This Poison Will Remain

by Fred Vargas

  ‘You’d never guess,’ said Retancourt.

  ‘Surprising, isn’t it? You might think it would be a heavier kind of loam. But no, it gets to be light and crumbly, it’s quite nice to handle. Look.’

  Mathias scooped up some finely powdered earth and put it in Retancourt’s outstretched palm. Adamsberg gave a slight start as he watched the archaeologist concentrating so hard that he didn’t seem to realise he was giving a woman a handful of shit. Retancourt crumbled the sediment in her fingers, impressed by the way Mathias had brought the living habits of the recluse to life: following in her footsteps, imagining her activity in this reduced space, even her character – clean, organised, determined – and her efforts not to be wading through her own rubbish, to ‘keep house’.

  ‘As for teeth,’ he said, turning to Adamsberg, ‘there are certainly some there. I can see some cusps – the tips of molars,’ he explained.

  Mathias spent the next two hours erecting his hoist, a triangular apparatus for setting up a sieve.

  ‘We don’t have water,’ he said, ‘so we’ll have to fetch some in buckets from the stream.’

  * * *

  *

  That night, from his tent, Adamsberg could hear Mathias and Retancourt chatting round the fire. Retancourt chatting.

  A text from Froissy woke him at two o’clock. Both Torrailles and Lambertin had died that day, a few hours apart. Full house.

  XLIV

  Under the admiring gaze of Retancourt, who was absorbing these skills that she did not possess, Mathias, wearing an anti-contamination suit, spent the second day of the dig silently excavating the occupied surface of the cell, and sifting out all the material. He placed in containers the various objects he had collected: fragments of china from a single plate and a water jug; some metal objects – knife, fork, spoon, a small mattock and a crucifix – all encased in rust; scraps of fabric from a blanket and a hammock, some shreds of leather (from a Bible); and finally a few animal bones, evidence of the rare gifts of meat, as well as some fish bones, eggshells and oyster shells (four of them or one for each Christmas spent there). The rest of the food received – gruel, soup, bread – had disappeared. No seeds from fruit, except for seven cherry stones. No bucket for a toilet. No comb, no mirror, no scissors. People might be pious and revere this holy woman, but they seemed to have been grudging with their offerings. Mathias often shook his head, disillusioned. When he dug out the latrine, a metre deep – she must have spent a long time digging it herself with the little mattock she’d received as a charitable gift – he nevertheless found five layers of straw, which meant she had been able to cover it over once a year. But there had been no straw elsewhere on the ground, which would have made the cell healthier.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, having dug out a total of fifty-eight plastic roses, ‘someone must have brought her a rose every month, and she stacked them against the wall. All the same,’ he repeated. ‘Out of a hundred men just one who thinks differently. Here, for you,’ he said, passing a bag to Adamsberg. ‘Six incisors, three canines, twelve premolars and molars. She’d lost twenty-one of her teeth.’

  Adamsberg went closer, feeling suddenly hesitant. The identity of the recluse was within reach. He took the bag, carefully, almost intimidated, put it away, then took his place without speaking alongside Retancourt, as they continued to fetch water non-stop, while Veyrenc sieved the sediment. Mathias pointed out the objects to pick up, the bones of mice, rats, a weasel, and countless scraps of chitin, the remnants of beetles and spiders. They also found long fragments of curved and broken fingernails, and quantities of hairs, blonde and grey, about four handfuls.

  Mathias inspected many of them under a magnifying glass.

  ‘The roots have gone, Adamsberg, you won’t get any DNA out of them. She came in here with blonde hair and went out grey. God Almighty, whatever happened to this woman?’

  ‘If she was Bernadette, the older sister –’

  ‘Bernadette, like St Bernadette?’ Mathias interrupted. ‘That’s why she came to Lourdes?’

  ‘Possibly. She was locked up until she was twenty-one by her father, raped from the age of five, ill-treated, badly fed, not cared for.’

  ‘One tooth lost for every year of suffering. And plenty of hair.’

  ‘If it was the younger sister, Annette, she was shut up until she was nineteen, and she was hired out to a gang of ten young boys who raped her between the ages of seven and nineteen. Whichever one of them it was, she couldn’t return to normal life. She did the only thing she’d learned to do, shut herself up in a cell.’

  Mathias twisted his trowel in his hands.

  ‘So who got her out of it?’

  ‘An order by the prefect of this département.’

  ‘No, I mean from her father’s house.’

  ‘Her older brother. At the age of twenty-three, he cut his father’s head off.’

  ‘And what do you suspect this woman has done?’

  ‘Murdered the ten rapists.’

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  * * *

  *

  By nine o’clock that evening, they had completed the work, after thirteen hours of solid effort. Only Retancourt was still busy, washing tools, dismantling the hoist, loading containers into the van. Mathias watched her, wondering if the power of the tree might be able to take a break.

  ‘Don’t put the shovels in the van, Violette,’ he said. ‘We’ll fill in the dig tomorrow.’

  ‘No, I thought of that.’

  ‘I’ll keep the plate,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Can you put the pieces on one side for me please, lieutenant?’

