‘And why did you ask for me?’
‘I didn’t ask for you.’
‘I was told the Serious Crime Squad of Paris was clamouring for me.’
‘Well, it wasn’t at my request. But I’m glad you’re here now.’
‘To get these two guys away from the Drug Squad.’
‘According to Mortier, they aren’t just two guys. They’re two villains, and one of them’s black. Mortier’s head of the Drug Squad. We don’t get on.’
‘Is that why you’re refusing to hand these bodies over?’
‘No, I’m not chasing after bodies for the sake of it. It’s just that those two should come to me.’
‘As you said before. So tell me about it.’
‘We don’t know anything about them. They were killed some time in the night between Friday and Saturday, at the Porte de la Chapelle. To Mortier, that means only one thing: dope. According to him, blacks do nothing all day long but deal drugs, that’s all their life consists of. And there was a syringe mark on the inside elbow in both cases.’
‘I saw that. The routine analysis didn’t turn anything up. So what do you want me to do?’
‘Take a look and tell me what was in the syringe.’
‘Why don’t you buy the drugs hypothesis? No shortage of narcotics round La Chapelle.’
‘The mother of the big black guy tells me her son never touched the stuff. Didn’t use it, didn’t deal it. The other one’s mother doesn’t know whether he did or not.’
‘And you’re ready to take the word of their old mothers?’
‘My own mother always used to say I had a head like a sieve, the wind went in one side and came out the other. She was right. And as I told you, they had dirt under their fingernails.’
‘Like a lot of no-hopers round the Flea Market.’
Ariane said ‘no-hopers’ in the pitying tone of the well-off and indifferent, for whom poverty is a fact of life rather than a problem.
‘It’s not just dirt, Ariane, it’s soil. And these guys didn’t go in for gardening. They lived in squalid rooms, in godawful tower blocks, without heating and lighting, the sort of place no-hopers get from the city council. With their old mothers.’
Dr Lagarde was staring at the wall. When Ariane was observing a corpse, her eyes narrowed to a fixed position, as if they were high-precision microscope lenses. Adamsberg felt sure that if he examined her pupils at that moment he would have found perfect representations of the two bodies, the white one in the left eye, the black one in the right.
‘Well, I can tell you one thing that might help you, Jean-Baptiste. It was a woman that killed them.’
Adamsberg put his cup down, hesitating to contradict the doctor for the second time in his life.
‘Ariane, did you see the size of them?’
‘What do you think I look at in the mortuary? Old photographs? I saw your guys. Big lads, who could lift up a wardrobe with one finger, yes. Even so, they were both killed by a woman.’
‘Explain.’
‘Come back tonight. I’ve got a few more things to check.’
Ariane stood up, and put on over her suit the clinical overall she had left on the peg. The owners of cafes near the morgue did not appreciate doctors in white coats dropping in. It put off the other customers.
‘I can’t tonight. I’m going to a concert.’
‘All right, come round after the concert. I work late – I expect you remember.’
‘No, I can’t, it’s in Normandy.’
‘Gracious me,’ said Ariane, stopping still. ‘What’s on the programme?’
‘No idea.’
‘You’re going all the way to Normandy to listen to it and you don’t even know what they’re playing? Or perhaps you’re trailing after a woman?’
‘I’m not trailing after her, I’m politely accompanying her.’
‘Gracious me. Well, come by tomorrow. Not in the morning, though. I sleep late.’
‘Yes, I remember. Not before eleven, then?’
‘Not before midday. Everything gets accentuated as time goes by.’
Ariane perched back on her chair, as if in temporary hesitation.
‘There’s something I’d like to tell you. But I don’t know if I really want to.’
Silence, however long it lasted, had never embarrassed Adamsberg. He waited, letting his thoughts run towards the evening concert. Five minutes went past, or ten, he couldn’t have said.
‘Seven months later,’ said Ariane, having taken a sudden decision, ‘the murderer made a complete confession.’
‘The one in Le Havre, you mean?’ said Adamsberg, looking up.
‘Yes, the man with the twelve rats. He hanged himself in his cell ten days after that. You’d got it right, not me.’
‘And you weren’t too happy about that?’
‘No, and neither were my bosses. I missed my promotion. I had to wait another five years. You’d practically given me the solution on a plate, and I hadn’t wanted to hear what you were saying.’
‘You didn’t tell me about it.’
‘I’d forgotten your name. In fact I’d deliberately wiped you out of my mind. With your glass of beer.’
‘And you’re still angry with me?’
‘No, actually. It was thanks to the rat man that I started my research on dissociation. Have you read my book?’
‘Some of it,’ Adamsberg prevaricated.
‘I invented the term “dissociated killers”.’
‘Yes, I remember – I’ve heard of them,’ Adamsberg corrected himself. ‘People who are split in two.’
The doctor pulled a face.
‘Let’s just say individuals who are made up of two distinct parts: one that kills, one that leads a normal life – and both halves are almost entirely unconscious of the other’s existence. It’s quite rare. For instance, that district nurse they arrested in Asnieres, two years ago. This kind of murderer is dangerous, and recidivist, and almost impossible to spot. Nobody suspects them, not even themselves, and they go to extraordinary lengths to stop the other half of themselves from finding out.’
‘I remember the nurse. So, according to you, she was a dissociated killer, was she?’
‘Almost the classic case. If she hadn’t crossed the path of some genius in the police force, she’d have gone on killing people until the day she died, and denied it to herself. Thirty-two victims in forty years, without turning a hair.’
‘Thirty-three,’ Adamsberg corrected her.
‘Thirty-two. I’m well placed to tell you, I interviewed her for hours.’
‘It was thirty-three, Ariane. I arrested her.’
The doctor paused, then smiled.
‘Ah, did you now?’
‘So when the Le Havre killer cut open those rats, he was the other part of himself. Number Two, the murderous one?’ said Adamsberg.
‘Are you interested in dissociation?’
‘That case of the nurse still haunts me, and the Le Havre man sort of belongs to me too. What was his name?’
‘Hubert Sandrin.’
‘And when he confessed? Was he still the other one then?’
‘No, that would be impossible, Jean-Baptiste: the other one never denounces himself.’
‘But Number One couldn’t confess, because he didn’t know about the murder.’
‘That’s the point. For a few moments, the dissociation stopped working and the barrier between the two selves opened up, like a crack in a wall. And, through the crack, Hubert Number One saw the other one, Hubert Number Two, and was overcome with horror.’
