This Night’s Foul Work

earth. It’s invisible. So someone dug a hole, but where?’

‘You can’t find it?’ asked Adamsberg, suddenly anxious.

‘Not by looking.’

‘How, then?’

‘With my fingers. When you can’t see anything, you can always feel. But it takes longer.’

‘Feel what?’ asked Justin.

‘The edges of the trench, the gap between its edge and the surrounding area. Where one bit of earth meets another. There’s got to be a line, and it’s just a matter of finding it.’

Mathias ran his fingers over the apparently uniform surface of the soil. Then he seemed to dig his fingertips into a phantom crack, which he slowly followed. Like a blind man, Mathias was not actually looking at the ground, as if the illusion provided by his eyes might have spoiled the search; he was concentrating entirely on his sense of touch. Gradually he traced the outline of a rough circle about one metre fifty across, which he then redrew with the tip of the trowel.

‘I’ve got it now, Adamsberg. I’m going to dig it out myself, so that I can follow the sides of the hole, if you can get your men to take the earth away. That’d be quicker.’

Eighty centimetres down, Mathias looked up, pulled off his shirt, and put his hands over the sides of the hole.

‘I don’t think whoever it was was burying anything. We’re too deep now. He was trying to reach the coffin. There were two people.’

‘Correct.’

‘One was digging and the other was emptying the bucket. At this point, they swapped over. No two people handle a pickaxe the same way.’

Mathias took up the trowel again and plunged into the hole. They had borrowed spades and buckets from the keeper, and Justin and Veyrenc were emptying the soil out. Mathias held out some gravel to Adamsberg.

‘When they filled it in, they picked up a bit of gravel from the alleyway. The one with the pickaxe was getting tired, his strokes are less straight. They haven’t buried anything in here – the hole’s quite empty.’

The young man continued to dig for an hour in silence, breaking it only to say: ‘They’ve swapped over again’ and ‘They’ve changed the pickaxe for something smaller.’ Finally, Mathias stood up and leaned his elbows on the edge of the hole, which was now more than waist-deep.

‘By the state of the roses,’ he said, ‘I suppose the man in the grave hasn’t been there long.’

‘Three and a half months. And it’s a woman.’

‘Well, this is the parting of the ways, Adamsberg. I’ll leave the rest to you.’

Mathias pressed his hands on the edges of the hole and jumped out.

Adamsberg looked in.

‘You haven’t reached the coffin. They stopped before it?’

‘I’ve reached the coffin. But it’s open.’

The men of the squad exchanged glances. Retancourt moved forward. Justin and Danglard stepped back.

‘The wood of the lid has been forced in with a pick and pulled off. More earth has fallen inside. You called me to explore the earth, not the corpse. I don’t want to see it.’

Mathias put his trowel back in his pocket and rubbed his large hands on his trousers.

‘Marc’s uncle’s expecting you for supper some day, you know,’ he said to Adamsberg.

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t have much money these days. Let us know ahead of time, so Marc can pinch a bottle and something to eat. Rabbit, shellfish? Would that do you?’

‘That would be perfect.’

Mathias shook hands with the commissaire, smiled briefly at the others, and loped off, carrying his shirt over his arm.

XVII

DANGLARD WAS EXAMINING HIS DESSERT, AN EXPRESSION OF SHOCK ON HIS pale face. He had a horror of exhumations and other atrocious aspects of the profession. The idea that some diabolical grave-robber should be forcing him to look into an open coffin was driving him to the edge of psychic collapse.

‘Eat up, Danglard,’ Adamsberg insisted. ‘You need some sugar. And drink your wine.’

‘Hell’s bells, they must be seriously sick to want to put something in a coffin,’ Danglard muttered.

‘To put something in, or perhaps to take something out.’

‘Whatever. Surely there are enough hiding places in the world not to go poking about there.’

‘Maybe this person was in a hurry. Or perhaps they’d put something into the coffin before they screwed it down.’

‘Must be something very precious if he had the stomach to go and fetch it three months later,’ commented Retancourt. ‘Money or drugs, perhaps – it always comes back to that.’

‘What doesn’t fit,’ Adamsberg said, ‘is not so much whether this individual is sick. It’s that he chose the head of the coffin and not the foot. After all, there’s less room at the head, and it’s much more distressing.’

Danglard nodded silently, still contemplating his dessert.

‘Unless whatever it was was already in the coffin,’ said Veyrenc. ‘If he didn’t put it there himself, he didn’t have any choice.’

‘For instance?’

‘Earrings, maybe, or a necklace belonging to the dead woman.’

‘Jewel robberies are deeply uninteresting,’ muttered Danglard.

‘People have been robbing tombs since the beginning of time, capitaine, and precisely for stuff like that. We’re going to have to find out if this woman was rich. Anything on the register?’

‘Elisabeth Chatel, unmarried, no children, born at Villebosc-sur-Risle, near Rouen,’ Danglard reeled off.

‘What is it with these people from Normandy? I can’t seem to get away from them. What time are we expecting Ariane?’

‘Who’s Ariane?’

‘The pathologist.’

‘Six o’clock.’

Adamsberg pushed his finger round the rim of his wineglass, producing a painful whine. ‘Eat the damn pudding, capitaine. You don’t have to stick around for the rest of this.’

‘If you’re staying, I’m staying.’

‘Sometimes, Danglard, you have a medieval way of carrying on. Hear that, Retancourt? I stay, he stays.’

Retancourt shrugged, and Adamsberg once more made a strident noise with his wineglass. The television set in the cafe was transmitting a rowdy football match. The commissaire stared for a while at the figures running all over the pitch, their movements followed with fascination by the dining customers, whose heads were all turned towards the screen. Adamsberg had never been able to understand this passion for football matches. If some fellows liked kicking a ball into a goal mouth, which he could well understand, why give yourself the bother of having to do it against another lot of characters who were determined to stop you? As if the world wasn’t full enough already of people who stopped you kicking the ball where you wanted it to go.

‘What about you, Retancourt?’ Adamsberg asked. ‘Are you staying? Veyrenc can go home, he’s exhausted.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Retancourt rather sulkily.

‘How long for, Violette?’

Adamsberg smiled. Retancourt untied and redid her ponytail, then got up to go to the washroom.

‘Why are you bugging her?’ Danglard asked when the other two were out of earshot.

‘Because she’s getting away from me.’

‘Where to?’

‘To the New Recruit. He’s powerful – he’s going to drag her off.’