This Night’s Foul Work

‘Who used to do it?’ asked a voice.

‘Never you mind – it was way back.’

‘Whoever it was,’ said Alphonse, ‘what he was after was killing it, then ripping its heart out. He didn’t even take the horns, and that’s the only thing people take when they don’t know nothing about it.’

Adamsberg looked up at the large antlers displayed on the wall of the cafe, over the door.

‘No,’ said Robert. ‘That’s crap, that lot.’

‘Don’t talk so loud,’ said Anglebert, pointing to the counter, where the cafe owner was playing dominoes with a couple of youngsters too inexperienced to join in the gathering of the elders.

Robert cast a glance at the owner, then turned back to the commissaire.

‘He’s from away,’ he said.

‘Meaning?’

‘He’s from Caen, not from round here.’

‘Caen’s in Normandy, isn’t it?’

There were a few exchanges of glances and pulled faces. Could they really trust this mountain dweller with such intimate and painful information?

‘Caen’s in Lower Normandy,’ Anglebert explained. ‘Here you’re in Upper Normandy.’

‘And that’s important?’

‘Let’s just say you don’t compare them. The real Normandy’s the Upper one, here.’

Anglebert’s gnarled finger pointed to the wooden table. As if Upper Normandy could be reduced to the size of the cafe in Haroncourt.

‘But you watch out,’ Robert added. ‘Over there in Calvados, they’ll tell you different. But don’t you listen to them.’

‘All right,’ Adamsberg promised.

‘And over there, it rains all the time, poor sods.’

Adamsberg looked up at the windows, against which the rain was beating continuously.

‘There’s rain and rain,’ Oswald explained. ‘Here, it doesn’t rain, it’s just a bit damp. Don’t you have them where you come from? Outsiders?’

‘Yes,’ Adamsberg agreed. ‘There’s bad feeling between the people in the Gave de Pau valley and the Gave d’Ossau valley.’

‘Yeah, course there is,’ agreed Anglebert, as if he already knew all about that.

Although he was well used to the ponderous music of the evening male ritual, Adamsberg understood that the Normans, true to their reputation, were more difficult to get through to than other people. They didn’t say much. Here their sentences came out cautiously and suspiciously, as if testing the ground with every word. They didn’t speak loudly, nor did they tackle their subjects head-on. They went round them, as if putting a subject directly on the table was as indelicate as throwing down a piece of raw meat.

‘So why is that crap?’ Adamsberg asked, pointing to the antlers over the door.

‘Because those are cast antlers. OK for decoration, to show off. Go and have a look if you don’t believe me. You can see the bump at the base of the bone.’

‘It’s a bone?’

‘Don’t know a thing, do you?’ said Alphonse sadly, sounding regretful that Angelbert had allowed this ignoramus to join them.

‘Yes, it’s a bone,’ the old man confirmed. ‘It grows out of the skull – only the deer family does that.’

‘What if we had skulls that bulged out?’ wondered Robert fancifully.

‘With ideas growing on ‘em,’ said Oswald with a thin smile.

‘Wouldn’t be a big bulge in your case, Oswald.’

‘Practical for the cops,’ said Adamsberg. ‘But risky. You’d be able to read people’s thoughts.’

‘Stands to reason.’

There was a pause for thought and for a third round of drinks.

‘So what do you know about? Apart from police stuff?’ asked Oswald.

‘No questions,’ decreed Robert. ‘He knows what he knows. He’s asking you what you know about.’

‘Women,’ said Oswald.

‘So does he. Or he wouldn’t have lost his.’

‘Stands to reason.’

‘There’s knowing about women and knowing about love, and it’s not the same thing. Specially with women.’

Anglebert sat up as if dispelling a memory.

‘Explain it to him,’ he said, gesturing towards Hilaire and tapping his finger on the photo of the stag that had been slit open.

‘Right. So a red deer stag, he loses his antlers every year.’

‘What for?’

‘’Cos they get in the way. The only reason to have antlers is for the rut, to get the hinds. So when the rutting season’s over, they fall off.’

‘What a pity,’ said Adamsberg, ‘when they’re so beautiful.’

‘Like everything beautiful,’ said Anglebert, ‘they’re complicated. They’re heavy, you got to understand, and they catch on the branches. So after the fighting they fall off.’

‘It’s like laying down his arms, if you like. He’s got his females, he drops his weapons.’

‘Females, now, they’re complicated,’ said Robert, still pursuing his train of thought.

‘But beautiful.’

‘Like I said,’ muttered the old man, ‘more beautiful they are, more complicated. No good trying to understand everything in this world.’

‘No, right,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Ah, well.’

Four of the men took a mouthful of wine at the same time, with no apparent coordination.

‘So it falls off, and that’s what we call cast antlers,’ Hilaire went on. ‘You can find them in the forests like mushrooms. But antlers from a kill, they’ve been cut off from the animal you hunted. See? Living bone.’

‘And this killer doesn’t care about living bone,’ said Adamsberg, returning to the murdered stag. ‘He’s just interested in death. Or the heart.’

‘That he is.’

IX

ADAMSBERG TRIED TO EXPEL THE STAG FROM HIS MIND. HE DIDN’T WANT TO go into the hotel room with all that blood in his head. He paused in front of the door, wiping his thoughts, clearing his brow, and forcing himself to think about clouds, marbles and blue skies. Because in the hotel room a child aged nine months was asleep. And with children you never know. They can penetrate your skull, hear the ideas moving around, feel the sweat of anguish and maybe even see a picture of a slaughtered stag in their father’s head.

He pushed the door open quietly. He had not told the male assembly the truth. Accompanying, yes, out of consideration, yes, but so as to babysit the child, while Camille played her viola up at the chateau. Their last break-up – had it been the fifth or the seventh? he wasn’t sure – had led to an unforeseen catastrophe. Camille had become a good friend, a comrade, something that drove him to desperation. Towards him she was absent- minded, smiling, affectionate and familiar: in short, and tragically, just a good friend. This new state of affairs disconcerted Adamsberg who was trying to find the fault line, to dislodge the feeling beating under this natural mask, like a crab under a rock. But Camille seemed really to be walking away into the distance, freed of her former stress. And as he said to himself, as he greeted her with a polite kiss, trying to bring an exhausted friend back towards a renewal of love was a near-impossible task. He was therefore concentrating, in a fatalist manner