This Night’s Foul Work

XXXII

THE OFFICERS IN THE SERIOUS CRIME SQUAD WERE ARRANGING THE CHAIRS in the Council Chamber when Adamsberg walked across the large communal room without saying a word. Danglard gave him a quick look, and from the glow circulating under the commissaire‘s skin like radioactive material he deduced that something critical had happened.

‘What is it?’ asked Veyrenc.

‘He’s plucked an idea out of the air,’ Danglard explained, ‘from the seagulls. You could call it a celestial bird-dropping. It falls on him, with a flurry of wings, between earth and heaven.’

Veyrenc glanced admiringly at Adamsberg, momentarily unsettling Dangard’s suspicions. But the commandant quickly corrected the impression. Admiring one’s enemy doesn’t make him any less an enemy, on the contrary. Danglard remained convinced that Veyrenc had found in Adamsberg his quarry of choice, an enemy to be reckoned with, the little gang-leader of long ago, standing in the shade of the walnut tree, and the chief of the squad today.

Adamsberg opened the meeting by distributing to everyone the photographs of the exhumation at Opportune, which were particularly horrific. His movements were quick and concentrated, and everyone understood that the investigation had taken a new turn. Their chief rarely made them stay for conferences at the end of the afternoon.

‘We didn’t have victims, murderer, or motive with these graves. Now we have all three.’

Adamsberg rubbed his cheeks, wondering how to proceed. He didn’t like summing up, not being gifted at the task. Danglard always helped him out in this respect, rather like the punctuator in the village, providing links, transitions and repetitions in the conversation.

‘The victims,’ Danglard proposed.

‘Neither Elisabeth Châtel nor Pascale Villemot died by accident. Both of them were murdered. Retancourt has brought the evidence back from the Evreux gendarmerie this afternoon. The stone which had supposedly “fallen” out of the south wall of the church, fracturing Pascaline’s skull, had been lying on the ground for at least a couple of months. While it was there, it had acquired a deposit of dark lichen on one of its surfaces.’

‘And the stone couldn’t have jumped up off the ground to hit her,’ observed Estalère attentively.

‘Correct, brigadier. Someone used it to bash her head in. That enables us to deduce that someone had most likely tampered with Elisabeth Châtel’s car as well, causing a fatal accident once she drove it on the main road.’

‘Devalon’s not going to be happy about this,’ observed Mercadet. ‘It’s what you could call rubbishing his investigation.’

Danglard smiled as he chewed his pencil, feeling pleased that Devalon’s aggressive refusal to listen had led him straight into trouble.

‘But why didn’t Devalon think of examining the stone?’ Voisenet asked.

‘Because he’s as thick as two planks, according to local opinion,’ explained Adamsberg. ‘But also because there was no reason in the world to think anyone would murder Pascaline.’

‘How did you find her grave?’ asked Maurel.

‘By chance, apparently.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Correct. I think we were deliberately pointed in the direction of the graveyard at Opportune. The murderer is telling us where to look, but from way ahead.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Back to the victims, then,’ prompted Danglard. ‘Pascaline and Elisabeth.’

‘They were about the same age. They both led very quiet lives and there was no man in sight. Both of them were virgins. Pascaline’s grave had been treated in exactly the same way as Elisabeth’s. The coffin had been broken open, but the body hadn’t been touched.’

‘Was their virginity something to do with the motive for the killings?’ asked Lamarre.

‘No, it was the criterion for choosing the victims, but not the motive.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Lamarre, frowning. ‘This murderer, she kills virgins, but her aim isn’t to kill virgins?’

The interruption had disturbed Adamsberg’s concentration, so he signed to Danglard to carry on.

‘Remember what the pathologist told us,’ the commandant said. ‘Diala and La Paille were killed by a woman, measuring about one metre sixty-two or so, someone who was a perfectionist, who knew how to use both a scalpel and a syringe, and wore navy-blue leather shoes. The shoes had been polished under the soles, indicating a possible dissociative pathology, or at least a desire to provide a protective layer between herself and the ground on which the crimes were committed. Claire Langevin, the angel of death, presents all these characteristics.’

Adamsberg had opened his notebook without noting anything in it. He doodled as he listened to the summary by Danglard, who would, in his opinion, have made a better chief of squad than him.

‘Retancourt has found a pair of shoes that belonged to her,’ Danglard added. ‘They were made of navy-blue leather. That’s not enough to provide any certainty, but in the meantime we’re still closely investigating this nurse.’

‘She finds everything, Retancourt,’ muttered Veyrenc.

‘She can channel her energy,’ Estalère responded passionately.

‘This angel of death is a fantasy,’ said Mordent irritably. ‘Nobody ever saw her talking to Diala or La Paille at the Flea Market. She’s invisible, she’s vanished into thin air.’

