by Fred Vargas
Adamsberg sat in Froissy’s office to watch as she tracked the movements of Jarras and Quissol.
‘Far as I can see,’ she said, ‘your two guys don’t go much outside Alès. They don’t have GPS on their cars, and according to their mobile phones – just one in each household – I can only find short-distance trips in town. And that could be their wives. We don’t suspect their wives, do we?’
‘No. This is some kind of personal vengeance.’
‘Both of them tend to use their landline mostly, in the traditional way. Ah, yes, on 27 May, Richard Jarras called his wife from Salindres, a few kilometres outside Alès, at 6.05 p.m. But that’s not on the way to Nîmes. He was back in Alès by 9 p.m. No movement in the direction of the old men in the Recluse Gang.’
‘Unless they left their mobiles at home, which would be prudent.’
‘Essential, actually.’
Mercadet was having no more luck in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, where Louis Arjalas and Marcel Corbière lived within a few streets of each other. Like the two spider-bite victims in Alès, they just seemed to move about locally, with the exception of one return trip to Carpentras. And Jean Escande seemed similarly to stay put in Courthézon, apart from visits to Orange.
‘Just shopping,’ Mercadet suggested. ‘Or going to the doctor, or some official business. Not one of them has gone anywhere near Nîmes. Unless they left their mobiles at home.’
‘Which would be prudent,’ Adamsberg repeated.
‘That’s what we all do.’
‘You leave your mobile at home?’
‘Correct, so as not to have the cops on my back all the time, commissaire.’
‘So our five victims probably do the same then.’
‘If it’s them.’
‘What about the rapes? Anything?’
‘Too much,’ sighed the lieutenant, ‘and that’s only the reported ones. For the 1950s, when women hardly dared go to the police, I’ve got two though.’
‘In Nîmes itself?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘One in 1952. When Claveyrolle and Barral would have been twenty, Landrieu nineteen, Missoli seventeen, Lambertin and Vessac eighteen and sixteen respectively. The first two, they’re the ones who were caught in the girls’ dormitory?’
‘Yes.’
‘I listed these names because the other boys seem a bit young for it: Haubert, Duval and Torrailles were fifteen and Ménard only fourteen.’
‘It does happen though. Peer pressure.’
‘The girl described older teenagers, not youngsters. The point in common with 1988 is the use of a van. And the fact that there were three of them. She was seventeen. It was her first time out at night, she’d had a bit to drink, she was walking home. She was only fifty metres away. Jocelyne Briac.’
‘Landrieu, if he was involved, might have been able to borrow someone’s van.’
‘Jocelyne didn’t dare tell anyone until two weeks later, so there was no usable evidence. One detail: one of the little pricks slipped up, because he said to his pal, “Your turn, César! The way’s clear now.” Because, you see, she was a virgin. Of course, there are plenty of boys called César in the south of France. Still, it could just have been César Missoli.’
‘Claveyrolle was the chief, he would have gone first, then César Missoli would have followed him.’
‘And the third?’
‘She says he lay on top of her and wriggled about, but in fact didn’t do anything and the other two mocked him.’
‘Possibly one of the fifteen-year-olds, Haubert or Duval. I’m sure this was them, Mercadet, but we’ll never be able to prove it. What about the second rape?’
‘The following year, 1953, also in Nîmes. This was Véronique Martinez. One month before Missoli left the orphanage. This time, there were just two of them, on foot. They dragged the girl into a building. Again, no way of finding any evidence. And I should say, sir, that back in the day, the cops didn’t bust a gut investigating rapes. I did note one thing. The girl said these boys smelled of bicycle oil.’
‘Perhaps one of their chains came off a bike on the way.’
‘Well, that’s all we have. And these two girls, Jocelyne and Véronique, unlike Justine, didn’t know their attackers at all. So why would they kill them sixty years later?’
‘What if one of the boys was a suspect in a later rape case? And maybe one or other of the women saw his photo in the papers?’
