An Uncertain Place

XLIII

DANGLARD, VEYRENC AND ADAMSBERG ARRANGED TO MEET discreetly for dinner in a restaurant some distance from the squad, like three conspirators. Veyrenc had told Danglard about the question marks looming over Weill’s interest in the case. The commandant ran his fingers over his fleshy cheeks and Veyrenc found that he looked different. Must be the Abstract effect, Adamsberg had warned him. There was more energy in Danglard’s pale eyes, his shoulders were more firmly squared, taking up the cut of his suit better. Neither of them knew that in his anguish at Adamsberg’s possible death, Danglard had postponed a visit from Abstract.

‘Shall we just call Weill?’ said Veyrenc.

Adamsberg had ordered stuffed cabbage to rekindle Kisilova memories, but it was so inadequate that he was regretting his choice.

‘Risky,’ he said.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ said Danglard.

The three heads nodded and Adamsberg tapped in Weill’s number, signing to the others to stop talking.

‘The Avignon sample went off to the lab yesterday,’ said Adamsberg into his phone. ‘Just two days left. Where are we now, Weill?’

‘Just a moment, while I rescue my lamb roast.’

Adamsberg put his hand over the phone.

‘He’s seeing to his lamb.’

The other two nodded, understandingly.

Adamsberg switched on the loudspeaker.

‘I don’t like interrupting the flow when I’m cooking,’ said Weill, coming back on. ‘You never know how it will turn out.’

‘Weill, Emma Carnot knows who the Garches killer is. But only indirectly. The man she has really latched on to is the one who put seventeen severed feet outside Higg-gate Cemetery.’

‘Highgate you mean.’

‘We forgot about the eighteenth foot. I think that’s the one she saw.’

‘If you won’t let me tell you anything myself, Adamsberg, I’ll get back to the lamb.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Right. I got on to someone from the police in Auxerre, the place where the marriage register was clipped. A rather intriguing report was made there twelve years ago. A woman had been shocked by finding a severed foot, still in its shoe, lying on a path in the woods, no less. The foot was decomposed and had been attacked by birds and animals. This woman, according to the officer I spoke to, had just evicted her ex-husband from her country house. She was only going down there, after he’d left, to change the locks. And she found this foot about fifteen metres from the front door, on the path leading to the house.’

‘And at the time, Carnot didn’t suspect the ex-husband?’

‘No, or she wouldn’t have gone to the police. But there were several reasons why she ought to have been suspicious. It was a private path, no one else would normally be there. The husband made use of the house at weekends, and had been doing so for over fifteen years. He liked hunting there. And this husband, a lonely oddball, according to the people in the village, used to keep his game in a locked freezer. He wouldn’t accept any help from the locals when Emma Carnot finally forced him to move out. You can imagine what the freezer held. One foot must have got dislodged when he was in a hurry, loading his van on his own. Emma Carnot must surely have realised that the foot couldn’t have fallen out of someone’s pocket, or been dropped by a bird. But she didn’t want to understand. She probably began to realise only some time later, and then she made the connection right away. The investigation got nowhere – they decided it must have been a bodysnatcher and the affair was buried.’

‘Until the discovery made at Higg-gate. Then she understood right away.’

‘Obviously. Seventeen severed feet outside a cemetery, and she knew where the eighteenth was. If it got out that she had married a man who had cut the feet off nine corpses, her career was shot. Unfortunately, you happened to be on the spot in London. So her next step was to demolish you, as completely as she could. It took her less than a day to find out where Mordent’s pressure point was, and she got her hooks into him. When the Carnot machine gets going, nothing moves faster, and especially not you, commissaire. The Garches affair came to light on the Sunday, and she had linked it to Highgate before you did. How, I don’t know. Perhaps because of the dismemberment. She sabotaged the investigation, she got someone to shoot Émile, she had already told Mordent to engineer the flight of the suspect, and to plant the cartridge case and the pencil shavings in Vaudel junior’s house. She wanted the real culprit to get away, and she wanted you to go down with all hands.’

