by Fred Vargas
‘In the yard? Someone might pinch it.’
‘All the same,’ Estalère repeated, ‘that’s quite something, isn’t it, a moray eel?’
Voisenet shot him a grateful glance, then slipped behind his desk and rapidly, almost furtively, switched off his computer screen. After which, he left the room, not exactly gracefully, which was impossible for him, but with a certain bravado, carrying his heavy trophy at arm’s length and leaving behind the ignorant company of police officers. What could you expect from a bunch of cops?
‘Now open all the windows, everyone,’ Adamsberg ordered. ‘Froissy, come with me, we’ll try that video again from the beginning.’
‘Did you notice anything special?’
‘Possibly,’ Adamsberg lied. ‘Wait, just a sec.’
The commissaire, feeling suspicious, went to stand behind the desk of his fish-loving colleague once more. Why had Voisenet turned off his screen so quickly before going out? He switched it back on and looked at the last site consulted. Nothing there about either moray eels or police business. Instead, a photo of a small brown spider, of no apparent interest. Feeling puzzled, he flicked back, one by one, to Voisenet’s last internet searches in the computer’s history. Spider, spider, always the same one, specialist articles, distribution in France, feeding habits, harmful effects, reproduction and a few recent newspaper articles with alarmist titles: ‘Return of the recluse spider?’, ‘Man bitten by spider in Carcassonne’, ‘Should we be worried about the brown recluse spider?’, ‘Second death in Orange’.
Adamsberg paused the computer. Froissy stood waiting beside him, elegant, upright and slim. Given the amount of food she ate (in secret, she firmly believed) because of a deep-seated fear of going hungry, her perfect figure was an enigma.
‘Lieutenant,’ said Adamsberg, ‘can you check out and download all these files consulted by Voisenet over the last three weeks. About some spider.’
‘What kind of spider?’
‘Something called the recluse, or the brown recluse or the violin recluse – ever heard of it?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Spiders aren’t his usual terrain. He’s held forth often enough about hooded crows, dormouse droppings, and – of course – fish. But spiders, never. I’d just like to know where our lieutenant is going with this.’
‘Sir, it’s not proper to look into a colleague’s computer.’
‘No, it isn’t very. But I want to know. Can you transfer the files to me?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Perfect, go ahead, Froissy, and don’t leave any footprints.’
‘I never do. But what will I tell the others, if they see me working on Voisenet’s computer?’
‘Say he asked you to take a look, because of some bug. And you’re fixing it while he’s away.’
‘His desk stinks to high heaven.’
‘I know that, Froissy.’
III
This time, Adamsberg managed to concentrate on the interrogations of the proletarian, Nassim Bouzid, and the arrogant lawyer, Maître Carvin. He replayed several times passages where the lawyer shamelessly sought to deploy his superiority and cynicism. His ‘strategy’, as Mordent had called it, but above all his personality. Adamsberg decided that his commandant had misunderstood the exact nature of the strategy.
Mordent: Your bank account shows you have savings of four million, two hundred and seventy-six thousand euros. But they weren’t there as recently as seven years ago.
Carvin: Have you heard of the mass return of the tax exiles? Trying to negotiate the best terms for making their peace with the Revenue? A windfall for lawyers, believe me. But you have to have the right kind of knowhow. You need to be familiar with the law, that goes without saying, but you need to know all the loopholes as well. Spirit of the law and letter of the law, have you heard of that? Myself, I’m in favour of the spirit, an infinitely flexible concept.
Voisenet: . . . ?
Carvin: But I don’t see what this has to do with my wife’s death.
Mordent: Well, I’m wondering, for example, why, with all that money, you continue to rent a three-room apartment on the ground floor in a gloomy little side street like the Impasse des Bourgeons.
Carvin: What does that matter? I spend all day in my chambers, weekends too. I come home late, and I just sleep there.
Mordent: Do you come home for dinner?
Carvin: Not often. My wife is a good cook, but one has to cultivate one’s networks. Networks are my garden.
