Seeking Whom He May Devour (10 page)

As he pushed open the door of the Waters of Liffey he reckoned it must be close to eight o’clock. Adamsberg never wore a watch and relied on his inner chronometer, accurate to within ten minutes, sometimes better but never worse than that. The tang of Guinness – or of Guinness-induced vomit – hung heavy in the bar-room air which the large ceiling fan had never managed entirely to refresh. Your elbows stuck to the lacquered tables permanently tacky from spilled beer too rapidly wiped away. Adamsberg put his spiral notepad onto one such table to bag his place, and stuck his jacket unceremoniously over the chair-back. It was the best table in the room, standing under a huge wall-sign bearing three crudely painted silver turrets being consumed by heraldic flames. The arms, so he had been told, of Baile Áthe Cliath, the Gaelic Dublin.

He gave his order to Enid, a strapping, fair-haired waitress endowed with uncommon resistance to Guinness, and asked her to do him a favour by allowing him to watch the evening television news. People knew he was a
flic
and granted him the privilege, when he needed it, of using the little set that was kept tucked inside the bar. Adamsberg knelt down and switched on.

“Trouble brewing?” Enid asked in her thick Irish accent.

“There’s a wolf eating lambs, but a long way away.”

“Why’s that anything to do with you?”

“Dunno.”

“Dunno” was among the most frequent of Adamsberg’s utterances. He fell back on it neither from laziness nor
from
lack of wits, but because he really did not know the right answer and was ready to admit it. The
commissaire
’s passive ignorance bemused and maddened his deputy, who could not conceive of the possibility of taking any appropriate steps in full ignorance of the facts. Wavering was Adamsberg’s most natural element, however, and his most productive by far.

Enid went off, arms laden with dishes to serve customers seated at tables, and Adamsberg concentrated on the broadcast that had just begun. He put the volume right up as that was the only way of making out the commentary over the Waters’s hubbub. He had been following the national news since Thursday, but there’d been nothing more about the wolves of the Mercantour Wildlife Reserve. Story over. He was surprised by the apparently abrupt ending, and convinced that it was more a truce than a final victory. The story was going to pick up again, and go on in a not necessarily very nice manner towards some ineluctable fatality. Why it should do so he did not know. And why it should hold his interest he knew even less. Which is what he had said to Enid.

Adamsberg was therefore only half-surprised to see a view of the now-familiar village square of Saint-Victor-du-Mont on the screen. He bent low and put his ear to the set so as to hear the voice-over. He stood up five minutes later somewhat groggy. Was that what he had been looking for? A woman slaughtered in her own sheep-pen? Had he not been expecting it all week long, at some deeper level of intuition? Only at moments like this one, when the lower depths of his mind were validated by reality, did Adamsberg
lose
his inner poise and become almost scared of himself. He had never been entirely at ease with his lower depths. He thought them approximately as wholesome as ingrained dirt on the bottom of a witch’s cauldron.

He walked slowly back to his table. Enid had already served his regular plate, a good old baked potato with cheese filling, and Adamsberg sat down to consume it mechanically. He wondered why the death of that woman had not surprised him. Good grief, wolves do not attack humans, they scarper, like the clever good beasts they are. Maybe they might, at a pinch, go for a small child, but they would never take on an adult. The woman would really have had to have given the wolf no alternative at all. And who is dumb enough to corner a wolf? But still, that’s what must have happened. The pedantic vet from the previous broadcasts had come on screen again. Science lesson time. He’d given another demo of the carnassials, here, there, you see? The first tear, the second tear. The man was a bore. But he seemed to know his job, and he virtually certified that the woman had been done in by the teeth and jaws of a wolf, of
the
wolf, the big bad wolf of the Mercantour. Yes indeed, that ought to have surprised him, Adamsberg thought.

