An Uncertain Place

IV

WHEN THE TRAIN ENTERED THE CHANNEL TUNNEL, DANGLARD took a deep breath and clenched his teeth. The journey out had not relieved his apprehensions and this passage under water still seemed to him to be unacceptable, and his fellow travellers strangely insouciant. He distinctly pictured himself speeding through this conduit covered by tons of seawater overhead.

‘You can feel the weight of it,’ he said, his eyes fixed to the roof of the carriage.

‘There isn’t any weight,’ said Adamsberg. ‘We’re not under water, we’re under rock.’

Estalère asked how it was possible for the weight of the sea not to press down on the rock so hard that the tunnel collapsed. Adamsberg patiently and determinedly drew a diagram for him on a paper napkin: the water, the rock, the shorelines, the tunnel, the train. Then he did the same diagram without either the tunnel or the train, to show that their existence did not modify anything.

‘All the same,’ said Estalère, ‘the weight of the seawater must be pressing down on something.’

‘Yes, on the rock.’

‘But then the rock must be weighing on the tunnel.’

‘No,’ said Adamsberg, starting another diagram.

Danglard made a gesture of irritation.

‘It’s just that you imagine the weight. A monstrous mass of water over our heads. The idea of being swallowed up. Sending a train under the sea is a demented idea.’

‘No more than eating a wardrobe,’ said Adamsberg, perfecting his diagram.

‘What the heck has the wardrobe-eater done to get under your skin? You’ve done nothing but talk about him since yesterday.’

‘I’m just trying to imagine his thought processes, Danglard. I’m trying to see how they think, the wardrobe-eater, the foot-amputator, or that man whose uncle was eaten by a bear. The thoughts of mankind are like drills opening up tunnels under the sea that you never expected to come into existence.’

‘Who was eaten by a bear?’ asked Estalère, suddenly waking up.

‘This guy’s uncle was on an ice floe,’ Adamsberg told him. ‘About a hundred years ago. All that was left of him were his glasses and his shoelaces. And this nephew was fond of his uncle. So he flipped. He killed the bear.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ commented Estalère.

‘Yes, but then he brought the bearskin back to Geneva, and gave it to his aunt, the widow. Who put it in her sitting room. Danglard, your colleague Stock gave you an envelope at the station. His preliminary report, was it?’

‘Radstock, yes,’ said Danglard gloomily, still looking up at the ceiling of the carriage and watching out for the weight of the sea.

‘Interesting?’

‘What does it matter? They’re his feet, he can keep them.’

Estalère was twisting a paper napkin in his fingers and concentrating hard, looking down at his knees.

‘So I suppose this nephew wanted to bring some relic of his uncle back to the widow?’ he asked.

Adamsberg nodded and turned back to Danglard.

‘Tell me all the same, what does the report say?’

‘When will we get out of the tunnel?’

‘Another sixteen minutes. What did Stock find, Danglard?’

‘But logically,’ Estalère said hesitantly, ‘if the uncle was inside the bear… and the nephew…’

He stopped and looked down again, puzzled and scratching his blond head. Danglard sighed, whether for the sixteen minutes, or the ghastly feet, which he would rather leave far behind, forgetting all about the cemetery gate in Highgate. Or because Estalère, who was as slow-witted as he was curious, was the only member of the squad unable to distinguish between the valuable and the pointless among Adamsberg’s remarks. For the young officer, every word his commissaire let drop had meaning and he was now pursuing it. And to Danglard, whose elastic mind leapt over ideas extremely fast, Estalère represented a constant and irritating waste of time.

‘If we hadn’t gone for a walk with Radstock two days ago,’ Danglard said, ‘and if we hadn’t bumped into that crazy Clyde-Fox character, we wouldn’t know a thing about those revolting feet and we’d have left them to rot in peace. They belong to the Brits, full stop.’

‘There’s no rule against being interested,’ said Adamsberg, ‘when something crosses your path.’

He felt pretty sure that Danglard had not parted with the woman in London on as reassuring a note as he might have wished. So his anxiety was taking over again, slipping into the recesses of his being. Adamsberg imagined Danglard’s mind as a block of fine limestone, where rain, in other words questions, had hollowed out countless basins in which his worries gathered, unresolved. Every day, three or four of these basins were active simultaneously. Just now, the journey through the tunnel, the woman in London, the feet in Highgate. As Adamsberg had explained to him, the energy Danglard expended on these questions, seeking to empty out the basins, was a waste of time. Because no sooner had he cleared out one space than it made way for something else, for another set of agonising questions. By digging away at them, he was stopping peaceful sedimentation from taking place, and the natural filling up of the excavations, which would happen if he forgot about them.

‘Don’t worry, she’ll be in touch,’ Adamsberg told him.

‘Who?’

‘Abstract.’

‘Logically,’ Estalère interjected, still following his train of thought, ‘the nephew ought to have left the bear alive, and brought some of its droppings to the aunt. After all, the uncle was inside the bear, but not in its skin.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Adamsberg, looking satisfied. ‘It all depends on the attitude the nephew had both to the uncle and to the bear.’

‘And to his aunt,’ added Danglard, who was feeling calmer on hearing Adamsberg’s certainty about Abstract getting back in touch. ‘We don’t know the aunt’s reactions either, whether she would rather have had the bearskin or the droppings.’

