his five children, and the esteem shown him by Adamsberg. In addition to which, some of the commissaire’s serenity had trickled into his own life by capillary action. Danglard did not intend to lose his privileged position, and was alarmed at the advantages the New Recruit seemed to have acquired. Veyrenc’s intelligence, which was wideranging and subtle, conveyed by his melodious voice and linked to his pleasant face with its crooked smile, might tempt Adamsberg into his web. And what was more, this man had removed the Brezillon roadblock. The day before, Danglard had acted with circumspection and chosen to say nothing about information he had received two days earlier. Now, wounded to the quick, he brought it out of his armoury and shot it off like a dart.
‘Danglard,’ Adamsberg had said, ‘can you send the team within the hour? I can’t hang on to our prehistoric man for long. He’s supposed to be on another dig with flint arrowheads.’
‘The prehistorian, you mean,’ Danglard had corrected.
‘Call the police doctor too, but not before midday. We need her here when we reach the coffin. She should reckon two and a half hours for us to do the digging.’
‘I’ll bring Lamarre and Estalere with me. We’ll be at Opportune in an hour and forty minutes.’
‘No, you stay in the office,
‘I’ll be there,’ said Danglard without further explanation. ‘And I have some news for you. You asked me to find out about four men.’
‘It can wait,
Adamsberg sighed. Dangard often beat about the bush out of delicacy, but some times he beat about it even more out of anxiety, and the sophisticated process annoyed Adamsberg.
‘I’ve got a cemetery to cordon off, Danglard,’ he said more urgently. ‘We’ve got to find some stakes and string and so on. Anything else can wait for now.’
Adamsberg switched off his phone and spun it round on the table top.
‘What am I doing,’ he commented, more for himself than for Veyrenc, ‘in charge of twenty-seven human beings, when I could be just as happy, in fact a thousand times better off, on my own in the mountains, sitting on a stone with my feet in a stream?’
‘
‘Yes, I know, Veyrenc. But I wish people wouldn’t get so worked up. Twenty-seven different people with their worries, all bumping into each other and getting across each other, like boats in a tiny harbour. There ought to be a way to move over the waves.’
‘Let’s see which way the aerial points,’ said Adamsberg, spinning his phone. ‘Towards people or towards empty space,’ he said, pointing first to the street door, then to the window, which looked out on open countryside.
‘People,’ said Veyrenc before it had stopped spinning. ‘People,’ Adamsberg confirmed, as he watched the phone come to a halt pointing to the door.
‘Anyway, the view wasn’t empty. There are six cows in that field and a bull in the next one. That’s already enough to start something, isn’t it?’
As in Montrouge, Mathias had taken up his position near the grave and was moving his large hands over the surface, his fingers stopping every now and then, as he followed the scars imprinted in the earth. Twenty minutes later he was using a trowel to dig up the trace of a hole 1.60 metres across, at the head of the grave. Adamsberg, Veyrenc and Danglard were standing round, watching him work, while Lamarre and Estalere were fencing off the area with yellow plastic tape.
‘Same thing,’ Mathias said, getting to his feet and addressing Adamsberg. ‘I’ll leave you to it, you know the rest.’
‘But only you can tell us if it was the same people digging. If we go in, we could destroy the edges of the hole.’
‘Yes, I suppose you would,’ Mathias agreed, ‘especially in clay. The loose earth will stick to the walls.’
It was half past five by the time Mathias had finished emptying the hole and the light had begun to fail. According to him, and following the traces left by the tools, two men had been taking it in turns to dig, probably the same ones as in Montrouge.
‘One of them lifts the pick very high and strikes almost vertically, the other doesn’t take it back so far and the marks left by his blows are shorter.’
‘Were,’ said the pathologist, who had joined the group twenty minutes earlier.
‘From the settlement of the mound and the height of the grass, I’d say this was done about a month ago,’ Mathias continued.
‘A bit before the Montrouge job, probably.’
‘When was this woman buried?’
‘Four months ago,’ said Adamsberg.
‘In that case, I’ll leave you to it,’ said Mathias, with a grimace.
‘What’s the state of the coffin?’ asked Lamarre.
‘The lid’s been smashed in. I didn’t look beyond that.’
A curious contrast, thought Adamsberg, watching the blond giant withdraw to the car which was to take him back to Evreux, while Ariane came forward to take over, putting on her protective clothing without any apparent apprehension. They didn’t have a ladder, so Lamarre and Estalere helped the doctor down into the hole. The wood on the coffin had cracked open in several places, and the two policemen stood back in reaction to the nauseating smell that arose from it.
‘I told you to put masks on first,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Light the projectors, please, Jean-Baptiste,’ came the doctor’s calm voice, ‘and pass me a torch. It looks as if everything’s still here, like in the case of Elisabeth Chatel. As if someone had opened both these coffins just to take a look.’
‘Maybe a reader of Maupassant,’ muttered Danglard, who had a mask wedged firmly on his face and was trying not to stand too far from the others.
‘Meaning what,
‘There’s a Maupassant story about a man who’s haunted by the death of his sweetheart, and he’s in despair that he’ll never see her face again. So, since he’s determined to look at her one last time, he digs up her grave till he reaches his beloved’s face. Which doesn’t look anything like the face he adored. All the same, he embraces her in her decayed state, and after that, instead of the perfume of his mistress, it’s the odour of her death that he carries round with him.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Adamsberg. ‘Charming.’
‘That’s Maupassant for you.’
‘Just a story, all the same. And the point of stories is to stop them happening in real life.’
‘Well, you never know.’
‘Jean-Baptiste,’ called the doctor. ‘Do you know how this woman died?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well, I’m going to tell you. She had the back of her skull smashed in. Either she was hit with a heavy weapon, or perhaps something fell on her.’
Adamsberg moved away, lost in thought. An accident in the case of Elisabeth Chatel, and an accident in this case too – unless they were looking at two murders. Suddenly he felt disorientated. To kill two women, in order to open their graves three months later, seemed beyond all understanding. He waited in the damp grass for Ariane to finish her inspection.
‘Nothing else,’ said the doctor as she was hauled up out of the grave. ‘They haven’t taken so much as a tooth. I got the impression that the digging was aimed at the upper part of the head. Possibly whoever it was wanted