Adamsberg frowned, pushed away his empty plate, put sugar in his coffee. Maybe it had all seemed odd from the start. Too wonderful or too poetical to be true. When poetry bursts into real life you may be amazed and delighted, but it is never very long before you see that you have been had by a con or a scam. Maybe he had thought it unreal for a wolf out of hell to turn up and lay siege to
a
whole village. But for heaven’s sake, those really were the marks of a wolf’s bite. Maybe it was a mad dog? No, the vet had been clear it could not be that. Of course, it was not easy to make a positive identification on the basis of mere bite-marks, but no, it was not a dog. Domestication, mongrelisation, lesser height, shortening of muzzle, overlapping of premolars – Adamsberg had not got all of the explanation in detail, but the gist of it was clear: the sheer distance between the two halves of the bite made it impossible to pin the crime on a dog. Save for the special case of the giant mastiff, or bloodhound. But was there a mastiff running wild in the mountains? No, there was not. It was therefore a wolf, and a big one.

On this occasion spoor had been found – a left front paw imprinted in sheep dung, just to the right of the corpse. A print about ten centimetres wide, the size of a wolf’s tread. When men put their left foot in shit, it’s supposed to bring luck. Adamsberg wondered if it also worked for wolves.

You would really have to be rather dim to corner an animal of that kind. That’s what happens if you take it too fast. People always want to go faster, to get things over with. Never does any good. Sin of impatience. Or else this was not an ordinary wolf. Not just a big one, but psychotic too. Adamsberg opened his sketch-pad, pulled a chewed pencil from his pocket, and looked at it with moderate interest. Must be one of Danglard’s. He could chew away a warehouseful of pencils. Adamsberg rotated it in his fingers and dreamily studied the deep incisions in the wood made by the teeth of man.

XIII

CAMILLE HEARD THE
motorbike starting up at dawn. She had not even heard Johnstone getting up. He was a very quiet Canadian and mindful of Camille’s sleep. For himself, he did not mind much whether he slept or not, but Camille considered sleep as one of life’s key values. She could now hear the engine fading into the distance. She glanced at the alarm clock, and wondered what all the hurry was about.

But of course, it was about Massart. Johnstone was trying to catch him before he left for the slaughterhouse at Digne. She turned over and went straight back to sleep.

At nine o’clock Johnstone returned and shook her shoulder.

“Massart didn’t sleep at his place last night. His car is still there. Didn’t go to work.”

Camille sat up and rubbed her hair.

“Gonna tell the police.”

“Tell them what?”

“That Massart has gone AWOL. Have to search the mountains.”

“You won’t say anything about Suzanne?”

Johnstone shook his head.

“Gonna go through his place first,” he said.

“Search his house? Are you crazy?”

“Have to find him.”

“What good would searching his place do?”

“Could tell us where he’s gone.”

“What do you think you’ll find? His werewolf suit on a hanger in the closet?”

Johnstone shrugged. “Camille, put a sock in it, for God’s sake. Come on.”

Forty-five minutes later they walked into Massart’s little shack, built half of cinder-block and half of planks. The door wasn’t even locked.

“I prefer it that way,” Camille said.

There were only two rooms: a barely furnished, gloomy main room, a bedroom and a bathroom. In one corner of the main room a large freezer provided the only visible trace of the modern world.

“Filthy,” Johnstone muttered as he looked around. “The French are filthy. Have to look in the freezer.”

“Do it yourself,” Camille said, defensively.

Johnstone collected what was on top of the freezer and put the whole lot – a cap, a pocket lamp, a newspaper, a road map and some onions – on Massart’s dining table. Then he opened the lid.

“And so?” asked Camille, who had retreated to the opposite side of the room.

“Meat, meat and more meat,” Johnstone reported.

He rummaged among the contents with one hand, right down to the bottom.

“Hare, rabbit, beef, and a quarter-carcass of a deer. Massart’s been poaching. For himself, or for his dog, or for both.”

“Any pieces of lamb?”

“No.”

Johnstone dropped the lid back down. Camille was relieved, and sat down at the table to unfold the map.

“Maybe he marks his tracks through the mountains,” she said.

Johnstone moved silently to the bedroom, lifted the mattress, then the base of the bed, opened the drawers in the bedside table and the chest of drawers, looked into the little wardrobe. All filthy.

He came back into the main room wiping his hands on his trousers.

“It’s not a local map,” Camille said. “It’s a map of France.”

“Anything written on it?”

