The Chalk Circle Man

VII

SINCE CHARLES SEEMED TO BE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THINGS, Mathilde decided that she could count on a peaceful quarter of an hour during which he wouldn’t try to reduce the universe to shreds, and that she would therefore be able to introduce him to Clémence that evening. She had asked the elderly Clémence to stay behind in the flat for the occasion, and had taken some pre-emptive action by warning her emphatically that the new tenant was indeed blind, but that it would not do either to exclaim, ‘Oh my sakes, what a terrible affliction!’ or to pretend complete ignorance.

Charles heard Mathilde introduce him and listened to Clémence’s greeting. From her voice, he would never have imagined the naive woman whom Queen Mathilde had described to him. He seemed to hear fierce determination, and weird but recognisable intelligence. What she actually said seemed silly, but in the intonations behind the words there was some secret knowledge, caged but breathing audibly, like a lion in a village circus. You hear it growling in the night and tell yourself this circus isn’t what you thought, it isn’t quite as pathetic as the programme might make you think. And Charles, the expert on sounds and noises, could quite distinctly hear this distant growling, a little unsettling since it was possibly concealed.

Mathilde had offered him a whisky and Clémence was telling him about the incidents in her life. Charles was troubled, because of Clémence, and happy because of Mathilde. A divine creature who was quite indifferent to his nastiness.

‘… and this man,’ Clémence was saying, ‘anyone would think he was really nice! He thought I was “interesting,” those were his very words. He never so much as touched me, but I guessed he would sooner or later. Because he wanted to take me on a trip to the South Seas, he wanted us to get married. Oh, my sakes, I was on cloud nine! He got me to sell my house in Neuilly, and my furniture. I put the rest of my things in two suitcases, because he said “You won’t want for anything, my dear.” So I trotted along to our rendezvous in Paris, feeling so happy that I should have smelled a rat. I kept pinching myself and saying, “Clémence, old girl, it was a long time coming, but it’s happened at last, a real fiancé, and such a cultured man too, and now you’re going to see the Pacific.” Well, I didn’t see the Pacific, monsieur, I saw Censier-Daubenton metro station for eight and a half hours! I waited all day, and that’s where Mathilde found me, still at the metro station, in the evening, same place she’d seen me in the morning. She must have said to herself, my sakes, but something’s up with that old woman. Perhaps she’s jinxed.’

‘Clémence invents things, you know,’ Mathilde interrupted. ‘She reruns anything she doesn’t like. What really happened the night this famous fiancé stood her up at Censier-Daubenton was that in the end she went off to find a hotel, and going along my street she saw my “to let” sign. So she rang the bell.’

‘Well, maybe it could have happened that way,’ Clémence conceded. ‘But now I can’t take the metro at Censier-Daubenton, without thinking of the South Sea Islands. So there we are, I go travelling in the end. By the way, Mathilde, a gentleman telephoned twice for you. Very soft voice, I thought I’d faint listening to him, but I’ve forgotten his name. It was urgent, apparently. Something wrong.’

Clémence was always on the brink of fainting, but she might be right about the voice on the phone. Mathilde thought that it could have been that policeman, the half-weird, half-enchanting one she had met ten days earlier. But she could think of no reason why Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg should call her urgently. Unless he had remembered her offer to help him catch sight of the chalk circle man. She had proposed that on an impulse, but also because she would be sorry never to have an excuse in future to see this remarkable flic, who had been the real find of that day and who had saved the first section of her week at the last moment. She knew she would not easily forget him, that he was securely lodged somewhere in her memory, spreading his nonchalant luminosity. Mathilde found the number that Clémence had scribbled down in her cramped handwriting.

