by Fred Vargas
But there was no need. The New Recruit opened the door at once, cigarette in hand, and nodded briefly in recognition. Neither deferential nor nervous, he was simply trying to collect his thoughts rapidly, as one herds sheep into a fold. Adamsberg shook hands with him, while observing him candidly. A mild-looking man, but not all that mild. Energy and a certain potential for anger lay behind those eyes which were indeed melancholic. As for his features, Danglard had painted too depressing a picture, professional pessimist that he was, giving up the battle before it had started. Yes, he was quite good-looking, but only up to a point, and then only if you were disposed in his favour. And this man was hardly any taller than himself. He was certainly more heavily built, both his face and body carrying a certain amount of soft tissue.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Adamsberg, ‘I missed our appointment.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I was told something urgent had come up.’
The voice was well pitched, light and slightly husky. Quite pleasant. The New Recruit stubbed out his cigarette in a pocket ashtray.
‘Yes, it was very urgent.’
‘Another murder?’
‘No, the first day of spring.’
‘OK,’ said the New Recruit, after a slight pause.
‘How’s this guard duty going?’
‘Long and monotonous.’
‘Not interesting?’
‘Not at all.’
Perfect, thought Adamsberg. He was in luck. The man was blind, unable to spot that Camille was one in a thousand.
‘We’ll suspend it, then. I’ll get a team from the thirteenth arrondissement to relieve you.’
‘When?’
‘Right away.’
The New Recruit glanced at the broom cupboard and Adamsberg wondered whether he was regretting something. But no, it was just his generally melancholy expression that suggested he clung on to things longer than other people. He picked up his books and came out without looking back, nor did he so much as glance at Camille’s door. Blind and probably insensitive too.
Adamsberg pressed the light switch and sat down on the top stair, gesturing to his colleague to join him there. His tumultuous life with Camille had given him complete familiarity with this landing and with the entire staircase, to every one of whose steps he had given a name: impatience, negligence, infidelity, pain, remorse, infidelity, reconciliation, remorse, and so on for ever in a spiral.
‘How many steps do you think there are on this staircase?’ Adamsberg asked. ‘Ninety?’
‘A hundred and eight.’
‘You count stairs do you?’
‘I’m methodical – it’s in my file.’
‘Sit down. I’ve hardly had time to look through your file yet. You know that you’re on probation, and this conversation doesn’t alter that.’
The New Recruit nodded and sat down on the wooden stairs, with no sign either of insolence or distress. Under the electric light, Adamsberg could see the ginger stripes in his otherwise dark hair, like strange flashes of light. The New Recruit’s hair was so thick and curly that it looked as if it would be difficult to get a comb through it.
‘There were plenty of candidates for the job,’ Adamsberg began. ‘What were the qualities that helped you get it?’
‘Pulling strings. I know Divisionnaire Brézillon very well. I helped his younger son out of trouble once.’
‘A police matter?’
‘No, a sexual matter, in the boarding school where I was teaching.’
‘So you didn’t set out to be a cop?’
‘No, I started off in teaching.’
‘What ill wind made you change your mind?’
The New Recruit lit a cigarette. His hands were square and compact. Quite attractive.
‘A love affair,’ Adamsberg guessed.
‘Yes, she was in the force, and I thought it would be a good thing to join her. But by trailing after her I lost her, and I got stuck with the police.’
‘Pity.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you want this job? To get to Paris?’
‘No.’
‘To join the Serious Crime Squad?’
‘Yes. I made inquiries, and it suited me.’
‘What did your inquiries tell you?’
‘Lots of things, some of them contradictory.’
‘I haven’t made any inquiries about you, though. I don’t even know your name, because in the office they’re still calling you “the New Recruit”.’
‘Veyrenc, Louis Veyrenc.’
‘Veyrenc,’ Adamsberg repeated thoughtfully. ‘And where did you get your ginger streaks, Veyrenc? They intrigue me.’
‘Me too, commissaire.’
The New Recruit had turned his face away quickly, shutting his eyes. The New Recruit had suffered, Adamsberg sensed. Veyrenc blew a puff of smoke up at the ceiling, wondering how to finish his reply and failing to decide. In this arrested pose, his upper lip was raised slightly to the right as if pulled by a thread, a twist which gave him a peculiar charm. That and the dark eyes, reduced to triangles with a comma of long lashes at the corners. A dangerous gift from Divisionnaire Brézillon.
‘I’m not obliged to answer that question,’ Veyrenc said at last.
‘No.’
Adamsberg, who had come to fetch his new colleague with no other aim than to dislodge him from Camille’s door, felt that there was something disturbing about this conversation, without being able to identify why. And yet, he thought, the reason wasn’t far away, it was within thinking range. He allowed his gaze to wander over the banisters, the walls, the steps, one by one, down and up again.
He knew that face.
‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Veyrenc.’
‘Veyrenc de Bilhc,’ Adamsberg corrected him. ‘Your full name’s Louis Veyrenc de Bilhc.’
‘Yes, it’s in the file.’
‘Where were you born?’
‘Arras.’
