This Night’s Foul Work

‘Oh, if you heard what people sometimes say under sedatives or anaesthetic, you’d be astonished. I’ve heard blameless people come out with unbelievable obscenities.’

‘Is that what she’s doing?’

‘Like I said, she recites Corneille. Nothing surprising about that. Mostly people in her state say things they remember from their childhood, especially stuff they learned at school. She’s just going back to what she was made to learn for homework, that’s all. Once I had a government minister who was in a coma for three months, and he went through his primary education, multiplication tables and all. He could still remember it pretty well.’

As he listened to the doctor, Adamsberg was staring at a sentimental picture over his hotel bed, a forest glade in which a mother deer was being followed by a cute little fawn through the ferns. ‘An accompanied hind,’ Robert would call her.

‘I’ve got to go back to Paris today, to my own hospital team,’ the doctor was saying. ‘It won’t hurt to move her now, so I’m taking her in the ambulance. We’ll be at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Hospital by this evening.’

‘Why are you taking her with you?’

‘Because it’s such an extraordinary case, commissaire. I’m going to see this one through.’

Adamsberg hung up, still looking at the painting. The tangled skein was in there too, the quick of virgins and the ‘living cross from the heart of the eternal branches’. He looked for a long time at the hind as if hypnotised, trying to touch something just beyond his reach. An element he still had not grasped. There’s a bone in the snout of a pig, and a bone in the penis of a cat. And if he was not much mistaken, and unlikely though that seemed, maybe there was a bone in the heart of a stag. A bone in the form of a cross, which would take him straight to the third virgin.

LIII

THE TEAM HAD BEEN WORKING IN THE HANGAR SINCE TEN IN THE morning, with the help of two technicians and a photographer recruited from the local force at Dourdan. Lamarre and Voisenet had been in charge of searching the surrounding area, looking for tyre tracks in the field. Mordent and Danglard had each taken half the hangar. Justin was checking the tool cupboard where Retancourt had been found. Adamsberg joined them as they were starting a picnic lunch, sitting in the field under a pleasant April sun: sandwiches, fruit, beer, and hot drinks from a thermos, all impeccably organised by Froissy. There were no chairs in the hangar, so they sat on old car tyres, forming a curious circular convention in the field. The cat, which had not been allowed to travel in the ambulance, was curled up at Danglard’s feet.

‘The vehicle must have come in this way,’ explained Voisenet, his mouth full, pointing to a gap leading from the road. ‘It stopped by the side door at the end of the hangar, after reversing to have the boot facing the entry. There are plants everywhere, it’s impossible to find tracks. But judging by the way the grass is crushed down, it would be some kind of transit van, probably with a capacity of nine cubic metres. I don’t think the nurse has anything like that. She must have hired it. We might be able to trace it via agencies specialising in freight vehicles. An old woman renting a big van can’t be that common.’

Adamsberg had sat down cross-legged in the warm grass, and Froissy had laid out an ample supply of food beside him.

‘The transport of the body was carefully organised,’ said Mordent, taking over. Perched on a large tyre, he looked more than ever like a heron on its nest. ‘The nurse must have had a trolley, or hired it with the van. It looks as if there was a ramp you could let down. All she had to do was roll the body down the slope and put it on the trolley. Then she pushed the trolley through the hangar to the tool cupboard.’

‘Can you see tracks from its wheels?’

‘Yes, they go through the hall. She must have neutralised the dogs with meat laced with Novaxon. Then the tracks turn, and we can see them going along the corridor. Partly covered by the return trip.’

‘Footprints?’

‘You’re going to like this,’ said Lamarre, with the smile of a child who has been hiding a present behind his back to increase the surprise. ‘The angle of the corridor wasn’t easy to negotiate, so she had to lean hard on the trolley and pivot on her feet – see what I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the concrete floor is rough there.’

‘Yes?’

‘And just there we found traces…’

‘Of navy shoe polish,’ said Adamsberg.

‘You’ve got it.’

‘Isolated from the ground on which her crimes are committed,’ said the commissaire slowly, ‘but still leaving traces behind. Nobody can really be a Shade. We’ll get her through these blue marks.’

‘There aren’t any full prints anywhere, so we can’t be sure about the size. but it looks as if they were women’s shoes, flat-heeled and solid.’

‘Now the cupboard,’ said Justin. ‘That’s where she injected the dose of Novaxon, before shutting the door on its hook.’

‘Nothing of significance in the cupboard?’

A short silence punctuated Justin’s report.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The syringe.’

‘You can’t be serious, lieutenant! She surely didn’t leave her syringe behind?’

‘Yes, absolutely. On the floor. Wiped completely clean, of course – no prints.’

‘So now she’s signing her work,’ said Adamsberg, getting to his feet as if the nurse was openly challenging him.

‘That’s what we thought too.’

The commissaire paced around for a few moments on the grass, his hand behind his back.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘She’s crossed some kind of threshhold. She thinks she’s invincible, and she’s telling us so.’

‘Seems logical,’ said Kernorkian, ‘for someone who wants a recipe for eternal life.’

‘But she still hasn’t laid hands on the third virgin,’ said Adamsberg.

Estalere did his round of the officers, pouring coffee into the plastic cups they held out. The makeshift picnic site and the absence of milk made it impossible for him to conduct his usual complicated ceremony.

‘She’ll get there before we do,’ said Mordent.

‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Adamsberg.

He returned to the circle of officers and sat down cross-legged in the centre.

‘The quick of virgins,’ he said, ‘didn’t just mean the dead women’s hair.’

‘But Roman settled that for us,’ said Mordent. ‘We know this maniac cut off some locks of hair.’

‘If she cut off some locks of hair, it was in order to gain access.’

‘To what?’

‘To the real hair of death. To the hair that goes on growing after death.’

‘Oh, of course!’ exclaimed Danglard ruefully. ‘The quick. The part that keeps on living – and growing – even after death.’

‘That’s the reason,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘why it was essential for the nurse to come back and dig up her victims a few months later. The quick needed time to grow. And that’s what she was after, the two or three centimetres of hair growing out from the root, in the grave. It was more than a symbol of eternal life. It was a concrete example of vital resistance, life refusing to stop after death.’

‘Ugh, sickening,’ said Noel, summing up the general reaction.

Froissy packed up the food, which no longer tempted anyone.