by Fred Vargas
‘She’s not resting doctor, she’s dying.’
The doctor looked away.
‘It’s not looking good,’ he admitted. ‘She’s had a massive dose of Novaxon and it’s paralysed her whole organism. The nervous system has closed down, but the heart’s somehow managing to hold out. I really don’t understand how she’s surviving. Even if we manage to save her, commissaire, I can’t be certain she’ll have all her mental faculties. There’s only a minimal flow of blood to the brain. It’s in the hands of fate now – try to understand.’
‘A few days ago,’ said Adamsberg, having difficulty articulating through clenched teeth, ‘I saved a guy whose fate had dictated that he was going to die. There isn’t such a thing as fate. She’s survived this long, she’ll hold out. You’ll see, doctor, it’ll be one for your record books.’
‘Go and see the others. She could last for days in this state. I’ll call you if anything changes, I promise.’
‘You can’t take everything out, clean it and put it back in?’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘Sorry, doctor,’ said Adamsberg, letting go his arm, which he had been clutching. He went back to the bed and ran his hands over Retancourt’s cropped hair.
‘I’ll be back, Violette,’ he said softly.
That was what Retancourt always said to the cat when she went out, so that it wouldn’t worry.
The crude and explosive hilarity reigning in the restaurant sounded more like a birthday party than a team of police officers plunged in the deepest anguish. Adamsberg looked at them from the doorway, the candlelight making all their faces deceptively young and beautiful, their elbows resting on the white cloth, glasses passing from hand to hand and jokes being cracked. Yes, it was the right thing to do, as he had hoped; it was best, after all, that they should have this brief respite outside real time, and enjoy it to the full, because they knew it couldn’t last. He was afraid that his arrival might break the mood of fragile happiness behind which their worries could be seen as if through glass. He forced a smile as he joined them.
‘She’s a bit better,’ he announced as he sat down. ‘Pass me a plate.’
Even Adamsberg, whose mind was still clinging on to Retancourt’s body, benefited a little from the food, wine and laughter. He had never been very good at meals in company, still less jolly ones, since he was incapable of cracking jokes quickly or making clever repartee. Like an ibex watching a train speed by in the valley, he sat peaceably like a foreign observer, watching his colleagues exchange excited remarks. Froissy, curiously, was on top form at times like this, helped by the food and drink and a wicked sense of humour which one wouldn’t have suspected from seeing her in the office. Adamsberg let himself be carried along by the mood, while constantly keeping an eye on the screen of his mobile. Which rang at eleven-forty.
‘She’s going downhill again,’ said Dr Lavoisier. ‘We’re going to try a total blood transfusion: it’s the last hope. The problem is that she’s group A negative and, God help us, our reserves were used up yesterday for a road-crash victim.’
‘What about donors?’
‘We’ve only got one here, and we need three. The two other regulars are on holiday. It’s Easter weekend, commissaire, half the town’s away. I’m so sorry. By the time we find donors from other centres it’ll be too late.’
A sudden silence fell over the table at the sight of Adamsberg’s devastated face. He left the room at a run, followed by Estalère. The young man returned a few minutes later and collapsed into his seat.
‘Urgent blood transfusion,’ he said. ‘Group A negative, but they haven’t got the right donors on hand.’
Sweating from his run, Adamsberg came into the white-walled room where the only A-negative donor in Dourdan was finishing giving blood. It seemed to him as though Retancourt’s cheeks had turned blue.
‘I’m Group O,’ he announced to the doctor, pulling off his jacket.
‘Right, we can use you, you can be the next.’
‘I’ve drunk two glasses of wine.’
‘Never mind. The state she’s in, that’s the least of our worries.’
A quarter of an hour later, his arm numbed by the tourniquet, Adamsberg could sense his blood flowing into Retancourt’s body. Lying on his back alongside her bed, he kept his eyes fixed on her face, waiting for any sign of a return to life. Please. But try as he might to concentrate and pray to the third virgin, he couldn’t give more blood than anyone else. And the doctor had said he needed three. Three donors. Three virgins. Three.
