by Fred Vargas
The other officers, however, had not missed the considerable opportunity offered by the arrival of a New Recruit. Which was why Veyrenc found himself stuck here in the broom cupboard on the seventh floor of a building, carrying out an excruciatingly boring surveillance duty. Normally, he should have been relieved regularly, and at first that had happened. Then the relief had become more erratic, with the excuse that X was depressive, Y might fall asleep, Z suffered from claustrophobia, or irritation or backache. As a result, he was now the only officer still mounting guard from morning to night, sitting on a wooden chair.
Veyrenc stretched out his legs as best he could. Newcomers usually get treated this way, and he was not particularly downcast. With a pile of books at his feet, a pocket ashtray in his jacket, a view of the clouds through the skylight and his pen in working order, he could almost have been happy here. His mind was at rest, his solitude was overcome, his objective reached.
1 The events in Canada which prompted this protection, and are referred to occasionally hereafter, are described in Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand (Knopf Canada, 2007).
V
DR LAGARDE HAD MADE LIFE COMPLICATED BY ASKING FOR A DROP OF barley water in her café au lait, but at last the drinks had arrived at their table.
‘What’s the matter with Dr Roman?’ she asked as she stirred the frothy liquid.
Adamsberg made a gesture of ignorance. ‘An attack of the vapours, he says. Like ladies in the nineteenth century.’
‘Gracious me. What kind of a diagnosis is that?’
‘His own. He’s not suffering from depression, no serious symptoms. But all he can do is drag himself from one sofa to another, between a siesta and the crossword.’
‘Gracious me,’ said Ariane again, with a frown. ‘But Roman’s a tough guy, and a very competent pathologist. He loves his work.’
‘Yes, but there it is, he’s suffering from an attack of the vapours. We hesitated a long time before getting a replacement.’
‘And why did you ask for me?’
‘I didn’t ask for you.’
‘I was told the Serious Crime Squad of Paris was clamouring for me.’
‘Well, it wasn’t at my request. But I’m glad you’re here now.’
‘To get these two guys away from the Drug Squad.’
‘According to Mortier, they aren’t just two guys. They’re two villains, and one of them’s black. Mortier’s head of the Drug Squad. We don’t get on.’
‘Is that why you’re refusing to hand these bodies over?’
‘No, I’m not chasing after bodies for the sake of it. It’s just that those two should come to me.’
‘As you said before. So tell me about it.’
‘We don’t know anything about them. They were killed some time in the night between Friday and Saturday, at the Porte de la Chapelle. To Mortier, that means only one thing: dope. According to him, blacks do nothing all day long but deal drugs, that’s all their life consists of. And there was a syringe mark on the inside elbow in both cases.’
‘I saw that. The routine analysis didn’t turn anything up. So what do you want me to do?’
‘Take a look and tell me what was in the syringe.’
‘Why don’t you buy the drugs hypothesis? No shortage of narcotics round La Chapelle.’
‘The mother of the big black guy tells me her son never touched the stuff. Didn’t use it, didn’t deal it. The other one’s mother doesn’t know whether he did or not.’
‘And you’re ready to take the word of their old mothers?’
‘My own mother always used to say I had a head like a sieve, the wind went in one side and came out the other. She was right. And as I told you, they had dirt under their fingernails.’
‘Like a lot of no-hopers round the Flea Market.’
Ariane said ‘no-hopers’ in the pitying tone of the well-off and indifferent, for whom poverty is a fact of life rather than a problem.
‘It’s not just dirt, Ariane, it’s soil. And these guys didn’t go in for gardening. They lived in squalid rooms, in godawful tower blocks, without heating and lighting, the sort of place no-hopers get from the city council. With their old mothers.’
Dr Lagarde was staring at the wall. When Ariane was observing a corpse, her eyes narrowed to a fixed position, as if they were high-precision microscope lenses. Adamsberg felt sure that if he examined her pupils at that moment he would have found perfect representations of the two bodies, the white one in the left eye, the black one in the right.