  ‘You want to stick it together?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘When we seal it all up, we’ll put the roses back in, shall we?’ she asked.

  Adamsberg nodded and went off to help Veyrenc prepare their supper: Louis had decided this should be a really satisfying one.

  ‘What do you think of Mathias?’ Adamsberg asked him.

  ‘Talented, subtle, a bit farouche. But I think your prehistoric man appreciates Retancourt.’

  ‘What’s more worrying, I think it’s mutual.’

  ‘Why is that worrying? For her?’

  ‘Because someone who becomes human loses their divine faculties.’

  * * *

  *

  As they ate their roast beef, potatoes baked in the ashes, and cheese, washed down with Madiran, Mathias nodded his thanks to Veyrenc several times. Adamsberg leaned on his elbows in the grass. Why was it that Veyrenc thought that the Dr Martin-Robinson bubble had not been resolved? He had been so pleased to cross it off the list. He thought about martins and robins. Small birds, nothing to do with the investigation. And the bubbles didn’t react when he thought about either of them, although the word ‘bird’ itself did seem to make the bubbles vibrate. Well, there were of course a lot of pigeons in there too.

  He sat up and wrote ‘Bird’ in his notebook.

  ‘What are you writing?’ asked Veyrenc.

  ‘Bird.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  * * *

  *

  Lying in his tent in the dark, his back stiff from lugging pails of water, Adamsberg thought about pitching a tent like this in his small garden, if Lucio would let him. He liked it here, it was a bit like time out travelling by train, noticing all the sounds of nature clearly, some distant frogs, the whoosh of bats flying low, the snuffling of a hedgehog outside his tent, and the sound of a male wood-pigeon which instead of going to sleep like all the daytime birds, went on making its mating call. It was June and he hadn’t found a mate. Adamsberg wished him luck, sincerely. There were some human noises too. The rasping sound of a tent being unzipped, a few metres to his left, footsteps in the grass, then a second zip being opened on the right. The tents of Retancourt and Mathias. Good Lord. Were they going to g
o on chatting, like the night before, sitting cross-legged in the tent by the light of a lantern? Or something else? Adamsberg had the uneasy feeling that his property was being stolen . . . He had by some unspoken Freudian slip allowed himself to think his property had been violated. Violate, Violette . . . He opened his own tent and peered out into the night. Yes, there was a lamp lit to his right. He lay down again and forced himself to think of something else. Mission accomplished, he had found the teeth of the recluse.

  So what are you going to do now?

  XLV

  The morning was spent filling in the excavation – with the fifty-eight roses buried inside – and striking camp. Adamsberg packed up the teeth and the fragments of the china plate. Mathias put the rest of the equipment in the van.

  He left at two o’clock, after shaking hands with the two men and kissing Retancourt under Adamsberg’s watchful eye. He had been wrong to describe his lieutenant as being ‘worth ten men’. She was worth one woman, and she was a woman. And he couldn’t help his feelings cooling towards her, as if she had in some obscure way betrayed him.

  Retancourt decided to drive the hired car with the baggage all the way back to Paris, which would take twice as long as the train, and dropped Veyrenc and Adamsberg off at the station.

  ‘She’s running away,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘You were sulking, so she’s running away,’ said Veyrenc.

  ‘I was not sulking.’

  ‘Yes you were.’

  ‘Did you hear, last night? The tent zips.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Adamsberg, knowing that in this matter Veyrenc was right and he was wrong.

  * * *

  *

  At nine in the evening, back in Paris, he had the new samples sent to the lab with a note for Louvain. This time, the DNA of the teeth would surely correspond to Louise, contrary to the false trail of the four hairs from Lédignan. Veyrenc had put it simply, and convincingly. Louise might well have put the hairs there. The crumbling of his own certainty, caused by the fruitless tumult of his thoughts, was based on nothing solid.

  He did not need to open the fridge or the cupboard to know that there was nothing to eat in his house. He set out without any destination in mind, his mood gloomy and his body tired. After a quarter of an hour of aimless walking, he headed back to his former neighbourhood and an Irish bar he used to go to, where the loud voices of the customers didn’t bother him since they were speaking English. In this incomprehensible hubbub, he could try to concentrate better than if he were alone. Back there, he sometimes managed it by small steps, feeling his way.

  He opened his notebook as he walked through the night, and looked at the crazy sequences of words, feeling discouraged, then clapped it shut again. How had he even dared read them out to Veyrenc? Louis had been Socratically annoying, by remarking that he had not crossed out the note about Martin-Robinson. And he had added that there were ‘a lot of birds in there’. Especially pigeons. Well, of course there were, but these feathered creatures could be chucked out with everything else. The bubbles of gas, the martins, robins, pigeons and creaky sounds could just be dispensed with, they were unwanted. His slight and enigmatic bitterness towards Retancourt was actually stopping him thinking about the bubbles. The previous evening was blocking his thoughts, that instant when the sound of the tent zip had felt like an assault. He kept running the nocturnal sounds on a loop through his head, the bats, the hedgehog, the bird desperately calling its companion to which he’d wished good luck.

