This Night’s Foul Work

XIII

IN THE LITTLE ROOM WITH THE DRINKS MACHINE, ADAMSBERG HAD FOUND on the floor two big foam cushions covered with an old blanket, creating a makeshift bed and transforming the area into a refuge for the homeless. It was no doubt the work of Mercadet, who was bordering on the narcoleptic, and whose need for sleep was agonising to his professional conscience.

Adamsberg served himself a coffee from the kindly machine and decided to try out the bed. He sat down, pushed a cushion behind his back and stretched out his legs.

Yes, one could have a nap there, no doubt about it. The warm foam wrapped itself round one’s body insidiously, almost giving the feeling of having company in bed. Perhaps one could do some thinking there, but Adamsberg was only capable of thinking when he was out for a stroll. If you could call it thinking. He had long ago been forced to the conclusion that in his case it did not correspond to the normal definition of thought: to shape and combine ideas and judgements. It was not for want of trying: sitting on a proper chair, elbows leaning on a table, without distractions, pen and paper to hand, pressing his fingers to his forehead. An approach which merely succeeded in disconnecting his logical circuits. His unstructured mind was like an unreadable map, a magma in which nothing clear emerged to be identified as an Idea. Everything always seemed to be linked to everything else, in a network of little pathways where sounds, smells, flashes of light, memories, images, echoes and grains of dust mingled together. And that was all he had at his disposal to act as Commissaire Adamsberg, running the twenty-seven officers in his outfit and obtaining, as his divisionnaire was always reminding him, Results. He ought to have been anxious. But that day, other floating bodies were taking up all the space in his mind.

He stretched out his arms, then folded them behind his head, appreciating the initiative of his drowsy colleague. Outside, rain and shadows. Which had nothing to do with each other.

Danglard stopped short before operating the machine when he found the commissaire asleep, and tiptoed backwards out of the room.

‘I’m not asleep, Danglard,’ Adamsberg said, without opening his eyes. ‘Go ahead and get your coffee.’

‘This bedding’s Mercadet’s is it?’

‘I imagine so, capitaine. I’m trying it out.’

‘You may have some competition there.’

‘Or multiplication. Another six couches in the corners if we don’t watch out.’

‘There are only four corners,’ objected Danglard, hoisting himself on to one of the high bar stools and swinging his legs.

‘Well, it’s more comfortable than those damn bar stools. I don’t know who produces them but they’re too tall. I can’t even reach the foot rest. We look like a lot of storks on chimney pots.’

‘They’re Swedish.’

‘The Swedes must be taller than us. Do you think that makes a difference?’

‘What?’

‘Size. Do you think it makes a difference if your head is nearly two metres above your feet? If the blood has such a long way to go up and down all the time? Do you think it makes the thought process purer if the feet are too far away to matter? Or would a little man think better, because the circulation would be more rapid and concentrated?’

‘Immanuel Kant,’ said Danglard without enthusiasm, ‘was only one metre fifty tall. He was all thought, impeccably constructed.’

‘What about his body?’

‘He never bothered to use it.’

‘But that’s no good either,’ murmured Adamsberg, closing his eyes again.

Danglard considered it more prudent and useful to head back to his office.

‘Danglard. Can you see it?’ said Adamsberg in a level tone of voice. ‘The Shade?’

The commandant turned back, and looked towards the rain which darkened the window. But he was too much of a connoisseur of Adamsberg to think the commissaire was talking about the weather.

‘It’s there, Danglard. It’s hiding the light. Feel it? It’s surrounding us, looking at us.’

‘A dark presence?’ he suggested.

‘Something like that. All round us.’

Danglard took time to think, rubbing the back of his neck. What Shade could this be? When and how had ‘it’ appeared? Since the traumatic events which had befallen Adamsberg in Quebec and had forced him to take more than a month’s leave to recover, Danglard had been watching him closely. He had been following his quick return to form after the shocks which had almost stripped him of his reason. And it seemed to Danglard that everything had gone back to normal fairly quickly, or at any rate to what passed for normal in Adamsberg’s case. He felt his fears creeping up again. Perhaps Adamsberg wasn’t so far away from the abyss into which he had almost fallen.

‘Since when?’ he asked.

‘A few days after I got back,’ replied Adamsberg, suddenly opening his eyes and sitting up straight. ‘Perhaps it was waiting, prowling around us.’

‘Us?’

‘The Squad. Our base. That’s the Shade’s territory too. When I go away – when I went to Normandy, for instance – I don’t sense it any more. When I get back, there it is again, quiet and grey. Perhaps it’s the Silent Sister.’

