The Chalk Circle Man

and ended up confessing to his mania for doing circles. Just as he had planned. Then he had been released, and everyone had gone chasing after Clemence. The guilty party he had been grooming. Clemence, who had been dead for months, and whom they would have gone on searching for indefinitely, until they had to abandon the case as unsolved. Danglard frowned. Too many things seemed inexplicable.

He rejoined the commissaire who was silently munching some bread with Castreau, both of them seated at the edge of the track. Castreau was trying to attract a hen blackbird with a few breadcrumbs.

‘Why is it,’ Castreau was saying, ‘that the females are always duller-looking than the males? Hen birds are all brown or beige, or some other boring colour. As if they couldn’t care less. But the males are red and green and gold. Why on earth should that be? It looks the wrong way round.’

‘What they say is,’ said Adamsberg, ‘that the males need to make all that fuss to attract a mate. They have to keep on inventing stuff. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, Castreau. All the time, inventing new stuff. Exhausting.’

The hen blackbird flew off.

‘Well, the female’s got enough to do, inventing eggs and bringing them up, hasn’t she?’ said Delille.

‘Like me,’ said Danglard. ‘I must be a hen blackbird. My eggs give me plenty of headaches, especially the youngest one, who was dumped on me, like a cuckoo in the nest.’

‘Ah, but hold on,’ said Castreau. ‘You don’t wear brown and beige.’

‘Anyway, for God’s sake,’ said Danglard, ‘ornithology is beside the point. You won’t understand people by observing birds. Birds are bloody birds, that’s all there is to it. So why are we talking about them when we’ve got a corpse here and we don’t understand the first thing about what’s going on? At least I don’t. But perhaps you all know everything about everything?’

Danglard was aware that he was going too far, and in other circumstances would have defended a more moderate point of view. But he wasn’t feeling strong enough for that this morning.

‘You’ll have to forgive me for not keeping you filled in on everything,’ Adamsberg said to Danglard. ‘But until this morning I really wasn’t sure of myself. I didn’t want to take you off on a wild-goose chase just because I had a sort of hunch, which you would have torn to pieces by applying reason to it. Your cast-iron reasoning influences me, Danglard, and I didn’t want to take the risk of being influenced until this morning. Or I might have lost the scent.’

‘The scent of rotten apples?’

‘Well, in particular the scent of the circles. Those circles that I really hated. I hated them even more when Vercors-Laury confirmed that we weren’t dealing with some authentic compulsion. Worse, there was no sign of obsession at all. Nothing about the circles indicated a genuine obsession. The whole thing just looked like an obsession, like the conventional idea someone might have about it. For instance, Danglard, it was you who pointed out that the man varied his technique: sometimes he drew the circle in a single line, but other times in two pieces, or even an oval. Would a real maniac have tolerated such sloppiness, do you think? A real obsessive sets out his little world very precisely, to the millimetre. Otherwise there’s no point having an obsession at all. An obsession is a way of organising the world, to bring it under control, to possess the impossible, so as to protect yourself from it. So a lot of circles like that, on any old date, with any old object in them, without any pattern to the place or the technique, could only be a fake obsession. And the oval circle in the rue Bertholet, around Delphine Le Nermord, was a big mistake.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Castreau. ‘Oh look, here’s the male now, yellow beak!’

‘The circle was oval, because the pavement was so narrow. Any self-respecting maniac wouldn’t have been able to cope with that. He’d have gone three streets up, simply to draw his circle. So if the circle was there, in this street, it was because it had to be, halfway between the two beats of the policemen, and in a dark street where the murder could take place. And the circle was oval, because there was no way of killing Delphine Le Nermord anywhere else – on the boulevard, for instance. Too many cops wandering about, as I said, Danglard. He had to take cover, and kill in a safe place. So too bad about the circle, it would have to be an oval. That’s a dramatic mistake for a so-called maniac.’

‘Did you realise that night that the circle man was the killer?’

‘Well, I did know at least that the circles had something wrong with them. Fake circles.’

‘Well, he certainly put on a class act, Le Nermord, didn’t he? He had me round his little finger, with his tears, his panic, his collapse, and then his confession, finally getting me to think he was innocent. All complete bullshit.’

‘Yes, he did it very well. He shook you, Danglard. Even the examining magistrate, who isn’t a soft touch at all, thought it was impossible that he could be guilty. Killing his wife in one of his own circles just made no sense. So we had no choice but to let him go, and after that we went wherever he wanted us to. He led us by the nose to the murderer he had invented, poor old Clemence. And I was no different. I just went along with it.’

‘Now the male’s brought a present for the hen,’ said Castreau. ‘A little strip of tinfoil.’

‘Aren’t you interested in what we’re talking about?’ asked Danglard.

‘Yes, but I don’t want to seem too interested because it makes me feel like an idiot. You didn’t take any notice of me, but I was thinking about this case too. The only thing I thought was that Le Nermord was a bit creepy. But I didn’t get any further than that. I looked for Clemence like the rest of us.’

‘Clemence!’ said Adamsberg. ‘He must have taken some time to find her. He had to find someone of roughly his own age and build, someone inconspicuous, and sufficiently isolated from other people that her disappearance would go unnoticed. This elderly Mademoiselle Valmont in Neuilly was just the job, a lonely old lady, obsessively answering small ads from the paper. He just had to answer one, charm her, promise her the moon, convince her to sell up and go off with him, with her two suitcases – it wasn’t too difficult. Clemence told no one but her neighbours. But since they weren’t close friends they weren’t too bothered about her adventure, they just had a good laugh about it. Nobody had ever seen the famous new fiance. And the poor old soul turned up at the rendezvous.’

‘Ah,’ said Castreau. ‘Here comes another male now. What’s he want? The female’s looking at him, there’s going to be a fight. Oh-oh, here we go.’

‘So he killed her,’ said Danglard. ‘Then he brought her all this way to bury her. Why here? Where is this?’

Adamsberg stretched a weary arm out to his left.

‘If you’re going to bury someone, you have to know a quiet spot. The lodge in the forest is the Le Nermords’ country house.’

Danglard looked through the trees at the distant house. Yes, Le Nermord had certainly made a fool of him.

‘After that,’ Danglard went on, ‘he disguised himself as Clemence. Easy enough, he had her two suitcases.’

‘Carry on, Danglard, I leave it to you now.’

‘Now the hen blackbird’s flying away,’ said Castreau. ‘She’s dropped the tinfoil. Waste of time bringing her presents. No, she’s coming back.’

‘He went to lodge with Mathilde,’ said Danglard. ‘This woman had been following him. She worried him. He had to keep an eye on Mathilde, and then use her. The empty flat was a stroke of luck. If there was a problem, Mathilde would be a perfect witness: she knew the circle man and she knew Clemence. She believed they were two different people and he worked hard to convince her of that. How did he manage the teeth, though?’

‘Well, it was you who remarked on the noise he made with his pipe against his teeth.’

‘Yes. Ah, dentures, of course. He must have filed down an old set. What about the eyes, though? He’s got blue eyes. Clemence’s were brown. Oh, contact lenses! Yes, tinted contact lenses. Beret, gloves, she was always wearing gloves. But the transformation must have taken a bit of time and a lot of trouble, in fact quite a bit of artistry. And how could he leave his own house dressed as an old woman? One of his neighbours might have seen him. Where did he change?’

‘He changed somewhere on the way. He left his house as a man and arrived in the rue des Patriarches as a woman. And vice versa, of course.’

‘So where did he do it? Some abandoned house, a workman’s hut perhaps, where he could change and leave the clothes?’

‘Something like that. We’ll have to find it. He’ll have to tell us.’