His head was starting to spin, since he had scarcely touched his food. He accepted the vertigo without displeasure, feeling that his train of thought was slipping away from him. Still forcing himself to keep watching Retancourt, he noticed that the roots of her hair were fairer than the ends. He had never noticed before that Retancourt dyed her hair a darker blonde than the natural colour. What an odd aesthetic idea. There was a lot he didn’t know about Retancourt.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the doctor. ‘Not going to pass out?’
Adamsberg made a negative sign and returned to his vertiginous thoughts. Light blonde and dark blonde in Retancourt’s hair, the quick of the virgin. Therefore, he calculated with difficulty, the lieutenant must have dyed her hair in December or January, since the fairer roots had grown about two or three centimetres, an odd idea in wintertime, and he had not noticed. He had lost his father about then, but that had nothing to do with it. It seemed to him that Retancourt’s lips had moved, but he couldn’t see very well. Perhaps she wanted to tell him something, to talk about the quick growing on her head, coming out of her skull like the horns of the ibex. Good God, the quick. From a long way off, he heard the doctor saying something.
‘Stop now,’ said a voice, that of Dr Lariboisier, or whatever his name was. ‘We don’t want two corpses instead of one. That’s as much as we can take from him.’
At the hospital reception desk, a man was asking:
‘Violette Retancourt, where is she?’
‘Sorry, you can’t see her now.’
‘I’m a donor, Group O, universally compatible.’
‘She’s in resuscitation,’ said the woman at the desk, jumping up. ‘I’ll take you there.’
Adamsberg was talking to himself when they took off the tourniquet. Hands helped him up, and someone made him drink some sugary water, while another medic was giving him an injection in his other arm. The door opened, and a large shape wearing a leather jacket burst into the room. ‘Lieutenant Noël,’ said the large shape. ‘Group O.’
LI
IN FRONT OF THE HOSPITAL, AS A CONTRAST WITH THE BLEAK CONCRETE surroundings, the planners had put a little green space, to indicate that some flowers ought to be included somewhere. In his comings and goings, Adamsberg had spotted this concession to nature, fifteen metres square, with two benches and five flower baskets arranged around a little fountain. It was now two in the morning, and the commissaire, feeling better with his sugar balance restored, was resting and listening to the plashing of the water, a comforting sound that he knew medieval monks had valued for its soothing qualities. After Noël had finished the final transfusion, the two men had stood and looked at Retancourt’s inert body, one each side of her bed, as if they were supervising a risky scientific experiment.
‘It’s coming through now,’ said Noël.
‘Not yet,’ said the doctor.
From time to time, Noël would impatiently and fruitlessly grip Retancourt’s arm to try and hurry up the process, stir her blood, get the system going again, restart the engine.
‘Come on, big girl, for Chrissake, get moving!’
On edge and unable to stand still without moving and speaking, Noël paced from one end of the bed to the other, rubbing Retancourt’s feet to warm them up, then tried her hands, checked the drip, patted her head.
‘That’s not helping,’ said the doctor irritably.
The heartbeat on the screen suddenly accelerated.
&
nbsp; ‘Here she comes now,’ said the doctor, as if announcing the arrival of a train.
‘Come on, big girl,’ repeated Noël for the tenth time. ‘Make an effort.’
‘We have to hope,’ said Lavoisier, with the involuntary brutality that doctors display, ‘that she’s not going to wake up with brain damage.’
Retancourt opened her blue eyes weakly and looked blankly at the ceiling.
‘What’s her first name?’ asked Lavoisier.
‘Violette,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Like the flower,’ added Noël.
Lavoisier sat on the bed, turned Retancourt’s face towards him and took her hand.
‘Is your name Violette?’ he asked. ‘If yes, blink your eyes for me.’
‘Come on, big girl,’ said Noël.
‘Don’t try to help her, Noël,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Nothing to do with help or not,’ said Lavoisier, running out of patience. ‘She’s got to understand the question. For pity’s sake, shut up – she’s got to concentrate. Violette, tell me, is that your name?’
