The Chalk Circle Man

XII

DANGLARD HAD MANAGED TO EXTRACT THE ADDRESS OF THE restaurant in Pigalle from Mathilde, but it had closed down two years earlier.

Throughout the day, Danglard kept a watchful eye on Adamsberg’s changing moods. Danglard felt that the investigation was dragging. But he recognised that there was not much to be done about it. He had devoted himself to going through Madeleine Châtelain’s life with a toothcomb, without finding the least irregularity anywhere. He had also been to see Charles Reyer, to ask him to explain why he had been so curious about the article in the newsletter. Reyer was both taken aback and put out, and above all vexed that his attempt to conceal anything from Adamsberg had been so ineffective. But Reyer was rather taken with Danglard, and the deep and languid tones of this weary man, whom he imagined to be tall, disturbed him less than the too-gentle voice of Adamsberg. His answer to Danglard was simple. As a student of animal anatomy, he had had occasion to attend some of Madame Forestier’s seminars in the past. That could be checked out. At the time, he had not had any grudge against anyone, and he had appreciated Madame Forestier for what she was: intelligent and attractive, and he had never forgotten a word of the lectures she had given. Afterwards, he had wanted to wipe this whole period out of his life. But when the client in the hotel foyer had mentioned ‘the lady who goes deep-sea diving’ the memory of those days had been pleasant rather than otherwise, so he had wondered if the article was about her, and if so what she was being accused of. Reyer gathered that Danglard was prepared to accept this version of events. Danglard nevertheless asked him why he hadn’t said all that to Adamsberg the day before, and why he hadn’t told Mathilde that he had already realised who she was, on the occasion of their ‘chance’ meeting in the rue Saint-Jacques. Reyer had replied to the first question that he didn’t want Adamsberg to complicate life for him, and to the second that he didn’t want Mathilde to think of him as one of those eternal students who as they get older are still acolytes of their professor. Which he had no desire to be.

So all in all, there wasn’t much to be gleaned from that, Danglard told himself. Just the usual bundle of half-truths that waste everyone’s time. The children would be disappointed. But he felt resentment towards Adamsberg for these dreary days, punctuated only on the mornings when the circles reappeared.

He had the unjustified impression that Adamsberg was exerting a malign influence on the passage of time. The police station itself seemed to be impregnated with the particular behaviour of the commissaire. Castreau was no longer fuming over trifles, and Margellon was making fewer stupid remarks – not that the former was becoming milder or the latter more intelligent, rather that it wasn’t worth their while to react so strongly all the time. On the whole – but perhaps it was just an impression generated by his own worries – there were fewer outbursts and the usual little rows about nothing were less in evidence, being replaced by a sort of nonchalant fatalism which seemed more dangerous to him. All the officers seemed to be handling the sails of the ship routinely, without showing the least concern if the vessel was momentarily becalmed when the wind dropped. Everyday police matters took their course – three muggings in the street yesterday, for instance. Adamsberg came and went, disappeared and reappeared, without this provoking either criticism or alarm.

Jean-Baptiste went to bed early that night. He even discouraged the young woman from downstairs, as gently as he could, without offending her. And yet that morning he had felt an urgent desire to see her, to distract his thoughts and help him dream of a different body. But when evening came, his only thought was to get to sleep as fast as he could, without a bedfellow, or a book, or a thought in his head.

When the telephone rang in the small hours, he knew immediately that it had come at last, the end of marking time, the crisis, and that someone had been killed. Margellon was on the line. A man had had his throat cut on the boulevard Raspail, in the quiet section leading to the Place Denfert. Margellon was on the spot with the team from the 14th arrondissement.

‘And the circle? What’s the circle like?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘Yes, there’s a circle, commissaire. Carefully drawn, as if the guy was taking his time. And the words round the edge are the same as always: “Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?” That’s all I can tell you for now. I’ll wait for you here.’

‘I’m on my way. Call Danglard. Tell him to get there fast.’

‘Is it really necessary to get everyone out?’

‘Yes. That’s what I want. And stay there yourself as well.’

He had added that so as not to offend Margellon.

