by Fred Vargas
‘It won’t work,’ said Danglard, whose pessimism always got the better of him at night.
‘Yes, it will,’ said Adamsberg for the fourth time.
‘It’s ridiculous. The Haroncourt inn. He’s sure to smell a rat.’
‘No. Hush, Danglard. Estalère, take care – I can hear you breathing.’
‘Sorry,’ said Estalere. ‘It’s hay fever.’
‘Well, blow your nose once for all, then keep quiet.’
Adamsberg rose silently one last time and twitched the curtain another few centimetres along. He had to have the dark absolutely under control. The killer would be completely silent, as the cemetery keeper at Montrouge had described, and as Gratien and Francine had confirmed. There would be no heavy footsteps to give warning of approach. They would have to be able to see the killer before the killer saw them. The darkness in the corners where they were posted would have to be denser than the light round the door. He sat back down and gripped the light switch. His job was to switch it on the moment the killer got inside the door. Then Estalère would block the exit while Danglard pulled his gun. Perfect. He looked at the bed where the woman he was protecting was peacefully asleep.
As Francine slept under her guard in the inn at Haroncourt, the Shade checked the time in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a hundred and thirty-six kilometres away. At ten fifty-five, the Shade silently opened the door of the linen store and slipped along the corridor, syringe in hand, checking the numbers of the rooms. Retancourt’s room, number 227, had its door open, being guarded by the sleeping Mercadet. As the Shade tiptoed round him, he did not stir. In the middle of the room the large body of the lieutenant was visible under the sheets, her arm hanging down vulnerably at the side of the bed.
LXII
ADAMSBERG WAS THE FIRST TO SEE THE SHADE COME INTO HIS FIELD OF vision. His heart did not miss a beat. He pressed the switch with his thumb, Estalère barred the doorway, Danglard pushed the gun into the back of the figure, which did not cry out or utter a word as Estalère rapidly put the handcuffs on it. Adamsberg went over to the bed and stroked Retancourt’s hair.
‘OK, let’s go,’ he said.
Danglard and Estalère dragged their prisoner out of the room and Adamsberg took care to switch the light off on the way out. Two squad cars were waiting outside the hospital.
‘Wait for me back at headquarters,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I won’t be long.’
At midnight he was knocking at the door of Dr Roman. Five minutes later the doctor opened the door, looking pale and dishevelled.
‘You’re mad,’ said Roman. ‘What are you getting me up for?’
The doctor could hardly stand and Adamsberg pulled him along in his slippers into the kitchen, where he sat him down in the same place as he had on the evening of their conversation about the ‘quick of virgins’.
‘Do you remember what you asked me for?’
‘I didn’t ask you for anything,’ said Roman, looking dazed.
‘You asked me to find you an old recipe against the vapours. And I promised I would.’
Roman blinked and rested his heavy head on his hand.
‘So what did you find me? Eye of newt and toe of frog? Gall of pig? Or some recipe that tells you to cut up a chicken and lay it on my head? I know those old wives’ tales.’
‘And what do you think of them?’
‘Are you waking me up in the middle of the night for rubbish like that?’ said Roman, reaching out sleepily for his stimulant pills.
‘Listen to me,’ said Adamsberg, holding back his arm.
‘All right, but put some cold water on my head.’
Adamsberg once more rubbed the doctor’s head with the wet and still grubby dishcloth. Then he looked in the drawers for a plastic bin bag, which he opened and put down between them.
‘They’re here, your vapours,’ he said, putting his hand on the table.
‘In the bin bag?’
‘You’re not with it, Roman.’
‘No.’
‘They’re here,’ said Adamsberg, showing him the packet of red and yellow stimulants, which he dropped into the bag.
‘Hey, give me back my stuff.’
‘No.’
Adamsberg got up and opened all the medicine packs he could see, looking for capsules.
‘What’s this one?’ he asked when he found some.
‘It’s Gavelon.’
‘Yes, I can see that, but what’s it for?’
