by Fred Vargas
‘Snowstorms. Those things you shake and you get snowflakes all over some monument.’
‘Understood.’
‘And then ask to go to the bathroom, and try to get some of her hair from a brush or comb.’
‘Which isn’t allowed without a warrant.’
‘Sure. There will be two hairbrushes. Besides Louise’s there’ll be one belonging to Irène, but she dyes her hair blonde. You won’t be able to mistake them.’
‘That’s if Louise does dye her hair red. Which we don’t know.’
‘Precisely, and send me the result as soon as possible. Don’t worry if Irène refers to me as “Jean-Bapt” in front of Louise. It’s agreed between us. Oh, and one more thing, I told Irène you’re very nice.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Retancourt, losing a smidgeon of her usual confidence.
She thought for a moment.
‘I’ll manage,’ she said finally. ‘I think I can do it.’
‘Who would ever doubt it, Violette?’
* * *
*
Retancourt dropped Adamsberg and Veyrenc at their hotel in Nîmes, and set off at once for Cadeirac with her camera.
Adamsberg took the time to send a message to Froissy telling her to stop looking for pictures of Louise smiling. And another to Noël and Justin, to tell them to go back to headquarters.
‘What I propose now,’ he said to Veyrenc, ‘is to eat a substantial breakfast and rest until Retancourt calls in.’
‘You think she’ll manage this visit? It isn’t straightforward. She’ll have to lie through her teeth, and be very tactful psychologically.’
‘Retancourt can manage anything. She’d have been able to sail the San Antonio single-handed.’
‘Perhaps you’re pulling too hard on the rein.’
‘Retancourt doesn’t have one,’ said Adamsberg, eyeing him. ‘And if she did, she’d drag me right round the world.’
XL
Veyrenc took the text from Retancourt at about midday.
No response from boss, sent this earlier, can you pass on copy please? Louise has false teeth, complete set. Hair identical to sample. Looks 70. ‘Used to drive.’ Nothing in the bathroom, she has en suite bedroom. Couldn’t get in there, creaky boards. Genuinely afraid of recluses. She started law degree Nîmes, gave up because of ‘incident’. Spoke of labour law with authority. And as I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I pinched a little teaspoon she used. I WAS nice. So were they. Irène’s funny, but they’re cooing and chattering all the time in that house, not my scene. She gave me a goddam Rochefort snowstorm for boss!
When Veyrenc went into Adamsberg’s room, the commissaire was still fast asleep, fully dressed on the bed. He shook his shoulder.
‘News from Retancourt, Jean-Baptiste. She’s been trying to reach you.’
‘Didn’t hear.’
He smiled as he read the message.
‘Yes, good idea the teaspoon.’
‘Do you really suspect her?’
‘False name, her age, her hair and teeth, for the moment everything fits.’
‘What’s all this about teeth?’
Adamsberg sighed and passed the mobile back.
‘My recluse only had a few rotten teeth left in her mouth, Louis. Because of malnutrition. Once she was out of . . . shit! what’s the name of that place, you know, where they keep those birds?’
‘The dovecot, you mean? Doves, pigeons, same thing. Danglard would tell you it could be a columbarium, from columba, Latin for pigeon. Though when it’s in a house, it could be a pigeon loft –’
‘Just dovecot will do, not the rest. I must have slept too long,’ said Adamsberg, smoothing his hair with his fingers. ‘I’m forgetting words now.’
He stayed sitting on the bed for a few moments, then put his shoes on and opened his notebook. Dovecot, I couldn’t find the word.
‘It’s just the extraction,’ said Veyrenc. ‘As the doc told you.’
‘Yes, but still.’
‘Forget the dovecot, back to Louise. Yes, all right, I agree, the name, Chevrier, Monsieur Seguin’s little goat. And she was raped by Carnot, who knew Landrieu, who was linked to the orphanage gang. Yes, the hair, her phobias, soap and oil. But then again, she’s terrified of recluses. And if she really started her law studies before the “incident” – which must be the rape – she can’t be one of the sisters locked up in Nîmes. Froissy’s probably right, she must have been born abroad.’