‘And who might that be?’

‘Sister Clarisse, the nun who was killed by the tanner.’

‘You believe in her?’

Adamsberg smiled.

‘I heard her the other night,’ he said, quite cheerfully. ‘She was walking about in the attic, with a sound like a robe sweeping the ground. I got up and went to have a look.’

‘And there was nothing there?’

‘No, stands to reason,’ said Adamsberg, with a fleeting memory of the punctuator of Haroncourt.

The commissaire looked all round the little room.

‘And does she bother you?’ asked Danglard carefully, feeling he was stepping into a minefield.

‘No, but this isn’t a friendly ghost, Danglard, bear that in mind. Not there to help us.’

‘Since you got back, nothing special’s happened, except we’ve got this New Recruit.’

‘Veyrenc de Bilhc.’

‘Does he bother you? Did he bring the Shade with him?’

Adamsberg thought over Danglard’s suggestion.

‘Well, he does bother me a bit. He comes from the valley next to mine. Did he tell you about it? The Ossau valley? And about his hair?’

‘No. Why should he?’

‘When he was a little kid, five other boys attacked him. They slashed his stomach and cut up his scalp.’

‘And?’

‘And these boys came from my village, and he knows that. He pretended he was only just discovering it, but he was perfectly aware of it before he got here. And if you ask me, that’s why he’s here at all.’

‘But why?’

‘Chasing memories, Danglard.’

Adamsberg lay back again on the cushions.

‘Remember that woman we arrested a couple of years ago? The district nurse? I’d never had to arrest an old woman before. I hated that case.’

‘She was a monster,’ said Danglard in a shocked voice.

‘According to our pathologist, she was a dissociated killer. With her Alpha self, which went about its everyday business, and her Omega self, which was an angel of death. What are Alpha and Omega, anyway?’

‘Letters from the Greek alphabet.’

‘If you say so. She was seventy-three years old. Remember what she looked like when we arrested her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not a happy memory was it, capitaine? Do you think she’s still spying on us? Do you think she could be the Shade? Cast your mind back to the case.’

Yes, Danglard could perfectly well cast his mind back. It had begun at the home of an elderly woman who had apparently died of natural causes, and there was a routine procedure to determine the cause of death. The local GP and the police pathologist, Dr Roman, at that stage not having a fit of the vapours, had reached agreement in fifteen minutes. A cardiac arrest. The television was still on. Two months later, Lamarre and Danglard had been in attendance for another routine formality, this time concerning a man of ninety-one who had died sitting in his armchair, his hand still holding a book, curiously enough entitled The Art of Being a Grandmother. Adamsberg had arrived just as the two doctors were agreeing the certificate.

‘An aneurysm, I’d say,’ said the man’s own physician. ‘You can never predict them, but when they strike, they strike. Any objection, doctor?’

‘None at all,’ Roman had replied.

‘OK, let’s do the paperwork.’

The GP had already pulled out his pen and was about to sign the certificate.

‘Stop,’ said Adamsberg.

They both looked at the commissaire, who was standing against the wall, arms folded, looking at them.

‘Anything wrong?’ Roman had asked.

‘Can’t you smell anything?’

Adamsberg moved away from the wall and approached the body. He sniffed close to the old man’s face and vaguely patted his sparse hair. Then he walked around the small two-room flat, his nose in the air.

‘It’s in the air, Roman. Look around, instead of at the body.’

‘Around where?’ asked Roman looking up through his glasses at the ceiling.

‘Roman, this old man was murdered.’

The GP looked impatient as he pocketed his fat fountain pen. This little man with vague eyes who had just turned up, hands thrust in the pockets of a scruffy pair of trousers, and whose arms were as brown as if he spent his life out of doors, did not inspire him with confidence.

‘My patient was worn out, like an old workhorse. Like I said, when it strikes, it strikes.’

‘It strikes all right, but not necessarily from heaven. Can you smell it, doctor? It’s not a perfume, not a medicine. It’s something like camphor, camomile, pepper, orange blossom.’

‘We’ve made our diagnosis, and you’re not a doctor as far as I know.’

‘No, I’m a policeman.’

‘I dare say. But if you’re not satisfied, go and tell your commissaire.’

‘I am the commissaire.’

‘He is the commissaire,’ Roman confirmed.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said the doctor.

