An Uncertain Place

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SUPPORTED BY THE COMMISSAIRE, MORDENT WAS LIMPING back to join the rest of the team. Lieutenant Froissy had now replaced Lamarre and had immediately taken charge of rations, providing everyone with lunch on a table in the garden. You could always count on Froissy, who treated the question of provisions as if there was a war on. Thin and always hungry, her obsession with nourishment had led her to install various food stores in the headquarters of the squad. They were believed to be even more numerous than Danglard’s caches of white wine. Some people even claimed that they would still be finding these food stores in the remains of the building in two hundred years’ time, whereas Danglard’s bottles would long since have been emptied.

Lieutenant Noël had his own theories about Froissy. Noël was the toughest member of the team, with a crude attitude to women and an aggressive one towards men. Suspects he always treated with contempt. He caused more harm than good on balance, but Danglard considered his presence necessary, maintaining that Noël catalysed the darkness that lay inside every police officer and in that way he allowed others to behave better. Noël shrugged and accepted his role. But oddly enough, he was better informed than anyone about his colleagues’ intimate secrets, whether because his brusque and direct approach overcame their inhibitions, or because they felt no shame in letting him view the murky depths of their lives, since Noël’s own past made him unshockable. At any rate his interpretation of Froissy’s dietary insecurity was, he said, linked to the fact that when she was a baby her mother had fainted and lost consciousness and she had been left for four days without nursing. So Froissy, he concluded with a knowing laugh, was still looking for the breast and giving it to others at the same time, which explained why she never put on any weight.

It was three in the afternoon and they had to wait till they had eaten before they could relax and tell each other what exactly had been happening outside the villa. They knew that Retancourt had gone in pursuit of someone – which was generally bad news for the pursued – and that she had been backed up by a squad from Garches, three patrol cars and four motorcyclists. But there had been no word from her, and Adamsberg had reported that she had set off with three minutes’ handicap, after receiving a punch to the midriff. And the someone in question, otherwise known as Émile or ‘Basher’, eleven years inside and 138 known brawls, was the kind of guy who would escape even Retancourt. He summarised, but without going into details, the disagreement between himself and Mordent which had caused the suspect to run for it. Nobody asked why Émile hadn’t punched the commissaire or why Adamsberg hadn’t gone after him himself. Everyone knew that Retancourt was the fastest on her feet of all the squad, so they considered it normal that she had set off alone. Mordent wiped his plate, still looking grim, but that was put down to concern for his testicles. In Émile’s file, rapidly checked, nobody had failed to see one item, namely that ‘Basher’ had destroyed the manhood of a racing driver with a single blow of his elbow. That fight alone had fetched him a year in jail, plus compensation and damages yet to be finalised.

Adamsberg observed his colleagues’ expressions of doubt, questioning and hesitating between the instinctive sympathy they all felt for their fellow officer who had received such an intimate injury, and a cautious prudence. Everyone, even Estalère, had understood that Mordent had stepped out of line in an incomprehensible way: he had jumped the gun by ordering a suspect to be taken into custody without first referring to Adamsberg, and had then panicked the suspect by tackling it in an amateur way.

‘Who put the last samples in the truck this morning?’ Adamsberg asked.

He unthinkingly poured the liquid from the bottom of a bottle into his glass: it was ochre-coloured and cloudy.

‘It’s home-brewed cider,’ Froissy explained. ‘You can really only drink it for an hour after it’s opened, but it’s very good. I thought it would cheer us up.’

‘Thank you,’ said Adamsberg, drinking off the thick residue.

Another of Froissy’s functions was to try and keep people’s spirits up, which was not easy in a team of criminal investigators who were chronically short of sleep.

‘Froissy and me,’ said Voisenet, in answer to his question.

‘We need to retrieve the horse shit. I want to see it.’

‘That went off yesterday to the lab.’

‘No, I don’t mean that sample, I mean the stuff they found in Émile’s van.’

‘Oh,’ said Estalère, ‘you mean Émile’s horse shit.’

‘Easy enough,’ said Voisenet, ‘it’s stacked in the priority box.’

‘Should we put someone on to the mother’s nursing home?’ Kernorkian asked.

‘Yes, we ought to, for form’s sake. But even a Neanderthal would realise it would be watched.’

‘And he is a Neanderthal,’ said Mordent, as he went on wiping his plate.

‘No,’ said Adamsberg, ‘he’s a nostalgic. And nostalgia can give you ideas.’