‘She’s having us on. Everything converges, everything looks solid. Apparently.’
‘Apparently? You’re sure you’ve got your killer, but now it’s only “apparently”?’
‘It’s all these blind inlets, Louis. Maybe this is just one more. No,’ he said, ‘it’s something else. A sort of itch that’s bothering me, as Lucio would say.’
‘Since when?’
‘Can’t say.’
‘What kind of itch?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Come on then, let’s clear the rooms and have breakfast.’
‘Drekka borða,’ agreed Adamsberg, getting up. ‘And back to base. We’ll send the hairs and the spoon straight to the lab for DNA testing. Then we’ll know whether, yes or no, she was in that little box room with a gun and some venom. And we might find some link to the Seguin family.’
‘Enzo can’t have had his DNA taken when he got out of prison, they didn’t do that in 1984. We’d have to exhume the parents.’
‘Or find in police archives the axe that killed the father. Which might tell us if Louise was his tethered goat. Who, unlike in the story, got free and went around killing wolves.’
* * *
*
From the train on the way back to Paris, Adamsberg texted Retancourt: Congratulations and end of mission. Leave spoon on my desk.
Then he went into the corridor to phone Dr Martin-Robinson.
‘Remember that recluse in the dovecot, doctor?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, today, I couldn’t remember the word for “dovecot”.’
‘Have you been sleeping a lot, as advised?’ the doctor asked.
‘Never slept so much in my life.’
‘Excellent.’
‘If I’ve forgotten the word for dovecot, is that collateral damage from the extraction?’
‘No, it means the scarring process is working. It’s evasion. We all do it.’
‘What do you mean, evasion?’
‘You’re failing to recognise something you do know, but you don’t want to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it hurts, it’s a problem, we prefer to evade it, go round it, not say it.’
‘But look, doctor, if it’s the dovecot, I must be thinking about my recluse woman, mustn’t I?’
‘No. That chapter’s over, and you’ve fully remembered it. Have you ever had anything else to do with doves? Or pigeons?’
‘Pigeons? Six million Parisians see pigeons every day.’
‘No, I don’t mean that. Have you ever personally had any worry connected with a pigeon? Take your time.’
Adamsberg leaned against the train door, letting the motion of the carriage rock him.
‘Well, yes, in fact I did once,’ he said. ‘With my son – we found this pigeon with its legs tied together. We took it in, looked after it, and it comes back almost every month to the house.’
‘And you’re fond of it?’
‘I was concerned whether it would survive, yes. And I like it when it appears. Except the damn thing shits on the kitchen table every time.’
‘That means it sees your place as a safe house. So it puts down a marker. Don’t clean up its droppings in front of it, Adamsberg, you’d hurt its feelings, psychologically.’
‘You can hurt a pigeon’s feelin
gs psychologically?’
‘Naturally.’
‘All right then, what about the dovecot? It was quite a while back that I rescued the pigeon.’
‘It was probably the fact that its feet were tied together that affected you. The fact that it was a prisoner. So that relates to your investigation, and your search for any girls who had been sequestered. Have you found any?’
‘Yes. We’ve discovered a horrific case. Dating back forty-nine years. And I do believe one of those two girls is the killer.’
‘And you’re feeling wretched at the thought of arresting her? Putting her back in a cage, or a dovecot, with your own hands.’
‘Yes, precisely.’
‘Quite normal. Hence the evasion. There is of course another possibility, less likely though. You know the slang meaning of pigeon? A sucker, a dupe, someone who’s been tricked. Perhaps you’re afraid that you’re being taken for a ride, like a pigeon. In other words, someone’s deceiving you. And since this possibility, in your unconscious, is hurtful, you’re avoiding anything to do with pigeons, like the word dovecot, so it must be someone close to you. Someone who’s fooled you. Maybe a colleague.’