‘Clumsy allusion to Voltaire,’ muttered Danglard, who had slipped in behind Adamsberg. ‘As if this pompous ass had any right to quote him.’
‘He’s unbelievable,’ said Adamsberg.
‘But he got the better of Voisenet.’
Voisenet: . . .
Carvin: Just move on, lieutenant. I’m still waiting for you to explain what connection any of this has with my wife’s death.
Mordent: So like Louis XIV, you’ve ‘almost been kept waiting’.
The tape showed Carvin shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. Danglard pulled a face.
‘Nice try,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t score. He’s outfooted them both.’
‘So why didn’t you handle this interrogation, Danglard?’
‘I wanted Carvin to reveal the extent of his strategy of condescension towards us. Towards the cops, and maybe towards his wife. So that he would reveal his concealed potential for violence. But I don’t see where he’s going. Humiliating the police won’t help him get them on his side – on the contrary.’
‘He’s not humiliating them, Danglard, he’s dominating them. Different thing. Our local zoologist Voisenet would say that the whole pack of cops would implicitly obey the alpha male – Carvin. Because Carvin has dominated the alpha male of the squad, that is Mordent, in terms of rank. You wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to Carvin’s attacks, because you’re an alpha male yourself.’
‘Me?’ said Danglard.
‘Já,’ said Adamsberg.
Danglard was taken aback, since he considered his own life, apart from his five children, to be an alternating sequence of anguish and impotence.
‘It was probably a mistake not to have taken over the interrogation yourself, Danglard. You’d have crushed this lawyer and the squad would have felt strengthened. It’s all very well sneering that he’s “unbelievable”, which is true, but they’re all to some extent under his sway. So they can’t apply reason to the question of who is guilty of this murder.’
‘It’s not being an alpha male to quote a bit of Nietzsche or Voltaire now and then.’
‘Depends on the context. Here he’s banking on the fact that a police station is unlikely to be a hothouse of high culture. So he’s using that weapon to get at us, find our weak spot. Oh, for pity’s sake, Danglard, you should have gone in to fight for us!’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see it like that.’
‘It’s still not too late.’
Mordent: But what about your wife? She spent every evening and morning there. For how many years?
Carvin: Over fifteen years.
Mordent: And you never thought of offering her somewhere with more light, in a less lonely district when she came home at night?
Carvin: Commandant, you don’t try to dislodge a limpet from its rock.
Mordent: Meaning?
Carvin: If I had made the mistake of forcing my wife to leave the flat, I’d have been uprooting her, as surely as if I had taken an axe to her. It was for her sake that I kept the apartment on. She would have quite lost her psycho-social bearings in some place with high ceilings on one of the West End boulevards.
Voisenet: You don’t believe in the power of adaptation then? One of the signs of human intelligence?
‘Voisenet is trying to haul him in �
�� he’s on his own ground here, the natural world,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Won’t work.’
‘As I saw. I watched this bit twice.’
Carvin: My wife was not intelligent, lieutenant.
Mordent: Why did you marry her, then?
Carvin: For her laugh, commandant. I’m not a man who laughs. And her laugh, which was a joyful sound, attracted everyone, including even that Arab. Not a vulgar laugh, a cackle or a peal, it was a series of little chuckles, like a Seurat painting, so to speak.
Mordent: . . .
Carvin: And I’m going to miss her laugh.
Voisenet: Not as much as you’d miss the two million euros she could have walked away with if you’d divorced.
Carvin: A life-giving laugh has no price on it. Even if we had divorced – and we hadn’t reached that stage anyway – I would have carried on being able to hear it.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Adamsberg stopping the video sharply.
‘What about Nassim Bouzid?’
‘Seen that too.’
‘And what would you say about the two of them? How do their “looks” strike you?’
‘Signs, wrinkles, marks, gestures. Not enough, though. This morning before coming to work, I walked the route you’d tracked from the tyres, between the video shop and the murder scene, through the back streets. I found something interesting.’