Adamsberg hesitated. There was one almost fail-safe way of catching Émile: by going to the farm where Cupid was kept. All he had to do was post a couple of men there and they’d pick him up, this week or next. He was the only person who knew about Cupid’s existence, or the farm’s, or its approximate location, and the name of the owners, which his memory had miraculously retained. The Gérault cousins, three-quarters dairy, one-quarter beef. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, haunted by uncertainty, wondering whether he believed Émile to be innocent, whether he was brooding over some kind of revenge against Mordent, whether for the last two hours, or perhaps since the London trip, he had gone over to the other shore, siding with the migrants who were trying to get across frontiers illegally, giving a hand to wrongdoers, and resisting the forces of order. These questions flowed through his mind like a flock of starlings, but he didn’t attempt to answer them. As the others got up, having eaten and been brought up to date, Adamsberg stood apart and motioned to Noël. If anyone knew, he would.

‘Mordent. What’s the matter with him?’

‘He’s got problems.’

‘I’m sure he has. What kind of problems?’

‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘Vital to the inquiry, Noël. You saw for yourself. Go on.’

‘If you insist. His daughter. Only daughter. Sun shines out of her. Mind you, ask me, she’s not much to look at. Anyway, she was picked up two months ago, living with half a dozen dropouts, doped up to the eyeballs, in a squat in La Vrille. Know it? One of those stinking holes on the estates where rich kids go when they start doing drugs.’

‘And?’

‘One of these six wankers is her boyfriend, a skinny so-and-so, rotten to the core. They even call him “Bones”. Twelve years older than her, plenty of form for mugging pensioners, that kind of thing, total scumbag, but good-looking, and a big player in the Colombian network. The girl had run away from home, leaving a note, and our poor old Mordent’s gnawing his balls off about it.’

‘Well, how are his balls anyway?’

‘He’s called the doctor, they say leave it for a day or two. Hope he gets them back, not a foregone conclusion with that Basher’s record. Not that he has much call for them, his wife’s having it off with the piano teacher, and she rubs his nose in it.’

‘Why didn’t he tell me when the girl left home?’

‘He’s like that, the old storyteller. He spins us any number of yarns, but he keeps shtum about real life. If you remember, we were doing all that stuff with the graves we opened. And take it any way you want, but people don’t like to tell you this kind of thing.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re never sure you’d be listening. And even if you listen, they expect you’ll forget. So no point, is there? Mordent doesn’t want to get into the clouds. But you’re sitting up in them.’

‘I know what they say. But I think my feet are on the ground.’

‘Well, different ground from the rest of us, is all I can say.’

‘Perhaps, Noël. Anyway, what’s happened about the girl?’

‘Elaine, she’s called. Mordent went over to the squat when the Bicêtre cops called him in, and it was a real hell-hole, you can imagine. Teenagers there eating dog food out of tins. It was one of them panicked and called the emergency services, because somebody OD’d. Mind you, dog food isn’t as bad as all that, it’s just meat stew. Any rate, Mordent’s kid was totally out of it, high as a kite, and the cops found enough coke there to slap on a charge of dealing. But the worst thing was they found weapons – a couple of handguns and flick knives. And one of the guns was traced to a case from some months back in the north of Paris, shooting of a dealer, name of Stubby Down. And the witnesses had said there were two attackers involved, one of them a girl with long brown hair.’

‘Oh dammit.’

‘In the end, they kept three of the kids in on remand, and Elaine Mordent’s one of them.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Fresnes jail, and she’s on methadone. She could get two to four years minimum, more if they prove she was really involved in this Stubby Down murder. Mordent says when she comes out she’ll be finished for good. Danglard’s trying to keep him going by watering him with white wine like a plant, but it just makes him worse. As soon as he can get away from work, he’s down there, in Fresnes or outside, looking at the walls. So, you can imagine.’

Noël turned round, thumbs in his belt, and jerked his chin towards the villa.

‘And with this God-awful scene in there, it’s no wonder he’s going off message. Perhaps we’d better get Danglard to come along, now we’ve cleaned it up. Voisenet’s looking for you, he’s found Émile’s horse shit, as that halfwit Estalère called it.’

Voisenet had put the sample on the garden table. He passed Adamsberg a pair of gloves. The commissaire opened the plastic sachet and sniffed the contents.

‘They labelled it “horse manure” but it could be something else.’

