the scientist thug?”
“He finally popped up on screen late last night. It’s Châtellerault. Messelet Fabricators, a huge plant out in the industrial park. World’s largest suppliers to the aircraft industry.”
“That’s a big fish you’ve caught, Danglard. Does Messelet actually own the firm?”
“Yes, the owner’s called Rodolphe Messelet, he’s got degrees in mechanical engineering, a university chair and his own research lab, as well as being CEO and sole proprietor of nine industrial patents.”
“One of them for unshatterable superlight steel?
“Shatterproof, sir. Among others. That patent was granted seven years and seven months ago.”
“That’s him, Danglard. He’s the one who set up the chamber of horrors and the theft.”
“Of course it is. He’s also a provincial bigwig and a famous captain of French industry. Friends in high places, sir.”
“They’ll dry their tears.”
“I doubt if the Ministry will back us up, sir. Too much money at stake, not to mention national interest.”
“We don’t have to ask permission, Danglard, nor even let Brézillon know ahead of time. Leak it to the media and they’ll have the animal buried under his own shit within forty-eight hours. He’ll have no option but to drive into a large tree. We’ll scrape him off the courthouse floor later on.”
“Perfect,” said Danglard. “Now, as I was saying, Madame Hurfin –”
“Later, Danglard. Her son’s expecting me.”
The night officers had left their report lying in Adamsberg’s in-tray. Antoine Hurfin, age twenty-three, place of birth Vétigny, residing at Romorantin, department of Loir-et-Cher, had stuck obstinately to his original story and had phoned
a solicitor who’d advised him off the cuff to keep his mouth shut. Since when Antoine Hurfin hadn’t said a word.
Adamsberg went and stood at the door of Antoine’s cell. The youngster was sitting on the bunk. He was clenching his teeth; dozens of tiny muscles were twitching all over his bony face; and he kept on cracking the joints of his slender fingers.
“Antoine,” Adamsberg said, “you are the son of Antoine. You are a Heller-Deville without anything to show for it. You’ve not got the name, you’ve not got a father, you’ve not got the dough. But you probably got all the thrashings and misery you could take. You’re a rough customer, too. You thumped your big brother Damascus, the lucky boy who got the name. Your half-brother. Who got pushed around as much as you did, in case you weren’t aware of it. Same father, same bruiser.”
Hurfin did not respond, save for giving Adamsberg a look revealing vulnerability and profound hatred at the same time.
“Your solicitor told you to keep your mouth shut and you’re following his orders. You’re obedient and self-controlled, Antoine. That’s odd, in a murderer. If I came into your cell, I don’t know if you’d knock me over and slit my throat, or curl up in a ball in the corner. Or do both. I don’t even know if you’re aware of what you’ve done. You’re all action, and I don’t know what’s on your mind. Whereas Damascus is all mind, and no action. You’re both destructive, but you do it with your hands and he does it in his head. Are you listening to me, Antoine?”
The lad shivered but didn’t move an inch.
Adamsberg let go of the bars of the door and moved away, feeling as upset by the twitching, tortured face of Antoine as he had been by Damascus’s imperturbable blankness. What a wonderful father you must have been, Mr Heller-Deville.
Clémentine and Damascus were at the other end of the cell block. They’d begun a game of poker, sliding the cards to each other on the floor, through the gap under the bottom bars. Since they didn’t have any chips they used girdle cakes for stakes.
“Did you get any sleep, Clémentine?” Adamsberg enquired as he unlocked the door.
“Can’t grumble,” the old lady replied. “Not like my own bed, but a change is as good as a rest, that’s what I say. When can we go home, me and the boy?”