‘Well, I can tell you one thing that might help you, Jean-Baptiste. It was a woman that killed them.’
Adamsberg put his cup down, hesitating to contradict the doctor for the second time in his life.
‘Ariane, did you see the size of them?’
‘What do you think I look at in the mortuary? Old photographs? I saw your guys. Big lads, who could lift up a wardrobe with one finger, yes. Even so, they were both killed by a woman.’
‘Explain.’
‘Come back tonight. I’ve got a few more things to check.’
Ariane stood up, and put on over her suit the clinical overall she had left on the peg. The owners of cafés near the morgue did not appreciate doctors in white coats dropping in. It put off the other customers.
‘I can’t tonight. I’m going to a concert.’
‘All right, come round after the concert. I work late – I expect you remember.’
‘No, I can’t, it’s in Normandy.’
‘Gracious me,’ said Ariane, stopping still. ‘What’s on the programme?’
‘No idea.’
‘You’re going all the way to Normandy to listen to it and you don’t even know what they’re playing? Or perhaps you’re trailing after a woman?’
‘I’m not trailing after her, I’m politely accompanying her.’
‘Gracious me. Well, come by tomorrow. Not in the morning, though. I sleep late.’
‘Yes, I remember. Not before eleven, then?’
‘Not before midday. Everything gets accentuated as time goes by.’
Ariane perched back on her chair, as if in temporary hesitation.
‘There’s something I’d like to tell you. But I don’t know if I really want to.’
Silence, however long it lasted, had never embarrassed Adamsberg. He waited, letting his thoughts run towards the evening concert. Five minutes went past, or ten, he couldn’t have said.
‘Seven months later,’ said Ariane, having taken a sudden decision, ‘the murderer made a complete confession.’
‘The one in Le Havre, you mean?’ said Adamsberg, looking up.
‘Yes, the man with the twelve rats. He hanged himself in his cell ten days after that. You’d got it right, not me.’
‘And you weren’t too happy about that?’
‘No, and neither were my bosses. I missed my promotion. I had to wait another five years. You’d practically given me the solution on a plate, and I hadn’t wanted to hear what you were saying.’
‘You didn’t tell me about it.’
‘I’d forgotten your name. In fact I’d deliberately wiped you out of my mind. With your glass of beer.’
‘And you’re still angry with me?’
‘No, actually. It was thanks to the rat man that I started my research on dissociation. Have you read my book?’
‘Some of it,’ Adamsberg prevaricated.
‘I invented the term “dissociated killers”.’
‘Yes, I remember – I’ve heard of them,’ Adamsberg corrected himself. ‘People who are split in two.’
The doctor pulled a face.
‘Let’s just say individuals who are made up of two distinct parts: one that kills, one that leads a normal life – and both halves are almost entirely unconscious of the other’s existence. It’s quite rare. For instance, that district nurse they arrested in Asnières, two years ago. This kind of murderer is dangerous, and recidivist, and almost impossible to spot. Nobody suspects them, not even themse
lves, and they go to extraordinary lengths to stop the other half of themselves from finding out.’
‘I remember the nurse. So, according to you, she was a dissociated killer, was she?’
‘Almost the classic case. If she hadn’t crossed the path of some genius in the police force, she’d have gone on killing people until the day she died, and denied it to herself. Thirty-two victims in forty years, without turning a hair.’
‘Thirty-three,’ Adamsberg corrected her.
‘Thirty-two. I’m well placed to tell you, I interviewed her for hours.’
‘It was thirty-three, Ariane. I arrested her.’
The doctor paused, then smiled.
‘Ah, did you now?’
‘So when the Le Havre killer cut open those rats, he was the other part of himself. Number Two, the murderous one?’ said Adamsberg.
‘Are you interested in dissociation?’
‘That case of the nurse still haunts me, and the Le Havre man sort of belongs to me too. What was his name?’
