This Night’s Foul Work

‘Parish priest, perhaps. Don’t ask. Hermance, she’s not what you might call reasonable. She’s got her own ideas all right, but we don’t always know where they come from.’

Oswald’s voice had trailed off sadly, and Adamsberg changed the subject.

‘Never mind, Oswald. Tell me about the ghost.’

‘Wasn’t me that saw it, it was my nephew. Gratien.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Over five weeks ago, one Tuesday night.’

‘And where?’

‘In the graveyard, of course. Where do you think?’

‘What was your nephew doing in the graveyard?’

‘He wasn’t in there, he was in the lane that goes up the top of it. Well, goes up or down, depending which way you’re facing. Tuesdays and Friday nights, he meets his girlfriend up there when she’s worked her shift. Whole village knows about it, except his mother.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Seventeen. With Hermance going off to sleep at ten, like clockwork, it’s easy for him to slip out. Mind now, don’t give him away.’

‘So what next, Oswald?’

Oswald filled two small glasses with calvados and sat down with a sigh. He raised his pale eyes towards Adamsberg and drank it off.

‘Good health.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Want me to tell you something?’

He’s going to tell me anyway, thought Adamsberg.

‘This is the first time an outsider’s been let take the antlers out of the district. I’ve seen it all now.’

‘Seen it all’ is a bit much, thought Adamsberg. But obviously this business with the stag was serious. ‘They were offered to you, you yourself gripped the knife.’ The commissaire was both surprised and annoyed at himself for having memorised one of Veyrenc’s lines of verse.

‘Does it bother you if I take them?’ he asked.

Faced with a direct and intimate question, Oswald gave an oblique anwer.

‘It’s like this. Robert, he must have a deal of respect for you, do a thing like that. Then again, I suppose he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t make mistakes, as a rule.’

‘So it’s not so bad, then?’ said Adamsberg, with a smile.

‘No, I suppose not. When all’s said and done.’

‘Well, what next, Oswald?’

‘Like I said. Then he saw this ghost.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘This shape, like a tall woman, if you could call it a woman, all grey, all muffled up, no face. Figure of death, sort of. I wouldn’t say that if my sister was here, but man to man we can say that kind of thing, can’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I’ll say it. Death. Didn’t walk like ordinary people. Kind of gliding along in the cemetery, very stiff and slow. Not in a hurry, going step by step.’

‘Does your nephew like a drink?’

‘No, not yet. Just because he’s sleeping with his girlfriend doesn’t mean he’s a man yet. As for this ghost, what it did I can’t say. Or what it was looking for. Afterwards we watched to see if anyone died in the village. No, nothing like that.’

‘And that’s all he saw?’

‘Well, he ran straight home without waiting to find out. What would you do? So why did she come? Why here?’

‘I have no idea, Oswald.’

‘The priest says she appeared before, in 1809, and that was the year the apple harvest failed. The branches were bare as my arm.’

‘No other consequences? Besides the apples?’

Oswald stole a glance at Adamsberg. ‘Robert says you’ve seen a ghost too.’

‘I haven’t seen mine, I’ve just thought about it. It’s a sort of dark cloud, a Shade, a veil that falls over me when I’m in the office. A doctor would say I’m imagining things. Or perhaps reviving some bad memory.’

‘Doctors don’t reckon much to this sort of thing.’

‘Well, maybe they’re right. It’s probably just a dark thought. Not yet out of my head, roaming about inside.’

‘Like the deer’s antlers before they grow.’

‘Exactly,’ said Adamsberg, with a sudden smile.

This idea greatly pleased him, since it almost resolved the matter of his own dark Shade. The weight of a dark idea, formed inside the mind but not yet making its way to the outside. Like a child struggling to be born.

‘This idea, you just get it at work?’ asked Oswald, thoughtfully. ‘You don’t get it here?’

‘No.’

‘Well, something must have come into your squad,’ explained Oswald, gesturing. ‘Then the thing got in your head, because you’re the boss. That’s logical, isn’t it?’

Oswald emptied the last drop of calvados into the glasses.

‘Or maybe it’s something personal to you,’ he added. ‘Anyway, I got the boy here. He’s waiting outside.’

No choice. Adamsberg followed Oswald outside.

‘You haven’t put your shoes back on,’ Oswald pointed out.

‘It’s fine like this. Ideas can circulate through the soles of your feet.’

‘Well, if that were true,’ said Oswald with a half-smile, ‘my sister’d have plenty of ideas.’

‘And she doesn’t?’

‘Tell you God’s truth, she’s kind enough to melt a heart of stone, but there’s nothing between her ears. But there it is. She’s my sister.’

‘What about Gratien?’

‘No comparison. Takes after his father, sharp as a needle.’

‘And his father is…?’

Oswald clammed up immediately, drawing in his horns like a snail.

‘Amedee left your sister, then?’ Adamsberg insisted.

‘How do you know his name?’

‘It was written on a photo in the kitchen.’

‘No, Amedee’s dead. Long time ago. We don’t talk about it.’

‘Why not?’ asked Adamsberg, ignoring the warning signs.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘You never know. With a ghost about, understand? You have to think of everything.’

‘Well, perhaps so,’ Oswald conceded.

‘My neighbour says that the dead don’t leave us if they haven’t finished their lives. They come back to worry the living for centuries.’

‘You mean Amedee hadn’t finished living?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He was coming back home from another woman, one night,’ Oswald said, with some reticence. ‘He had a bath, so my sister wouldn’t guess. And he drowned.’

‘In the bathtub?’

‘Like I said. He must have taken a queer turn or a stroke. And in the bath, there was water, right? And if your head goes under water, you can drown, just like in a pond. That was what finished my sister’s mind off.’

‘Was there an inquest?’

‘Of course. They got everyone sweating with panic for weeks. You know what the cops are.’