‘Yeah, as it happens, I was betrayed by my longest-standing deputy, but I’ve sorted it.’
‘How?’
‘By destroying the posture he’d taken up.’
‘And how did you do that?’
‘I socked him on the jaw.’
‘Ah, that was a brutal method. Did it work?’
‘Very well – he’s returned to his normal self.’
‘That’s a style of therapy forbidden to me,’ said the doctor, with one of his hearty laughs. ‘But let’s be serious. It’s not your deputy, then. Think about the other members of your team. Perhaps you’re afraid someone hasn’t told you everything. Because after all, it would be normal for them not to want the murderer of these old bastards to get caught. To consider the vengeance well deserved.’
‘No, no,’ said Adamsberg. ‘That’s unthinkable for me.’
‘I said there were two possibilities. Either you’re bothered by the idea of putting the wounded creature, this woman, back in captivity, or by the thought that you’re the pigeon, if someone’s deceiving you. Think it over.’
‘I can’t think.’
‘In that case, go back to sleep.’
Adamsberg returned to his seat, feeling worried. He wrote down the doctor’s two theories. Putting back in chains the poor little girl who’d been locked up, even if she had become a demented killer? Sending her back to a cell, just like the one where she’d spent her childhood? Becoming her final jailer? Her final Monsieur Seguin? He tried to do his job, not think about it. Too painful. Evade it.
Then he thought about the second possibility. Was he the pigeon? Was someone in the team altering the vessel’s course, as Danglard had already tried to do? Who had been in charge of processing information? Mercadet and Froissy. Neither of them had been able to find any trace of the Seguin sisters. Or so they had said. Voisenet, Justin, Noël and Lamarre had been on watch, and assured him that none of the boys who were bitten had gone missing at the time of Vessac’s murder. So they’d abandoned that lead. There was Retancourt of course, who’d failed to stop the killer of Torrailles and Lambertin. Unusual for Retancourt to fail at anything. Why hadn’t she thought of the possibility that the assassin was inside the house, rather than approaching it from outside? But then, he’d been slow off the mark himself, before he’d thought of the hypodermic. So he hadn’t suggested anything of the sort to her. If he’d thought of it a few hours earlier, he’d have ordered them to keep Torrailles and Lambertin in a closed room under police protection. It was his own fault. Still, she had apologised and justified herself, she’d said ‘I’m terribly sorry’, which was unlike her. But no, not Retancourt, for the love of God, don’t let it be Retancourt who’s betraying me.
* * *
*
That evening, Adamsberg went into the almost deserted squad headquarters, to send a request to police archives concerning the homicide of Eugène Seguin in Nîmes in 1967. He didn’t expect too much from the service, especially without some official backup from his superiors. To find an axe that had been packed away for forty-nine years was a very long shot. The hairs he had collected and the little teaspoon went off by special courier for analysis, with a personal request to make it urgent, addressed to Louvain, one of the senior staff in the DNA lab.
He left instructions to the duty officers regarding the blackbirds, and asked Veyrenc to draft a report for the team on the events at Lédignan. Gardon, who was on the desk, confessed shamefacedly that he really couldn’t handle putting wriggling worms down in the earth for the birds. On the other hand, Estalère offered enthusiastically to do it. He was off duty next day, but he’d come in morning and evening to distribute the worms, cake and raspberries.
Estalère hadn’t been in charge of any search for information. Estalère he could trust as if he were his own son.
XLI
Adamsberg was becoming aware that there was not just one single ‘proto-thought’ troubling him, but a whole disparate group of gas bubbles – and they certainly existed – some of them so small as to be barely discernible. He could feel them bouncing around in different directions, and their trajectories were wild. Facing two unresolved questions – and there were more, obviously – the bubbles had no more chance of finding their way than someone who was cross-eyed. Or that man in the story who tried to chase two hares at the same time – though why anyone would do that if they weren’t completely stupid was anyone’s guess. He lost them both, of course.