Adamsberg had gone home to wait for a call from Mathilde Forestier. The day had started out typical of the aftermath of a murder, a day of silent, sweaty activity by the lab technicians, of stuffy offices with plastic cups all over the tables. The graphologist had arrived and had started delving into the piles of snapshots taken by Conti. And over it all loomed a sort of trembling, of apprehension perhaps, into which this out-of-the-ordinary event had thrown the 5th arrondissement police station. Whether it was the apprehension of failure, or the apprehension of a weird and monstrous killer, Adamsberg had not tried to work out. To escape having to witness it all, he had gone for a walk in the streets all afternoon. Danglard had stopped him at the door. It wasn’t yet midday, but Danglard had already had too much to drink. He said it was irresponsible to walk out like that, on the day they’d had a murder. But Adamsberg couldn’t admit that nothing removed his powers of thought so effectively as watching a dozen other people thinking. He needed the temperature at the station to drop, it was probably an undulant fever anyway, and it was essential that nobody should be expecting anything from him for Adamsberg to be able to harness his own ideas. And for the moment the suppressed excitement in the police station had scattered his ideas all over the place, like panicking soldiers in the thick of the battle. Adamsberg had long ago noted that when there are no combatants left, the fighting stops, so when he had no ideas he stopped working and didn’t try to winkle them out of the cracks to which they had retreated. It had always turned out to be a waste of time.

Christiane was waiting at his front door.

Just his bad luck. This was one evening when he would have preferred to be alone. Or else perhaps to spend the night with his neighbour, a young woman whom he had met several times on the stair and once at the post office, and who was definitely appealing.

Christiane announced that she had come from Orleans to spend the weekend with him.

He was wondering whether the young neighbour, when she had given him that look at the post office, had meant ‘I’d like to go to bed with you’ or ‘I’d like a chat, I’m bored.’ Adamsberg was a docile man. He tended to go to bed with any girl who wanted to: sometimes that seemed exactly the right thing to do, since it apparently kept everyone happy, other times it seemed pointless. But in any case, there was no way of knowing what it was that the girl downstairs had wanted to convey to him. He had tried thinking about that, but had put it off until later. What would his youngest sister have said? His little sister was a powerhouse of thought, enough to drive him mad. She gave her opinion of any girlfriend of his she met. Of Christiane, her judgement had been: ‘B minus. Lovely body, very entertaining for an hour, medium-serious brain, centripetal mind with concentric thoughts, three key ideas, gets bored after a couple of hours, goes to bed, is extremely self-denying and biddable in love, same again next day. Overall verdict: don’t get hooked, move on if a better prospect turns up.’

But that wasn’t why Adamsberg wanted to avoid Christiane that evening. Perhaps it was because of the look that girl in the post office had given him. Perhaps it was simply because he had found Christiane waiting for him, so sure that he would smile when he saw her, so sure that he would open the door, and then unbutton his shirt, and then turn down the sheets, and so sure that she would be making the coffee in his kitchen next morning. Absolutely confident of all that. Whereas for Adamsberg, the more certain other people’s expectations were of him, the more oppressed he felt. It gave him an irresistible urge to disappoint them, to let them down. And then again, he had been thinking a bit too much about his petite chérie lately, and would go on doing so, on the slightest pretext. Especially since he had realised during his walk that afternoon that it was nine years now, not eight, since he had last seen her. Nine years, good God! And all at once it had seemed to him that this wasn’t normal. He had felt alarmed.

Until now, he had always imagined her travelling the world, in a yacht with some flying Dutchman perhaps, or riding a Berber camel, learning to throw a spear under the guidance of an African tribesman, eating croissants in the Café des Sports et des Artistes in Belleville, or chasing cockroaches in a hotel bedroom in Cairo.

But today he had imagined her dead.

