This Night’s Foul Work

XLVIII

IN THE DARKNESS INSIDE THE INDUSTRIAL BUILDING, EACH OF THE TWO groups moved forward in silence, flashing their torches across broken furniture, piles of tyres and bundles of rags. The hangar seemed to have been abandoned for about ten years but still smelled strongly of diesel oil and burnt rubber.

‘He knows where he’s going,’ said Adamsberg, as he focused his torch on the little round pawprints that the Snowball had left in the thick dust.

Head down, and breathing with difficulty, Adamsberg followed the cat’s tracks very slowly, and none of the others tried to move ahead of him. After eleven hours of the chase, no one was now eager to reach their goal. The commissaire concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as if he were wading through mud, hauling his stiff legs along with every pace. His group met up with the second team at the entry to a long dark corridor, lit only by a high window through which the moon was shining. The cat had stopped about twelve metres along it, and was crouching in front of a door. Adamsberg caught its luminous eyes with a sweep of the torch. It was now seven days and seven nights since Retancourt had been brought to this burial pit, in which three dogs were somehow surviving.

Adamsberg advanced heavily along the corridor, turning round after he had gone a few steps. None of the others had followed him. They were all massed at the end of the corridor, a frozen group, unable to face the last stretch.

I can’t face it either, thought Adamsberg. But they couldn’t stay there, clinging to the walls, abandoning Retancourt because they were unable to bear the sight of her body. He stopped in front of the metal door guarded by the cat, which was now sniffing along the ground, unconcerned by the terrible excremental smell coming from it. Adamsberg took a deep breath and put out his hand to release the hook that secured the door, then pulled it open. Forcing himself to look down, he made himself see what he had to: Retancourt’s body, lying on the floor of a dark and tiny room, huddled against old car tools and petrol cans. He stood quite still, his gaze fixed on the sight, tears spilling freely from his eyes. It was the first time he had wept for anyone, except his brother Raphaël or Camille. Retancourt, his tree, his mainstay, was on the ground, struck down. Running the beam of the torch across her, he could see her dust-covered face, the nails on her hands already turning blue, her open mouth and her blonde hair, across which a spider ran.

He stood leaning against the dark brick wall, while the cat, unafraid, went into the tiny room and jumped on to Retacourt’s body, lying down on her filthy clothes. The smell, Adamsberg thought. All he could smell was diesel, motor oil, urine and shit. Just regular animal and mechanical fluids. What was missing was the stench of decomposition. He took a couple of steps towards the body again, and knelt down on the sticky concrete floor. Holding his torch over Retancourt’s face, which looked like a dirt-encrusted marble statue, all he could see was the immobility of death. The lips were open and fixed, not reacting to the spider as it ran over them. He slowly stretched out his hand and laid it on her forehead.

‘Doctor!’ he called, beckoning him on.

‘He’s calling you, doctor,’ said Mordent, not moving an inch himself.

‘Lavoisier, like the chemist.’

‘Go on, he’s calling you,’ said Justin.

Still on his knees, Adamsberg moved back to make room for the doctor.

‘She’s dead,’ he said, ‘and yet she isn’t dead.’

‘One or the other, commissaire,’ said Lavoisier, opening his bag. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Torches, please,’ called Adamsberg.

The group gradually approached, Mordent and Danglard in front with their flashlights.

‘Still slightly warm,’ said the doctor, after a rapid examination. ‘She must have died less than an hour ago. I can’t find a pulse.’

‘She is alive,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Just a minute, mon vieux, don’t get excited,’ said the doctor, pulling out a mirror and placing it in front of Retancourt’s mouth.

‘OK’, he said after several long seconds. ‘Get the stretcher. She’s still alive. I don’t know how, but she’s alive. In a para-lethal state, subnormal temperature – I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘Seen what?’ asked Adamsberg. ‘What state is she in?’

‘The metabolic functions are operating at minimum level,’ said the doctor, still pursuing his examination. ‘Her hands and feet are freezing cold, the circulation’s very slow, the intestines have emptied and the eyes are unfocused.’

The doctor rolled up the sleeves of Retancourt’s sweater and felt her arms. ‘Even her forearms are already cold.’

‘Is she in a coma?’

‘No. It’s a form of lethargy, below the normal vital thresholds. She could die at any minute with the stuff she must have been injected with.’

‘What?’ asked Adamsberg, who was holding Retancourt’s large arm in both hands.

‘Well, as far as I can tell, she’s been injected intravenously with a dose of sedatives strong enough to kill a horse.’

‘The syringe,’ whispered Voisenet.

‘She must have been hit on the head first,’ said the doctor, feeling under her hair. ‘There’s possible concussion. She’s been tied up tightly, hands and feet, the rope’s bitten into the skin. I think she was injected with the stuff here. She should have died almost immediately. But according to the dehydration rate and the excretion, she must have survived six or seven days. It’s not normal. I confess, I don’t really understand it.’

‘She isn’t a normal person, doctor.’

‘Lavoisier, like the chemist,’ said the doctor automatically. ‘Yes, I can see that, commissaire, but her size and weight alone wouldn’t explain it. I just don’t know how her organism managed to fight against the toxins, as well as hunger, thirst and cold.’

The paramedics arrived, put a stretcher on the ground and began trying to transfer Retancourt on to it.

‘Gently,’ said Lavoisier. ‘Don’t oblige her to breathe more deeply, it could be fatal. Put straps round her and move her a centimetre at a time. Let go her arm, mon vieux,’ he said to Adamsberg.

Adamsberg removed his hands from her arm and told the officers to move back into the corridor.

‘She’s channelled her energy,’ said Estalère as he watched the slow transfer of the large body on to the stretcher. ‘She must have channelled it into stopping that sedative invading her bloodstream.’

‘If you say so,’ said Mordent. ‘But we’ll never really know.’

‘Take the stretcher straight to the helicopter,’ Lavoisier ordered. ‘We’ve got to move quickly now.’

‘Where will they take her?’ asked Justin.

‘The hospital in Dourdan.’

‘Kernorkian and Voisenet, can you go to Dourdan and find a hotel for everyone to stop in tonight,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Tomorrow we’ll have to go through this shed with a fine-tooth comb. They must have left some traces in all this sticky dust.’

‘There weren’t any prints in the corridor,’ Kernorkian said. ‘Just those of the cat.’

‘They must have come from the other end. Lamarre and Justin, stay here to guard the exits until I can send some officers over from Dourdan to take over for the night.’

‘Where’s the cat?’ asked Estalère.

‘On the stretcher. Go and get it, brigadier - take care of it and help it recover.’

‘There’s a very good restaurant in Dourdan,’ said Froissy calmly, ‘La Rose des Vents. Old beams and candlelight, speciality seafood, excellent wine – they do sea bream in a pastry crust, if they can get it. Of course, it’s not cheap.’

The men all turned towards their quiet colleague, stunned that Froissy could be thinking about food while one of the team was at death’s door. Outside, the revving-up of the helicopter indicated that Retancourt’s removal was imminent. The doctor didn’t think she would regain consciousness. Adamsberg could read it in his eyes.

He looked over the exhausted faces before him, shining palely in the torchlight. The incongruous prospect of a good dinner in a high-class restaurant seemed as remote to them as it was desirable, in some other life; an ephemeral bubble in which the artifice would help to suspend the horror.

‘Right you are, Froissy,’ Adamsberg said. ‘We’ll meet up at La Rose des Vents and get some supper there. Come on, doctor, we’re going with Retancourt.’

‘Lavoisier, like the chemist,’ said the doctor.