This Night’s Foul Work

smoothe them out by hand before putting on his jacket and finding a bar where he could wait in the warm for his prearranged rendezvous. Sitting comfortably on a battered leather banquette, with his back to the wall and a glass of beer in front of him, the commissaire examined the noisy group which had just taken possession of the cafe, rousing him from a semi-doze.

‘Want me to tell you what I think?’ said a big fair-haired man, pushing his cap back with his thumb.

He’s going to tell them anyway, thought Adamsberg.

‘Summat like that? Want me to tell you?’ the man was repeating.

‘We need a drink first.’

‘We do at that, Robert,’ said his neighbour, pouring out generous helpings of white wine into the six glasses.

So the big fair one was Robert – built like a wardrobe. And he was thirsty. It was the aperitif hour: heads sunk into shoulders, fists clenched around glasses, chins jutting at aggressive angles. The majestic hour, when the men of the village foregather and the angelus is rung, a time for sage opinions and nods of the head, a time for rural rhetoric, pompous and trivial. Adamsberg knew the score by heart. He had been born into this music, had grown up hearing its solemn developments, its rhythms and its themes, its variations and counterpoints, and he knew the players. Robert had sounded the first note on the violin, and all the other instruments would be moving into place at once, in an unvarying order.

‘Tell you what, though,’ said the man on Robert’s left. ‘It’s not just a drink we need after that. Makes you sick to your stomach.’

‘That it does.’

Adamsberg turned to have a better view of the last speaker, who had the humble but essential task of punctuating every turn in the conversation, as if on a double bass. He was small and thin, the least robust-looking of the group. That figured.

‘Whoever did that,’ said a tall stooped individual at the end of the table, ‘he’s no human being.’

‘No, he’s an animal.’

‘Worse than an animal.’

‘That he is.’

The first subject had been introduced. Adamsberg got out his notebook, still warped with rain, and started sketching the faces of the actors in the little drama. These were Norman heads, no mistake about it. He realised that they looked like his friend Bertin, a descendant of the god Thor, wielder of thunderbolts, who kept a cafe on a square in Paris. Square-jawed and high-cheekboned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with an elusive expression in them. It was the first time Adamsberg had set foot among inland Normandy’s damp woods and fields.

‘What I think,’ Robert was saying, ‘is it’s some young fellow. Some nutter.’

‘Nutters aren’t all young.’

This contrapuntal interjection came from the oldest speaker at the head of the table. Alerted, the other faces turned his way.

‘Because when a young nutter grows up, he turns into an old one.’

‘Dunno about that,’ grunted Robert.

So Robert had the difficult but also essential task of contradicting the elder of the tribe.

‘I’m telling you they do,’ the older man said. ‘But say what you like, whoever did that, crazy’s the word all right.’

‘A savage.’

‘Stands to reason.’

Recapitulation and development of the first subject.

‘’Cos there’s killing and killing,’ said Robert’s neighbour, a man with hair less fair than the rest.

‘Dunno about that,’ said Robert.

‘Yes, I’m telling you there is,’ said the old man. ‘Whoever did that, they were just out to kill, nothing else. Two shots in the ribs, and that’s it. Didn’t even do anything with the remains. Know what I call that?’

‘Cold-blooded murder.’

‘That it is.’

Adamsberg had stopped sketching and started listening. The older man half-turned towards him, with a sideways look.

‘Then again,’ Robert was saying, ‘where’s Bretilly? Not our neck of the woods – thirty kilometres away. So why should we care?’

‘’Cos it’s shameful, Robert, that’s why.’

‘I don’t even think it was someone from Bretilly. I’ll bet it was a Parisian. Anglebert, what do you think?’

So the old man who dominated the group from the top of the table was Anglebert.

‘Yes, Parisians now, they can be crazy,’ he said.

‘The life they lead.’

Silence fell around the table and a few faces turned furtively towards Adamsberg. When men foregather for a drink in the evening, the newcomer is inevitably spotted, weighed up and rejected or accepted. In Normandy, like everywhere else, and possibly a bit more so than anywhere else.

‘What makes you so sure I’m a Parisian?’ Adamsberg asked calmly.

The old man jerked his chin at the book on the commissaire’s table, next to his glass of beer.

‘The metro ticket,’ he said. ‘You’ve marked your page with a Paris metro ticket. Easy to spot.’

‘But I’m not a Parisian.’

‘Not from Haroncourt, though, are you?’

‘No, I’m from the Pyrenees, from the mountains.’

Robert raised one hand and let it fall heavily on the table.

‘A Gascon!’ he concluded as if a sheet of lead had fallen on the table.

‘I’m from the Bearn,’ Adamsberg said pointedly.

The weighing-up process began.

‘People from the mountains, they’ve been trouble,’ said Hilaire, a balding but slightly less old elder statesman, at the other end of the table.

‘When was that?’ asked the not-so-fair one.

‘Don’t you bother asking, Oswald, it was way back.’

‘Well, what about the Bretons? Man from the Pyrenees, at least he’s not going to try and take the Mont Saint Michel away from us.’

‘That’s true enough,’ said Anglebert, nodding.

‘Well,’ hazarded Robert, looking at the newcomer, ‘you don’t look to me like you’re descended from the Vikings. So where do people in the Bearn come from, then?’

‘Straight out of the mountain,’ Adamsberg replied. ‘Stream of lava came down the mountainside and when it hardened, it turned into us.’

‘Stands to reason,’ said the one who punctuated every stage in the conversation.

The men sat waiting, silently asking to be told what had brought this stranger to Haroncourt.

‘I’m looking for the chateau.’

‘That’s easy. There’s a concert on there tonight.’

‘I’m with one of the musicians.’

Oswald brought out the local paper from his inside pocket and unfolded it carefully. ‘Here’s a picture of the orchestra,’ he said.

That constituted an invitation to approach their table. Adamsberg crossed the room, holding his beer in his hand, and observed the page that Oswald held out to him.

‘Here,’ he said, pointing. ‘That one, the viola player.’

‘The pretty girl?’

‘That’s her.’

Robert served another round of drinks, as much to mark the significance of the pause as to absorb more alcohol. An archaic problem now tormented the gathering. What was this woman to the intruder? Mistress? Wife? Sister? Girlfriend? Cousin?

‘And you’re with her?’ Hilaire asked.