Adamsberg had been so shaken that he had stopped for a cup of coffee, his forehead burning, sweat running down his temples. He visualised her lying dead, having died some time ago, her body decomposing under a tombstone, and in the grave alongside her the little bundle of bones belonging to Richard III. He had tried to summon up images of the Berber camel-handler, the Dutch yachtsman and the café owner in Belleville. He had begged them all to help him reanimate her as usual in front of his eyes, to work the strings and make that tombstone vanish. But damn them all, these characters wouldn’t let themselves be summoned up. Leaving the way clear for this deathly fear to grip him. Dead, dead, dead, Camille dead. Yes, surely dead. And he had been imagining her alive all this time, even if she had been unfaithful to him with other men, just as he had been unfaithful to her with other women, even if she had expelled him from her thoughts, even if she was stroking the shoulders of the bellhop in the bed in the Cairo hotel, after he had come to her room to get rid of the cockroaches, even if she was taking photographs of all the clouds in Canada – because Camille collected clouds that looked like people’s profiles, which were not easy to come by – and even if she had forgotten Adamsberg’s face and his name, just so long as Camille was alive somewhere in this world. Because if so, everything was all right. But if Camille had died somewhere or other in this world, then everything was not all right at all. In that case, what point would there be any more in getting up in the morning and busying oneself, if she were dead, Camille, the unlikely offspring of a Greek god and an Egyptian prostitute (for that was how he saw her origins)? What would be the point after that of bothering to track down murderers, or counting the spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee, or going to bed with Christiane, or looking at the stones in every street, if Camille wasn’t somewhere on the planet, making life vibrate around her with her combination of seriousness and frivolity, the seriousness reflected on her forehead, the frivolity on her lips which met together in a perfect figure of eight, an image of the infinite? And if Camille was dead, Adamsberg would have lost the only woman who had said to him quietly one morning: ‘Jean-Baptiste, I’m going to Wahiguya. It’s on the upper reaches of the Volta.’ She had disentangled herself from his arms, had said ‘I love you,’ dressed, and left. He had thought she was going out to buy bread. But she had not come back, his petite chérie. Nine years. He wouldn’t have been entirely misleading anyone if he had said to them ‘Yes, I know Wahiguya, I even lived there for a while.’

And on top of everything, here was Christiane, quite certain that she would be making the coffee for him in the morning. While the petite chérie had died somewhere without his being able to do anything about it. And now, one day, he would die himself, without ever seeing her again. He imagined that Mathilde Forestier might be able to pull him out of this black depression, even if that wasn’t the reason he was trying to find her. But he did hope that when he saw her the film would start again, from the right moment, with the bellhop in the Cairo hotel.

Mathilde did telephone.

He told Christiane, who had quickly been disillusioned, to have an early night, since he would be late back; half an hour later, he was talking to Mathilde Forestier.

She welcomed him with a friendliness that loosened the stranglehold the world had exerted on him for the past few hours. She even gave him a kiss, not quite on the cheek and not quite on the lips. She laughed, and said yes she liked doing that, she knew exactly where to plant a kiss, she had an excellent eye for that kind of thing, but he was not to be alarmed, since she never took men her own age as lovers, it was an absolute principle, avoiding comparisons and complications. Then she took his shoulder and led him over to a table, where an old lady was playing patience and sorting the mail at the same time, and where a very tall blind man seemed to be advising her on both counts. The table was oval, and transparent, and had water and fish inside it.

‘It’s an aquarium-table,’ Matilde explained. ‘I designed it myself one evening. It’s a bit showy, a bit obvious, like me. The fish don’t like Clémence playing patience. Every time she slaps a card down on the glass, they shoot off in all directions – look.’

‘No good!’ sighed Clémence, gathering up the cards. ‘It’s a sign. I shouldn’t send a reply to the well-preserved M., 66. But he was so tempting. His ad in the paper was so good.’

‘Have you replied to many?’ asked Charles.

‘Two thousand, three hundred and fifty-four. But it’s never any good. It’s fate. I end up telling myself, Clémence, it’s just not going to work out.’

‘Yes, it will,’ said Mathilde, to encourage her, ‘especially if Charles helps you write the replies. He’s a man, he’ll know what appeals to them.’

‘The product doesn’t seem all that easy to market, though,’ observed Charles.

‘But I’m counting on you to help me find a way,’ said Clémence, who didn’t seem to take offence whatever anyone said to her.

Mathilde took Adamsberg into her study. ‘We’ll sit at my cosmic table, if you don’t mind. I find it relaxing.’