‘Possible, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but we don’t know. With all the work I’ve given Froissy, she hasn’t been able to get round to the police records of all the stink bugs.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me?’
‘It was before the meeting this morning. I didn’t know if you would be on board.’
‘The Recluse conspiracy,’ said Mercadet with a grin. ‘You and Veyrenc and Voisenet, and I know where you ended up in the evening. At La Garbure.’
‘Have you been following me, lieutenant?’
‘I didn’t like the atmosphere in the squad. I envied you.’
‘What for? The soup or the conspiracy?’
‘Both.’
‘You like garbure?’
‘Never tasted it.’
‘It’s poor man’s soup. You have to like cabbage.’
Mercadet pulled a face.
‘That said,’ he went on, ‘even if I thought Voisenet’s lecture about poisonous fluids was brilliant, I still don’t believe a woman who had been raped would dream of killing someone with recluse venom. Why not use a viper? Because, yes, I can buy the idea of a snake rearing up and spitting fluid, it kind of figures. And it’s relatively easy to extract venom from a snake. But a recluse spider? I just don’t see it.’
‘No, neither do I,’ Adamsberg admitted. ‘All the same, check whether among any of the women you’ve traced there might be a biologist or a zoologist, or someone who works in the Sainte-Rosalie hospital in Marseille. One of the kids who was bitten at the orphanage worked there for twenty-eight years. Our only lead, and not all that promising.’
‘Which one?’
‘Richard Jarras. But not a word about that, lieutenant. Retancourt is doing surveillance on him, and Voisenet on the three in the Vaucluse. We’re doing 24/7 checking, to see if any of them moves.’
‘And what if the killer doesn’t attack for another month?’
‘Then they’ll stay on duty for a month.’
‘Exhausting, that kind of work,’ said Mercadet, puffing out his cheeks. ‘Well, it doesn’t apply to Retancourt, of course.’
Mercadet was himself ruled out from any surveillance operation. It wasn’t practical to use a man who dropped off to sleep every three hours.
‘So why is the Jarras lead useful, but not outstanding?’ he asked.
‘Because the APC in Marseille orders the stuff from the Pennsylvania branch of Meredial-Lab. Or else from Mexico City.’
‘And they stock poisons, do they?’
‘Yes, but Jarras has never been to America.’
‘Not conclusive then.’
‘Very thin, as Froissy might say.’
‘About what?’
‘The blackbird.’
‘Perhaps he could have got a false passport. Not the blackbird, Jarras.’
‘How could we find that out?’
‘In the archives of fake passport issues.’
‘But there are thousands of those, lieutenant.’
‘Using his photo,’ suggested Mercadet, who was not deterred by the idea of complicated internet searches.
For Mercadet, as for Froissy, the millions of routes through the internet were walkways he could navigate very fast, taking short cuts, diversions and so on, like a runaway cutting his way through barbed wire across a series of fields. He liked it. In fact, the mor
e challenging the task, the better he liked it.
Adamsberg closed his office door to make some phone calls. With five lieutenants and ten junior ranks out on mission, the place was very quiet. Even if Danglard was sulking in his tent, Adamsberg didn’t want to risk being overheard by him, as he enquired about official poison holdings in Paris.
After almost an hour of effort, while the various administrations passed him from one person to another until someone competent could answer his queries, Adamsberg went back to see Mercadet.
‘Nothing,’ he said, throwing his phone on to the desk as if it was the mobile’s fault.
‘You’re going to break it at that rate.’
‘The screen is already cracked – it’s the one belonging to the cat. I just wanted to check other places: they don’t keep any recluse venom in the Natural History Museum, nor the Pasteur Institute, nor in the centre in Grenoble.’
‘Well, I did a little reconnoitre over the last twenty years. There’s never been any whisper of a clandestine lab for spider venom, or indeed snake venom. And who on earth would try to extract it from a recluse anyway?’ Mercadet said, pushing back the keyboard.