‘No, that’s what it is,’ said Adamsberg, holding a chunk in his hand, ‘though it doesn’t look the same as the stuff in the house. That was in pellets.’

‘Yeah, but that’s because the pellets formed in the soles of the boots. And with all the blood and stuff on the carpet, they came out.’

‘No, Voisenet, it wasn’t the same horse. At least what I’m saying is, it’s not the same horse shit, so it wasn’t the same horse.’

‘Maybe there were two horses,’ Justin hazarded.

‘What I mean is, not a horse from the same farm. Therefore not the same shoes. At least I think not.’

Adamsberg pushed back a lock of hair. It was annoying that they kept getting back to shoes. His mobile rang. Retancourt. He dropped the sample on to the table.

‘Commissaire, nothing doing. Émile got away from me in the car park of Garches hospital, two ambulances got between us. I’m sorry. There are some motorbike cops trying to pick up the scent.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, lieutenant, he had a good start.’

‘That wasn’t all he had,’ said Retancourt. ‘He knows the area like the back of his hand, he went streaking through gardens, alleyways, as if he’d built them himself. He’s probably hiding behind some hedge. It’ll be hard to dislodge him unless he gets hungry, which he might soon. I’m stopping here, because I think he cracked one of my ribs when he took off.’

‘Where are you, Violette? Still at the hospital?’

‘Yes, the cops have gone round it searching for places he might be hiding.’

‘Get inside and see a doctor about the rib.’

‘Will do,’ said Retancourt and rang off.

Adamsberg snapped his mobile shut. Retancourt had no intention of getting herself examined.

‘Émile may have broken her rib,’ he said. ‘Painful.’

‘Could have been worse, he could have kicked her in the balls.’

‘That’ll do, Noël.’

‘Not the same horse farm?’ Justin chipped in.

Adamsberg took up the piece of horse manure again, biting back a more angry retort to Noël, who never stopped needling Retancourt, saying she wasn’t a woman at all, but an ox or something. Whereas for Adamsberg, if Retancourt wasn’t exactly a woman in the ordinary sense, it was because she was a goddess. The polyvalent goddess of the squad with as many talents as the God-knows-how-many-armed goddess Shiva.

‘How many arms does that Indian goddess have?’ he asked his juniors, still holding the scrap of dung.

The four lieutenants shook their heads.

‘Always the same,’ said Adamsberg. ‘When Danglard’s not here nobody knows the answer to anything.’

He closed up the sachet again, shut the zip and gave it to Voisenet.

‘We’ll have to call him to get an answer. Now, what it is, I think this horse, the one that produced this shit, familiarly known as Émile’s horse shit, was out in a field and has eaten nothing but grass. And I think the other one, the origin of the pellets in the villa, which we’ll call “the killer’s horse shit”, was fed in a stable on granules.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘I spent my childhood collecting horse manure for fertiliser, and cowpats for burning in the fireplace. I still do that, and I can assure you, Voisenet, that depending on what they’ve been fed, you get a different kind of horse manure.’

‘OK,’ agreed Voisenet.

‘When will we get the lab results?’ asked Adamsberg, as he punched in Danglard’s number. ‘Give them a kick up the pants: we need this stuff urgently – the shit, the Kleenex, fingerprints, body parts, all that.’

He walked away as Danglard came on the line.

‘Nearly five o’clock, Danglard. We need you for this Garches mess. It’s all cleared up, we’re on our way back, we’re going to do the first summary. Oh, one second, how many arms has that Indian goddess got? The one that sits inside a ball? Shiva?’

‘Shiva’s not a goddess at all, commissaire. He’s a god.’

‘A god! It’s a man,’ added the commissaire for his lieutenants’ benefit. ‘So Shiva’s a man, and how many arms does he have?’ he asked Danglard.

‘Depends on the different images, because Shiva’s powers are immense and contradictory, covering practically the whole spectrum, from destruction to blessing. Sometimes two, sometimes four, but it can go up to ten. Depends what he’s embodying at the time.’

‘And roughly speaking, Danglard, what does he embody?’

‘Well, to cut a long story short, “at the vacuum in the centre of Nirvana-Shakti is the supreme Shiva whose nature is emptiness”.’

Adamsberg had turned up the speaker, and looked at his colleagues who seemed as lost as he was and were making signs to forget it. Finding out that Shiva was a male deity was quite enough for one day.

‘Has this got anything to do with Garches?’ asked Danglard. ‘Not enough arms?’