Adamsberg examined the large table made of black glass and pierced with hundreds of luminous dots lit from below, representing all the constellations in the night sky. It was beautiful, excessively so.

‘My tables don’t seem to tempt anyone to market them,’ Mathilde commented. ‘Facing you,’ she went on, pointing with her finger at the surface, ‘you have Scorpio, the Serpent Holder, the Lyre, Hercules and the Corona Borealis. Do you like it? I like to sit here with my elbows on the south end of Pisces. And the thing is, the whole picture’s false. Because the thousands of stars we see shining have already burnt themselves out, so the sky’s out of date. You realise what that means, Adamsberg? The sky’s out of date. But does that matter, if we can still see it?’

‘Madame Forestier,’ said Adamsberg, ‘I’d like you to take me to see the chalk circle man tonight. Have you listened to the radio today?’

‘No,’ said Mathilde.

‘This morning we found a woman with her throat cut, inside one of his circles, just a couple of streets away from here, in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie. A nice, ordinary, middle-aged lady, with no secret vices to explain why someone would want to kill her. The chalk circle man has moved up a gear.’

Mathilde lowered her darkened face onto her clenched fists, then stood up abruptly and fetched a bottle of Scotch and two glasses, putting them between the two of them, over Aquila, the Eagle.

‘I’m not feeling too good this evening,’ Adamsberg said. ‘Death is stalking around in my head.’

‘I can see that. Have a drink,’ said Mathilde. ‘Tell me about the woman who had her throat cut. We can talk about the other death afterwards.’

‘What other death?’

‘There must be another one,’ Mathilde said. ‘If you get this upset every time you come across a murder, you’d have left the police long ago. So there must be some other death that’s tormenting you. Do you want me to take you to the chalk circle man, so you can arrest him?’

‘It’s too soon. I just want to locate him, see him, find out about him.’

‘I feel awkward, Adamsberg. Because this man and I, we’ve sort of become accomplices. There’s a bit more between us than I told you the other day. In fact I’ve seen him about a dozen times, and from the third time on he realised that I’d spotted him. He keeps his distance, but he still lets me trail him, he glances at me, maybe even smiles, I’m not sure, he’s always been too far away to see, and he keeps his head down. But the last time, he even gave a little wave of his hand before he left, I’m convinced. I didn’t want to tell you all this the other day, because I didn’t want you to put me down as crazy. After all, the police pigeonhole us all, don’t they? But now it’s different, if the police want him for murder. Adamsberg, this man looks totally inoffensive to me. I’ve walked along streets at night enough times to be able to scent danger. But with him, no, nothing. He’s quite small, very short for a man, slight, neatly dressed, his features are vague, they change, they’re hard to remember, but he’s not good-looking. I’d put him at about sixty-five. Before he crouches down to write on the pavement he flicks up the tails of his raincoat, so as not to get them dirty.’

‘How does he draw the circles – from the inside or the outside?’

‘From the outside. He’ll stop suddenly, in front of something on the ground, get out his chalk as if he knew right away that this was tonight’s object. He looks round, waits till the coast is clear, he certainly doesn’t want to be seen, except by me, and he seems to allow that, I don’t know why. Perhaps he thinks I understand him. His whole operation takes about half a minute. He draws a big circle round the object, then he crouches down to write his words, still looking round. Then he disappears at the speed of light. He’s as quick as a fox and he seems to know his way around. He always manages to lose me once he’s drawn the circle, and I’ve never managed to track him to his home. But anyway, if you arrest this guy, I think you’d be making a big mistake.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Adamsberg. ‘I need to see him first. How did you find him in the first place?’