Ten agonising seconds passed before Retancourt unmistakably blinked her eyes.
‘She’s understood,’ said Lavoisier.
‘Of course she understood,’ said Noël. ‘You should make the question harder, doc.’
‘That’s already a hard question, when you’re coming back from where she’s been,’ said the doctor.
‘Look, I think we’re in the way,’ said Adamsberg.
Lieutenant Noël was incapable of sitting and listening to the sound of the fountain like Adamsberg. The commissaire watched him pacing up and down the little garden, where the two policemen seemed to be in a tiny circus ring, lit from ground level by blue lights.
‘Who told you, lieutenant?’
‘Estalère phoned me from the restaurant. He knew my blood group would be compatible. He’s the kind of guy who remembers personal details. Whether you take sugar in your coffee, whether you’re A, B or O. Tell me what’s happened, commissaire, I’ve missed out on a lot of this.’
Adamsberg summarised, in his own haphazard fashion, the elements Noël had missed while he was out consulting the seagulls. Curiously, the lieutenant, who was in theory a hardcore positivist, asked him to repeat twice the De sanctis reliquis recipe. And he was opposed to Adamsberg’s proposal to give up on the third virgin. Nor did he make any inappropriate jokes about the cat’s penile bone or the quick of virgins.
‘We can’t just allow some girl to get knocked off without lifting a finger, commissaire.’
‘But I was probably mistaken when I thought the third virgin had already been chosen.’
‘Why?’
‘Because in the end, I think the killer chose Retancourt for that.’
‘But that wouldn’t make sense,’ said Noël, stopping short.
‘Why not? She meets the requirements of the recipe.’
Noël looked across at Adamsberg through the darkness.
‘Well, for a start, commissaire, Retancourt would have to be a virgin.’
‘Yes, well, I think she is.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You’d be the only one to think that, Noël.’
‘I don’t think. I know. She’s not a virgin. Not at all.’
Noël sat down on the bench, looking pleased with himself, while Adamsberg in turn started walking round the garden.
‘Surely you’re the last person Retancourt would take into her confidence.’
‘We yell at each other so much that we end up telling each other the story of our lives. She’s not a virgin, full stop.’
‘So that means that there is a third virgin. Somewhere else. And that Retancourt did understand something we didn’t.’
‘And before we find that out,’ said Noël, ‘a lot of water’s going to flow under the bridge.’
‘We’ll have to wait a month for her to recover properly, according to Lariboisier.’
‘Lavoisier,’ said Noël. ‘Maybe a month for someone normal, but probably a week for Retancourt. Funny to think of your blood and mine circulating through her veins.’
‘And the blood of the third donor.’
‘Who’s the third donor, anyway?’
‘He’s a cattle farmer, I believe.’
‘That’ll be a weird mixture,’ said Noël, with a pensive shake of his head.
In his chilly hotel bed, Adamsberg could not close his eyes without seeing himself once more lying wired up alongside Retancourt and going back over the vertiginous thoughts that had flashed through his head during the transfusion. Retancourt’s dyed hair, the quick of virgins, the horns of the ibex. There was a persistent alarm bell ringing through this combination of ideas, which would not be silenced. It must be something to do with the blood passing from him into her, recharging her heartbeats, rescuing her from the clutches of death. It must be something to do with the virgin’s hair, of course. But what was the ibex doing there? That reminded him that the horns of the ibex were simply the same thing as hair in a very compressed form, or, looking at it another way, that his own hair was simply a very dispersed kind of horn. They were all the same thing. But so what? He would have to try and remember tomorrow.
LII
A PEAL OF CHURCH BELLS WOKE ADAMSBERG AT MIDDAY. NO PEACE FOR the wicked, his mother used to say. He called the hospital at once and listened as Lavoisier gave a positive report.
‘She’s talking?’ he asked
‘No, she’s sleeping soundly now,’ said the doctor, ‘and probably will for some time. Remember, she’s also got concussion.’
‘Is she saying anything in her sleep?’