‘That’s how she used to operate all her life,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Like a ghost.’

‘No, it doesn’t fit,’ Mordent persisted, stretching his long heron-like neck out of his grey pullover. ‘This woman killed thirty-three old people, always the same method, never changing it at all. And suddenly she’s transformed herself into a different kind of monster, she goes chasing after virgins, opens graves, cuts the throats of two big lads. No, it just doesn’t fit. You can’t change a square into a circle, and someone who goes round quietly killing off helpless elderly folk doesn’t turn into a wild necrophiliac. Shoes or no shoes.’

‘I agree it doesn’t fit,’ said Adamsberg, nodding. ‘Unless, that is, some profound shock might have opened up a different crater in the volcano. The lava of madness might have flowed in a different direction. Maybe her stay in prison could have had a strong effect, or the fact that her Alpha caught sight of her Omega.’

‘I know about Alpha and Omega,’ piped up Estalère. ‘They’re the two halves of a dissociating murderer, one each side of the wall.’

‘The angel of death is a dissociator. Her arrest may have broken down her inner wall. After that, any kind of change is conceivable.’

‘All the same,’ said Mordent, ‘it doesn’t tell us what she’s after with her virgins, or what she’s looking for in their graves.’

‘That’s the black hole,’ said Adamsberg. ‘To get in there, we can only work backwards, since we have traces of her actions. Pascaline owned four cats. Three months before her death, one of them was killed. The only male among them.’

‘Was that some kind of early threat to Pascaline?’ asked Justin.

‘No, I don’t think so. It was killed to get at its genitals. Since it was already a neutered tom, its penis was the part that was taken. Danglard, explain about the bone.’

The commandant repeated his lesson about penile bones in carnivores – all pinnipeds, felids, etc.

‘Anyone else here know about that before?’ asked Adamsberg.

Only Voisenet and Veyrenc raised their hands.

‘Voisenet, that figures, since you’re a zoologist. But Veyrenc, how did you know that?’

‘My grandfather told me. When he was a boy, a bear was killed in the valley. Its corpse was dragged around the villages. My grandfather kept the bone from its penis. He said it shouldn’t be lost or sold at any price.’

‘Do you still have it?’

‘Yes, it’s still there, back home.’

‘Do you know why he valued it so much?’

‘He just said it kept the house standing and the family safe.’

‘How big is the penile bone of a cat?’ asked Mordent.

‘This big,’ said Danglard, showing about two or three centimetres between finger and thumb.

‘Not enough to keep a house standing,’ remarked Justin.

‘It’s symbolic,’ said Mordent.

‘I dare say,’ said Justin.

Adamsberg shook his head, without pushing back the hair that was falling into his eyes.

‘No, I think this cat’s bone has some precise significance for whoever took it. I think it’s something to do with the male principle.’

‘Contradiction with the value of the virgins, then,’ objected Mordent.

‘Depends what she’s looking for,’ said Voisenet.

‘She’s looking for eternal life,’ said Adamsberg. ‘And that’s the motive.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Estalère after a silence.

And for once, something Estalère didn’t get corresponded to incomprehension all round.

‘At the same time the cat was mutilated,’ Adamsberg said, ‘it was discovered that a reliquary had been looted, in the church at Le Mesnil, just a few kilometres away from Opportune and Villeneuve. Oswald was right, that’s a lot of disturbance for a small area. From the reliquary the thief took only the human bones belonging, supposedly, to Saint Jerome, but left behind various sheep bones, plus the bone from the snout of a pig.’

‘Must have been a connoisseur, then,’ remarked Danglard. ‘It’s not everyone who could recognise the bone from a pig’s snout.’

‘There’s a bone in a pig’s snout?’

‘So it would seem, Estalère.’

‘The same way, it’s not everyone would know that the cat has a penile bone. So one way or another, we’re dealing with a woman who knows what she’s doing.’

‘I don’t see the link,’ Froissy said, ‘between the relics, the cat and the graves. Except that there are bones in all three cases.’

‘That in itself is something,’ said Adamsberg. ‘The relics of the saint, the relics of a male animal, and the relics of virgins. In the priest’s residence in Le Mesnil, alongside Saint Jerome, they have a very old book, which is open and available for anyone to see, where these three elements are combined in a kind of recipe.’

‘More like a remedy or a potion,’ Danglard corrected.

‘What for?’ asked Mordent.

‘To obtain eternal life, with various ingredients. In the priest’s house, the book was open at the page of this recipe. He’s very proud of it, and I think he shows it to all his visitors. So did his predecessor, Father Raymond. This recipe must have been known to about thirty parishes in the area, and over many generations.’

