The Chalk Circle Man

XVIII

THE FOLLOWING WEEK BROUGHT NO MORE NEWS OF CLÉMENCE. By three every afternoon, Danglard was drifting off into an alcoholic haze, punctuated by a few verbal outbursts to vent his frustration. Dozens of reported sightings of her had come in. Morning after morning, Danglard would place on Adamsberg’s desk the negative results of the follow-up searches.

‘Report from Montauban. False alarm again,’ said Danglard.

And Adamsberg had raised his head to say, ‘Fine, OK, very good.’ Worse still, Danglard suspected that Adamsberg was not even reading the reports. In the evening, they were still sitting where Danglard had left them in the morning. So he picked them up again and filed them away in the dossier marked ‘Clémence Valmont’.

Danglard couldn’t help keeping count. It had been twenty-seven days now since Clémence Valmont had disappeared. Mathilde often telephoned Adamsberg to see if there was any news of her weird little shrew-mouse, and Danglard heard him say, ‘No, nothing. No, I haven’t given up, what makes you think so? I’m waiting for some facts to trickle in. No hurry.’

‘No hurry.’ Adamsberg’s motto. Danglard was in a state of high nervous tension, whereas Castreau seemed to have changed his spots and was taking life as it came, with unusual tolerance for him.

In addition to this, Reyer had come in several times at Adamsberg’s request. Danglard found him less off-putting than before. He wondered whether that was because Reyer was more familiar with the police station now that he could find his way along the corridors by feeling the walls, or because the identification of the murderer had left him feeling relieved. What Danglard did not want to think, at any cost, was that the handsome blind man was in a better mood because he had found his way to Mathilde’s bed. No, anything but that. How would he know, though? He had listened to the beginning of his interview with the commissaire.

‘Take you now,’ Adamsberg had said, ‘you can’t see any more, so you have different ways of seeing. What I’d like is for you to talk to me about Clémence Valmont for as long as you like, just give me your impressions of her, how it struck you when you listened to her, all the sensations you felt in her presence, all the details you guessed at when you went near her, or heard her, or felt she was in the room. The more I know about her, the more likely it is I’ll get somewhere. You’re the person, Reyer, along with Mathilde, who must have known her best. And you have a knowledge of the para-visible. You pick up on all the things that we fail to understand because we get a quick visual fix with our eyes, which satisfies us.’

And every time he came, Reyer stayed there for a long while. Through the open door, Danglard could see Adamsberg leaning against the wall and listening attentively.

It was three-thirty in the afternoon. Adamsberg opened his notebook at page three. He waited for a long-drawn-out moment, then wrote as follows:

Tomorrow I’ll go out into the country to look for Clémence. I don’t think I’m mistaken. I can’t remember when it came to me, I should have made a note. Was it at the very beginning? Or when I heard about the smell of rotten apples? Everything Reyer tells me points in the same direction. Yesterday I took a walk as far as the Gare de l’Est. I wondered why I was a policeman. Perhaps because it’s a job where you have to look for things with some chance of finding them, and that makes up for the rest. Because in the rest of your life, nobody ever asks you to look for anything and you don’t stand much chance of finding anything, since you don’t know what you’re looking for. Leaves, for instance. I don’t know why it is, really, that I keep drawing them. Yesterday in the café in the Gare de l’Est, someone said to me that the way not to be afraid of death was to live as stupid a life as possible. That way there’d be nothing to regret. It didn’t seem a very good solution to me.

But I’m not afraid of death, not all that much. So it didn’t really concern me, what he said. And I’m not afraid of being lonely either.

All my shirts need replacing, now I think of it. What I’d like is to find some sort of universal clothing. Then I’d buy thirty sets and I wouldn’t have to worry about clothes for the rest of my life. When I told my sister what I thought, she shrieked. The very idea of a universal uniform horrified her.

I’d like to find a universal uniform so that I wouldn’t have to think about it.

I’d like to find a universal leaf too, so that I wouldn’t have to bother about that.