‘It wasn’t rocket science. I phoned a few journalists I know who’d taken an interest in the case from the start. They gave me the names of the people who’d first reported the circles. I telephoned the witnesses. It may seem odd to you that I got involved in something that’s none of my business, but that’s because you don’t work with fish. When you spend hours of your life studying fish, you start thinking there’s something wrong with you, and perhaps it’s that you ought to spend less time on fish and more on your fellow human beings, and watch their habits as well. I’ll explain that another time. Anyway, practically all these witnesses had discovered the circles before about half past midnight, never any later. And since the chalk circle man seemed to roam all over Paris, I thought, well, he must be taking the metro, and he doesn’t want to miss the last connection, so that’s a hypothesis to test. Stupid really, isn’t it? But two circles had been found only at two in the morning, in the same area, in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and the rue de la Tour-d’Auvergne. Since they’re fairly busy streets, I thought these circles must have been drawn late at night, after the last metro. Perhaps because by then he was going home on foot, because he lived nearby. Is this getting too involved?’

Adamsberg shook his head slowly. He was full of admiration.

‘So then I thought, with a bit of luck his nearest metro station must be either Pigalle or Saint-Georges. I lay in wait four nights running at Pigalle: nothing. And yet there were two more circles on those nights in the 17th and 2nd arrondissements, but I saw nobody who fitted the bill coming in or out of the metro station between ten and when it closed. So I tried Saint-Georges. And there I noticed a small man on his own, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking at the ground, who took a train at quarter to eleven. I saw a few other people too, who might have been likely suspects. But just this one little man came back out of the metro at quarter past midnight. And four days later he did the same thing. The next Monday, the beginning of a section number one, you’ll remember, so a new age, I went back to Saint-Georges. He turned up and I followed him. That was the time with the biro. Because it was him all right, Adamsberg. Other times I would wait at the metro to try and follow him home. But at that point he always manages to give me the slip. I wasn’t going to run after him – I’m not the police.’

‘I won’t tell you that’s fantastic work, it sounds too much like police talk, but all the same, it is fantastic work.’

Adamsberg often used the word ‘fantastic’.

‘True,’ said Mathilde. ‘I did well there, better than with Charles Reyer, at any rate.’

‘You like him – Reyer?’

‘He’s a bad-tempered so-and-so, but that doesn’t bother me. He makes up for Clémence, the old woman you saw, who’s mind-numbingly good-natured. She seems to do it on purpose. Charles won’t get a rise out of her any more than with me. That’ll teach him, it’ll blunt his teeth.’

‘Her teeth are a bit funny, Clémence’s.’

‘You noticed, yes, like Crocidura russula – more like animal’s teeth, aren’t they? It must put off the lonely-hearts men she tries to date. We ought to give Charles an eye makeover and Clémence a teeth makeover – we ought to give the world a makeover, really. Then of course it would be perfectly boring. If we get a move on, we could be at Saint-Georges metro station by ten, if that’s what you want. But I’ve already told you, Adamsberg, I really don’t think it’s him you should be chasing. I think someone else used his circle afterwards. Is that impossible?’

‘It would have to be someone who was remarkably familiar with his routine.’

‘Like me.’

‘Yes, and don’t say so too loudly or you’ll be suspected of following your chalk circle man that night and then dragging your victim, whom you’d previously knocked out, of course, over to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, before cutting her throat, on the spot, right in the middle of the circle, making sure she wasn’t outside the line. But that seems pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it?’

‘No. I think that would be quite possible if you wanted to incriminate somebody else. In fact, it’s very tempting, this madman who’s been offering himself on a plate to the police and drawing his blue chalk circles two metres wide, just big enough to contain a corpse. It could have given plenty of people the idea of committing murder, if you ask me.’

‘But how could any prosecutor prove a motive, if the victim turns out to be entirely unknown to the circle man?’

‘The prosecutor would think it was a motiveless crime by a lunatic.’

‘He doesn’t look like a lunatic at all, from all the classic signs. So how could the “real” murderer, according to you, be certain that the circle man would be found guilty in his place?’

‘Well, what do you think, Adamsberg?’

‘I don’t think anything yet, Madame, to tell you the truth. But I’ve just had a bad feeling about these circles from the beginning. I don’t know, just now, whether the man who draws them killed this woman. You could be perfectly right. Perhaps the chalk circle man is just a victim himself. You seem to be much better at working things out and reaching conclusions than I am, you’re a scientist. I don’t use the same methods, I don’t do deductive reasoning. But the feeling I’ve got at the moment, very strongly, is that this circle man isn’t nice at all – even if he is your protégé.’

