This Night’s Foul Work

‘The kids are asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go out, then, Danglard, go and find an Oswald or an Anglebert. There are plenty of them in Paris as well as here.’

‘Not with names like that, there aren’t. And anyway, what could they tell me?’

‘That cast-off antlers aren’t as highly prized as antlers from a hunted stag.’

‘I know that already.’

‘That it’s only members of the deer family that have a bone growing out of their forehead.’

‘Know that, too.’

‘That Lieutenant Retancourt is sure not to be asleep, and that it would be beneficial to go chat with her for an hour.’

‘Yes, that’s probably correct,’ said Danglard after a silence.

Adamsberg heard a little more optimism in his deputy’s voice, and hung up.

‘See, Tom,’ he said, cradling the baby’s head in his hand, ‘they put a herringbone in a wall, and don’t ask me why. We don’t need to know that, because Danglard knows all about it. Let’s give up on this book – it’s boring.’

As soon as Adamsberg put his hand round the child’s head the baby went off to sleep, as indeed did any other child. Or adult. Thomas’s eyes were closed within a few moments, and Adamsberg gently removed his hand, looking in mild puzzlement at his palm. Perhaps one day he would understand through which pores of his skin drowsiness seeped out. Not that it interested him overmuch.

His mobile rang. It was the pathologist, very wide awake, calling from the morgue.

‘Wait a minute, Ariane, I just have to put the baby down.’

Whatever the purpose of her call, and it certainly would not be a social one, the fact that Ariane was thinking about him was a distraction in his present state of having no woman on the horizon.

‘The gash on the throat – we’re talking about Diala now – is horizontal. The hand holding the blade was therefore neither high above the point of impact nor well below, or the wound would have been slanting. Like in Le Havre. You follow me?’

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg, playing with the baby’s toes, which were like little round peas in a pod. He lay down on the bed to listen to Ariane’s voice. To tell the truth, he didn’t much care about the techniques she must have used, he simply wanted to know why she was so sure it was a woman.

‘Diala stood one metre eighty-six. The base of his carotid artery would be one metre fifty-four from the ground.’

‘Well, what does that tell us?’

‘The cut would be horizontal if the aggressor’s clenched fist holding the knife was below his eyes. That would give us an aggressor of one metre sixty-six. If we do the same calculation for La Paille, where there’s a slight downward trajectory, we get a killer of between one metre sixty-four and one metre sixty-five. But perhaps one metre sixty-two, if we take high heels into account.’

‘A hundred and sixty-two centimetres,’ said Adamsberg pointlessly.

‘That’s well below the average height for a man. It’s got to be a woman, Jean-Baptiste. And as for the syringe marks on the arm, they both punctured the vein very precisely.’

‘You’re thinking it’s a professional?’

‘Yes, using a medical syringe. The very fine gauge and the angle of the insertion mean it wasn’t just any old needle.’

‘So someone injected them with something before they died?’

‘No, nothing. Nothing at all was injected.’

‘Nothing? Air do you mean?’

‘Air would definitely be something. No, this person didn’t inject them with anything, just made a jab.’

‘Without having time to finish?’

‘Or without needing to. She jabbed them after they were dead, Jean-Baptiste.’

Adamsberg hung up, thoughtfully. Thinking of old Lucio and wondering whether at this very moment Diala and La Paille were trying to scratch an unfinished injection in their dead arms.

X

ON THE MORNING OF 21 MARCH, THE COMMISSAIRE TOOK THE TIME TO greet every tree and little branch on his new route to work, from the house to the office. Even in the rain, which had not stopped since that hailstorm over Joan of Arc, the date deserved effort and respect. Even if, like this year, Spring was late, perhaps on account of some previous engagement. Or maybe she had slept in, as Danglard did one day in three. Spring is capricious, Adamsberg thought, you can’t expect her to arrive punctually on the morning of 21 March, when you think of the astronomical quantity of buds she has to deal with, not to mention all those larvae, roots and seeds, things you can’t see but that must certainly take up a huge amount of her energy. By comparison, the non-stop work of the Crime Squad was negligible, a joke really. A joke that gave Adamsberg a good conscience while he took his time walking through the streets.

As the commissaire strolled at a leisurely pace across the large shared hall known to the staff as the Council Chamber, to place a sprig of forsythia on the desks of the six female officers, Danglard came rushing to meet him. The commandant’s shambling body – which seemed to have melted like a candle, wiping out his shoulders, making his torso shapeless and his legs crooked – was not suited to rapid walking. Adamsberg always watched with interest when he tackled long distances, wondering whether one day he would lose one of his limbs in the process.

‘We’ve been looking for you,’ puffed Danglard.

‘I was paying homage, capitaine, and just now I’m paying my respects.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, it’s after eleven.’

‘The dead aren’t going to quibble over a couple of hours. My appointment with Ariane isn’t until four o’clock. She sleeps in all morning. Be careful not to forget that.’

‘It’s nothing to do with the deaths. It’s the New Recruit. He’s been waiting for you for two hours. This is the third time he’s made an appointment to see you. And when he turns up, he’s left sitting on a chair as if you couldn’t care less.’

‘Sorry, Danglard, I had an important rendezvous that was fixed a year ago.’

‘With?’

‘With the Spring. She’s touchy. If you forget her, she’s liable to go off and sulk. Then it’s no good trying to catch her. But the New Recruit will be back. Anyway, which New Recruit are we talking about?’

‘Oh for God’s sake, the one who’s replacing Favre. Two hours he waited.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Red-haired.’

‘Good, that makes a change.’

‘Actually his hair’s dark, but it has ginger stripes in it, sort of black-and-tan effect. Odd-looking, I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘All the better,’ said Adamsberg, putting his last flower on the desk belonging to Violette Retancourt. ‘If we have to have New Recruits, best they should be really new, out of the ordinary.’

Danglard thrust his gangling arms into the pockets of his elegant jacket and watched as the massive Lieutenant Retancourt put the little yellow flower in her buttonhole.

‘This one seems rather too out of the ordinary, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Have you read his file?’

‘Dipped into it. At any rate he’s here on probation for six months, whether we like it or not.’

Before Adamsberg could open his office door, Danglard held him back.

‘He’s not there any longer, he’s gone off on duty to the broom cupboard.’