‘An accident of birth, I presume, during an absence from home. You’re not a northerner.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘Definitely not. You’re a Gascon, a Béarnais.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘Of course it’s true. A Béarnais from the Gave d’Ossau valley.’
The New Recruit closed his eyes quickly, as if making a tiny movement of retreat.
‘How do you know?’
‘If you have the name of a wine, you’re likely to be easy to place. The Veyrenc de Bilhc grapes grow on the slopes of the Ossau valley.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Possibly. Gascons aren’t the easiest of people to deal with. Melancholy, solitary, mild, hardworking, ironic and stubborn. It’s a nature which is quite interesting if you can put up with it. I know some people who can’t.’
‘Yourself, for instance? You’ve got something against the Béarnais?’
‘Obviously. Think, lieutenant.’
The New Recruit drew back a little, as an animal withdraws better to consider the enemy.
‘The Veyrenc de Bilhc vintage is not very well known,’ he said.
‘Not known at all.’
‘Except by a few wine experts, or people who live in the Ossau valley.’
‘And?’
‘And possibly the people in the next valley.’
‘For instance?’
‘The Gave de Pau valley.’
‘It wasn’t exactly rocket science, was it? Can’t you recognise someone else from the Pyrenees when you’ve got one in front of you?’
‘It’s a bit dark on this landing.’
‘Never mind, I’m not offended.’
‘It’s just that I don’t go round looking for them.’
‘What do you think happens when someone from the Ossau valley works in the same outfit as someone from the Gave de Pau valley?’
The two men both took a little time to think, staring at the wall opposite.
‘Sometimes,’ Adamsberg suggested, ‘it’
s harder to get on with your neighbour than with a perfect stranger.’
‘There’ve been run-ins between the two valleys in the past,’ agreed the New Recruit, still looking at the wall.
‘Yes. They’ve been known to kill one another over a scrap of land.’
‘Over a blade of grass.’
‘Yes.’
The New Recruit got to his feet and paced the landing, with his hands in his pockets. Discussion over, thought Adamsberg. They could pick it up again later, on a different footing. He stood up in turn.
‘Close the cupboard and go back to the office. Lieutenant Retancourt is waiting to take you to Clignancourt.’
Adamsberg made a sign of farewell and went down the first flight of stairs, feeling annoyed. Sufficiently annoyed for him to have forgotten his little sketchbook on the top stair, so that he had to go back up. On the sixth-floor landing, he heard Veyrenc’s elegant voice in the semi-darkness:
‘My lord, take heed to me. Am I so little worth,
That anger without cause should drive me from my place?
Is this the fair welcome they told me I would face,
And am I to suffer, for the land of my birth?’
Adamsberg tiptoed quietly up the last few steps, stupefied.
‘Is’t a fault, or a crime, to have first seen the light
So close to your valley? Am I not then allowed
To have rested my eyes on the same silver cloud?’
Veyrenc was leaning against the side of the cupboard, head lowered, auburn tears gleaming through his hair.
‘To have run as a child on the same mountain trails
Which the gods gave to you, and the same deepest vales.’
Adamsberg watched as his new colleague folded his arms and smiled briefly to himself.
‘I see,’ said the commissaire slowly.
The lieutenant gave a start.
‘It’s in my file,’ he said, by way of excuse.
‘Under what?’
Veyrenc ran his hands through his hair in embarrassment.
‘The commissaire at Bordeaux couldn’t stand it. Or the one at Tarbes, or the one at Nevers.’
‘And you couldn’t help it?’
‘Alas, I cannot, sire, though if I could I would,
But my ancestor’s blood runs in my veins for good.’
‘How the hell do you do that? Waking? Sleeping? Hypnosis?’
‘Well, it runs in the family,’ said Veyrenc rather shortly. ‘I just can’t help it.’
‘Oh, if it runs in the family, that’s different.’
Veyrenc twisted his lip, and spread his hands in a fatalist gesture.
‘Perhaps you’d better come back to the office with me, lieutenant. Maybe the broom cupboard wasn’t good for you.’
‘That’s true,’ said Veyrenc, whose heart contracted suddenly as he thought of Camille.
‘You know Retancourt? She’s the one who’s in charge of your induction.’
‘Something’s cropped up in Clignancourt?’
‘It soon will have, if you can find some gravel under a table. She’ll tell you about it, and I warn you, she doesn’t like the assignment.’
‘Why not hand this one over to the Drug Squad?’ asked Veyrenc, as he came downstairs alongside the commissaire, carrying his books.
Adamsberg lowered his head without replying.
‘Perhaps you can’t tell me?’ the lieutenant persisted.
‘Yes. But I’m trying to think how to tell you.’
Veyrenc waited, holding the banister. He had heard too much about Adamsberg to be surprised at his odd ways.
‘Those deaths are a matter for us,’ Adamsberg finally announced. ‘Those two men were caught up in some web, some machination. There’s a shade hovering over them – they’re caught in the folds of its robe.’
Adamsberg looked in perplexity at a precise point on the wall, as if to search there for the words he needed to elaborate his idea. Then he gave up, and the two men continued down to the ground floor, where Adamsberg paused once more.
