This Night’s Foul Work

By the child’s weight, Adamsberg felt that Tom had gone to sleep. He put his hand on the baby’s head and closed his eyes, breathing in his smell of soap, milk and sweat. And something else.

‘Surely your mother doesn’t spray perfume on you,’ he whispered. ‘That’s silly, babies shouldn’t wear perfume.’

No, the delicate smell didn’t come from Tom, it was coming from the bed. Adamsberg sniffed in the dark, like the brown ibex, suddenly alerted. It was a scent he knew from somewhere. But it wasn’t Camille’s.

He got up gently, and laid Tom in his cot. He walked around the room, sniffing the air. The scent was localised, it was on the sheets. A man, for God’s sake, a man had been sleeping there, leaving his smell.

Well, so what? he thought, switching on the light. How many women’s beds did you jump into, before it turned Camille into a friend? He lifted the covers in a swift movement, looking at them as if finding out more about the intruder would soothe his anger. Then he sat on the disturbed bed and breathed in deeply. It wasn’t important. One lover more or less, what difference would that make? Nothing serious. Not a reason to be angry. Feelings of revenge like those of Veyrenc were not in his nature. Adamsberg knew the sensation would pass, and waited for it to subside, while he withdrew to the protection of his own private shore, where nothing and no one could reach him.

Calmly, he folded the covers back, tucked them in properly on both sides, and smoothed the pillows with the palm of his hand, not quite knowing whether with this gesture he was wiping out the unknown man or his own anger, which had already passed. He found under his hand a few hairs, which he examined under the lamp. Short hairs, mascu-line hairs. Two black and one ginger. He clenched his fingers round them abruptly.

Breathing fast, he paced from wall to wall, images of Veyrenc tumbling into his head. A torrent of mud, in which he saw the lieutenant’s face from every angle, sitting in the blasted broom cupboard: the silent face, the provocative face, the verse-spouting face, the obstinate face, just like a Bearnais. Fucking bastard of a Bearnais. Danglard was right, this mountain dweller was dangerous, he had seduced Camille on to his wavelength. He had come to exact vengeance, and had started right here. In this bed.

Thomas made a sound in his sleep, and Adamsberg laid his hand on his head.

‘It’s that ginger ibex, little one,’ he whispered. ‘He’s on the attack, and he’s taken the other one’s wife. And that means war, Tom.’

Adamsberg sat motionless for the next two hours, alongside his son’s cot, waiting for Camille to return. He departed quickly, hardly speaking to her, his attitude bordering on discourtesy, and went out into the rain. Behind the wheel, he reviewed his strategy. It looked good: it would be silent and efficient. If one can play at bastards, so can two. He looked at his watches by the overhead light and nodded. By five o’clock tomorrow, the system would be in place.

XXXV

LIEUTENANT HELENE FROISSY, SO SELF-EFFACING, QUIET AND GENTLE THAT she tended to melt into the background, a woman with unremarkable features but a very shapely figure, had three special qualities. The first was that she could be seen eating from morning to night, without putting on any weight; secondly, she painted in watercolours, the only hobby she was known to have. Adamsberg, who filled entire notebooks with sketches during meetings, had taken over a year to notice Froissy’s little paintings. One night the previous spring, he had been looking in the lieutenant‘s cupboard for something to eat. Froissy’s office was considered by the whole squad as a back-up supply of groceries and you were sure to find a great variety of foodstuffs there: fresh and dried fruit, biscuits, dairy products, cereal, pate, Turkish delight – a resource in cases of unforeseen pangs of hunger. Froissy was well aware of these depredations and laid in stocks accordingly. When foraging about, Adamsberg had stopped to leaf through a sheaf of watercolours and had discovered the darkness of her colours and subjects, the desolate silhouettes and mournful landscapes under lowering skies. Since then, they had occasionally exchanged paintings and drawings without speaking, slipped into a report here and there. Froissy’s third characteristic, however, was that she had a degree in electronics and had worked for eight years in the transmission-reception services, otherwise known as telephone tapping, and had accomplished marvels of speed and efficiency in this post.

She joined Adamsberg at seven in the morning, as soon as the rather scruffy little bar opposite the Brasserie des Philosophes opened its doors. The Brasserie, being opulent and catering for a largely bourgeois clientele, never opened before nine, whereas the workmen’s cafe raised the blinds at dawn. The croissants had just appeared in a wire basket on the counter and Froissy took advantage of this to order her second breakfast.

‘It’s illegal, of course,’ she said.

‘Naturally.’

Froissy pulled a face as she dipped her croissant in her cup of tea.

‘I need to know a bit more,’ she said.

‘Froissy, I can’t take the risk that a rogue cop has infiltrated the squad.’

‘What would he be up to?’

‘That’s what I don’t know. If I’m wrong, we’ll forget it – you know nothing about it.’

‘But I’ll still have placed bugs without knowing why. Veyrenc lives alone. What do you expect to get by listening in?’

‘His telephone conversations.’

‘So what? If he’s plotting anything, he’s hardly going to talk about it on the phone.’

‘If he is plotting anything, it would be extremely serious.’

‘All the more reason for him to keep quiet.’

‘All the less. You’re forgetting the golden rule of secrecy.’

‘And that is?’ asked Helene, sweeping up her crumbs into one hand with the other, so as to leave the table looking clean.

‘Someone who has a secret, a secret so important that this person has sworn by all that’s holy not to tell a single soul, always does in fact tell one other person.’

‘Where does that rule come from?’ asked Froissy, rubbing her hands together.

‘From human nature. Nobody, with very rare exceptions, can keep a secret entirely to themselves. The bigger the secret, the more reliable the rule. That’s how secrets leak out, Froissy, being passed from one person who’s sworn not to tell to another person who swears not to tell, and so on. If Veyrenc has a secret, at least one other person must be in on it. And he’ll talk to that person, which is what I want to hear.’

That and something else, thought Adamsberg, feeling uncomfortable at misleading an honest person like Helene Froissy. His resolve of the previous evening had not diminished, and he had only to think of Veyrenc laying hands on Camille – or, worse still, their inevitable coupling – for his entire being to be transformed into a war machine. In his dealings with Froissy, though, he simply felt a bit shabby, and he could deal with that.

‘Veyrenc’s secret,’ Froissy repeated, dropping her crumbs neatly into her empty cup. ‘Does it have anything to do with his poems?’

‘No, not at all’

‘With his stripy hair?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Adamsberg, realising that Froissy would not cross over the bounds of legality unless he gave her a bit of help.

‘He was attacked?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And he’s looking for revenge?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Deadly revenge?’

‘That I can’t say.’

‘I see,’ said the lieutenant, continuing to smooth the table with her hand, and looking vaguely puzzled to find nothing left there. ‘So it amounts to protecting him from himself in the end?’

‘You’ve got it,’ said Adamsberg, delighted that Froissy had managed unaided to find that the end might justify