Danglard, who had been there before, had watched as the GP gradually responded to Adamsberg’s voice and manner, yielding to the persuasiveness that seemed to flow out of him like an insidious breath. He had seen the doctor bend and submit, like a tree in the wind, as so many others had before him, men of bronze and women of steel, seduced by a charm that was neither brilliant nor showy, but which obeyed no rhyme or reason. It was an arrogant phenomenon, which always left Danglard both satisfied and irritated, divided between his affection for Adamsberg and his pity for himself.

‘Yes,’ said Danglard sniffing the air. ‘I know this smell. It’s some expensive sort of oil, they sell it in little capsules at aromatherapists. It’s supposed to settle the nerves. You put a drop on each temple and one at the back of the neck, and it works wonders. Kernorkian in our office uses it.’

‘That’s what it is, Danglard, you’re right. That must be why I recognised it. And I don’t suppose your patient was in the habit of buying it.’

The doctor looked round the two poor little rooms, which indicated near-abject poverty rather than the means to buy expensive aromatherapy products.

‘But it doesn’t mean anything,’ he said tentatively.

‘That’s because you weren’t attending a woman who died a month or two back. Same smell there. Do you remember it, Danglard? You were there.’

‘I didn’t notice anything.’

‘Roman, what about you?’

‘Sorry, nothing.’

‘It was the same smell. So the same person could have been here and in the other case, just before they died. Who was the district nurse, doctor?’

‘A very competent woman. I’d recommended her to him.’

The doctor rubbed his shoulder, looking embarrassed.

‘She’s past retiring age. She has been, well, I have to say, working unofficially. So she could visit my patients every day without them having to pay too much. When there’s no money left, you have to turn a blind eye to the rules.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Claire Langevin. She’s very competent, forty years’ experience in hospital nursing and a specialist in geriatrics.’

‘Danglard, call the office. Get them to check with the old lady’s GP – call him and ask what was the name of the nurse who visited her.’

They stood talking shop for about twenty minutes while Danglard went back to the patrol car. The doctor had pulled out from under the patient’s bed a bottle of home-made fortified wine.

‘He always offered me a little glass of this stuff – real rot-gut.’

Then he had put it back under the bed, looking sad. Danglard returned.

‘Claire Langevin,’ he announced.

Silence. All eyes were on the commissaire.

‘A killer nurse,’ said Adamsberg. ‘One of the sort they call angels of death. When they come down to earth, they kill. And when they fall, they really fall.’

‘Oh my God,’ whispered the doctor.

‘How many other patients have you recommended her to, doctor?’

‘Oh my God.’

In under a month, the macabre list of the thirty-three victims of the death-dealing angel had been established: in hospitals, private nursing homes, clinics and in their own houses. She had spent the last half-century working in France, Germany and Poland, distributing death by injecting air bubbles into arm after arm.

One February morning, Adamsberg and four of his men had surrounded her suburban villa, with its gravel paths and neat little flower beds. Four experienced men, used to dealing with tough male killers, but that day reduced to a state of impotence, sweating with unease. When women went off the rails, Adamsberg said, the world seemed to teeter on its axis. In fact, he had confided to Danglard as they walked up the path, men only allow themselves to kill each other because women don’t, but when women cross the red line, the universe tilts.

‘Maybe,’ Danglard had said, feeling as upset as the others.

The door had opened on a very wrinkled old woman, neat and poised, who had asked the police to please be very careful of her flowers, her paintwork and her borders. Adamsberg had considered her carefully, but could find nothing in her face, neither the flame of hatred nor the fury of killing he had sometimes detected in others. Nothing but a blank-faced and unnaturally thin old woman. The men had handcuffed her almost in silence, reciting their usual formulae, to which Danglard had added under his breath: ‘Do not condemn woman if she stoops to such crime/Who knows with what torments she has fought all this time.’ Adamsberg had assented, without knowing who Danglard was supplicating with this evening prayer in broad daylight.

‘Yes, of course I remember the case,’ said Danglard with a shudder. ‘But she’s nowhere near here. They’ve got her under lock and key in Freiburg. She can’t be sending a shade over you from there.’

Adamsberg had stood up. Pressing his hands against the wall, he was watching the rain still falling.

‘No. Ten months and five days ago, Danglard, she somehow managed to kill a prison guard. And got herself out of the prison.’

‘Good God,’ said Danglard, crushing his plastic cup. ‘Why weren’t we told?’

‘The Baden Land authorities neglected to send us a message. Administrative slip-up. I only heard about it when I got back from leave.’

‘Have they found her?’

Adamsberg made a vague sign towards the street.

‘No, capitaine. She’s still out there somewhere.’