This Night’s Foul Work

LVI

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE, AND FOR TWENTY-TWO DAYS NOW, Francine had not been pulling the blankets over her face at night. She went to sleep with her head calmly resting on the pillow, which was much more comfortable than being curled up under her sheets with a tiny opening to breathe through. Not only that, but she had been making only the most cursory checks on the woodworm holes, hardly bothering to count the new perforations moving towards the south end of the beam, and not worrying about what the nasty little creatures looked like.

This police protection was a gift from the gods. Three men came in turns every night and watched over her, even in the morning, until she went to work. It was a dream come true. She had asked no questions about the reason why she was under guard, for fear her curiosity might annoy the gendarmes and then they would abandon their bright idea. From what they had given her to understand, it was something to do with recent burglaries, so Francine didn’t find it at all odd that the gendarmes should be keeping an eye on all the women locally who lived alone. Others might have protested, but she was far from doing so. On the contrary, she gratefully cooked supper every evening for the gendarme on duty, and a much better supper than she had ever made for her father.

The rumours of these good suppers – and of Francine’s pretty face – had spread in the Evreux brigade, so although Devalon did not know why, there was never any problem finding volunteers to guard Mademoiselle Bidault. Devalon had no time at all for the cock-and-bull investigation being led by Adamsberg, which he thought was a complete waste of time. But there was no way this Paris police chief, who had already demolished the Evreux reports on Elisabeth Châtel and Pascaline Villemot because of a bit of lichen on a stone, was going to trespass on his patch. His men would be the ones to guard the farm, and not a single cop from Adamsberg’s outfit would set foot there. Adamsberg had had the cheek to insist that the men doing shifts would have to be sitting up and awake. Well, he could stuff that. He wasn’t going to have his team short-manned for this ridiculous enterprise. He would send his men over to Francine’s after their normal day’s work, with orders to eat and sleep there, without trying to stay awake.

During the night of 3 May, at three-thirty-five in the morning, only the woodworms were awake in the bedrooms where Francine and Brigadier Grimal were sleeping. The insects were quite uninhibited by the presence of an armed man in the house as they munched their thousandth of a millimetre of wood. Woodworms being deaf, they did not react to the creak of the scullery door. Grimal, who was sleeping in the bedroom of Francine’s late father, tucked in under a purple eiderdown, sat up in the dark, unsure what kind of sound had woken him, or whether his gun was on the left or right of the bed, on the chest of drawers or on the ground. He felt blindly on the table, then crossed the room, wearing only his T-shirt and shorts, and opened the door leading to Francine’s bedroom. Empty-handed, he watched as a long grey shadow approached him in a strangely slow and silent way, without stopping when the door opened. The shadow didn’t approach normally, it slid and stumbled, passing over the floor in a hesitant but unstoppable progress. Grimal had just time to shake Francine awake, without knowing whether he was trying to save her or to ask her for help.

‘A ghost, Francine! Get up, run!’

Francine screamed, and Grimal, although terrified, approached the shadow to cover the flight of the young woman. Devalon had not prepared him to deal with this, and he cursed his boss with his last thought. To hell with him, and the ghost as well.