‘But you haven’t got any evidence?’

‘No. But I’ve been trying to find out everything about him for weeks. He was already dangerous, in my view, when he was just drawing rings round cotton buds and hairpins. So he’s still dangerous now.’

‘But good heavens, Adamsberg, you’re working backwards! It’s as if you were to say that some food was toxic because you felt sick before eating it!’

‘Yes, I know.’

Adamsberg seemed irritated with himself: his eyes were heading for dreams and nightmares where Mathilde couldn’t follow him.

‘Come on, then,’ she said, ‘let’s go to Saint-Georges. If we get lucky and see him, you’ll find out why I’m defending him against you.’

‘And why’s that?’ asked Adamsberg, standing up, with a sad smile on his face. ‘Because a man who gives you a little wave of his hand can’t be all bad?’

He looked at her, his head on one side, his lips curled into a lopsided grin, and he looked so charming that Mathilde felt once more that with this man life was a little better. Charles needed new eyes, Clémence needed a new set of teeth, but this policeman needed a total face makeover. Because his face was crooked, or too small, or too big, or something. But Mathilde would not have let anyone touch it for the world.

‘Adamsberg,’ she said, ‘you’re just too cute. You’ve no business being a policeman, you should have been a streetwalker.’

‘Well, I am a streetwalker as well, Madame Forestier. Like you.’

‘That must be why I like you so much. But that won’t stop me proving to you that my intuition about the chalk circle man is as good as yours. And watch it, Adamsberg, you’re not going to lay a finger on him tonight, not in my company. Give me your word.’

‘I promise. I won’t lay a finger on anyone at all,’ said Adamsberg.

At the same time, he was thinking that he would try to keep his word on this in relation to Christiane, who was lying waiting for him, naked, in bed, back at his flat. And yet who would turn down an offer from a naked girl? As Clémence would say, perhaps the evening was jinxed. Clémence seemed to be a bit jinxed herself, in fact. As for Charles Reyer, it was worse than a jinx: he was teetering on the edge of an internal explosion, a major cataclysm.

When Adamsberg followed Mathilde back into the big room with the aquarium, Charles was still talking to Clémence, who was listening attentively and amiably, puffing at a cigarette as if she was new to smoking. Charles was saying:

‘My grandmother died one night, because she had eaten too many spice cakes. But the real sensation was next day, when they found my father at the table eating the rest of the cakes.’

‘Very interesting,’ said Clémence, ‘but now I’d like you to help me write my letter to my M., 66.’

‘Night-night, children,’ said Mathilde on the way out.

She was already in action, striding towards the stairs, in a hurry to be off to the Saint-Georges station. But Adamsberg had never been able to hurry.

‘Saint George,’ Mathilde called to him, as they scanned the street for a taxi. ‘Isn’t he the one who killed the dragon?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Adamsberg.

The taxi dropped them at the Saint-Georges metro station at five past ten.

‘It’s OK,’ said Mathilde. ‘We’re still in time.’

By half past eleven, the chalk circle man had still not shown up. There was a pile of cigarette ends around their feet.

‘Bad sign,’ said Mathilde. ‘He won’t come now.’

‘Perhaps his suspicions have been aroused,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Suspicions? What about? That he’d be accused of murder? Rubbish! We don’t know if he even listens to the radio. He might not even know about the murder. You already know he doesn’t go out every night, it’s as simple as that.’

‘It’s true, he might not have heard the news yet. Or else perhaps he did hear it, and it made him wary. Since he knows someone’s watching him, he may be changing his haunts. In fact, I’m sure he will. It’s going to be the devil’s own job to find him.’

‘Because he’s the murderer – is that what you mean, Adamsberg?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How many times a day do you say “I don’t know,” or “Maybe”?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I know about all your famous cases so far, and how successful you are. But all the same, when you’re here in the flesh, one wonders. Are you sure you’re suited to the police?’

