The Chalk Circle Man

VI

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY MORNING TWO CIRCLES WERE discovered: in the rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée was the cork from a wine bottle, and in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, in the 5th arrondissement, lay a woman with her throat cut, staring up at the sky.

In spite of the shock, Adamsberg could not help thinking that the discovery had been made at the beginning of section two of the week, the time for unimportant things, but that the murder must have been committed at the end of the first section, the serious one.

He paced around his office, with a less vague expression than usual on his face, his chin thrust forward, his mouth open as if he was out of breath. Danglard saw that Adamsberg was preoccupied, but that he nevertheless didn’t give the impression of deep concentration. Their previous commissaire had been just the opposite. He had been completely tied up in his thoughts, a man of perpetual rumination. But Adamsberg was open to every wind, like a cabin made of rough planks, letting his brain receive fresh air, Danglard thought. Yes, it was true, you could imagine that everything that went in through his ears, eyes and nose – smoke, colours, paper rustling – caused a draught to whistle through his thoughts and stopped them solidifying. This man, thought Danglard, is attentive to everything, which means he pays attention to nothing. The four inspectors were even getting into the habit of walking in and out of his office without fear of interrupting any particular train of thought. And Danglard had noticed that at certain times Adamsberg was more absent-minded than at others. When he was doodling, not resting his notepad on his knee but holding a little piece of paper against his stomach, then Danglard would say to himself: ‘If I were to announce to him now that a giant fungus was about to engulf the Earth and squeeze it to the size of a grapefruit, he wouldn’t give a damn. And that would be a pretty serious matter – not room for many people on a grapefruit. As anyone can see.’

Florence was also watching the commissaire. Since her conversation with Castreau she had thought again, and had announced that the new commissaire made her think of a rather depraved Florentine prince she had seen in a picture in some book, but now she couldn’t remember which. Anyway, she would like to sit on a bench and look at him as if he were a picture in an exhibition when she’d had enough of life, enough of finding ladders in her tights, and enough of hearing Danglard tell her he didn’t know when the universe would come to an end, or indeed why it was the universe anyway.

She watched them drive off in two cars to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie.

In the car, Danglard muttered: ‘A cork and a woman with her throat cut. Can’t see the connection – it’s beyond me. I don’t understand what’s going through this character’s mind.’

‘If you look at water in a bucket,’ Adamsberg said, ‘you can see the bottom of the bucket. You can put your arm in, you can touch it. Or even a barrel, same thing. But if it’s a well, there’s no hope. Even if you chuck pebbles in to see how deep it is, it’s no use. Problem is, you keep on trying to understand. People always want to “understand”. And that way madness lies. You wouldn’t believe the number of little pebbles there are at the bottom of a well. It’s not to hear the splash that people throw them, really. No, it’s to understand. But a well is a terrible thing. Once the people who built them have died, nobody knows anything about the well. It’s beyond our reach, it’s laughing at us from deep inside its mysterious cylindrical belly, full of water. That’s what a well’s like, for me. But how much water is there? How deep does it go? You have to lean over, to find out, you have to lower ropes down inside it.’

‘You can get drowned like that,’ said Castreau.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I don’t see what this has to do with the murder,’ said Castreau.

‘I didn’t say it had anything to do with it,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Then why did you get us started on wells?’

‘Why not? The things we talk about don’t always have to be relevant. But Danglard’s right. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between a wine cork and a dead woman. But that’s exactly what’s important.’

The eyes of the murdered woman were open, with a terrified expression in them, and her mouth was open too, her jaw virtually dislocated. It almost looked as if she had been shouting the rhyme which was written all round the circle surrounding her: ‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?‘

The sound was deafening, enough to make one want to stop one’s ears, and yet the policemen standing in a group around the circle were silent.

Danglard was looking at the woman’s cheap raincoat, buttoned up tightly, at her throat which had been cut, and at the blood which had trickled as far as the door of a building. He felt sick. He had never been able to view a corpse without feeling sick, something which did not however distress him. It wasn’t unpleasant to feel sick. It made him forget his other sorrows, the sorrows of the soul, he thought bitterly.

‘She was killed by a rat, a human rat,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Rats leap at people’s throats like that.’

Then he added.

‘So who is this lady?’

His petite chérie always said ‘lady’ and ‘gentleman’. ‘That’s a pretty lady.’ ‘That gentleman wants to go to bed with me’, and Adamsberg hadn’t been able to rid himself of the habit.

Inspecteur Delille replied:

‘Her papers were on the body – the murderer didn’t take anything. Her name was Madeleine Châtelain, aged fifty-one.’