  Then Adamsberg stopped short in mid-pavement, his notebook in hand, and stood still. This time he must not move an inch. A snowflake, a bubble, a proto-thought was stirring somewhere. He recognised the slight tickle as it made its way up, knowing he should not make any movement which might scare it off, if he wanted to see it clearly.

  Sometimes he didn’t have to wait long. This time, it seemed an eternity. And it was. A heavy bubble, a clumsy one perhaps, finding it hard to manoeuvre, or find the strength to rise to the surface. Passers-by in the street avoided this man standing there, or bumped into him, by mistake, but no matter. It was imperative not to take any notice of them, not to move or say a word. He stood as if transfixed.

  Suddenly, the bubble reached the surface explosively, making him drop his notebook. He picked it up, found a pen and wrote in shaky handwriting:

  The male bird in the night.

  Then he reread the list.

  Out of breath now, more than after ferrying hundreds of bucketfuls of water, he leaned against a tree and called Veyrenc.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked him.

  ‘Have you been running?’

  ‘No, no. Where the hell are you? At La Garbure?’

  ‘No, at home.’

  ‘Get over here, Louis. I’m on the corner of the rue Saint-Antoine and the rue du Petit Musc. There’s a café here. Get a move on.’

  ‘No, you come over to my place. Earth, buckets, I’m dropping off to sleep.’

  ‘Louis, I can’t move.’

  ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

  ‘Something like that. Listen, I’m reading the name of the café, Le Petit Musc. Jump in a taxi and get here fast, Louis.’

  ‘Should I bring a gun?’

  ‘No, just your brain. Run.’

  * * *

  *

  Veyrenc never neglected this type of appeal from Adamsberg. Voice, tone, rhythm of speaking, all were different. Wide awake now, he managed, by running as requested, to catch the first passing taxi.

  Even from a distance, from the door of the café, he could see the brilliance of Adamsberg’s eyes, which seemed to concentrate all the surrounding light, instead of diluting it as usual. He was sitting in front of a sandwich and a coffee, but neither eating nor moving. His notebook lay on the table, with his hands flat down either side of it.

  ‘You need to follow me carefully,’ said Adamsberg, before Veyrenc had even sat down. ‘Follow me carefully, because this will come out jumbled. You’ll be able to sort it out. Last night, before we heard the tent zip open, I was lying in my tent, listening to the sounds of the night. Are you with me?’

  ‘So far, yes. Mind if I order a coffee?’

  ‘Go ahead. There were frogs croaking, the wind in the grass, the flutter of bats swooping low, a hedgehog, and a wood-pigeon cooing all the time, trying to attract a mate.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And none of that reminds you of anything?’

  ‘Just one thing. The wood-pigeon. Which is a species of pigeon.’

  ‘And that explains why the bubbles got excited about the pigeon. Like you said, we’ve mentioned pigeons quite a lot.’

  Adamsberg pulled the notebook towards him and read phrases out:

  ‘“Dovecot: couldn’t find the word / pigeon feet tied / being pigeon myself / too much chattering and cooing.” But it’s not just pigeon I should have written down, Louis, but “wood-pigeon”.’

  ‘It’s just another kind of pigeon, different from the town ones.’

  ‘But then what? Shit, Louis, where does that take us?’ said Adamsberg, shaking his notebook. ‘What does the wood-pigeon connect to? It was you that told me.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you did. Look, I had to write it down. “Martin-Robinson: just two birds, not a problem, resolved. Or not.”’

  ‘What I said was that if that thought had really been dealt with, you wouldn’t have read it out to me.’

  ‘And why wasn’t it dealt with?’

  Adamsberg broke off to drink some coffee.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said.

  ‘You too? The buckets, eh?’

  ‘No, not the buckets. Now don’t say anything, or you’ll confuse me. So what’s the connection between Dr Martin-Robinson and a wood-
pigeon?’

  ‘Easy, you’ve got two names of birds in there, martin and robin.’

  ‘Yes, but as well, they’re double-barrelled names, Louis. Double! See now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then there were the two things Retancourt said: “too much chattering and cooing” was one of them. Pigeons again, they coo, don’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, you read that one out too.’

  ‘And the other thing’s connected, too. Everything’s connected, Louis. My bubbles are dancing round, holding hands, and I can’t ignore them. The other thing she said was “creaking boards”. Now what links those two sentences?’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ said Veyrenc, by now worried about the apparent confusion of Adamsberg’s thoughts, ‘but I’m going to need a glass of Armagnac.’

  ‘All right, get me a glass too.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Veyrenc, a little anxious about his boss’s apparent state of mind.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A glass of what?’

  ‘Anything. See what links them? It’s the place. The place it happened, the place where the cooing went on, the place where everything was creaking. Creaky, not right, doesn’t hold water.’

  ‘Well, Retancourt was talking about Louise’s house.’

  ‘Yes indeed, Socrates. See, where we’re going now, if you connect it to the wood-pigeon, and the double-barrelled surnames.’

  The waiter put their glasses on the table and Veyrenc drank off half of his at once.

  ‘To be quite honest, no,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. It’s linked to the names in that house. Their meaning. Remember we went astray, because Louise had the surname Chevrier, and it tied up so neatly with that story, La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, Monsieur Seguin’s little goat?’