‘It’s for stomach relief. I’ve always taken it.’
Adamsberg made one pile with the boxes of Gavelon and another with the stimulants, Energyl, and swept the lot into the bin bag. ‘Have you taken many of these?’
‘As many as I could. Give me back my pills.’
‘Your pills, Roman, are what were giving you the vapours. It was in the capsules.’
‘I know what Gavelon is, don’t be silly.’
‘You don’t know what’s inside these capsules.’
‘Gavelon, of course, mon vieux.’
‘No, some ghastly stuff, eye of newt and toe of frog, ground up with pig’s gall and chicken’s blood. We’ll get it analysed.’
‘You’re the one who’s not with it now, Adamsberg.’
‘Listen carefully, and concentrate as hard as you can,’ said Adamsberg, taking the doctor’s wrist. ‘You’ve got plenty of friends, haven’t you, Roman? Plenty of excellent women friends too, like Retancourt, who run errands for you and help you out, don’t they? Like going and fetching your prescriptions from the pharmacy because you can’t go yourself.’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone comes to see you every week and brings you your pills?’
‘Yes.’
Adamsberg closed the bin bag and put it down beside him.
‘Are you taking that lot away?’ asked Roman.
‘Yes. And now you’ve got to drink as much fluid as you can and piss it out. In a week’s time, you should almost be yourself. Don’t worry about your supplies of Gavelon and Energyl, I’ll get you some. The genuine article. Because what you’ve been taking is really eye-of-newt stuff. Or your vapours, if you want to put it like that.’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Adamsberg. You don’t know who has been bringing me them.’
‘Oh yes, I do. One of your contacts for whom you have great esteem.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because your contact is sitting in my office this minute, with handcuffs on. Because she’s killed eight people.’
‘You can’t be serious, Adamsberg,’ said Roman after a shocked silence. ‘Are we talking about the same person?’
‘A very sharp mind, with a head screwed on to her shoulders. And one of the most dangerous killers I’ve come across. Ariane Lagarde, the most famous pathologist in France.’
‘You must be out of your mind.’
‘No, she is. She’s a dissociator, Roman.’
Adamsberg helped the doctor up and took him to his bed.
‘Get the dishcloth,’ said Roman. ‘You never know.’
‘OK.’
Roman sat down on the bed, looking both tired and stunned, gradually remembering all the times Ariane had been to visit him.
‘But we’ve known each other for ever,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you, mon vieux – she would never try to kill me.’
‘No, she wasn’t trying to kill you. She just needed you out of circulation, so that she could take your place for as long as was necessary to carry out her plans.’
‘Plans for what?’
‘Her plans to examine her own victims, so that we wouldn’t know what she was after. She told us it was a female killer about one metre sixty-two tall, so I’d go chasing off after that district nurse. She didn’t mention that Elisabeth and Pascaline had had their hair scalped at the root. You didn’t tell me the whole truth, Roman.’
‘No, all right, I didn’t.’
‘You realised that Ariane had made a serious professional mistake if she hadn’t noticed
that the hair had been shaved. But if you told me that, you’d get your friend into trouble. On the other hand, if you said nothing you’d be hampering the investigation. You wanted to be sure before acting, so you asked Retancourt for enlargements of the photographs of Elisabeth.’
‘Yes.’
‘Retancourt wondered why, and she started looking at the enlargements differently. She saw the marks on the right side of the skull, but she didn’t know what they meant. It bothered her and she came back to ask you. What was it you were looking for? What had you seen? What you’d seen was that a small section of the skull had actually been scalped, but you hadn’t said so. You decided to help us as much as you could, without betraying Ariane. So you gave us the information, but you altered it a bit. You told us the hair had been cut, but not that it had been shaved. After all, what difference could that possibly make to our investigation? It was hair, just the same. And that way you got Ariane off the hook. By saying that you were the only person who could spot it. Your story about hair being recently cut and having different-shaped ends – that was rubbish, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You couldn’t have told from an ordinary photograph a detail like the cut ends. Was he really a barber, your father?’