“Dunno. Can’t see anything in this light.”

Johnstone shrugged, opened the table drawer and emptied its contents onto the oilcloth.

“Stuffs his drawers with piles of shit,” he said. “Utter crap.”

Camille went to the open front door and looked at the map in the light of day.

“He’s marked a route in red pencil,” she said. “All the way from Saint-Victor to . . .”

Johnstone surveyed the scattered objects briefly, then stuffed the lot back into the drawer and blew away the dust that had settled on the table. Camille was unfolding the other half of the map.

“. . . to Calais,” she concluded. “Then it crosses the Channel and ends in England.”

“A trip,” Johnstone decided. “Irrelevant.”

“Along secondary roads. It would take days and days.”

“So he likes the byways.”

“But not people. What’s he going to England for?”

“Forget it,” said Johnstone. “No connection. Anyway it could have been ages ago.”

Camille folded the map in half again and took another look at the area of the Mercantour.

“Look at this,” she said.

Johnstone looked up at her.

“Come and see,” Camille repeated. “Three pencilled Xs.”

Johnstone bent over the map.

“Can’t see them.”

“There,” Camille said, pointing with her finger. “They’re hardly visible.”

Johnstone took the map outside and creased his brow as he studied the red marks in full daylight.

“The three sheep farms,” he said between his teeth. “Saint-Victor, Ventebrune, Pierrefort.”

“Can’t be sure. The scale’s too big.”

“Yes, we can,” Johnstone said with a shake of his long hair. “Sheep farms.”

“But so what? All it proves is that Massart is interested
in
the savagings, same as you, same as everyone. He wants to work out how the wolf is moving around. You’ve done exactly the same thing, you’ve plotted the sites on the map of the Mercantour.”

“In that case he’d have put crosses on the other savagings, the ones that happened last year and the year before.”

“But if he’s only interested in the big wolf?”

Johnstone folded the map in a trice, put it in his jacket and closed the door behind him.

“We’re off,” he said.

“What about the map? Aren’t you going to put it back?”

“Taking it. To have a closer look.”

“And what about the
flics
? What if they discover what you’ve done?”

“Do you think the
flics
are bloody well going to care about a map?”

“You’re talking like Suzanne.”

“I told you. She turned my head.”

“Turned it a bit too far. Put the map back.”

“Camille, you’re the one who’s trying to protect Massart. It’s better for him if we slip his map out from under.”

When they reached home Camille opened the shutters wide while Johnstone spread the map of France on the wooden table.

“This map stinks,” he said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Camille said.

“It stinks of grease. Dunno what you French have up your noses so as smells never bother you.”

“We’ve been deep-fried in two thousand years of
historical
fat, that’s what. You uncooked Canadians can’t understand.”

“Has to be something like that,” said Johnstone. “Has to be why old countries always stink. All right,” he added, handing her a magnifying glass, “you give that a good look. I’m going down to see the
flics
.”

Camille bent over the map and studied the roads, moving the glass slowly over the whole Mercantour area.

Johnstone took a whole hour to get back.

“They kept you a while,” Camille said.

“Yeah. Wondered why I was fussing over Massart. How did I know he’d run off. Nobody round here gives a damn for that man. Couldn’t tell them about the werewolf.”

“So what did you say?”

“I told them Massart had made a rendezvous with me on Sunday to show me a big paw-print he’d spotted near Mont Vence.”

“Not bad.”

“And there was nobody there in the morning, or in the evening. So I got worried, and went back to see this morning.”

“Sounds logical.”

“In the end, they got worried too. Rang the slaughterhouse at Digne. Nobody’s seen him there either. So they’ve just called in the men from Puygiron and given them instructions to comb the area around the shack. If they haven’t found Massart by two o’clock, they’ll call in the
gendarme
s from Entrevaux as well. I want to eat, Camille. I’m starving. Fold the map away. Did you find anything else?”

“Four more
X
s, very faint. All of them between RN202 and the Mercantour.”

Johnstone raised his head interrogatively.

“They correspond roughly to Andelle and Anélias, east of Saint-Victor, to Guillos, ten kilometres north, and to La Castille, at the very edge of the National Park.”