‘Yes, she mutters stuff from time to time. But it’s not really conscious or even intelligible. Don’t get excited.’
‘I’m quite calm, doctor. But I just want to know what she says.’
‘She keeps saying the same thing over and over. A bit of poetry that everyone knows.’
Poetry? Was Retancourt dreaming about Veyrenc? Or had he somehow infected her? Seducing all the women into his entourage one after the other?
‘So what poetry would that be?’ asked Adamsberg, with some annoyance.
‘Lines by Corneille we all learned at school:
To see the last Roman, as he draws his last breath,
Myself to die happy, as the cause of this death.’
They were indeed two of the few lines of verse that even Adamsberg knew by heart.
‘That’s not her style,’ he muttered. ‘Is that really what she’s saying?’
‘Oh, if you heard what people sometimes say under sedatives or anaesthetic, you’d be astonished. I’ve heard blameless people come out with unbelievable obscenities.’
‘Is that what she’s doing?’
‘Like I said, she recites Corneille. Nothing surprising about that. Mostly people in her state say things they remember from their childhood, especially stuff they learned at school. She’s just going back to what she was made to learn for homework, that’s all. Once I had a government minister who was in a coma for three months, and he went through his primary education, multiplication tables and all. He could still remember it pretty well.’
As he listened to the doctor, Adamsberg was staring at a sentimental picture over his hotel bed, a forest glade in which a mother deer was being followed by a cute little fawn through the ferns. ‘An accompanied hind,’ Robert would call her.
‘I’ve got to go back to Paris today, to my own hospital team,’ the doctor was saying. ‘It won’t hurt to move her now, so I’m taking her in the ambulance. We’ll be at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Hospital by this evening.’
‘Why are you taking her with you?’
‘Because it’s such an extraordinary case, commissaire. I’m going to see this one through.’
Adamsberg hung up, still looking at the painting. The tangled skein was in there too, the quick of virgins and the ‘living cross from the heart of the eternal branches’. He looked for a long time at the hind as if hypnotised,
trying to touch something just beyond his reach. An element he still had not grasped. There’s a bone in the snout of a pig, and a bone in the penis of a cat. And if he was not much mistaken, and unlikely though that seemed, maybe there was a bone in the heart of a stag. A bone in the form of a cross, which would take him straight to the third virgin.
LIII
THE TEAM HAD BEEN WORKING IN THE HANGAR SINCE TEN IN THE morning, with the help of two technicians and a photographer recruited from the local force at Dourdan. Lamarre and Voisenet had been in charge of searching the surrounding area, looking for tyre tracks in the field. Mordent and Danglard had each taken half the hangar. Justin was checking the tool cupboard where Retancourt had been found. Adamsberg joined them as they were starting a picnic lunch, sitting in the field under a pleasant April sun: sandwiches, fruit, beer, and hot drinks from a thermos, all impeccably organised by Froissy. There were no chairs in the hangar, so they sat on old car tyres, forming a curious circular convention in the field. The cat, which had not been allowed to travel in the ambulance, was curled up at Danglard’s feet.
‘The vehicle must have come in this way,’ explained Voisenet, his mouth full, pointing to a gap leading from the road. ‘It stopped by the side door at the end of the hangar, after reversing to have the boot facing the entry. There are plants everywhere, it’s impossible to find tracks. But judging by the way the grass is crushed down, it would be some kind of transit van, probably with a capacity of nine cubic metres. I don’t think the nurse has anything like that. She must have hired it. We might be able to trace it via agencies specialising in freight vehicles. An old woman renting a big van can’t be that common.’
Adamsberg had sat down cross-legged in the warm grass, and Froissy had laid out an ample supply of food beside him.
‘The transport of the body was carefully organised,’ said Mordent, taking over. Perched on a large tyre, he looked more than ever like a heron on its nest. ‘The nurse must have had a trolley, or hired it with the van. It looks as if there was a ramp you could let down. All she had to do was roll the body down the slope and put it on the trolley. Then she pushed the trolley through the hangar to the tool cupboard.’