Adamsberg sat down heavily, running his hands several times through his hair. It was a habitual gesture of his, either to make his hair sit down, which didn’t work, or to dispel fatigue. And you could see why, Mercadet thought: three old men murdered, five suspects from among the kids in the orphanage, not to mention the women who might have been raped, most of them unknown. Plus the fact that the murder method was still a mystery.
‘Retancourt and Voisenet are tracking them,’ Adamsberg repeated. ‘One of these days, one of them is sure to make a move. Tonight, tomorrow.’
‘Commissaire, why don’t you take a rest? On the cushions upstairs? Oh shit!’ Mercadet said, standing up, because mention of the cushions reminded him of the upstairs drinks room, and by extension the cat’s feeding dish.
‘An idea, lieutenant?’
‘The cat, time to feed it. What if Retancourt was to get back and find the cat had lost weight!’
‘He could do with losing weight.’
‘Even so,’ said Mercadet, going to fetch a tin of cat food from Violette’s cupboard. ‘I mustn’t miss his afternoon feed, I’m already late.’
However great its hunger, and whatever its annoyance at not receiving dinner at the right time, the cat would never have dreamed of stirring itself – a mere seven metres – to ask for its food. It just waited calmly for someone to come and fetch it from the photocopier.
Mercadet came past again, with Snowball draped over his arm and climbed the stairs to the little room containing the drinks dispenser, the cat’s dish and the three blue cushions.
* * *
*
Froissy appeared, with a little colour in her cheeks and followed by Veyrenc, just as Mercadet came down the stairs carrying a well-fed purring cat, which he gently replaced on the photocopier. The machine was pressed into service only for emergencies, because it was the creature’s resting place. But they left the copier switched on so that the surface would stay warm. Fleetingly, Adamsberg thought that life in his squad was very complicated. Had he been too lax? Allowing Voisenet to litter his desk with magazines about fish, allowing the cat to dictate its own territory, allowing Mercadet to take a nap on the cushions whenever he needed to, allowing Froissy to fill her cupboards with food rations as if in wartime, allowing Mordent to indulge his love of fairy tales, Danglard to wallow in his encyclopedic erudition, and Noël to persevere in his sexism and homophobia? And allowing his own mind to be open to every wind.
He ran his fingers through his hair again as he watched Froissy approach, holding a file, followed by Veyrenc.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, in a voice that seemed to himself to sound tired.
‘Something was bothering Veyrenc.’
‘Just as well, Louis, because tonight, the wind is blowing through my ears. I feel like a damp rag.’
‘I checked out the records of the bad boys in the orphanage who have already died,’ Froissy continued. ‘Remember them? The ones who were dead long before the recluse attacks?’
‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘There were four of them.’
‘César Missoli, Denis Haubert, Colin Duval and Victor Ménard,’ Froissy listed them. ‘Veyrenc thought it wasn’t logical. If the boys who had been bitten had decided to take vengeance on the whole gang, it was unlikely they’d have allowed those ones to die in their beds.’
‘Vengeance has to be total or nothing,’ said Veyrenc.
‘And?’ said Adamsberg, looking up.
‘César Missoli was shot in the back, outside his house in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes. They never got to the bottom of it. Since he was connected to mafia networks in Antibes, they assumed it was gang warfare.’
‘When was this?’
‘In 1996. Two years later, Denis Haubert fell off his roof, which he was repairing. The safety catch on his extension ladder gave way. Classified as a household accident.’
Adamsberg started to pace round the room, hands behind his back. Then he lit one of Zerk’s last cigarettes, half emptied of tobacco. He was going to have to buy a few more for his son soon, so that he could steal them. He didn’t like this brand, which was too bitter for him, but you don’t look a gift cigarette in the mouth. Veyrenc was smiling, leaning back on Kernorkian’s table, arms folded.