‘Émile Feuillant’s inherited Vaudel’s estate, except the legal share that goes to Pierre junior. Mordent broke the rules and told him he was about to be arrested. So Émile, aka Basher, floored him and made a break for it.’

‘And Retancourt couldn’t catch him?’

‘She didn’t manage it. She can’t have had all her arms working, and he’d broken one of her ribs when he took off. We’re expecting you, commandant. Mordent’s out of it more or less.’

‘I dare say. But my train doesn’t leave until nine twelve in the evening. I don’t think I can change my ticket.’

‘What train, Danglard?’

‘The train that goes through the goddam tunnel, commissaire. Don’t imagine I’m doing this for my own amusement. But I saw what I came to see. And if he didn’t cut off my uncle’s feet, it came pretty close.’

‘Danglard, where are you?’ asked Adamsberg slowly, sitting back down at the table and turning off the speaker.

‘Where the heck do you think I am? I’m in London, and they’re pretty sure now, the shoes are almost all French, some good quality, some bad. Different social classes. Believe me, we’re going to get the whole lot on our plate, and Radstock is already rubbing his hands.’

‘But what the devil took you back to London?’ Adamsberg almost shouted. ‘Why the hell did you have to go and get mixed up with the damned shoes again? Leave them in Higg-Gate, leave them to Stock!’

‘Radstock you mean. Commissaire, I told you I was going and you agreed, it was necessary.’

‘Don’t mess me about, Danglard, it was that woman Abstract, and you swam the Channel to see her.’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t seen her again!’

‘I didn’t say that, but that’s got nothing to do with the shoes.’

‘I certainly hope not, Danglard.’

‘If you thought that someone had cut off your uncle’s feet, you’d want to go and take a look too.’

Adamsberg looked up at the sky which was clouding over, watched as a duck flew across the horizon, and turned back to the phone more calmly.

‘What uncle? I didn’t know there was an uncle involved.’

‘I’m not talking about a living uncle, I’m not talking about someone walking around with no feet. My uncle died about twenty years ago. My aunt’s second husband, and I was very fond of him.’

‘Without wanting to upset you, commandant, nobody would be capable of recognising their uncle’s dead feet.’

‘Not his feet, no, the shoes. As our friend Lord Clyde-Fox rightly said.’

‘Clyde-Fox?’

‘That eccentric English lord we met.’

‘Ah. Yes,’ said Adamsberg with a sigh.

‘I saw him again yesterday, incidentally. He was down in the dumps because he’s mislaid his new Cuban pal. We had a few drinks, he’s a specialist on Indian history. And as he quite rightly said, what can you put into shoes? Feet of course. Usually your own. And if the shoes belonged to my uncle, there was every chance the feet did too.’

‘A bit like the horse shit and the horse,’ Adamsberg commented. Fatigue was starting to give him a backache.

‘Like the container and the contents. But I’m not sure whether it’s actually my uncle or not. It could be a cousin, or someone from the same village. They’re all cousins of some kind over there.’

‘OK,’ said Adamsberg, sliding along to the end of the table. ‘Even if some nutter has made a collection of French feet and his path unfortunately crossed that of your uncle, or his cousin, what the hell has that got to do with us?’

‘You said yourself that there was no rule against taking an interest,’ said Danglard, sounding disgruntled. ‘You were the one who wouldn’t let the Highgate feet drop.’

‘While we were there, yes, maybe. But now we’re in Garches and I’m not interested. And that was a big mistake to go back, Danglard. Because if these feet are French, Scotland Yard will want us to collaborate. It could have been sent to a different squad, but now, thanks to you, our squad is the one with its head above the parapet. And I need you here, for this bloodbath in Garches, which is a damn sight more scary than some necrophiliac who went round cutting off feet right and left twenty years ago.’

‘Not “right and left”. I think they were selected.’

‘Did Stock tell you that?’

‘No, that’s my idea. Because when my uncle died, he was in Serbia, and so were his feet.’

‘And you’re wondering why the amputator went all the way to Serbia to collect feet, when there are sixty million of them in France.’

‘A hundred and twenty million. Sixty million people, a hundred and twenty million feet. You’re making the same mistake as Estalère in reverse.’

‘But what was your uncle doing in Serbia anyway?’

‘He was a Serb himself, commissaire. His name was Slavko Moldovan.’

Justin arrived, out of breath.

‘There’s this guy outside demanding an explanation. We rolled out the crime scene tapes, but he wouldn’t listen. He wants to come in.’