Adamsberg had pulled on the first pair of trousers and shirt that came to hand, as Danglard noticed, having arrived at the scene a few minutes before him. Adamsberg’s shirt buttons were done up awry, as he realised himself. While looking down at the corpse, the commissaire therefore unfastened all the buttons, then did them up again, without seeming the least troubled by the incongruous sight he offered to the local officers standing around on the boulevard Raspail. They watched him in silence. It was three-thirty a.m. As on every occasion when it looked likely that the commissaire would be the object of critical comment, Danglard had an urge to defend him against allcomers. But in this case, there was nothing he could do.

So Adamsberg calmly finished buttoning up his shirt, while looking at a body which appeared under the arc lamps even more mutilated than that of Madeleine Châtelain. The throat had been so deeply slashed that the man’s head was almost back to front.

Danglard, who was feeling as nauseated as when he had seen Madeleine Châtelain’s body, tried not to look. His own throat was his most sensitive spot. The idea of wearing a scarf upset him as if it might strangle him. He didn’t like shaving under his chin, either. So he looked the other way, towards the dead man’s feet, one of which was pointing to the word ‘Victor’ and the other towards the word ‘woe’. The shoes were classic and well-polished. Danglard’s gaze moved up the long body, examining the cut of the grey flannel suit and the ceremonial presence of a waistcoat. An elderly doctor, he guessed.

Adamsberg was scrutinising the corpse from the other side, looking at the old man’s throat. The commissaire‘s mouth was twisted in a grimace of disgust for the hand that had slashed that neck. He was thinking of the stupid drooling dog and nothing else. His colleague from the 14th arrondissement approached with outstretched hand.

‘Commissaire Louviers. We haven’t met before, Adamsberg. Nasty circumstances.’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought it best to alert your sector straight away,’ Louviers insisted.

‘Thank you. Who is this gentleman?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘I think he was probably a retired doctor. At any rate he was carrying a medical bag with him. Seventy-two years old. Gérard Pontieux, born in the Indre département, height 1 metre 79, and that’s all we can say at present, just what’s on his ID card.’

‘We couldn’t have prevented it,’ said Adamsberg, shaking his head. ‘We just couldn’t. A second murder was predictable, but not preventable. All the policemen in Paris wouldn’t have been enough to stop it.’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Louviers. ‘It’s your case after that Châtelain murder in your sector, and the killer hasn’t been caught yet. He’s struck again. Hard to take, isn’t it?’

It was true: that was more or less what Adamsberg had been thinking. He had known that this new murder would happen. But not for a moment had he hoped that he could do anything about it. There are stages in an investigation when all you can do is wait for the irreparable to happen if you are to make any progress. Adamsberg could not feel any guilt. But he felt sorry for this harmless well-dressed elderly man stretched out on the pavement, who had had to pay the price for his own powerlessness.

By dawn, the corpse had been taken away in a police van. Conti had come to take some photographs in the morning light, replacing the photographer from the 14th. Adamsberg, Danglard, Louviers and Margellon all met round a table in the Café Ruthène, which had just opened its shutters.

Adamsberg remained silent, disconcerting his bulky colleague from the 14th, who was still taking in the hooded eyes, the lop-sided mouth and the dishevelled hair.

‘No point asking the café owners this time,’ Danglard remarked. ‘This one and the Café des Arts close too early, before ten. The chalk circle man knows where to find a deserted spot. It wasn’t far from here that he put the dead cat in a circle in the rue Froidevaux, by the Montparnasse cemetery.’

‘That’s in our sector,’ Louviers reacted. ‘You didn’t tell us.’

‘There wasn’t a murder then, or even an incident,’ Danglard replied. ‘We just had a look out of curiosity. Actually, you’re not quite right, because it was one of your men who told us about it in the first place.’

‘Ah, that’s all right then,’ said Louviers, relieved not to have been kept out of the loop.

‘Like last time,’ Adamsberg was saying from the end of the table, ‘this victim is entirely inside the circle. You can’t tell whether the circle man was responsible or whether his circle’s just been used. Always this ambiguity. Very clever.’

‘So?’ asked Louviers.

‘So nothing. The doctor thinks it happened at about one a.m. A bit late, to my mind,’ he concluded after another pause.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Louviers, who wasn’t easily discouraged.

‘I mean that’s after the last metro.’

Louviers went on looking puzzled. Then Danglard read from his expression that he had given up trying to intervene in the conversation. Adamsberg asked what time it was.

‘Coming up to eight-thirty,’ said Margellon.

‘Go and phone Castreau. I asked him to do some checking at about four-thirty. He should have some results by now. Try and catch him before he goes to bed. Castreau takes sleeping seriously.’