‘Before we go out on to the street, and before we become colleagues, can you tell me where you got the ginger streaks?’
‘I don’t think you’ll like the story.’
‘Very few things annoy me, lieutenant. And relatively few things upset me. Only one or two shock me.’
‘That’s what I’ve heard.’
‘It’s true.’
‘All right. I was attacked when I was a child, up in the vineyard. I was eight years old, and the boys who went for me were about thirteen to fifteen. Five young toughs, a little gang. They hated us.’
‘Who’s “us”?’
‘My father owned the vineyard, the wine was getting itself a reputation, it was competing with someone else’s. They pinned me down and cut my head with iron scraps. Then they gashed my belly open with a bit of broken glass.’
Adamsberg, who had started to open the door, stopped still, holding the handle.
‘Shall I go on?’ asked Veyrenc.
The commissaire encouraged him with a nod.
‘They left me there, bleeding from the stomach and with fourteen wounds to the scalp. The hair grew back afterwards, but it came out ginger. No explanation. Just a souvenir.’
Adamsberg looked at the floor for a moment, then raised his eyes to meet the lieutenant‘s.
‘And what made you think I wouldn’t like the story?’
The New Recruit pursed his lips and Adamsberg observed his dark eyes, which were possibly trying to make him lower his own gaze. They were melancholy, yes, but not always and not with everyone. The two mountain dwellers stood facing each other like two ibex in the Pyrenees, motionless, horns locked in a silent duel. It was the lieutenant who, in a movement acknowledging defeat, looked down first.
‘Finish the story, Veyrenc.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s our job to finish stories. If you want to start them, go back to teaching. If you want to finish them, stay being a cop.’
‘I see.’
‘Of course you see. That’s why you’re here.’
Veyrenc hesitated, then raised his lip in a false smile.
‘The five boys were from the Gave de Pau valley.’
‘My valley.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, Veyrenc, finish the story.’
‘I have finished it.’
‘No, you haven’t. The five boys came from the Gave de Pau valley. And they came from the village of Caldhez.’
Adamsberg turned the door handle.
‘Come along, Veyrenc,’ he said softly. ‘We’re going to look for a little stone.’
XII
RETANCOURT SANK DOWN WITH ALL HER CONSIDERABLE WEIGHT ON AN OLD plastic chair in Emilio’s café.
‘Not wanting to be rude,’ said Emilio, ‘but if the cops turn up here too often, I might as well shut up shop.’
‘Just find me a little pebble, Emilio, and we’re out of here. Three beers, please.’
‘No, just two,’ said Estalère. ‘I can’t drink it,’ he said looking at Retancourt and the New Recruit to excuse himself. ‘I don’t know why, but it goes to my head.’
‘But Estalère, it goes to everyone’s head,’ said Retancourt, who never ceased to be surprised at the naivety of this twenty-seven-year-old boy.
‘Really?’ said Estalère. ‘It’s normal?’
‘Not only is it normal, it’s the whole point.’
Estalère frowned, not wishing at any price to give Retancourt any hint that he was reproaching her with anything. If Retancourt drank beer during working hours, it was not only permitted but obviously recommended.
‘We’re not on duty now.’ Retancourt smiled at him. ‘We’re looking for a little pebble. Quite different.’
‘You’re angry with him,’ observed the young man.
Retancourt waited until Emilio had brought their beer. She raised her
glass to the New Recruit.
‘Welcome. I still haven’t got your name right.’
‘Veyrenc de Bilhc, Louis,’ said Estalère, pleased with himself for having remembered the whole name.
‘Let’s stick with Veyrenc,’ proposed Retancourt.
‘De Bilhc,’ said the New Recruit.
‘You’re attached to your fancy name?’
‘I’m attached to the wine. It’s the name of a vintage.’
Veyrenc moved his glass closer to Retancourt’s but without clinking it. He had heard a good deal about the extraordinary qualities of Violette Retancourt, but all he could see at present was a tall, very well-built blonde woman, rather down-to-earth and jolly, displaying nothing that enabled him to understand the fear, respect or devotion which she inspired in the squad.
‘You’re angry with him,’ Estalère repeated glumly.
Retancourt shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I’ve nothing against going for a beer in Clignancourt. If that amuses him.’
‘You’re angry with him.’
‘So what?’
Estalère bowed his head unhappily. The difference and indeed frequent incompatibility of behaviour between his commissaire and his colleague distressed him deeply. The double veneration he felt for both Adamsberg and Retancourt, the twin compasses of his existence, allowed no compromise. He would not have deserted one for the other. The young man’s organism functioned entirely on nervous energy, excluding all other forces such as reason, calculation or intellectual interest. And like an engine which can only run on purified fuel, Estalère’s was a rare and fragile system. Retancourt knew this, but had neither the subtlety nor the desire to adapt to it.
‘He’s got some idea in his head,’ the young man persisted.
‘The file ought to go over to Drugs, Estalère, full stop,’ said Retancourt, folding her arms.
‘He says not.’