‘Certain. And anyway, I do other things in life.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as drawing.’

‘Drawing what?’

‘The leaves on the trees and more leaves on the trees.’

‘Is that interesting? Sounds pretty boring to me.’

‘You’re interested in fish, aren’t you?’

‘What do you all have against fish? And anyway, why don’t you draw people’s faces? Wouldn’t it be more fun?’

‘Later. Later or maybe never. You have to start with leaves. Any Chinese sage will tell you.’

‘Later? But you’re already forty-five, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but I can’t believe that.’

‘Ah, that’s like me.’

And since Mathilde had a hip flask of cognac in her pocket, and since it was getting seriously cold, and since she said, ‘We’re into a section two of the week now, we’re allowed to have a drink,’ they did.

When the metal gates of the metro station closed, the chalk circle man had still not appeared. But Adamsberg had had time to tell Mathilde about the petite chérie and how she must have died somewhere out in the world, and how he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Mathilde appeared to find this story fascinating. She said that it was a shame to let the petite chérie die like that, and that she knew the world like the back of her hand, so she’d be able to find out whether the petite chérie had been buried, with her monkey, or not. Adamsberg felt completely drunk because he didn’t usually touch spirits. He couldn’t even pronounce ‘Wahiguya’ properly.

At about the same time, Danglard was in an almost identical condition. The four twins had wanted him to drink a large glass of water – ‘to dilute the alcohol,’ the children said. As well as the four twins, he had a little boy of five, just now fast asleep in his lap, a child whom he had never dared mention to Adamsberg. This last one was the unmistakable offspring of his wife and her blue-eyed lover. She had left this child with Danglard one fine day, saying that all in all it was better that the kids should stay together. Two sets of twins, plus a singleton who was always curled up in his lap, made five, and Danglard was afraid that confessing to all this would make him look a fool.

‘Oh, stop going on about diluting the alcohol,’ said Danglard. ‘And as for you,’ he said, addressing the first-born of the older set of twins, ‘I don’t like this way you’ve got of pouring white wine into plastic cups, and then pretending that you’re being sympathetic, or that it looks nice, or that you don’t object to white wine so long as it’s in a plastic cup. What’s the house going to look like with plastic cups everywhere? Did you think of that, Édouard?’

‘That’s not the reason,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s because of the taste. And then, you know, the flakiness afterwards.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Danglard. ‘And if we’re talking about flakiness, you can take a view on that when the vicomte de Chateaubriand, the greatest writer in French literature, and about ninety-nine beautiful girls, have all rejected you, and when you’ve turned into a Paris cop who may be a sharp dresser but is all mixed up inside. I don’t think you’ll ever manage that. What about a case conference tonight?’

When Danglard and his kids had a case conference, it meant they got to talk about his police work. It could last hours, and the kids adored it.

‘Well, for a start,’ said Danglard, ‘and can you beat this? St John the Baptist walked out and left us to deal with this shambles for the rest of the day. That got me so worked up that by three o’clock I was well away. And yes, it’s clear that the man who wrote that stuff on the other circles is the same one who wrote the stuff round the circle with the murdered woman in it.’

‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?’ chanted Édouard. ‘Or you might as well say “Marcel, go to hell, on your bike and ring the bell” or “Maurice, call the police, give us all a bit of peace” or-’