‘It all depends on what was going on in the nephew’s mind. Was it that his uncle’s soul had gone into the bear, right to the tips of its fur? And what idea did the thekophagist have of the wardrobe? And what was the foot-chopper thinking about? Whose soul is inside the wooden panels, or on the ends of people’s feet? What did Stock say, Danglard?’

‘Forget the feet, commissaire.’

‘They remind me of something,’ Adamsberg said in a hesitant voice. ‘A picture somewhere, a story?’

Danglard stopped the attendant passing with the drinks trolley and bought some champagne for himself and for Adamsberg, and put them both on his side of the table. Adamsberg drank very rarely and Estalère not at all, since alcohol went to his head. It had been explained to him that that was exactly the point, and he had been astonished. When Danglard had a drink, Estalère looked at him with intense puzzlement.

‘Perhaps,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘it’s some vague story I seem to recall about a man looking for his shoes in the night. Or who came back from the dead to find his shoes. I wonder if Stock knows it.’

Danglard quickly knocked back his first glass of champagne, and wrenched his gaze away from the carriage roof to look at Adamsberg, half enviously, half in despair. There were times when Adamsberg converted himself into a compact and dangerous attacker. Not often, but when he did it was easy to counter him. On the other hand, it was less easy to seize hold of him when his mental equipment was dislocated into several moving parts, which was his usual state. But it became completely impossible when this state intensified to the point of dispersal, as at present, assisted by the movement of the train which shook up any coherence. Adamsberg at such times seemed to move like a diver, his body and mind swooping gracefully without any precise objective. His eyes followed the movement, taking on the look of dark brown algae and conveying to his interlocutor a sensation of indeterminacy, flow, non-existence. To accompany Adamsberg in these extremes of his activity was like swimming into deep water, alongside slow-moving creatures, slimy mud, floating jellyfish, a world of vague outlines and swirling colours. Spend too much time with him and you might go to sleep in the warm water and drown. At these particularly aqueous moments, there was no point in arguing with him any more than with foam, mist or sea spray.

Danglard was furious with his boss for pulling him towards this liquidity just as he was suffering from the double anguish of the Channel Tunnel and uncertainty about Abstract. He was also furious for allowing himself to be drawn so often into Adamsberg’s misty moods.

He swallowed down the second glass of champagne, the one for Adamsberg, and recalled Radstock’s report quickly in order to extract from it some precise, clear and reassuring factual details. Adamsberg could see that, and was himself not anxious to explain to Danglard the state of terror into which the sight of those feet had thrown him. The wardrobe-eater and the story about the polar bear had been trivial distractions to help him blot out the image of what he had seen on the pavement in Highgate, to take him out of himself and away from the impressionable Estalère.

‘There were actually seventeen feet,’ Danglard said. ‘Eight matched pairs and one isolated foot. Nine people then.’

‘People or corpses?’

‘Corpses. It seems that the feet were amputated after death, with a saw. Five men, four women, all adults.’

Danglard paused, but the deep-sea gaze of Adamsberg was intensely waiting for more details.

‘The feet were definitely taken from the cadavers before they were buried. Radstock has made a note “In the morgue? Or in the cold stores of the undertakers?” and also, according to the styles of the shoes, though that has to be checked, it looks as if all this happened between ten and twenty years ago, spread over a long period. In short, this was someone who cut off a pair of feet here, then another there, from time to time.’

‘Until he got tired of his collection.’

‘What’s there to say he got tired?’

‘The event we’ve witnessed. Just cast your mind back, Danglard. This man amasses his trophies for ten or twenty years, a diabolically difficult thing to do. He fanatically stores them in a freezer. Did Stock say anything about that?’

‘Yes, he says they had been frozen and defrosted several times.’

‘So the foot-chopper took them out now and then to look at them for God knows what purpose. Or perhaps to move them.’

Adamsberg leaned back against his seat and Danglard glanced up at the roof again. Another few minutes and they would be out from under the sea.

‘And one night,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘despite all the trouble he had taken to build up his collection, the foot-chopper abandons his precious loot. Just like that, on a public street. He leaves it all behind as if it doesn’t interest him any more. Or – and that would be even more disturbing – as if it wasn’t enough for him any more. Like those collectors who junk one lot of stuff to go off in search of something new, moving up a stage. The foot-chopper switches to a more worthwhile quarry. Something better.’

‘Or worse.’

‘Yes. He’s going deeper into his tunnel. No wonder Stock is upset. If he follows this trail, he’ll get to some worrying levels.’

‘Where will he get to?’ asked Estalère, meanwhile closely observing the effect the champagne was having on Danglard.

‘He’ll go on until he reaches some unspeakable, cruel, devastating event, the one that has triggered the whole story, a story that ends in cut-off feet, or eating wardrobes. Then the dark tunnel opens up with its stairways and its caves, and Stock will have to go down into it.’

Adamsberg closed his eyes, passing without any visible transition to an apparent state of sleep or escape.

‘We can’t say that the foot-chopper has moved on to a new phase,’ Danglard interjected, before Adamsberg escaped from him altogether. ‘Or that he is getting rid of his collection. What we do know is that he deposited it outside Highgate Cemetery. And, good grief, that’s not a matter of indifference. It’s almost as if he were making an offering.’

The Eurostar sped out into the daylight, and Danglard’s brow cleared. His smile encouraged Estalère.

‘But, commandant,’ Estalère whispered, ‘what did happen in Highgate?’

As so often and without meaning to, Estalère was putting his finger on the crucial spot.