When it comes down to it, I wish I hadn’t missed Camille the other night in the street. I’d have caught up with her, she’d have been astonished – touched, perhaps. I might have seen her face tremble, she might have blushed or turned pale, I don’t know which. I would have taken her face in my hands to stop her trembling, and it would have been fantastic. I’d have held her in my arms, we’d have stood there in the street for a long time. An hour, say. But perhaps she wouldn’t have felt anything at all. Perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted to stand there holding me. Perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted to have anything to do with me. I don’t know. I can’t imagine. Perhaps she’d have said, ‘Jean-Baptiste, my taxi’s waiting.’ I don’t know. And perhaps it wasn’t Camille at all. And perhaps I don’t care. I don’t know. I don’t think so.

And as for my intellectual colleague Danglard, I’m getting on his nerves. It’s obvious. I’m not doing it on purpose. Nothing’s happening, nothing’s being said, and that’s what gets on his nerves. And yet since Clémence has gone missing, some key thing has happened. But I couldn’t tell him.

Adamsberg raised his head as he heard the door open.

It was a warm afternoon. Danglard was returning from a northern suburb, perspiring freely. An interview about stolen goods. It had been quite satisfactory, but it hadn’t satisfied him. Danglard needed more important cases to keep him going, and the murderous shrew-mouse seemed to him to be a worthy challenge. But the fear of having to admit failure was getting sharper every day. He didn’t even dare talk about the case to the children. He was feeling very much like pouring himself a glass of white wine, when Adamsberg came into his office.

‘I’m looking for some scissors,’ Adamsberg said.

Danglard went to look in Florence’s desk and found a pair. He noticed that Florence had laid in a fresh stock of toffees. Adamsberg closed one eye as he threaded a needle.

‘What’s up now?’ asked Danglard. ‘Bit of mending?’

‘The hem of my trousers has come undone.’

Adamsberg sat on a chair, crossed his knee and began to mend his trousers. Danglard watched him, taken somewhat aback, but feeling soothed. It was soothing to watch someone sewing with little stitches, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.

‘You’ll see how good I am at this, Danglard,’ Adamsberg remarked. ‘I do tiny little stitches. My youngest sister showed me how, one day when we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, as my father used to say.’

‘I don’t know what to do with myself,’ said Danglard. ‘For one thing, I’m no good at fixing the hems on the kids’ trousers. And for another, this killer is haunting me. Ghastly, horrible old woman. She’s going to get away, I know it. It’s driving me nuts. Honestly, it’s driving me nuts.’

He got up to take a beer can out of the cupboard.

‘No,’ said Adamsberg

‘No what?’

‘No beer.’

The commissaire was biting off the thread, having completely forgotten that he had Florence’s scissors.

‘The scissors are right there,’ said Danglard. ‘Damn it all, I fetched you the scissors for the thread, and look what you’re doing now. And what’s wrong with beer, all of a sudden?’

‘What’s wrong is that you might get launched and drink ten beers, and today that won’t do.’

‘I didn’t think that was any of your business. My body, my responsibility, my belly and my beer.’

‘Of course. But it’s your investigation and you’re my inspector. And tomorrow we’re going to the country. We have a rendezvous with someone we know, I hope. So I need you, and I need you with a clear head. And a strong stomach, too. Very important, the stomach. I don’t know if a settled stomach helps one to think clearly. But I do know that a poor stomach will stop you thinking at all.’

Danglard observed Adamsberg’s tense face. It was impossible to guess whether it was because his thread had just knotted, or because of the projected trip to the country.

‘Oh damn and blast!’ said Adamsberg. ‘My thread’s got a knot. I really hate that. Apparently the golden rule is that you should sew in the same direction as it comes off the reel, otherwise you get a knot. See what I mean? I must have been working the other way without thinking. And now there’s a knot.’

‘I think you had too long a thread in the first place,’ Danglard ventured.

Yes, sewing was a restful kind of occupation.

‘No, Danglard, I had the right length, from my hand to my elbow. Tomorrow, at eight o’clock, I’ll need eight men, a van and some dogs. And we’d better take the doctor along too.’

He poked the needle into the knot to undo it, broke off the thread, and smoothed down his trousers. Then he went out, without discovering whether Danglard would have a clear head and a strong stomach the next day. Danglard didn’t know, either.