‘OK, OK, said Danglard, ‘but yes, “Victor, woe’s in store” does suggest something vicious: death, bad luck, a threat of some kind. Needless to say, Adamsberg was the first to get a sniff of that. But is that enough for us to charge this man? The handwriting expert’s quite positive about it: the man’s not mad, he’s not even disturbed, this is an educated person, careful about his appearance and his career, but discontented and aggressive as well as deceptive – those were his words. He also said, “This man’s getting on in years, he’s going through some crisis, but he’s in control; he’s a pessimist, obsessed about the end of his life, therefore about his afterlife. Either he’s a failure on the brink of success, or a successful man on the brink of failure.” That’s the way he is, kids, our graphologist. He turns words inside out like the fingers of a glove, he sends them one way, then the other. For instance, he can’t talk about the desire for hope without mentioning the hope for desire, and so on. It sounds intelligent the first time you hear it, but after that you realise there’s nothing there really. Except that it is the same man who’s been doing all the circles so far, a man who’s clever and perfectly lucid, and that he’s either about to succeed in life or to fail. But as for whether the dead woman was put into a circle that had already been drawn or not, the lab people say it’s impossible to tell. Maybe yes, maybe no. Does that sound like forensic science to you? And the corpse hasn’t been much help, either: this is the corpse of a woman who led a totally uneventful existence, nothing odd at all, no complicated love life, no skeletons in the family cupboard, no problems with money, no secret vices. Nothing. Just balls of wool and more balls of wool, holidays in the Loire Valley, calf-length skirts, sensible shoes, a little diary that she wrote notes in, half a dozen packets of currant biscuits in her kitchen cupboard. In fact she wrote about that in her diary: “Can’t eat biscuits in the shop, if you drop crumbs the boss notices.” And so on and so forth. So you might say, well, what on earth was she doing out late at night? And the answer is she was coming back home after seeing her cousin, who works in the ticket office at the Luxembourg metro station. The victim often used to go over there and sit alongside her in the booth, eating crisps, and knitting Inca-style gloves to sell in the wool shop. And then she would go back home, on foot, probably along the rue Pierre-et-Marie Curie.’

‘Is the cousin her only family?’

‘Yes, and she’ll inherit the estate. But since it consists of the currant biscuits plus a tea caddy with a few banknotes in, I can’t see the cousin or her husband cutting Madeleine Châtelain’s throat for that.’

‘But if someone wanted to use a chalk circle, how would they have known where there was going to be one that night?’

‘That is indeed the question, my little ones. But we ought to be able to work it out.’

Danglard got up carefully, to put Number Five, René, to bed.

‘For instance,’ he resumed, ‘take the commissaire‘s new friend, Mathilde Forestier: it seems that she’s actually seen the chalk circle man. Adamsberg told me. Look, I’m managing to say his name again. Obviously the conference is doing me good.’

‘At the moment, I’d say it was a one-man conference,’ Édouard observed.

‘And this woman, who knows the chalk circle man, she worries me,’ Danglard added.

‘You said the other day,’ said the first-born girl of the second set of twins, ‘that she was beautiful and tragic and spoilt and hoarse-voiced, like some exotic Egyptian queen, but she didn’t worry you then.’

‘You didn’t think before you spoke, little girl. The other day, nobody had been killed. But now, I can just see her coming into the police station, on some damfool pretext, making a big fuss, getting to see Adamsberg. And then talking to him about this, that and the other, before getting round to telling him she knows this chalk circle man pretty well. Ten days before the murder – bit of a coincidence isn’t it?’

‘You mean she’d planned to kill Madeleine, and she came to see Adamsberg so that she’d be in the clear?’ asked Lisa. ‘Like that woman who killed her grandfather but came to see you a month before, to tell you she had a “presentiment”? Remember?’

‘You remember that dreadful woman? Not an Egyptian princess at all, and as slimy as a reptile. She nearly got away with it. It’s the classic trick of the murderer who telephones to say they’ve found a body, only more elaborate. So, well, yes. Mathilde Forestier turning up like that does make you think. I can just imagine what she’d say: “But commissaire, I’d hardly have come and told you I knew all about the chalk circle man if I was intending to use him to cover up a murder!” It’s a dangerous game, but it’s bold, and it could be just her style. Because she is a bold woman, you’ve probably gathered that.’

‘So did she have a motive for killing poor fat Madeleine?’

‘No,’ said Arlette. ‘This lady, Madeleine, must just have been unlucky, picked by chance to start a series, so they’d pin it on the circle maniac. The real murder’ll happen later. That’s what papa is thinking.’

‘Yes, maybe that is what he’s thinking,’ Danglard conceded.