This Night’s Foul Work

smiling.

‘You can call me Lucio. Oh yes, there’s evidence all right. There was a trial at the time, in 1771. The convent was closed and the house had to be purified. The wicked Silent Sister had managed to get herself called Saint Clarisse. She promised any women prepared to come up with a sum of money and go through a ceremony that they would have a place in paradise. What these poor women didn’t know was that they were going straight there. When they turned up with their purses full of cash, she cut their throats. Seven of them she killed. Seven, hombre. But one night, she got her come-uppance.’

Lucio laughed like a boy, then gathered himself once more.

‘We shouldn’t laugh at anyone so wicked,’ he said. ‘The spider bite’s itching again, that’s my punishment.’

Adamsberg watched as Lucio scratched in the air with his left hand, waiting placidly for the rest of the story.

‘Does it help when you scratch it?’

‘Just for a moment, then it starts up again. Well, on the night of 3 January 1771, one more old woman turned up to see Saint Clarisse, hoping to buy her way into paradise. But this time the woman’s son, who was suspicious, and mean, came along with her. He was a tanner. And he killed the so-called saint. Like that,’ said Lucio, crashing his fist down in the table. ‘He beat her to pulp with his huge hands. Are you with me so far?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because if not, I can start again.’

‘No, no, Lucio, carry on.’

‘Only the thing was, this wicked Sister Clarisse never really went away. Because she was only twenty-six, do you see? And since then, every woman who’s ever lived here after her has left the house feet first, after meeting a violent death. Before Madeleine, that’s the one who hanged herself, there was a Madame Jeunet in the 1960s. She fell out of a top-floor window. No reason. Before Madame Jeunet, there was a Marie-Louise who put her head in the oven during the war. My father knew them both. Nothing but tragedy.’

The two men nodded simultaneously. Lucio Velasco with gravity, Adamsberg with a certain pleasure. The commissaire didn’t want to offend the old man. And to tell the truth, this satisfying ghost story suited both of them, so they savoured it, making it last as long as the sugar took to dissolve in their coffee. The horrors of Saint Clarisse made Lucio’s life more exciting, and the tale diverted Adamsberg momentarily from the mundane murders he was investigating at the time. This female phantom was more poetic than the two petty criminals who had been slashed to death the previous week at Porte de la Chapelle. He almost decided to tell Lucio about the case, since the old Spaniard seemed to have a definite view about everything. He warmed to this one- armed humorist, though he could have done without the radio buzzing away uninterruptedly in his trouser pocket. At a sign from Lucio, he filled his glass again.

‘If everyone who’s ever been murdered was still trailing around in the ether,’ Adamsberg said, ‘how many ghosts would I have on my hands in this building? Saint Clarisse, plus her seven victims. Plus the two your father knew, plus Madeleine. That makes eleven. Any more?’

‘No, no, it’s just Clarisse,’ Lucio pronounced. ‘Her victims were all too old, they didn’t come back. Unless they went to their own houses – that’s possible.’

‘OK.’

‘And the other three women, they’re different. They weren’t murdered, they were possessed. But Saint Clarisse hadn’t finished her life when the tanner beat her to death. Now do you see why the house was never demolished? Because if it had been, Clarisse would have moved somewhere else. To my house, for instance. And round here, we’d rather know exactly where she is.’

‘Right here.’

Lucio agreed with a wink. ‘And here, so long as nobody comes to disturb her, there’s no harm done.’

‘She likes the spot, you’re saying.’

‘She doesn’t even go into the garden. She just waits for her victims up there in your attic. But now she’s got company again.’

‘Me.’

‘You,’ Lucio agreed. ‘But you’re a man, so she won’t trouble you much. It’s the women she drives crazy. Don’t bring your wife here. Take my advice. Or else just sell up.’

‘No, Lucio, I like this house.’

‘Pig-headed, aren’t you. Where are you from?’

‘The Pyrenees.’

‘High mountains,’ said Lucio, with respect. ‘So it’s no good my trying to convince you.’

‘You know the Pyrenees?’

‘I was born the other side of them, hombre. In Jaca.’

‘And the bodies of the seven old women? Did they look for them when they held the trial?’

‘No, in the century before the one before, the police didn’t search the way they do now. I dare say the bodies are still under there,’ said Lucio, pointing to the garden with his stick. ‘That’s why people haven’t dug it too deeply. You wouldn’t want to disturb the devil.’

‘No, no point.’

‘You’re like Maria,’ said the old man, with a smile. ‘You think it’s funny. But I’ve seen her often, hombre. Mist, vapour, then her breath, cold as winter on the high peaks. And last week I was out taking a leak under the hazel tree in my garden one night, and I really saw her.’

Lucio drained his glass of Sauternes and scratched the spider’s bite.

‘She’s got a lot older,’ he said, almost with disgust.

‘It is a long time, after all,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Yes. Well, Sister Clarisse’s face is as wrinkled as a walnut.’

‘And where was she?’

‘On the first floor. She was walking up and down in the upstairs room.’

‘That’s going to be my study.’

‘And where will you sleep?’

‘The room next to it.’

‘You’re not easily scared, are you?’ said Lucio, getting to his feet. ‘I hope you don’t think I was too blunt? Maria thinks I’m wrong to come in and tell you all this straight off.’

‘No, not at all,’ said Adamsberg, who had unexpectedly acquired seven corpses in the garden and a ghost with a face like a walnut.

‘Good. Well, perhaps you’ll manage to calm her down. Though they say that only a very old man can get the better of her now. But that’s just fancy. You don’t want to believe everything you hear.’

Left to himself, Adamsberg drank the dregs of his lukewarm coffee. Then he looked up at the ceiling, and listened.

III

AFTER A PEACEFUL NIGHT SPENT IN THE SILENT COMPANY OF SAINT CLARISSE, Commissaire Adamsberg pushed open the door of the Medico-Legal Institute, which housed the pathology lab. Nine days earlier, at Porte de la Chapelle, in northern Paris, two men had been found a few hundred metres apart, each with his throat cut. According to the local police inspector, they were both small- time crooks, who’d been dealing drugs in the Flea Market. Adamsberg was keen to see them again, since Commissaire Mortier from the Drug Squad wanted to take over the investigation.

‘Two lowlifes who got their throats cut at La Chapelle? They’re on my patch, Adamsberg,’ Mortier had declared. ‘And one of them’s black, what’s more. Just hand them over. What the devil are you waiting for?’

‘I’m waiting to find out why they’ve got earth under their fingernails.’

‘Because they didn’t take a bath too often.’

‘Because they’d been digging somewhere. And if there’s digging going on, it’s a matter for the Crime Squad.’