This Night’s Foul Work

III

AFTER A PEACEFUL NIGHT SPENT IN THE SILENT COMPANY OF SAINT CLARISSE, Commissaire Adamsberg pushed open the door of the Medico-Legal Institute, which housed the pathology lab. Nine days earlier, at Porte de la Chapelle, in northern Paris, two men had been found a few hundred metres apart, each with his throat cut. According to the local police inspector, they were both small-time crooks, who’d been dealing drugs in the Flea Market. Adamsberg was keen to see them again, since Commissaire Mortier from the Drug Squad wanted to take over the investigation.

‘Two lowlifes who got their throats cut at La Chapelle? They’re on my patch, Adamsberg,’ Mortier had declared. ‘And one of them’s black, what’s more. Just hand them over. What the devil are you waiting for?’

‘I’m waiting to find out why they’ve got earth under their fingernails.’

‘Because they didn’t take a bath too often.’

‘Because they’d been digging somewhere. And if there’s digging going on, it’s a matter for the Crime Squad.’

‘Have you never seen these characters hide drugs in window boxes? You’re wasting your time, Adamsberg.’

‘That’s OK by me. I like wasting time.’

The two bodies were stretched out, unclothed, alongside each other: one very big white man, one very big black man, one with a hairy torso, the other smooth, both harshly illuminated by the strip lighting in the morgue. With their feet neatly together and their hands at their sides, they seemed in death to have turned abruptly into docile schoolboys. In fact, Adamsberg thought, as he considered their sober appearance, the two men had led lives of classic regularity, since there’s not a great deal of originality in human existence. Their days had followed an unchanging pattern: mornings asleep, then afternoons devoted to dealing, evenings to women, and Sundays to their mothers. On the margins of society, as elsewhere, routine imposes its rules. Their brutal murder had cut abnormally short the thread of their uneventful lives.

The pathologist was watching Adamsberg as he walked round the two bodies.

‘What do you want me to do with them?’ she asked, her hand resting negligently on the black corpse’s thigh, idly patting it as if in ultimate consolation. ‘Two dealers from the wrong side of town, slashed with a knife – looks like the Drug Squad had better take care of it.’

‘Yes, they’re shouting for them.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Me. I’m the problem. I don’t want to hand them over. And I’m hoping you’ll help me hang on to them. Find some excuse.’

‘Why?’ asked the pathologist. Her hand was still resting on the black corpse’s thigh, signifying that for the moment the man was still under her jurisdiction, in a free zone, and she alone would make any decision about sending him either to the Drug Squad or the Crime Squad.

‘They had newly dug earth under their fingernails.’

‘I expect the drugs people have their reasons too. Do they have files on these two?’

‘No, not at all. So these two are mine, full stop.’

‘They told me about you,’ said the pathologist calmly.

‘What did they tell you?’

‘That you’re sometimes on a different wavelength from everyone else. It causes trouble.’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time, would it, Ariane?’

With her foot the doctor pulled over a stool. She sat down on it and crossed her legs. Twenty-three years earlier, Adamsberg had thought her a beautiful woman and, at sixty, she still was as she posed elegantly on her perch in the mortuary.

‘Gracious me!’ she said. ‘You know my name.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I don’t know you.’

The doctor lit a cigarette and thought for a few seconds.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t say I remember you. I’m sorry.’

‘It was twenty-three years ago, and we were only in contact for a few months. I remember your surname and your first name, and indeed that we were on first-name terms.’

‘Were we now?’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘And what were we doing to be on such familiar terms?’

‘We had an almighty quarrel.’

‘A lovers’ tiff? I’d be devastated if I’d forgotten something like that.’

‘No, it was professional.’

‘Gracious me,’ said the doctor again, frowning.

Adamsberg inclined his head, distracted by the memories that her high-pitched voice and cutting tone brought up for him. He recognised the ambiguity which had both attracted and disconcerted the young man he had been then: her severe way of dressing combined with a mane of tousled hair, her haughty manner but familiar way of speaking, her elaborate pose but spontaneous gestures. He had never been quite sure whether he was dealing with a superior but absent-minded specialist, or a workaholic who cared nothing for appearances. He even recalled the way she said ‘Gracious me!’ at the start of a sentence, without being able to work out whether this was an expression of scorn or simply a provincial mannerism. He was not the only policeman to be wary of her. Dr Ariane Lagarde was the most eminent pathologist in France, an unrivalled forensic expert.