‘No, he was a doctor. But whether the hair was cut or shaved, I couldn’t see that it made any difference. I didn’t want to get Ariane into trouble, five years off retirement. I thought she’d simply made a mistake.’
‘But Retancourt wondered how Ariane Lagarde, supposedly the best forensic pathologist in the country, could have missed this finding. It seemed to her impossible that Ariane should miss it if you were able to guess at it just from an ordinary photo. She concluded that Ariane had not seen fit to tell us about it. But why? So, after she left you, she went round to the morgue to see Ariane and ask questions. Ariane realised the danger. It was in one of the morgue’s vans that she transported Retancourt to the hangar.’
‘Put some more cold water on my head.’
Adamsberg wrung out the cloth and once more gave Roman’s head a good rub.
‘There’s something that doesn’t fit,’ said Roman from under the cloth.
‘What?’ asked Adamsberg, stopping what he was doing.
‘I felt the first vapours long before Ariane took this job in Paris. She was still in Lille. So how come?’
‘She must have travelled to Paris, got inside your flat and replaced all your regular pills with whatever she used.’
‘The Gavelon, for instance.’
‘Yes, because she could inject capsules with some concoction of her own. She’s always been fond of mixing peculiar drinks, do you remember that? Then all she had to do was wait in Lille until you were too unwell to work.’
‘Did she tell you that? That she’d put me out of action?’
‘She hasn’t said a word yet.’
‘How can you be so sure, then?’
‘Because it was the first thing Retancourt said to me:
“To see the last Roman as he draws his last breath,
Myself to die happy, as the cause of this death.”
It wasn’t because of Camille or Corneille that she chose these lines, but because of you. Retancourt was thinking about you, with your vapours and your problem having enough breath to cross the room. Roman, that’s you, made short of breath by a woman.’
‘Why did Retancourt talk in verse?’
‘Because of her partner at the office, the New Recruit, Veyrenc. His way of talking is infectious and she was very drawn to him. And because she was only half conscious with all the drugs, she regressed to being a schoolgirl, and the name “Roman” must have brought the line swimming to the surface. Lavoisier says that one of his patients spent three months repeating his times tables.’
‘I don’t see what Lavoisier has to do with it. He was a chemist who was guillotined in 1793. More cold water.’
‘I’m talking about Lavoisier the doctor, who accompanied us to Dourdan,’ said Adamsberg, giving Roman’s head another rub.
‘He’s called Lavoisier, like the chemist?’ asked Roman indistinctly, from under the cloth.
‘Yes, as he never stops telling us. Once we realised that Retancourt was trying to say something about you, and not some Ancient Roman, and that a woman had caused your problems, the rest was easy. Ariane had put you out of action in order to take your place. I didn’t ask for her, Brézillon didn’t ask for her. She applied for it herself. Why? For prestige? But she already had that.’
‘So that she could run the investigation herself,’ said Roman, emerging from the cloth with his hair standing on end.
‘And, by the same token, she could engineer my fall from grace. I once humiliated her professionally, long ago. She never forgets and never forgives.’
‘Are you going to question her now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Take me with you.’
Roman had been too weak to go out for months now. Adamsberg wondered whether he could even manage the three flights of stairs to get down to the car.
‘Take me with you,’ Roman insisted. ‘She was my friend. I’ll have to see it to believe it.’
‘Well, all right,’ said Adamsberg, lifting him up under the arms. ‘Hold on to me. If you go to sleep at the office, there are some cushions upstairs, for the benefit of Mercadet.’
‘Does Mercadet eat pills full of unspeakable things, then?’