‘And nowhere else?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Danglard. ‘The book’s famous, and especially this con-coction. It’s the De sanctis reliquis, in the 1663 edition.’

‘Never heard of it,’ said Estalère.

And, once more, something that Estalère had never heard of corresponded to ignorance all round.

‘Personally, I wouldn’t want eternal life,’ said Retancourt, in a low voice.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ asked Veyrenc.

‘Just imagine living for ever. You’d end up flinging yourself on the ground and being bored to death.’

‘Carpe diem, Madame:

The span of a lifetime flies as a summer day,

Much more cruel though would be for ever here to stay.’

‘Yes, you could put it like that,’ nodded Retancourt.

‘So we need to analyse what’s in this book, is that it?’ asked Mordent.

‘I think so,’ replied Adamsberg. ‘Veyrenc has memorised the recipe.’

‘The potion,’ Danglard corrected him again.

‘Go on, Veyrenc, but not too fast.’

‘Sovereign remedy for the lengthening of life, through the quality possessed by sacred relics to weaken the miasmas of death, preserved from the truest processes and purged of former errors.’

‘That’s just the title,’ Adamsberg explained. ‘Now for the rest, lieutenant.’

‘Five times cometh the age of youth, till the day thou must invert it, pass and pass again, out of reach of the thread of life.’

‘I don’t understand a word of it,’ said Estalère, this time with a note of panic in his voice.

‘No one really understands it,’ Adamsberg reassured him. ‘But I think it means something about the age you have to be to take the remedy. Not when you’re young.’

‘That’s quite possible,’ agreed Danglard. ‘When you’ve seen the age of youth pass five times. One could say five times fifteen, if you took the average age of marriage in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe. That would make it seventy-five.’

‘Which is exactly the age of the angel of death now,’ said Adamsberg slowly.

There was a silence and Froissy raised her elegant arm to say something.

‘We can’t carry on like this. I propose we continue the discussion across the road.’

Before Adamsberg could say anything there was a general move to adjourn to the Brasserie des Philosophes. The discussion could not begin again until everyone was seated in the bay with the stained-glass windows, in front of a plateful of food and a glass.

‘Right,’ said Mordent. ‘Maybe when she reached the age of seventy-five, it opened up another crater.’

‘The nurse can’t see herself joining the common herd of old folk she’s been bumping off,’ said Danglard. ‘She’s not an ordinary mortal any more. One might imagine that she wants to find the secret of eternal life and hold on to her powers.’

‘And that she’s been preparing for it for some time,’ said Mordent. ‘So she’d need to have got out of prison before her seventy-fifth birthday whatever happened, in order to get the recipe together.’

‘The potion.’

‘I guess that makes sense,’ said Retancourt.

‘Give us the rest of the text, Veyrenc,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Sacred relics thou wilt crush, taking three pinches, mixed well with the male principle which must not bend, and with the quick of virgins, on the dexter side, sorted by three into equal quantities, and grind these with the living cross from the heart of the eternal branches, adjacent in equal quantity, kept in the same place by the valency of the saint, in the wine of the year, and thus wilt thou lay its head on the ground.’

‘I didn’t understand that,’ said Lamarre, getting in before Estalère.

‘Let’s take it again slowly,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Start again, Veyrenc, bit by bit.’

‘Sacred relics thou wilt crush, taking three pinches.’

‘That’s easy enough,’ said Danglard. ‘Three pinches of bones that have been reduced to powder. Saint Jerome would fill the bill.’

‘… Mixed well with the male principle which must not bend…’

‘A phallus,’ suggested Gardon.

‘That doesn’t bend,’ added Justin

‘Well, a penis with a bone in it, for example,’ confirmed Adamsberg. ‘In other words the penile bone of a cat. And since cats have nine lives, that would give a special little eternity as a bonus.’

‘Yes, OK,’ said Danglard, who was taking notes.

‘And with the quick of virgins, on the dexter side, sorted by three into equal quantities.’

‘Look out,’ said Adamsberg, ‘here come our virgins.’

‘Sorted?’ asked Estalère. ‘Does that mean three by three?’

‘No, it means “matching” – you have to take the same quantities as for the relics.’

‘But what are you supposed to take, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Well, that’s the question,’ said Adamsberg. ‘What is “the quick of virgins”?’

‘Blood?’

‘Genitals?’

‘Heart?’

‘I’d say blood,’ said Mordent. ‘That’s the most logical, if you’re seeking eternal life. Virgin’s blood, mixed with a male principle which would fertilise it and create eternity.’

‘Why blood “on the dexter side,” though?’

‘It means on the right,’ said Danglard.

‘Since when is there right-hand and left-hand blood?’

‘Don’t know what that means,’ said Danglard, serving more wine all round.

Adamsberg had put his chin in his hands.