‘We’ve already timed the journey.’
‘Not that, Danglard. The gravel chippings on one street, where there’d been roadworks.’
‘What about them?’
‘We’re agreed, are we, that of the billions of dandelions growing on this earth, no two are identical?’
‘Of course.’
‘Same thing with drivers. No two alike. Summon Dandelion No. 1, Carvin, for 2 p.m. and Dandelion No. 2, Bouzid, for 3 p.m. We’ll take a little drive. And get the fingerprint team to be there when I get back.’
‘All right. We’ve time for lunch.’
‘Drekka borða,’ said Adamsberg with a smile. ‘Drink, eat.’
OK, said Danglard to himself. Adamsberg could speak Icelandic – and how had he managed to learn his few words? But since the business over the moray eel, he did seem to have his feet more firmly on the ground.
‘One more thing, Danglard,’ said Adamsberg, standing up. ‘At about two thirty, when I come back with Carvin, put him through another round of questioning. But this time, beat him at his own game. I want him taken down a peg or two. And let the squad see the recording. That’ll cheer them up a bit. I want every officer to feel on an equal footing with both him and Nassim Bouzid. Use his own weapons and crush him.’
Danglard went out with a less lacklustre step than usual, holding himself straighter and rendered more cheerful by his new status as ‘alpha male’ – in which he did not believe at all.
And he had no idea what was going on with the gravel chippings.
IV
Maître Carvin was a cool customer, neither impatient nor hot-tempered, and when Lamarre and Kernorkian came to his chambers to summon him over to the station, interrupting him when he was busy at work, he merely asked for five minutes to clear his desk, and followed them without demur.
‘What’s it about this time?’ he asked.
‘The commissaire . . .’ Kernorkian began.
‘Ah, him. He’s back then? I’ve heard a bit about him.’
‘He wants to see both of you, you and Nassim Bouzid.’
‘Perfectly normal. I’m quite willing to speak to him as much as he wishes.’
‘I don’t think he wants to talk, he wants to take you for a drive.’
‘That’s a little less normal, but I assume he knows what he’s doing.’
* * *
*
Adamsberg had eaten lunch in his office, this time rereading the report he had received at Reykjavik airport. He stood to read it, as was his habit, pacing round the room. The commissaire rarely sat down to work if he could help it. As he read, murmuring every word out loud – which took some time – he could not help seeing Voisenet’s little spider running across his thoughts from left to right. It was advancing prudently, as if it didn’t want to be noticed, or to disturb anyone. But it was disturbing him, since Adamsberg now knew, thanks to Froissy’s efficiency, that the spider was in his own computer. He put down the report and switched on his screen. Better get to the bottom of it and brush the damn spider out of the way. Better find out what Voisenet was doing with this creature, even this morning, when he should have been concentrating on the approaching meeting and indeed thinking about how to deal with his pestilential fish. So why had he, all the same, called up yet another picture of the recluse spider?
Still standing, he opened the file Froissy had sent and checked back through it. Voisenet had been calling up information about this spider for the last eighteen days. This very morning, he had consulted the main local newspapers in Languedoc-Roussillon in southern France, and followed the subject on social media. There was a lot of passionate debate about this recluse spider, engaged in by people who were variously panic-stricken amateurs, pseudo-experts, pragmatists, ecologists and alarmists. Voisenet had even downloaded some news from last summer when, in the same region, there had been six recluse-spider bites, none of them fatal, but they had caused panic, even in certain national weeklies. And all this because of a rumour, coming from who knew where, spreading its scary breath: had the American brown recluse spider been sighted in France? That species was undoubtedly considered dangerous. But where was it, and how many of them could there be? There was a total outbreak of panic until a real specialist stepped in and closed the debate. No, the American variety had never set foot in France. But one of its relations had always been native to the south-east of the country, and was not lethal. Indeed it was a particularly timid creature, not aggressive, living in its hole, and the risk of it meeting a human was correspondingly small. This must be the one in question then, and none other, Loxosceles rufescens – Adamsberg couldn’t pronounce this Latin term. And that was the end of it.