‘So what is her ex-husband’s name, Weill?’ asked Adamsberg slowly.

‘No idea. The house in Burgundy is in her mother’s name, and has been in the Carnot family for generations. And in the hamlet near it, as they do in the countryside, they give the husband the family name he married into. They used to call him Monsieur Carnot, or Madame Carnot’s husband. He only went there for the hunting anyway.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, there must be a married name somewhere – when she made her statement, for instance.’

‘No, because when she went to the police, she’d already been divorced long before. When she embarked on her legal career, aged twenty-seven, she was using her original name Emma Carnot. So she’s been using her maiden name for twenty-five years now at least. The marriage was a short-lived youthful aberration.’

‘We need her statement, Weill. It’s the only element against her that we have.’

Weill just laughed and asked for a minute or two to baste the lamb.

‘Honestly, Adamsberg, you don’t seem to realise the powers these people have. Of course, there’s no longer any record of the statement. I got it verbatim from the officer in Auxerre who dredged it up. No paper trail left. They do these things thoroughly.’

‘Weill, what about the other witness to the marriage?’

‘Nothing so far. But Emma Carnot’s mother is still alive. She must have known who the young husband was, even if she only met him briefly. That’s Marie-Josée Carnot, and she lives at 17 rue des Ventilles, Bâle, Switzerland. I think it would be a good idea to put her under protection.’

‘What, her mother?!’

‘Yes. We’re talking about Emma Carnot here. The witness who was killed in Nantes was her first cousin. Tell your colleague Nolet that, if he dares pursue it.’

‘What is your message, Weill?’

‘Protect the mother.’

‘How would Carnot have known where Émile was headed?’

‘She caught up with him in her own time, and at her own speed, to deal with him.’

‘But the cops in Garches lost track of him.’

‘Adamsberg, you really aren’t cut out for dealing with the hierarchy. They never lost track of him at all, and they knew perfectly well where he was when he took refuge in the hospital. But they had orders from high up to let him go and just follow him, report where he went to ground, and then vanish. Which they did. That’s what they do, they obey orders.’

Adamsberg ended the call and twiddled his phone on the table. He had given the little foam heart to Danica.

‘Danglard, you take the mother, get Retancourt on to protection duty straight away.’

‘Not her own mother?’ said Veyrenc in a horrified whisper.

‘Some people eat wardrobes, Veyrenc.’

Danglard went to phone Retancourt. She was ordered to leave for Switzerland immediately. As soon as they knew she was on her way, the three men sighed with relief and Danglard ordered an armagnac.

‘I’d prefer a rakija after my kafa, like in the kruchema.’

‘How is it, commissaire, that you manage to remember half a dozen words in Serbian, when you can’t be bothered even to remember an easy name like Radstock?’

‘I specially memorised those Kiseljevan words,’ said Adamsberg. ‘No doubt because it was a place of uncertainty, Danglard. Where strange things happen. Hvala, dobro veče, kamak. And in the vault, I was thinking of kobasice. But don’t expect anything lofty, they’re just sausages.’

‘Spicy ones,’ Veyrenc pointed out.

Adamsberg was not surprised that Veyrenc already knew more than he did.

‘Weill seems to be on the level,’ observed Danglard.

‘Yes,’ said Veyrenc, ‘but that doesn’t mean anything. Weill always plays at the top of his game. On the side of the police or not.’

‘But why would he be after Carnot’s guts?’

‘To shoot her down. She makes mistakes, so she’s dangerous.’

‘Weill isn’t Arnold Paole. He can’t be the ex-husband.’

‘Why not?’ said Veyrenc, though he did not sound too sure. ‘The young man of thirty years ago wouldn’t look the same. He could have metamorphosed into what he is today, sophisticated, fat and with a white beard.’

‘I can’t put anyone to spy on Weill officially,’ said Adamsberg, ‘but, Veyrenc…’

‘OK, I see.’

‘Get a gun from Danglard. And please cover up your hair.’