When Margellon returned, he reported that the brief checks so far hadn’t produced much in the way of information.

‘No, I dare say not,’ said Adamsberg, ‘but let’s have them all the same.’

Margellon read from his notes.

‘Dr Pontieux has no record with us. We’ve already informed his sister, who still lives in the family home in the Indre. She’s apparently his only living relative. And she’s about eighty years old. The parents were ordinary peasant farmers and Dr Pontieux made good, with a career that seems to have absorbed all his energy. Well, that’s what Castreau says,’ Margellon remarked in an aside. ‘He never married, anyway, according to the concierge in his building. Castreau called her. There were no apparent relationships with women or indeed anything remarkable about him, or so Castreau says. He’d lived at that address for the last thirty years, with the surgery on the third floor and his private apartment on the second, and the concierge has known him all that time. She says he was a kind, considerate man, as good as gold, and she was in floods of tears. Verdict: no clouds on the horizon. A sober citizen. An uneventful and boring life. At least-’

‘Yes, that’s what Castreau says,’ Danglard interrupted.

‘Does the concierge know why the doctor was out last night?’

‘He was called out to a child with a high temperature. He wasn’t really practising any more, but some of his former patients still asked for his opinion. He liked going on foot, to get some exercise, obviously.’

‘Nothing very obvious about that,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Anything else?’ asked Danglard.

‘Nothing else.’ Margellon put his notes away.

‘A harmless local GP,’ Louviers concluded, ‘as blameless as your previous victim. Same scenario, it looks like.’

‘But there’s one big difference,’ Adamsberg remarked. ‘A colossal difference.’

The three men looked at him in silence. Adamsberg was scribbling with a burnt match on a corner of the paper tablecloth.

‘Don’t you see what I mean?’ he asked, looking up but without seeking to challenge them.

‘I can’t see what’s so obvious about it,’ said Margellon. ‘What’s the colossal difference?’

‘This time,’ said Adamsberg, ‘it’s a man that’s been killed.’

The pathologist submitted his full report by the end of the afternoon. He estimated the time of death at about one-thirty. Like Madeleine Châtelain, Dr Gérard Pontieux had been knocked unconscious before having his throat cut. The murderer had made a violent assault, slashing the throat at least six times, and cutting through to the vertebrae. Adamsberg winced. The day-long investigation had turned up no more helpful information than they already possessed. They now knew various things about the elderly doctor, but nothing marked him as out of the ordinary. His apartment, his surgery and his private papers had revealed a life without any apparently secret compartments. The doctor had been preparing to rent out his Paris flat and return to his roots in the Indre département where he had recently bought a small house, in perfectly normal circumstances. His will left a tidy but by no means extraordinary sum of money to his sister. Danglard returned at about five. He had been searching the crime scene with three of his men. Adamsberg could see that he was looking pleased, but also that he was in need of a glass of wine.

‘We found these in the gutter,’ Danglard said, holding out a plastic evidence bag. ‘Not far from the body, about twenty metres away. The killer didn’t even bother to hide them. He’s acting as if he’s untouchable, absolutely certain he can move about with impunity. First time I’ve seen anything like that.’

Adamsberg opened the bag. Inside were two pink rubber gloves, sticky with blood. The sight was repulsive.

‘This killer seems to see life quite straightforwardly, doesn’t he?’ said Danglard. ‘He kills his man, wearing these gloves, and then just chucks them into the gutter down the street, as if he was getting rid of waste paper. But there won’t be any prints: that’s the thing with rubber gloves, you can slip them off without touching them and you can pick them up anywhere. So what does this tell us, except that the murderer is pretty cocky? How many people is he going to kill at this rate?’

‘It’s Friday today. It’s a safe bet there won’t be anything over the weekend. I get the impression that the circle man doesn’t venture out on Saturdays or Sundays. He keeps to regular habits. And if the murderer is someone different, he’ll have to wait as well, until there’s another circle. Just out of interest, does Reyer have an alibi for last night?’

‘Same as ever. He was in bed asleep. No witness. Everyone in that house was asleep. And there’s no concierge to spot them coming and going. There are fewer and fewer concierges every day in Paris – bad news for us.’

‘Mathilde Forestier called me just now. She’d heard about the murder on the radio and sounded shocked.’

‘So she says,’ muttered Danglard.