‘So we were on first-name terms, were we?’ she went on, letting the ash from her cigarette fall to the floor. ‘Twenty-three years ago I would have been in mid-career, but you would have been just a junior policeman.’

‘As you say, a very junior policeman.’

‘Well, you surprise me. As a rule, I’m not on familiar terms with my junior colleagues.’

‘We got on pretty well. Until a big bust-up that caused a stir in a café in Le Havre. The door slammed and we never met again. I never got to finish my beer.’

Ariane stubbed out her cigarette underfoot, then sat back on the metal stool as a smile hesitantly returned to her face.

‘The beer,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t by any chance have thrown it on the floor, would I?’

‘You did indeed.’

‘Jean-Baptiste,’ she said, detaching each syllable. ‘That young idiot Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, who thought he knew better than everyone else.’

‘Yes. That’s what you said when you smashed my glass.’

‘Jean-Baptiste,’ Ariane repeated more slowly.

The doctor slipped off her stool and put her hand on Adamsberg’s shoulder. She seemed on the point of kissing him, then put her hand back in the pocket of her overall.

‘I did like you, Jean-Baptiste. You upset the apple-cart without even noticing. And according to what people say about Commissaire Adamsberg, you haven’t changed. Now I see: that was you, you’re him.’

‘Sort of.’

Ariane leaned her elbows on the dissecting table where the white corpse lay, pushing the body aside to make more room. Like most pathologists, Ariane showed little respect for the dead. On the other hand, she investigated the enigma of their bodies with unrivalled talent, thus paying homage in her own way to the immense and singular complexity of each one. Dr Lagarde’s analyses had made the corpses of some quite ordinary mortals famous. If you passed through her hands, you had a good chance of going down in history. After your death, unfortunately.

‘It was an exceptional corpse,’ she remembered. ‘We found him in his bedroom, with a sophisticated farewell letter. A local councillor, compromised and ruined, and he had killed himself with a sword, hara-kiri style.’

‘Having drunk a lot of gin first, to give himself courage.’

‘I remember it clearly,’ said Ariane, in the mild tone of someone recalling a pleasant story. ‘A straightforward case of suicide, on the part of a subject with a history of depression and compulsion. The local council was glad the matter went no further, do you remember, Jean-Baptiste? I had put in my report, which was impeccable. You were just the junior who used to make photocopies, run errands, sort out my paperwork, though you didn’t always stick to instructions. We used to go and have a drink sometimes by the harbour. I was about to be promoted, and you were daydreaming and going nowhere. In those days, I used to put pomegranate juice in beer to make it fizz.’

‘Do you still mix crazy drinks?’

‘Yes, lots,’ said Ariane, sounding disappointed, ‘but I haven’t found the perfect mixture yet. Remember the violine? An egg whipped up in crème de menthe and Malaga.’

‘Awful drink, I never went for that one.’

‘I stopped making the violine. OK for the nerves but a bit too strong. We experimented with a lot of things in Le Havre.’

‘Except one.’

‘Gracious me.’

‘A bedroom experiment. We never tried that.’

‘No, I was married in those days, and a very devoted wife. On the other hand, we worked well together on the police reports.’

‘Until the day.’

‘Until the day a little idiot of a Jean-Baptiste got it into his head that the local councillor in Le Havre had been murdered. Why? Because you found ten dead rats in a warehouse in the port.’

‘Twelve, Ariane. Twelve rats, all slashed across the belly with a blade.’

‘All right, twelve, if you say so. And you concluded that a murderer had been testing his courage before the attack. And there was something else. You thought the wound was too horizontal. You said the councillor would have had to hold the sword at more of an angle. While he was blind drunk.’

‘And you threw my glass of beer on the floor.’

‘I had a name for that beer-grenadine mixture, for heaven’s sake.’

‘La grenaille. You had me transferred away from Le Havre, and put in your report without me: suicide.’

‘What did you know about forensics? Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all,’ Adamsberg admitted.

‘Come and have a coffee. And tell me what’s bothering you about these two corpses.’