changed. In Paris, it would be virtually impossible to get people to believe that a
‘New place, unknown territory, different acts,’ Adamsberg agreed, sadly.
‘In Paris, nobody could possibly believe you capable of murder. But over there, well…The judge took his chance and it worked. You saw what they said about you in that RCMP dossier: “Unblocking of repressed drives”. It would be the ideal set-up, if he could manage to get you alone in the forest.’
‘He must have been aware of my habits, since he’d known me for several years, from when I was a boy until I was eighteen. He knew that I like to go walking alone at night. Well, it’s all possible, I suppose, but there’s nothing to prove it. He would have had to know all about our trip. But I’ve stopped believing that there was a mole in the department.’
Retancourt examined her nails as if she was consulting a notebook.
‘It’s true, I can’t work it out either,’ she admitted, with a frown. ‘I’ve talked to everyone. I’ve made myself invisible and listened in all the rooms. But nobody there seems to believe you could possibly have killed Noella. The atmosphere is very tense and everyone’s talking in whispers, as if they’re in a state of suspended animation. Luckily Danglard is in charge and he’s keeping people calm. I take it you don’t suspect him any more?’
‘No, on the contrary.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you now,
‘I don’t need it.’
‘I’ll get it to you all the same.’
XLVIII
‘CAN YOU BEAT THAT?’ BREZILLON WAS SAYING, IN THE CAR TAKING THE others back to Paris: he was somewhat excited by this ghoulish excursion. ‘Eighty kilos of sand. He was right then, damnit.’
‘He very often is,’ commented Mordent.
‘It changes everything,’ Brezillon went on. ‘Adamsberg’s accusation is a lot more solid. Anyone who fakes his death is no choirboy. That old man is still around, after committing twelve murders.’
‘Of which the last three were committed when he was ninety-three, ninety-five and ninety-nine years old,’ Danglard pointed out. ‘Does that really seem possible, sir? A man of a hundred years old dragging a girl and her bicycle off the road?’
‘That’s a problem, I grant you. But Adamsberg was right about Fulgence’s death, we can’t deny that. Are you telling me you don’t go along with him,
‘I’m simply pointing out facts and probabilities.’
Danglard shrank into himself in the back of the car and said no more, letting his colleagues, who were quite worked up, talk about the resurrection of the old judge. Yes, Adamsberg had been right. And that made things even more difficult.
Once he was home, he waited until the children were asleep before he called Quebec. It was only six in the evening there.
‘How are things going?’ he asked his Quebecois colleague.
He listened with impatience to the explanations he received from the other end.
‘We have to work faster,’ Danglard interrupted the other speaker. ‘Things are moving here. The exhumation was this afternoon. No body, just a bag of sand… Yes… absolutely… And the
Adamsberg had dined alone in a little restaurant in Richelieu, in that comfortable, slightly melancholy atmosphere you get in provincial hotels in the off-season. Not like the
But Danglard’s objections were extremely persuasive. How on earth could such an old man have dragged the body of Elisabeth Wind through the fields? She was a healthy eighteen-year-old, and no will o’ the wisp, even if her name suggested the lightness of the wind. Adamsberg blinked. That was what Raphael had said about his girlfriend, Lise. That she was as light and lively as the wind. And she even had the name of a wind too, the warm south- easterly wind, the Autan. Odd, two names for wind, Wind and Autan. He raised himself on one elbow, trying to recall the names of the other victims, in a whisper, in chronological order: Espir, Lefebure, Ventou, Soubise, Lentretien, Mestre, Lessard, Matere, Brasillier, Fevre.
Ventou and Soubise immediately jumped out at him. Vent = ‘wind’ in French; and the Bise is the French name of a north wind. That made four winds. Adamsberg put on the overhead light, sat at his little table and wrote down a list of all twelve victims, trying to see if there were any connections between their names. But apart from the four names reminiscent of winds, he could find no obvious links.
Wind equals air. One of the four elements with water, fire and earth. Perhaps the judge had some cosmogonic fantasy about making himself master of the four elements. That would make him a god, like Neptune with his trident, or Jupiter with his thunderbolts. Frowning, he looked at the list again. Only Brasillier was a bit like the word ‘brazier’, suggesting fire. None of the others seemed to relate to flames or water or earth. Tired, he pushed the paper away. An elusive old man, hellbent on an incomprehensible career of serial killing. He thought again about the old man in the village, Hubert, who had lived to a hundred, but was scarcely able to move about by the end. He lived at the top of the village and yelled at the boys in the evenings when they were up to their tricks with the toads. Ten or fifteen years earlier, he would have been down there, giving them a thrashing. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’
Now Adamsberg sat up again, putting his hands on the table. Listen to other people, Retancourt had said. And the doctor in Alsace, Courtin, had been quite sure about it. Don’t disregard his opinion, his professionalism, just because it doesn’t fit what you know. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ The judge was ninety-nine years old, because he had been born in 1904. But what was a birth certificate to a devil?
For a while Adamsberg paced round his room, then he picked up his coat and went out into the night. He walked along the rectilinear streets of the small town, and found himself in a park where a statue of Cardinal Richelieu himself loomed up out of the shadows. A cunning politician, the old Cardinal, and not afraid of bending the rules if he had to. Adamsberg sat down near the statue, chin in hand. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ OK, let’s try that. Born not in 1904 but in 1919. He would have been only fifty, not sixty-five when he retired from his circuit. And today he would be eighty-four, not ninety-nine. When he was eighty-four, Hubert had still been able to climb his trees to prune them. Yes, the judge had always looked younger than his age, even when his hair was white. Aged twenty at the start of the Second World War, not thirty-five, he calculated. Twenty-five in 1944, not forty. Why 1944? Adamsberg looked up at Richelieu’s bronze features as if expecting them to offer an answer. You know quite well why, young man, the Cardinal seemed to say. And yes, of course, the young man did know.
1944, a murder committed with three blows in a straight line. He had come across it in the records, but had ruled it out, because the undisputed killer had been a young man of twenty-five or so, when Fulgence was supposedly forty. He lowered his head to his knees, trying to concentrate. The fine rain formed a mist and seeped into his clothes, as he sat at the wily cardinal’s feet. He waited patiently for the ancient information to come up out of the mist. Or for the fish to swim up out of the depths of Pink Lake. A woman, it had been. Killed with three puncture wounds. And someone had drowned too. When was that? Before the murder? After? Where, in a lake, a pond? In the Landes? No, in the marshes of the Sologne, where people went duck-shooting. The man had drowned, that was it, in a marsh. A father. And after his burial, the woman, his wife, had been killed. He could vaguely picture some photographs in an old press cutting. Probably the father and mother under a headline. A double death, enough to merit a large spread, at a time when news of the war and anticipation of the Allied landings had pushed most