‘Hubert Sandrin.’
‘And when he confessed? Was he still the other one then?’
‘No, that would be impossible, Jean-Baptiste: the other one never denounces himself.’
‘But Number One couldn’t confess, because he didn’t know about the murder.’
‘That’s the point. For a few moments, the dissociation stopped working and the barrier between the two selves opened up, like a crack in a wall. And, through the crack, Hubert Number One saw the other one, Hubert Number Two, and was overcome with horror.’
‘And that sometimes happens?’
‘Hardly ever. But dissociation is rarely perfect. There are always a few leaks. Odd words leap from one side of the wall to the other. The murderer doesn’t notice, but an analyst can surprise them. And if the jump is too abrupt, it can cause a breakdown, a personality crash. That’s what happened to Hubert Sandrin.’
‘What about the nurse?’
‘Her wall has stayed intact. She has no idea what she’s done.’
Adamsberg seemed to be thinking, rubbing his cheek with his finger.
‘That surprises me,’ he said quietly. ‘It seemed to me she knew perfectly well why I was arresting her. She came along like a lamb, without a word.’
‘Part of her did, which explains her consent. But she has no memory of her actions.’
‘Tell me something. How did the guy in Le Havre find out about his other self?’
Ariane smiled broadly, flicking her cigarette ash to the ground.
‘It was because of you and your rats. At the time, the local press made a bit of a song and dance about them.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Well, Hubert Number Two, the murderer – let’s call him Omega – had kept newspaper cuttings, out of sight of Hubert Number One – let’s call him Alpha.’
‘Until Alpha found the cuttings that Omega had hidden away?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Do you think Omega had wanted that to happen?’
‘No. Alpha simply moved house. The cuttings fell out of a cupboard. And it detonated the explosion.’
‘So if it hadn’t been for my rats,’ Adamsberg summed up quietly, ‘Sandrin wouldn’t have denounced himself. Without his case, you wouldn’t have started working on dissociation. Every psychiatrist and detective in France knows about your studies.’
‘Yes,’ admitted Ariane.
‘So I reckon you owe me a beer.’
‘Certainly.’
‘By the Seine.’
‘OK, if you like.’
‘And, of course, you won’t hand these guys over to the Drug Squad?’
‘It’s the bodies that will decide that, Jean-Baptiste, not you and not me.’
‘The syringe mark, Ariane, and the earth under their nails. Take a look at the earth for me. Tell me if that’s what it is.’
They got up together, as if Adamsberg’s words had been a signal for them to leave. The commissaire walked along the street as if he was strolling aimlessly, and the doctor tried to follow his slow pace, her mind already on the autopsies awaiting her. Adamsberg’s preoccupation puzzled her.
‘There’s something about those bodies that bothers you, isn’t there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not just because of the Drug Squad?’
‘No. It’s just …’ Adamsberg broke off. ‘I’m going this way. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ariane.’
‘It’s just …?’ the doctor insisted.
‘Nothing that will help your analysis.’
‘But tell me anyway.’
‘Just a shade, Ariane, a shade hovering over them, or over me.’
Ariane watched Adamsberg walk away down the avenue, a wayward silhouette, taking no notice of anyone else. She recognised his style from twenty-three years back. The gentle voice, the slow gestures. She had not paid much attention to him when he was young, so she had understood nothing. If she was starting over again, she would listen to his story about the rats. She plunged her hands in the pockets of her overall and set off towards the two bodies waiting to take their place in history. Just a shade hovering over them. Today she could understand that kind of strange remark.
VI
LIEUTENANT VEYRENC TOOK ADVANTAGE OF HIS LONG HOURS IN THE BROOM cupboard to copy out in large handwriting one of Racine’s plays for his grandmother, whose sight was going.