‘None of that fits the opening of a grave,’ he said. ‘You could easily take any of these things from the corpse of a virgin who had recently died. That’s not what happened. And as for blood, you can’t extract blood or indeed any vital part from a body that’s been three months in the ground.’

Danglard pulled a face. He liked the intellectual element of the discussion, but the subject matter was abhorrent to him. The sordid dissection of the potion was making him now find repugnant the great De sanctis reliquis which he had once loved,

‘So what’s left in the tomb that might appeal to our angel?’ Adamsberg was asking.

‘Nails, hair, perhaps?’ Justin asked.

‘But to get them you wouldn’t need to kill anyone. They could have been taken from living women.’

‘The only thing left in the grave is bones,’ said Lamarre.

‘What about the pelvis?’ suggested Justin. ‘The basin of fertility. To sort of complement the “male principle”.’

‘That sounds a good idea, Justin, but only the head end of the coffins was opened, and the robber didn’t take any bones, not even a splinter.’

‘We’ve reached a dead end,’ said Danglard. ‘How does the text go on?’

Veyrenc obediently recited it: ‘Now grind these with the living cross from the heart of the eternal branches, adjacent in equal quantity.’

‘Well, that’s clear, at any rate,’ said Mordent. ‘The living cross that lives in the eternal branches must mean Christ’s cross.’

‘Yes,’ said Danglard. ‘So-called fragments of the True Cross were sold by the thousand as sacred relics. Calvin calculated that there must have been more wood than three hundred men could carry.’

‘Well, it gives us something to aim for,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Can one of you check whether there has been any theft from a reliquary containing fragments of the Cross since the nurse escaped from prison.’

‘OK, I will,’ said Mercadet, taking notes.

On account of his narcoleptic tendencies, Mercadet was often asked to do research in the files, since he was virtually incapable of fieldwork.

‘We should also see whether she ever practised in the Le Mesnil-Beauchamp region, possibly under a different name from Clarisse Langevin, and possibly a long time ago. Take her photo with you.’

‘OK,’ said Mercadet, with the same ephemeral show of energy.

‘“Clarisse” is the name of your bloodthirsty nun, commissaire,’ whispered Danglard. ‘The district nurse’s name is Claire.’

Adamsberg turned to him with a vague and astonished look.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘How odd that I mixed them up. As if they’re two kernels of a walnut inside the same shell.’

Adamsberg signalled to Veyrenc to carry on.

‘… kept in the same place by the valency of the saint.’

‘That’s easy, too,’ said Danglard, confidently. ‘It must mean the geographical sector, the zone of influence of the sacred relics. That would be the unity of place, so that all the ingredients came from the same area.’

‘Does a saint have a zone of influence?’ asked Froissy. ‘Like a radio transmitter?’

‘It isn’t written down anywhere, but that was the general feeling. If people took the trouble to go on pilgrimages, it was with the idea that the closer you got, the greater the influence of the saint.’

‘So she had to find all the ingredients in an area not too far from Le Mesnil,’ said Voisenet.

‘Logical,’ said Danglard. ‘In the Middle Ages, it was important to ensure the compatibility of the constituent parts, if a potion was going to be successful. They also took climate into consideration when balancing mixtures. So the bones of a Norman saint would mix better with some bones from a Norman virgin and a cat from the same place.’

‘OK,’ said Mordent. ‘So what comes next. Veyrenc?’

‘… in the wine of the year, and thus wilt thou lay its head on the ground.’

‘Wine,’ said Lamarre. ‘That must be to mix it together.’

‘It means blood, too.’

‘Christ’s blood. That ties it all together.’

‘Why “of the year”?’

‘Because in those days,’ Danglard explained, ‘wine didn’t keep. You always drank it the same year. Like when we drink Beaujolais Nouveau.’

‘So what’s left?’

‘… thou wilt lay its head on the ground.’

‘It means laying it low,’ said Danglard.

‘So it must mean to overcome,’ put in Mordent. ‘You’ll overcome death, I suppose, or the death’s head.’

‘So,’ said Mercadet, consulting his notes, ‘the killer has put together all these elements: some quick of virgins, whatever that may be, some saint’s relics, a cat’s bone. But perhaps not yet the wood of the Cross. All she needs is the wine of the year to mix it all up.’

Several glasses were emptied at the mention of wine, which seemed to conclude the conference. But Adamsberg had not moved, so no one else dared to get up. They did not know whether the commissaire was about to nod off, with his cheek on his hand, or whether he was about to close the session. Danglard was about to nudge him, when he suddenly came to the surface like a sponge.

‘I believe that a third woman is going to be killed,’ Adamsberg said, without moving his cheek from his hand. ‘I think we’d better order some coffee.’