This Night’s Foul Work

‘He’s guarding Camille? Why’s that? I asked for experienced officers.’

‘Because he’s the only one who will put up with that damn cubbyhole on the landing. The others are all fed up with it.’

‘And since he’s new, the others have landed him with it.’

‘Correct.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since three weeks ago.’

‘Send Retancourt. To protect Camille. She can stand anything, even the broom cupboard.’

‘She did offer. But there’s a problem.’

‘I don’t see any problem that would hold Retancourt up.’

‘Just the one. She can’t turn round in the space.’

‘Ah, too big,’ said Adamsberg pensively.

‘Too big,’ Danglard confirmed.

‘It was her magical size that saved my life, Danglard.’

‘Maybe so, but she can’t fit into that cupboard and that’s that. So she can’t take over from the New Recruit.’

‘OK, capitaine, I get it. How old is he, this New Recruit?’

‘Forty-three.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘From what point of view?’

‘Aesthetic, seductional.’

‘There’s no such word as “seductional”.’

The commandant ran his hand over the back of his neck, showing his embarrassment. Sophisticated as Danglard’s mental processes were, he was, like all men, reluctant to comment on the physical appearance of other men, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. Adamsberg, on the other hand, really wanted to know what the man looked like who had been allowed to sit for three weeks on Camille’s landing.

‘What’s he look like?’ Adamsberg persisted.

‘Quite good-looking,’ Danglard admitted reluctantly.

‘Not my lucky day, then.’

‘You could say that. It’s not Camille that I’m worried about, though, it’s Retancourt.’

‘She’s susceptible?’

‘So they say.’

‘Quite good-looking in what way?’

‘Built like a tree trunk, crooked smile, melancholy expression.’

‘Certainly not my lucky day,’ commented Adamsberg again.

‘Well, you can’t go round killing all the other men in the world.’

‘One could perhaps go round killing all the ones with melancholy expressions.’

‘Conference time,’ Danglard announced abruptly, looking at his watch.

Danglard was of course responsible for giving the name ‘Council Chamber’ to the large room in which they held meetings, in this case a general assembly of the twenty-seven officers in the squad. But the commandant had never owned up to it. Similarly he had planted the term ‘conference’ in the minds of his fellow officers, instead of ‘meeting’ which he found off-putting. Adrien Danglard’s intellectual authority carried such weight that everyone accepted his dictates without questioning their appropriateness. Like a medicine taken in full confidence, the new words that the commandant introduced were absorbed without qualm, and were so rapidly integrated that they became irreversible.

Danglard pretended not to be involved with these small alterations to the language. To listen to him, these slightly pompous terms had risen up through the ages, impregnating the buildings like ancient moisture sweating out of the walls through the cellars. A perfectly plausible explanation, according to Adamsberg. Why not? Danglard had replied.

The conference was due to discuss the two murders at La Chapelle and the death of a sixty-year-old woman from a heart attack in a lift. Adamsberg made a quick head count. Three were missing.

‘Where are Kernorkian, Mercadet and Justin?’

‘In the Brasserie des Philosophes,’ explained Estalere. ‘They’ll be finished in a minute.’

The number of murders with which the Serious Crime Squad had had to deal in two years had not yet extinguished the astonished cheerfulness that beamed out of Estalere’s green eyes. He was the youngest member of the team. Tall and thin, Estalere had attached himself to the ample and indestructible Violette Retancourt, whom he worshipped with a near-religious passion and from whom he rarely strayed more than a few feet away.

‘Well, tell them to get up here quickly,’ ordered Danglard. ‘I don’t suppose they’re finishing a philosophical debate.’

‘No, commandant, just their cups of coffee.’

As far as Adamsberg was concerned, whether it was called a conference or a meeting mattered little. He was not suited to collective discussions and was disinclined to distribute tasks. These general briefings bored him so intensely that he could scarcely remember having followed a single one from beginning to end. Sooner or later, his thoughts would leave the table, and from far away (but where?) meaningless fragments of sentences would reach him, about taking names and addresses, questioning suspects, putting tails on people. Danglard watched the degree of absent-mindedness in the commissaire‘s brown eyes and nudged him when it reached critical level. As he had done just now. Adamsberg recognised the signals and returned to earth, emerging from what some would term a state of blankness but which was for him a vital safety valve, allowing him to explore uncharted directions on his own. Pointless ones, Danglard opined. Yes, pointless, Adamsberg agreed. They were coming to a conclusion in the case of the sixty-year-old woman, thanks to some good detective work by lieutenants Voisenet and Maurel, who had smelled a rat and discovered that the lift’s mechanism had been tampered with. The arrest of her husband was imminent, and the drama was reaching its conclusion, leaving in Adamsberg’s mind a trail of sadness, as always when he encountered everyday brutality at a turn on the stair.

The investigation into the murders at La Chapelle was currently classified as following up a couple of routine underworld killings. It was now eleven days since the tall black man and the hefty white man had been discovered lying dead, each one in a cul-de-sac, the first in the Impasse du Gue, the second in the Impasse du Cure. It had now been established that Diala Tounde, aged twenty-four, had sold trinkets and belts under the bridge at the edge of the Clignancourt quarter, while the white man, Didier Paillot, known as La Paille, twenty-two, tried to engage passers-by with his card tricks in the main alleyway in the Flea Market. The two men did not apparently know each other, and their common denominator was that they were both massively built and had dirt under their fingernails. On account of which, Adamsberg, flying in the face of reason, had obstinately refused to pass the case over to the Drug Squad.

Questioning residents in the buildings where both men lived – labyrinths of cold rooms, and non-functioning lavatories in dark stairwells – had produced nothing, nor had visits to all the cafes in the sector from the Porte de la Chapelle to Clignancourt. Both mothers, who were devastated, had claimed that their boys were the best of sons, one showing off a nail-clipper and the other a shawl which they had been given only the month before. Brigadier Lamarre, overcome with timidity, had returned to base very upset.

‘Their old mothers,’ said Adamsberg. ‘If only the real world was like the dreams of old mothers.’

A nostalgic silence hung for a moment over the conference, as if each person present was remembering what the dream of his or her old mother had been, and whether he or she had lived up to it, and if not by what margin the reality had fallen short.

Retancourt had come no nearer than anyone else to fulfilling the dreams of her old mother, who had hoped her daughter would be a blonde air hostess, calming and charming airline passengers; a hope that her daughter’s height of one metre eighty and weight of a hundred and twenty kilos had ruled out after puberty, leaving only the blonde hair – and an ability to calm people which was indeed out of the ordinary. Retancourt had made a small