Until this spring, when this same little spider had bitten two elderly men. And this time, they had both died. This time, the recluse spider had actually killed people. Some commentators argued that the deaths could be explained by the advanced age of the victims. At any rate, these two deaths had launched a polemic stretching to over a hundred pages, as far as Adamsberg could hurriedly estimate. He checked the time on the computer, 13.53, so Maître Carvin would be here any minute. He crossed the large office (still stinking of fish, despite the wide-open windows) and took from the cupboard the keys of the only top-of-the-range car to which the squad had access. But what the hell was Voisenet interested in this spider for? All right, two people had died, and presumably their weakened physical condition had not been enough to protect them from a dose of poison, but did that mean his lieutenant had to keep track of the situation every day for the last eighteen days? Unless, perhaps, one of the victims was a relative of his, or a friend? Adamsberg expelled the recluse from his mind and set off to intercept the lawyer on the pavement, before his officers, who might be forgetful, could let him enter the putrid atmosphere inside the police station.
‘You’re taking him out in our best car, are you, commissaire?’ remarked Retancourt as he went past. ‘So you’re impressed by Maître Carvin and his haughty ways, too.’
Adamsberg smiled as he looked down at her, head on one side.
‘Have you forgotten what I’m like, Retancourt? In just seventeen days?’
‘No. I must have missed something.’
‘Yes indeed. The gravel chippings, on the way back to the video games centre.’
‘Gravel chippings,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘And you can’t tell me any more than that?’
‘Yes, I can. No two dandelions and no two drivers are identical on this earth, t
hat’s all.’
‘That’s all? And Danglard was afraid you’d changed. Huh.’
‘I’m probably worse than before, but nothing to worry about. Tell me,’ he said, swinging the keys from the end of his finger, ‘what are your views about losing one’s spare car keys? This is a serious question.’
‘Simple. You should never lose your spare car keys, commissaire.’
‘What if you do?’
‘You go in desperate search of them. Spare car keys are something that turns us all into idiots.’
‘I lost my mobile phone on Grimsey.’
‘Where?’
‘In a field, and a sheep trod it into some shit.’
‘And you didn’t make desperate efforts to get it out?’
‘Never underestimate the strength of a sheep’s hoof, Retancourt. It will have been shattered.’
‘So now you don’t have a phone?’
‘I’ve taken the cat’s phone. You know, the one that sits on the photocopier next to the cat. It doesn’t work properly though, I think the cat must have pissed on it. All my phones must have some excremental destiny. I don’t know how to take that.’
‘The cat hasn’t done anything to the phone,’ Retancourt objected, defending the cat (Snowball) which was the apple of her eye. ‘But it’s true that when you’re texting, that one does “r” for “c” and “p” for “n’’.’
‘Right. So if you get a message saying “Bark soop”, you’ll know it’s from me.’
‘That’ll make things easier. Not to worry.’
‘No.’
‘How are they all?’ she went on, lowering her voice. ‘Gunnlaugur, Rögnvar, Brestir . . .’
‘They sent you their fond regards. Believe it or not, Rögnvar has carved your portrait on to the blade of an oar.’
Adamsberg was happy to be back in the company of Retancourt, although he hadn’t been able to express this to her, except by a few gestures. This polyvalent goddess as he called her, standing 1m 85, weighing 110 kilos and endowed with the strength of ten men, impressed him enough to make him lose his usual sangfroid. She had unrivalled physical capacity and imperturbable mental equilibrium. To Adamsberg, Retancourt seemed like some tree in a folk tale, on whose branches the entire squad, if lost at night in a dense and storm-tossed forest, would find complete safety. A Druidic oak. Naturally, with all her unusual attributes, the lieutenant did not pretend to have feminine graces, as Noël sometimes vulgarly reminded her. Although, in fact, Retancourt had delicate features in a face which was, it is true, almost square in shape.