‘Have you searched her bag?’

‘Not thoroughly, but it doesn’t look as if there’s anything out of the ordinary.’

‘Tell me all the same.’

‘A knitting magazine, a tiny penknife, some of those little soaps you get in hotels, her wallet and keys, a pink plastic eraser and a pocket diary.’

‘Anything in the diary for yesterday?’

‘Yes, but not a rendezvous, if that’s what you were hoping. She’d written “It’s not much fun working in a knitting shop.”‘

‘Any other entries like that?’

‘Quite a few. Three days ago, for instance: “God knows why Maman’s so keen on dry Martinis.” And the week before that: “Nothing could ever persuade me to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.” ‘

Adamsberg smiled. The police pathologist was muttering that you couldn’t expect miracles if bodies weren’t dis covered quickly enough, that he thought she had probably been killed between ten-thirty and midnight, but that he would prefer to check the stomach contents before stating anything with confidence. The knife wound had been made with a medium-sized blade, following a massive blow to the head.

Adamsberg stopped thinking about the little entries in the diary and looked at Danglard. The inspector was pale and gave the impression of being on the point of collapse, his arms dangling at the sides of his shapeless body. He was also frowning.

‘You’ve seen what’s wrong?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘I’m not sure. What bothers me is that the trail of blood has run over the chalk circle and covered quite a bit of it.’

‘Yes, exactly, Danglard. And the lady’s hand is right up against the line. If he drew the circle after killing her, the chalk might have made a channel through the blood. And if I had been the murderer, I think I would have gone wider around the body to draw the circle. I don’t think I would have gone so close to her hand.’

‘So it’s as if the circle was drawn first, is that what you mean? And then the murderer arranged the body inside it?’

‘Looks a bit like that. But that seems stupid, doesn’t it? Danglard, would you go and check all this out with the scene-of-crime people and with the graphologist – Meunier, I think he’s called. This is where Conti’s photos are going to help us, and so will the dimensions of all the previous circles and the chalk samples you collected. We’ll have to compare them all with this new circle. We have to find out whether it’s the same man who drew it, and whether he drew it before or after the murder. Delille, can you follow up this lady’s address, her neighbours, friends and contacts? Castreau, check her place of work, if she had one, who her colleagues were, and what her income was. Nivelle, you take the family side of things, any family quarrels, inheritances, love affairs.’

Adamsberg had spoken without haste. It was the first time Danglard had seen him giving orders. He did so without seeming either self-important or apologetic about doing so. It was an odd thing, but all the inspectors seemed to be becoming porous, letting Adamsberg’s way of behaving seep into them. It was like being caught in the rain when your jacket can’t help absorbing water. The inspectors were becoming damp and without realising it they were imitating Adamsberg; their movements were slower, they smiled more, and were absent-minded. The one most altered was Castreau, who as a rule liked the gruff, manly responses their previous commissaire had expected of them, the military commands barked out without any superfluous commentary, the ban on looking to either side, the slamming of car doors, the fists clenched in the tunic pockets. Today, Danglard hardly recognised Castreau. He was leafing through the victim’s pocket diary, quietly reading out sentences to himself, glancing attentively at Adamsberg, apparently considering every word, and Danglard thought to himself that he might be able to confess to him his problems about corpses.

‘If I go on looking at her, I’ll be sick,’ Danglard said to Castreau.

‘It gets me in the knees. Especially women, even women like this one, nothing much to look at.’

‘What are you reading in the diary?’

‘Listen: “Had a perm, but I’m still ugly. Papa was ugly, so was Maman. Why would I be any different? A customer came in for blue mohair but I didn’t have any left. Another bad day.”‘

Adamsberg watched the four inspectors get back in the car. He was thinking about his petite chérie, Richard III and the lady’s diary. Once the petite chérie had asked him: ‘Is a murder like a packet of spaghetti that’s all stuck together? You just have to put it in boiling water for it to come untangled again? And the boiling water’s the motive?’ and he had replied: ‘No, what gets it untangled is knowledge, you just have to let the knowledge come to you.’ She had said: ‘I’m not sure I understood that’, which was fair enough, since he didn’t really understand it himself.

He waited for the police doctor, who was still grumbling away, to finish his preliminary check of the body. The photographer and the scene-of-crime people had already left. He stood alone, looking down at the lady on the ground, with the stretcher team waiting nearby. He hoped that a little knowledge would come to him. But until he came face to face with the chalk circle man, he knew it wasn’t worth racking his brains. He just had to keep on picking up information, and for him information had nothing to do with knowledge.