An Uncertain Place

The doctor’s fingers continued to move, like attentive moths, on to his nose, his jaws, touching his forehead, going into his ears.

‘Right,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘what we have here is a fibrillation incident, which is hiding your basic state. Some recent event has put the fear of death into you, and that has caused an overheating of the system. I don’t know what happened, but you didn’t like it. A major psycho-emotional shock. What it’s done is immobilise the parietal, block the pre-post sphenoid, and blown three fuses. Major stress episode, no wonder you weren’t feeling well. That must be why you fainted. Let’s get rid of this first, if we want to check the rest.’

The doctor scribbled a few lines and asked Adamsberg to roll on to his stomach He pulled up his shirt and felt the sacro-iliac joint. ‘I thought you said it was in my head.’

‘The head has to be reached through the sacrum.’

Adamsberg stopped talking and let the doctor move his fingers up his vertebrae, like kindly gnomes trotting up his back. He kept his eyes wide open, so as not to fall asleep.

‘Stay awake, commissaire, and lie on your back again. I’m going to relax the mediastinal fascia which are also completely blocked. Do you have some pain between your ribs on the right. Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good,’ said Josselin and put two fingers as a fork under the nape of his neck and then with the flat of his hand stroked his ribs as if he was ironing a shirt.

Adamsberg woke up groggily, with the unpleasant feeling time had passed. It was after eleven, he saw by the clock. Josselin had let him go to sleep. He jumped down, slipped on his shoes, and found the doctor sitting at the kitchen table.

‘Sit down, I’m having an early lunch because I’ve got a patient in half an hour.’

He pulled out another plate and cutlery and pushed the dish towards Adamsberg.

‘You put me to sleep?’

‘No, you just dropped off. The state you were in, there could be no better solution after the treatment. Everything’s back in position,’ he added, like a plumber reporting on a repair. ‘You were deep inside a well, totally inhibited from action, you couldn’t go forward. But it should settle down now. You might feel a bit drowsy this afternoon, and tomorrow you may feel a bit low and have a few aches and pains, but that’s only to be expected. Within three days, you ought to be back to normal. Better in fact. I had a go at the tinnitus while I was at it, and maybe a single session will be enough. Now it would be a good idea to have something to eat,’ he said, pointing to the dish of couscous and vegetables.

Adamsberg obeyed. He felt a bit stunned but also better, lighter, and very hungry. Nothing like the sickness and the feeling that he was carrying lead weights in his feet that had assailed him earlier. He raised his head to see the doctor give him a friendly wink.

‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘I saw what I wanted to. What your natural structure is.’

‘Oh?’ said Adamsberg, who felt somewhat diminished alongside Josselin.

‘A bit as I had hoped. I’ve only ever seen one similar case, in an elderly woman.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a total absence of anguish. A rare case. To compensate of course, your emotional temperature is low. The desire for things is only moderate, there’s some fatalism, a temptation to walk away, some difficulty relating to people around you, blank spaces. Well, you can’t have everything. Even more interesting, there’s a sort of interaction between the conscious and the unconscious. You could say that the airlock is badly adjusted, that sometimes you forget to shut the gate. Take care all the same, commissaire. It can result in ideas of genius which seem to come from out of the blue – intuition as it’s sometimes wrongly called, for short – immense stocks of memories and images, but it also allows toxic elements to rise to the surface, things that absolutely ought to remain buried in the depths. Do you follow me?’

‘Sort of. And if these toxic elements come to the surface, what happens?’

Dr Josselin whirled a finger round near his head.

‘Then you can’t tell the true from the false, the fantasy from the real thing, the possible from the impossible, in short you will end up mixing saltpetre, sulphur and carbon.’

‘Explosive,’ Adamsberg concluded.

‘As you say,’ said the doctor, wiping his hands and looking satisfied. ‘Nothing to fear if you keep a grip on things. Keep up your responsibilities, carry on talking to other people, don’t isolate yourself too much. Do you have any children?’

‘One, he’s very little.’

‘Well, tell him about the world, take him for walks, hang on to him. That will help you throw down some anchors, you mustn’t lose sight of the harbour lights. I’m not going to ask you about women, I can see. Lack of confidence.’

‘In them?’

‘No, in yourself. That’s the only little worry, if it can be called that. I have to leave you now, commissaire. Make sure to shut the door when you go out.’

‘Which door – the apartment or the one in my head?’

XXVI

THE COMMISSAIRE NOW FELT NO APPREHENSION AT THE IDEA of going to the squad’s headquarters. On the contrary. The man with the golden fingers had set him right, had chased away the smoke from the accident, the ‘psycho-emotional shock’ which had blocked everything out for him only that morning. He most certainly had not forgotten that he had let Zerk go. But he would catch him, in good time, in his own way, just as he had tracked down Emile.

Emile was making progress (‘He’ll pull through, mon vieux’ was one of the messages on his desk). Lavoisier had transferred him, but as agreed was not revealing where he was now being treated. Adamsberg read the news about Emile to the dog. Someone had given Cupid a bath – someone kind, or who had lost patience – and his fur was now soft and smelt of soap. The dog rolled over in his lap and Adamsberg stroked his back. Danglard came in and crashed down like a bag of old clothes on to a chair.

‘You look well,’ he said.

‘I’m just back from seeing Josselin. He fixed me like an engineer fixes a boiler. The man’s a pro.’

‘Not like you to go and consult someone.’

‘I meant just to talk to him, but I passed out in his surgery. I’d been through two ghastly hours this morning. A burglar got into the house and got hold of both my guns.’

‘Good grief, I told you to keep them by you.’

‘And I didn’t. So this burglar grabbed them.’

‘And?’

‘When he realised I didn’t have any money, he left in the end. But I felt like a wet rag.’

Danglard looked at him with some suspicion.

‘Who washed the dog?’ asked Adamsberg, changing the subject. ‘Estalere?’

‘Voisenet. He couldn’t stand the smell any longer.’

‘I read the note from the lab. So the horse shit on Cupid matched the lot on Emile. They both picked it up from the same farm.’

‘That may take the pressure off Emile a bit, but he’s not out of the woods yet. Nor is Pierre junior, because he puts money on horses a lot, so he goes to the races and training stables where there’s no shortage of manure. He’s even supposed to be buying a horse.’

‘He didn’t tell me that. How long have you known?’

As he talked, Adamsberg was leafing through the little pile of postcards which Gardon had put on the desk for him, taken from among Vaudel’s effects. They were mostly conventional holiday messages posted by his son.

‘The Avignon police found that out yesterday, and I did this morning. But hundreds of people go to the races. There are thirty-six major racecourses in France, hundreds of stud farms and riding schools and tens of thousands