to do that, even in the days when he had wanted to attract the beautiful police inspector. Even for her. People had said resignedly that Adamsberg was a lost cause, and he sometimes thought the same himself. Not always, though.
And today his mood pushed him to sit stirring his coffee, slowly. A textile merchant had been killed three days earlier, in his own warehouse. His accounts had looked so irregular that three inspectors were going through the customer files, convinced that the murderer’s name would be found there.
Ever since he had seen the dead man’s family, Adamsberg had not felt too concerned about this case. His inspectors were searching for a client who’d been cheated, and they even had one serious lead, but he had been keeping an eye on the murdered man’s stepson, Patrice Vernoux, a fine-featured, romantic-looking young man of twenty-three. That was all Adamsberg had done: keep an eye on him. He had already called him in three times to the station on different pretexts, getting him to talk about this and that: what did he think of his stepfather’s bald patch – did it disgust him? Did he like the textile business? What did he think when the electricity workers went on strike, why did he think so many people were interested in their family tree?
The last time, the day before, it had gone as follows:
‘Do you think you’re good-looking?’ Adamsberg had asked.
‘It’s hard to say no.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Can you tell me why I’m here?’
‘Yes. Because of your stepfather, of course. You did tell me you didn’t like to think of him sleeping with your mother.’
The young man shrugged.
‘Nothing I could do about it, was there? Except kill him, and I didn’t do that. But yeah, it did make me feel a bit sick. My stepfather was gross, he was hairy, he even had hair coming out of his ears, like a, well, a wild boar. Tell you the truth, monsieur, I couldn’t stomach that. Would you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. One day I walked in on my own mother in bed with one of my ex-schoolfriends. And yet, poor woman, she was faithful on the whole. I closed the door, and I remember that the only thing I thought was that the boy had an olive-green mole on his back, but perhaps my mother hadn’t seen it.’
‘Don’t see what that has to do with me,’ said the boy, sulkily. ‘If you can take that kind of thing better than me, that’s your business.’
‘Never mind – it doesn’t matter. Is your mother upset, do you think?’
‘Naturally she is.’
‘OK. Fine. But don’t go and see too much of her for now.’
And he had let the boy go.
Adamsberg walked into the station. Of his inspectors at present, his favourite was Adrien Danglard, a man who dressed impeccably in order to compensate for his un prepossessing looks and pear-shaped figure. Danglard liked a drink and didn’t seem too reliable after about four in the afternoon, or even earlier sometimes. But he was real, very real, and Adamsberg hadn’t yet found any other way of defining him to himself. Danglard had prepared a summary of the inquiry into the textile firm’s customer files.
‘Danglard, I’d like to see the stepson today – the boy, Patrice Vernoux.’
‘Again,
‘Why do you call him a poor lad?’
‘Because he’s shy, he keeps combing his hair, he tries to help, he’s doing his best to say what you want, and when he’s waiting in that corridor and doesn’t know what you’re going to ask him next, he looks so lost that I feel sorry for him. That’s why I call him a poor lad.’
‘You didn’t notice anything else, Danglard?’
Danglard shook his head.
‘Have I told you the story about the dog that drooled?’ Adamsberg asked.
‘No, I must say you haven’t.’
‘When you’ve heard it, you’ll think I’m a mean bastard. You’ll have to sit down: I can’t talk fast, I have trouble finding the right words and I sometimes lose the thread. I’m not very articulate, Danglard. So anyway, I went out of our village very early one morning to spend the day in the mountains – this was when I was about eleven. I don’t like dogs and I didn’t like them when I was little, either. And this one, a big dog with drooling chops, was just standing in the middle of the path, looking at me. It drooled all over my feet and hands, it was just a friendly, soppy old dog. I said to it: “Look, dog, I’m going for a long walk, what I’m trying to do is get lost and then find my way back. You can come with me if you want, but stop drooling all over me, it’s disgusting.” Well, the dog seemed to understand and started following me.’
Adamsberg stopped, lit a cigarette, and took a scrap of paper out of his pocket. He crossed his legs and rested the paper on his thigh to scribble a drawing, then went on, after a glance at his colleague.
‘Can’t help it if I’m boring you, Danglard, but I do want to tell you the story about the dog. So this dog and I set off, chatting about whatever interested us – the stars in the sky or juicy bones – and we stopped at an old shepherd’s hut. And there we came face to face with half a dozen kids from another village, I knew who they were, we’d had fights in the past. They said, “This your dog?” I said: “Just for today.” Then the smallest of them got hold of the dog by its long fur, because this dog was as cowardly and soft as a hearthrug, and he pulled it to the edge of an overhang. “Don’t like your fucking dog,” he said. “Stupid fucking dog.” The big dog was whining, but it wasn’t reacting, it’s true that it was stupid. And this tiny kid gave it a big kick up the backside, and the dog went over the edge. I put my bag down slowly. I do everything slowly. I’m a slow man, Danglard.’
Yes, Danglard felt like saying, I had noticed. A vague man, a slow man. But he couldn’t say that, since Adamsberg was his new boss. And anyway, he respected him. Danglard, like everyone else, had heard rumours of Adamsberg’s famous cases and, like everyone else, he admired the way he had solved them, something which today seemed to him incompatible with the man himself, as he had turned out on his arrival in Paris. Now that he had seen him in the flesh, he was surprised, and not only by his slow movements and way of talking. He was also disappointed by the unimpressive appearance of Adamsberg’s small, thin, yet compact body, and by the generally casual manner of this person who had not even turned up at the appointed time to meet the staff and who, when he did, had evidently hastily knotted on a necktie over a shapeless shirt stuffed negligently into the waistband of his trousers.
And then Adamsberg’s charm had started to work, rising like the water level. It had started with his voice. Danglard liked to listen to him: it calmed him – indeed, almost put him to sleep. ‘It’s like a caress,’ Florence had said, but then Florence was a woman, and anyway she was responsible for her choice of words. Castreau had snorted: ‘Don’t go telling us next that he’s good-looking.’ Florence had looked puzzled. ‘Wait a bit, I need to think about that,’ she had said. As she always did. She was a scrupulous person who took time to think before she spoke. Not feeling sure, she had murmured, ‘No, but it has to do with a kind of grace. I’ll think some more about it.’ When the other colleagues had laughed at her serious expression, Danglard had said, ‘Yes, Florence is right, it’s obvious.’ Margellon, a young officer, had seized the opportunity to call Danglard a poof. Margellon had never made an intelligent remark in his life. And Danglard needed intelligence as much as he needed drink. He had shrugged his shoulders, thinking briefly that it was a pity Margellon wasn’t right, because he had always had bad luck with women, and perhaps men would have been less fussy. He had heard it said that men were bastards, because once they had slept with a woman they passed judgement on her, but women were worse, because they refused to sleep with you unless everything was exactly right. So not only were you weighed up and judged, but you never got to sleep with anyone.
Sad, really.
Yes, women were complicated. And in Danglard’s life there had been plenty of women who had found him wanting. To his considerable distress at times. But at any rate, he knew that serious-minded Florence was right about Adamsberg, and Danglard had so far allowed himself to succumb to the charm of this little man a foot shorter than himself. He was beginning to understand how the vague desire to unburden yourself to him might explain why so many murderers had told him about their crimes: absent-mindedly, almost. Just like that. In order to chat to Adamsberg.
Danglard, who had a reputation for being handy with a pencil, did caricatures of his colleagues. So he knew something about faces. He had got Castreau off to a T, for instance. But he knew in advance that he would never be able to pin Adamsberg down, because it was as if sixty faces had been mingled to make one. The nose was too