‘Three years go by,’ Froissy was saying. ‘And it’s Victor Ménard’s turn, in 2001. He’s a garage owner, likes powerful motorbikes. At the time he had a 630cc that he liked riding at top speed. A heavy machine if you hit a slippery patch on the road.’
‘Slippery?’
‘Covered in motor oil,’ said Froissy, ‘a stretch four metres long on a bend. He skidded at 137 kilometres an hour, fractured vertebrae, brake lever went through his liver, died. An accident of course. Then it’s a year later, 2002, Colin Duval. He was a Sunday mushroom picker, also in the Alpes-Maritimes, knew all the good places. He was an expert, and what he did apparently was cut them into thin slices and hang them up to dry outside. Lived alone, cooked for himself. One evening in November, long after the picking season, he gets a violent bellyache. He’s not too worried, he knows his mushrooms. Two days later, he feels better, so he relaxes. Then it starts again, and in three days, despite being in hospital, he dies of liver and kidney failure. The autopsy showed traces of both alpha and beta amanitins, the toxic element of the death cap mushroom – or Amanita phalloides to give it its Latin name. It has a white stem and flat top and looks like some edible species. It would be fairly simple to insert some, mixed up with others, in a basket out in the woods. But, since he was an expert, much more effective to add some slices to the string of dried mushrooms later on. You need to know,’ she added, ‘that half the top of a death cap is fatal.’
‘Three accidental deaths, and one attributed to gang warfare,’ said Veyrenc, ‘that is, if we didn’t know that all four belonged to the Recluse Gang. Not coincidence, not accidents. These were murders.’
‘Bullseye!’ said Adamsberg. ‘So it means that the victims of the recluses didn’t wait seventy years to get their own back, as we had assumed.’
‘But then,’ said Mercadet, ‘they suddenly stopped. No more murders. When they’d wiped out four stink bugs, it was going to plan, nobody had suspected them. Because who would? But no, they stop for fourteen years before starting up again last month, with an infinitely complex method that we can’t work out.’
‘A very long period of latency,’ Adamsberg agreed.
‘But why?’ asked Froissy.
‘Maybe it was to devise an infinitely complex method that we wouldn’t be able to work out.’
Froissy shook her head.
‘That must be it,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Something about their modus operandi didn’t satisfy them in the end. Remember, an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It’s essential, this equivalence, it’s as old as the earth.’
‘And the equivalence wasn’t right,’ Veyrenc said. ‘Yeah, the first four guys are dead all right, but if your enemy takes your eye out, you’re not going to be satisfied cutting off his ear. Recluse venom against recluse venom.’
‘So during those fourteen years, they’re trying to accumulate enough of it to inject people?’
‘It must be that,’ said Adamsberg, ‘or else it doesn’t make sense.’
‘So to do it, Jarras tries to get in touch with someone in Mexico City?’ asked Froissy.
‘Don’t twist the knife in the wound. One way or another, they managed it.’
‘And in fourteen years,’ Veyrenc said, ‘they collected enough poison to kill three men. And probably to kill another three?’
‘Does this stuff keep?’
‘I checked that,’ said Veyrenc. ‘Eighty years for some species, but it’s better to freeze it. That’s snakes – I don’t know about the recluse.’
‘We never know anything about the recluse,’ said Mercadet with a sigh. ‘That figures, they don’t usually bother anyone.’
The commissaire stretched out his arms, feeling more satisfied. The wind had stopped whistling through his ears.
‘Garbure?’ Veyrenc suggested.
The interest Veyrenc had shown in this Estelle woman was more serious than he had realised, Adamsberg thought. With this lightly issued invitation, it was clear that the lieutenant didn’t want to turn up there alone, but to have others around him. The previous time, Estelle had been playing hard to get.
‘Yes, all right,’ he said, although after these difficult days he would really have preferred to be stretching his legs out in front of his fireplace and trying to think. Or at least to read his notebook.
