The Chalk Circle Man

XVI

WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE, MATHILDE HAD BEEN FRETTING ALL week. In the first place, she had not been best pleased to hear Charles coming in at half past one in the morning, and then learning next morning that another woman had been murdered. And as if to rub salt in the wound, Charles had spent the evening joking maliciously, in a thoroughly aggravating way. At the end of her tether, she had thrown him out of her apartment and told him he could come back when he was in a better mood. It worried her, there was no disguising it. As for Clémence, she had come back very late the same night in tears, and completely distraught. Mathilde had spent a fruitless hour trying to sort her out. Finally Clémence, her nerves shattered, had agreed that it would do her good to have a change of scene. The lonely-hearts ads were very bad for her. Mathilde had approved of this immediately, and sent her back up to the Stickleback to pack her case and take a few hours’ rest. She was cross with herself, because next morning as she heard Clémence tiptoeing downstairs trying not to disturb her, she had thought: ‘Good riddance, four days without having to put up with her.’ Clémence had promised to come back the following Wednesday to finish the classification she had started. She probably guessed that her friend the dressmaker wouldn’t be too keen to keep her longer than that. She was fairly clear-eyed, old Clémence. How old was she, anyway? Mathilde wondered. Sixty, seventy, somewhere in between? Her dark red-rimmed eyes and her unattractive pointed teeth made it difficult to guess.

During the week, Charles had continued to pull his own handsome face into infuriating expressions, and Clémence had failed to return as agreed. The slides were still scattered on the table. Charles was the first to say that it was a bit worrying, but maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the old woman had followed some man she met in the train and got herself murdered. This caused Mathilde to have a nightmare. When the funny little shrew-mouse hadn’t returned by Friday evening, she had been on the verge of starting to search for her by calling the dressmaker.

At which point Clémence turned up again. ‘Oh shit!’ said Charles who was sitting on the sofa in Mathilde’s apartment, running his fingers over a book in Braille. But Mathilde was relieved. All the same, looking at them both invading her room, the magnificent-looking man, sprawling on the couch, and the little old woman taking off her nylon overall but keeping her beret on her head, Mathilde told herself that something wasn’t right in her house.