As if echoing the turbulence of his bubbles, as if watching their movements, spying on them, he was playing with his snowstorm, now on his desk. He shook it and watched the crazy whirlwind of white particles falling on the coat of arms of Rochefort: a star with five points, a tower, and a three-masted ship under full sail.
The ship again. What would that hardened mariner Magellan have done with a woman who had been first martyred then turned murderer? Would he have beheaded and dismembered her, as had been a custom at the time? Or abandoned her on a desert shore, as he had some of his shipmates who had turned traitor?
Two elements kept appearing on the path ahead. The clock tower of the orphanage La Miséricorde, and the cell of the recluse in the Pré d’Albret. But nothing, or virtually nothing, told him that the woman living there had the remotest connection to the killer who had managed to get rid of ten men in twenty years. Yet that ‘virtually nothing’ still preoccupied his thoughts. The saint of Lourdes was called Bernadette. And so was the elder Seguin sister. Had her despair at living sent her towards the territory of her patron saint to cloister herself in a cell? Or was it the younger one? Which of them? And how might Louise fit in?
* * *
*
Next morning the news from the hospital in Nîmes was not good. The doctors were giving the two men who had been ‘bitten’ only a couple of days to live. Blood tests, this time more detailed, apparently showed a dose of venom twenty times that of a normal recluse spider. Dr Pujol had been right. You needed at least forty-four venom glands to kill a medium-sized adult man, so you had to find the impossible number of 132 spiders, then get them to spit out their venom. And how on earth did you do that?
Adamsberg couldn’t get his own recluse of Lourdes to spit out anything for him. The theory of venom for venom, fluid for fluid, didn’t entirely convince him. With snakes, yes, why not? But recluse spiders? There must be some more powerful motive for someone to choose such a complex method of killing people. And since that hideous woman had surged up from the depths of his memory, only a real life as a recluse seemed to him to justify such an insane project. Only the status of being a genuine recluse could explain that this woman had become identified with the spider of the same name, one that lived with her in her dark cell. In the same way, her physi
cal transformation – nails turning into claws, hair becoming a mane, making her more like a wild creature – could explain her metamorphosis into an animal, an animal with powerful, fluid, penetrating venom. That was her weapon, she had no choice.
This feeling was obsessive, but it was still exceedingly vague, with not the slightest factual proof to give it any substance. The sail was quivering in the wind – as Dr Martin-Robinson had said. Martin-Robinson – what a mouthful of a name!
It would be useless trying to find any clues on the spot. The woman had been surrounded by holy silence and remained so. Her identity and her secret had been buried deep in her hiding place, and she was no longer there.
Buried deep. Adamsberg looked up. What was the good of having a friend who was an archaeologist, if you didn’t try to tease the truth out of the very earth where she had lived? He packed a bag hurriedly, put the snowstorm in his pocket, and caught the 10.24 Paris–Lourdes train. From the train, he called Mathias, the prehistoric expert he had consulted before, one of the so-called ‘three evangelists’ who shared a run-down house in Paris. They exchanged their news. Mathias was waiting to be hired on a dig that summer on a Solutrean site. Lucien was making a name for himself as a historian of the Great War. Marc, the medievalist, was still dividing his time between giving classes at university and ironing sheets. Marc’s godfather, the ex-cop Vandoosler, was still alive and kicking, and as sarcastic as ever, and Marc was still addicted to stealing luxury food, especially hare and langoustines.
‘I don’t think he’ll ever stop doing that,’ said Mathias, ‘but Lucien cooks it all beautifully. So what’s this about?’
‘A dig. It’s not officially paid, but I’ll see what I can do.’
‘If it’s for you, I’m not bothered about the money. Are you on a murder case?’
‘Ten murders. Six in the last month.’
‘So you want to look in some graves?’
‘No, I want to look at the site of an old dovecot.’