LXIII
ARIANE’S BEHAVIOUR WAS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY THAT ADAMSBERG HAD ever seen in an arrested suspect. She was sitting on the other side of his desk, and should have been facing him. But she had turned her chair through ninety degrees and was looking at the wall, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. So Adamsberg had gone round to the wall to face her, whereupon she had immediately turned her chair through a right angle again, to face the door. This was neither fear, nor provocation, nor ill will on her part. But just as one magnet repulses another, so the commissaire’s approach made her swivel round. It was just like a toy one of his sisters had had, a little dancer who could be made to turn around when you put it close to a mirror. It was only later that he had understood that two contrary magnets were hidden, one inside the dancer’s pink tights and one behind the mirror. So Ariane was the dancer and he was the mirror. A reflective surface that she was instinctively avoiding, so as not to see Omega in Adamsberg’s eyes. As a result, he was obliged to keep moving round the room, while Ariane, oblivious of his movements, spoke into empty space.
It was equally clear that she did not understand what she was being accused of. But without asking questions or rebelling, she sat, docile and almost consenting, as if another part of her knew perfectly well what she was doing and accepted this for the moment, a mere twist of fate which she could handle. Adamsberg had had time to skim some of the chapters in her book and recognised in this conflicted yet passive attitude the disconcerting symptoms of the dissociated criminal. A split in the individual, which Ariane knew so well, having spent years exploring it with fascination, without realising that her own case had been the motive behind her research. Faced with an interrogation by the police, Ariane understood nothing, and Omega was prudently lying low, waiting for conciliation and a way out.
Adamsberg imagined that Ariane must be a hostage to her incalculable pride: this woman, who had never forgiven even the offence of the twelve rats, had been unable to bear the humiliation caused by the paramedic who had tempted her husband away so publicly. That or something else. One day the volcano had erupted, setting free a torrent of rage and punishments in a sequence of unbridled attacks. Ariane the pathologist remained ignorant of these murderous outbreaks. The paramedic had died a year later, in a climbing accident, but the husband had not returned to his wife. He had found a new partner, who in turn died on a railway line. Murder after murder: Ariane was already on her way to her ultimate aim, acquiring powers superior to those of all others of her sex. An eternal dominion which would preserve her from the threate
ning encirclement of her fellow women. At the centre of this journey lay an implacable hatred of other people which no one would understand – unless Omega revealed it one day.
But Ariane had had to bide her time for ten years, since the recipe in the De sanctis reliquis was clear: ‘Five times cometh the age of youth, till the day thou must invert it, pass and pass again.’
On this point, Adamsberg and his colleagues had made a serious miscalculation, by choosing to take fifteen as the age to be multiplied five times. Having identified the district nurse as their suspect, they had all interpreted the text to correspond to the seventy-five years of her age. But at the time the De reliquis was being copied, fifteen was seen as adulthood, when a girl could already be a mother and a boy ride on horseback. Twelve was when young people left behind the age of their youth. So the time to reverse the approach of death and escape its grasp came at the age of sixty. Ariane had been on the eve of her sixtieth birthday when she had embarked upon the series of crimes she had long been planning.
Adamsberg had started the tape officially recording the interrogation of Ariane Lagarde on 6 May at one o’clock in the morning: she was being held on suspicion of premeditated homicide and attempted homicide, in the presence of officers Danglard, Mordent, Veyrenc, Estalère and Dr Roman.
‘What’s all this about, Jean-Baptiste?’ asked Ariane amiably, speaking to the wall.
‘I’m reading you the charge in its first draft,’ Adamsberg explained gently.
She knew everything and knew nothing, and her gaze, if one managed to catch it, was difficult to bear, both pleasant and arrogant, understanding and vindictive, as Alpha and Omega battled it out. An unconscious gaze, which disconcerted her questioners, referring them to their own demons and the intolerable idea that perhaps behind their own walls there lurked monsters of which they were unaware, ready to burst open the swelling crater of an unsuspected volcano inside them. As Adamsberg read out the long charge sheet of her crimes, he watched for any quiver, any sign that one of them might elicit a response from Ariane’s imperial expression. But Omega was far too cunning to reveal herself. Hidden behind her impenetrable veil, she waited, smiling in the shadows. Only the rather stiff and mechanical smile hinted at her secret existence.