Nobody had ever understood the exclusive passion his grandmother had declared for this author, and no other, when she had been left a war orphan. The family knew that when there was a fire at her convent school, she had rescued a complete edition of Racine, except for the volume containing Phèdre, Esther and Athalie. As if the books had been granted to her by divine intervention, the little country girl had read them over and over, for eleven years. When she’d left the convent, the mother superior had given the volumes to her as a sort of vade-mecum, and his grandmother had gone on reading them, over and over, without changing the order, or ever having the curiosity to seek out Phèdre, Esther and Athalie. She would recite the speeches of this lifelong companion all the time, and the young Veyrenc had grown up hearing the twelve-syllable alexandrines, which had become as natural to his childish ears as if someone were singing around the house.
Unfortunately, he had picked up the habit as well, replying to his grandmother in the same mode – lines twelve syllables long. But since he had not had thousands of verses ingrained in his mind, night after night, he had to invent them. As long as he was living in the family home, it had hardly mattered. But once he was out in the world, this Racinian reflex had cost him dear. He had tried to suppress it by various methods, without success, then had given up the attempt and had gone on versifying unstoppably, muttering like his grandmother, a habit which had exasperated his superior officers. But it had also preserved him in some ways, since encapsulating life in twelve syllables had introduced an extraordinary distance – ‘to no other compared’ – between himself and the hurly-burly of the world. The effort of standing back had always brought him into a calmer and more reflective state and had above all stopped him making irreparable mistakes in the heat of the moment. Racine, despite the intensity of his dramas and his incendiary language, was the best antidote to haste, cooling immediately any temptation to go over the top. Veyrenc had started deliberately using verse this way, realising that his grandmother had contrived similarly to regulate and manage her life. It was a personal medicine – ‘to all others unknown’.
At the moment, his grandmother was unable to take her regular potion, so Veyrenc was copying out Britannicus in big letters for her: He had reached the point when Junie was emerging from her bedchamber,
In the simple array
Of a beauty from sleep summoned forth by the day.
Veyrenc raised his pen from the paper. By the sound of her boots, he could hear the grain of sand coming up the stairs – for the grain of sand always wore a recognisable pair of boots, criss-crossed with leather straps. The g
rain of sand would stop first on the fifth floor, and ring the bell of the flat belonging to her invalid neighbour, bringing her her mail and her lunch. She would then be up on the seventh within a quarter of an hour. The grain of sand, otherwise known as the resident on his landing, was Mlle Forestier, Camille, whom he had now been guarding for nineteen days. According to the little he had been told, she was to be kept under police protection for six months, shielding her from the possible vengeance of a murderous old man. Otherwise, all he knew of her was her name. And that she was bringing up a baby on her own, without any man on the horizon. He could not guess what her occupation was – he hesitated between plumber and musician. About twelve days ago, she had politely requested him to come out of the broom cupboard because she needed to solder a pipe inside it, at ceiling level. He had moved his chair out on to the landing and watched her precise and concentrated gestures, registering the metallic sound of the tools and the flame from her soldering iron. It was during this episode that he had felt himself slipping towards the forbidden and feared chaos. Since then, she had brought him a cup of hot coffee twice a day at eleven and four.
He heard her put down her bag on the fifth floor. The idea of leaving his broom cupboard that moment once and for all, so that he would never see this young woman again, made him rise from his chair. He tensed his arms, looked up at the skylight and considered his face reflected in the dusty pane. Abnormal hair, ordinary features, I’m ugly, I’m invisible. Veyrenc took a deep breath and muttered to himself:
‘But I see that thy soul is filled with sudden fear,
Thou, the victor of Troy, hero without a peer,
Who gained both the city and people with great art.
Can a woman’s fair face make tremble that brave heart?’
No, no way. Veyrenc sat down again calmly, cooled by his four lines of dramatic verse. Sometimes it took six or eight, other times two were enough. He took up his copying task once more, feeling pleased with himself. Grains of sand pass, birds fly away, control remains. There was no cause for concern.
