An Uncertain Place

XV

IT WAS ONLY WHEN ADAMSBERG HAD REACHED THE CENTRE of the large hall that people really noticed his filthy clothes, unshaven jowls and the little dog under his arm. A ragged circle of chairs organised itself spontaneously around him. The commissaire summarised the night’s events: Émile, the farm, the hospital, the dog.

‘So you knew where he was going, and let me chase after him?’ said Retancourt crossly.

‘No, I only remembered about the dog much later,’ Adamsberg lied. ‘After Vaudel’s doctor had come along.’

Retancourt tossed her head, indicating that she did not believe this for a second.

‘What did the doctor have to say,’ came Justin’s high-pitched voice.

‘For now he’s not told us any more about Vaudel than we’ve told him about the murder. Professional confidentiality, both of us are stymied.’

‘No secret, game over,’ said Kernorkian under his breath.

‘But the doctor did say that Vaudel had enemies, only he seemed to think they were imaginary. He knows more than he’s saying. He’s a skilled doctor, at least: he reset a dislocated jaw that was interfering with nursing.’

‘Vaudel’s?’

Adamsberg didn’t really want to look at Estalère. Sometimes you wondered if he was doing it on purpose. But he glanced at Maurel, who was scribbling something in a notebook. He knew that Maurel was collecting stories about Estalère, something which Adamsberg did not regard as innocent fun. Maurel saw him looking and closed the notebook.

‘Did someone check whether Pierre junior was in Avignon when Émile was attacked?’ Voisenet asked.

‘Mordent took charge of that, but the Avignon cops dragged their feet, they didn’t check until it was too late to be sure.’

‘Mordent should have insisted.’

‘He did insist,’ said Adamsberg, defending Mordent and his distracted mind. ‘Gardon said there were some results from the lab?’

Danglard stood up automatically. The commandant’s memory, knowledge and powers of synthesis made him the reporter of choice for summing up scientific data. This was a Danglard who stood up almost straight, whose complexion was almost fresh and whose expression was almost animated, having been regenerated by a second immersion in the British climate.

‘Concerning the body, it is estimated that it was cut into about four hundred and sixty fragments, and about three hundred of those were reduced to pulp. Some parts had been hacked off with an axe, others cut off with a chainsaw, using a wooden block as an anvil. The samples show wooden splinters and sawdust. The same block was used to crush body parts. The elements of mica and quartz found in the remains indicate that the killer rested the item on the block, and used a club to beat down on a granite stone. The most savagely attacked parts were the joints: ankles, wrists, knees, elbows, shoulders and hips, as well as the teeth and the feet, tarsals and metatarsals. The big toe had been pounded to pieces, but not the other toes. The least damaged features were the hands, apart from the carpal segments, and the longer bones, the iliac, the ischium, the ribs and breastbone.’

Adamsberg had not managed to take all this in, and he raised a futile hand to stop the recital. But Danglard pressed on.

‘The rachis was differently treated from the others, the sacro- and cervical vertebrae were clearly more fiercely attacked than the lumbar and dorsal ones. Of the cervicals nothing is left of the atlas and the axis. The hyoid has been preserved and the shoulder blades barely touched.’

‘Danglard! stop!’ said Adamsberg, observing the horror on the surrounding faces, and seeing that some had already melted away. ‘Let’s do a diagram, that will be more helpful for everyone.’

Adamsberg was an excellent draughtsman, and with a few deft strokes of his pen could bring anything to life on paper. He spent many odd moments scribbling, standing up, resting the paper on a notebook or on his thigh, and drawing in blacklead, charcoal or ink. His sketches were lying about in the office because he abandoned them as he came and went. Some of his colleagues, being admirers, discreetly collected them – notably Froissy, Danglard and Mercadet, but also Noël, who would never have admitted to it. Now Adamsberg quickly sketched on the whiteboard the outline of a body with its skeleton, one from the front, one from the back, and gave Danglard two ink markers.

‘Mark in red the parts that were particularly attacked, and in green the least damaged.’

Danglard illustrated what he had just been describing, and added red to the head and genitals and green to the clavicles, the ears and the pelvis. Once the drawing had been coloured in, it showed some kind of logic, though a strange one, demonstrating that the killer had not been arbitrary in what he chose to destroy or to spare. But the meaning of this weird series of choices was inaccessible.

‘There was some selection in the internal organs too,’ Danglard went on. ‘The killer wasn’t interested in the stomach, intestines or spleen, lungs or kidneys. But he attacked the liver, heart and brain, burned part of the brain in the fireplace.’

Danglard drew three arrows pointing outside the body for brain, heart and liver.

‘It’s an attempt to destroy his spirit,’ hazarded Mercadet, breaking the rather stunned silence of the officers, who were gazing mesmerised at the drawings.

‘The liver?’ asked Voisenet. ‘Does the liver have anything to do with the spirit?’

‘Mercadet’s got a point,’ said Danglard. ‘Before Christianity, but afterwards too, people thought of several souls existing inside the body, the spiritus, the animus and the anima. Spirit, soul and movement, which might lodge in different parts of the body, such as the heart and liver, which are seats of fear and emotion.’

‘OK,’ said Voisenet, since Danglard’s fund of knowledge was considered unchallengeable.

‘To destroy the joints,’ said Lamarre, speaking stiffly as usual, ‘would be so that the body would never function again. Like breaking the gears of a machine.’

‘What about the feet? Why the feet but not the hands?’

‘Same thing,’ said Lamarre. ‘So that he never walked again.’

‘No,’ said Froissy, ‘that doesn’t explain the attention to the big toe. Why smash that in particular?’

‘Oh, what the fuck are we doing?’ said Noël, getting to his feet. ‘Why are we looking for reasons for this goddam butchery? There’s no reason in it at all, it’s just what was in the killer’s mind, and we’re not even close.’

Noël sat down again, and Adamsberg nodded.

‘Like the guy who ate the wardrobe.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Danglard.

‘What did he do that for?’ asked Gardon.

‘Same difference. We don’t know.’

Danglard came back towards the board and took out a sheet of paper. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘The killer didn’t just chuck the bits about in any old order. Dr Roman was right, he arranged them. I won’t go into it, you can see the spatial distribution in the report, but to give you an example, the five metatarsals of the foot were thrown into the four corners of the room, and the same for other parts, here and there, a couple under the piano.’

‘Perhaps it was just an automatic reflex,’ said Justin, ‘he threw it all round him.’

‘There’s no pattern in any of this,’ Noël said again, angrily. ‘We’re wasting our time trying to interpret it. This killer was in a mad rage, he demolished this body, he went to town on some bits, and we have no idea why, end of story. We just don’t know.’

‘The mad rage went on for hours,’ Adamsberg pointed out.

‘Yes,’ said Justin. ‘If he went on being angry, perhaps that’s why he did all this. He couldn’t stop, he just went on and on blindly till he had reduced everything to pulp, like someone who drinks till he collapses.’

Or who scratches a spider bite all his life, Adamsberg thought.

‘We need to move to the other evidence,’ announced Danglard.

He was interrupted by his telephone, and moved away – rather fast for Danglard – pressing his mobile eagerly against his ear. That’ll be Abstract, Adamsberg diagnosed.

‘Should we wait for him?’ asked Voisenet.

Froissy shifted on her chair. She was getting anxious about eating – it was 2.45 already – and started to clench her arms around herself. Everyone knew that missing a meal brought on a panic attack and Adamsberg had asked his colleagues to watch out for that, because three times when out on a mission she had fainted with fear.