Seeking Whom He May Devour (22 page)

When Camille hung up she felt dizzy with all Danglard’s questioning. The way Adamsberg was being protected made it seem as if a team of killers was after him. She reckoned the memories of her mother had done a lot to bust the policeman’s barrage. She smiled. Queen Matilda was a pass key all to herself, and always had been. Adamsberg was in Avignon: she had the name of his hotel and his number.

Camille paced up and down beside the main road for a while, deep in thought. She had a vague idea in her head of where Avignon was on the map of France, and that it was relatively near. Tackling Adamsberg viva voce suddenly seemed infinitely preferable to speaking to him on the telephone. She did not trust a device unsuited to even moderately delicate circumstances. Telephones were fine for heavyweight and middleweight conversations but quite useless for the featherweight stuff. Calling a man you’ve not seen for years – and who is probably under deep cover – to ask him to help you find a werewolf that nobody else believes exists suddenly seemed a risky, not to say clumsy, way to proceed. Bumping into him seemed much more hopeful.

Soliman and Watchee were waiting at the back of the lorry in what had become their customary positions – the younger man sitting on the metal foothold, the straight-backed shepherd standing beside him, and the dog curled round his feet.

“He’s at Avignon,” Camille said. “I couldn’t get through. I guess we ought to be able to get there.”

“So you don’t know where Avignon is either?” asked Soliman.

“I do, in flashes. Is it far?”

Soliman looked at his watch.

“You go down to Valence and join the motorway south,” he said. “Then follow the Rhône gently downstream. Should get there by one. Aren’t you going to call ahead?”

“No. Better see him first.”

“Why?”

“Special reason,” Camille said with a shrug.

Watchee put his hand out to request the mobile phone.

“It’s almost dead,” Camille said. “Needs recharging.”

“I won’t take long,” mumbled Watchee as he wandered off.

“Who’s he calling?’ she asked Soliman.

“The flock. He’s having a wee word with the flock.”

Camille raised her eyebrows.

“So who picks up?” she asked. “A ewe? Mauricette?”

Soliman shook his head crossly.

“Don’t be silly. Buteil picks up. But after . . . well . . . Buteil puts one or two sheep on the line. He did it yesterday. He rings every day.”

“You mean to say he talks to the sheep?”

“Of course he does. Who else is he going to talk to? He tells them not to let themselves get down in the dumps, he tells them to eat properly, he tells them to keep their spirits up. He mostly talks to the leading ewe. As you might expect.”

“Are you telling me that Buteil shoves the mobile into the ear of the leading ewe?”

“Bloody hell. Yes, he does,” said Soliman. “How else is he going to talk to the sheep?”

“All right,” Camille said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just wanted to know, that’s all.”

She stared at Watchee pacing up and down with the mobile to his ear. His face had a caring expression and he was making soothing gestures with his free arm. His baritone carried all the way over and Camille could make out louder expressions like “Listen to what I’m telling you, old girl”. Soliman followed Camille’s gaze.

“Do you reckon a
flic
could take on board all that sort of thing?” he asked, waving generally at the mountains, the sheep wagon and the three of them.

“I wonder,” Camille said. “It’s not obvious.”

“I know what you mean,” Soliman said.

XXVI

AT AROUND THREE
in the afternoon camille left the city walls of Avignon behind her and crossed the bridge to the right bank of the Rhône. She sauntered along the downstream towpath in search of Adamsberg, under a broiling sun. Nobody knew exactly where he was to be found. The hotel people did not know, nor did anyone at police HQ, where he had spent half the night and which he had left at around two. All they knew was that the
commissaire
hung around on the far side of the water.

It took an hour of walking for Camille to come upon him. He was sitting quite still, on his own on a narrow strip of grass cut through the willow thicket. He was at the water’s edge, his feet touching the surface. He did not appear to be doing anything at all, but for Adamsberg sitting out in the open air was an activity in its own right. Actually, though, Camille saw as she looked at him more attentively that he
was
doing something. He was holding a long branch in the water and he was staring intently at its tip and at the eddies that this minor barrier created in the stream.
Unusually
, he had kept his leather holster-strap on over his shirt. It was a piece of gear which always made quite an impression, and it stood in stark contrast to Adamsberg’s crumpled shirt, his worn trousers, and his bare feet.

Camille was standing at three-quarters angle behind him and saw him almost in profile. He had not changed these past few years, and that did not surprise her. Not that he was exempt from the passing of time, but it left no visible mark on Adamsberg because his face was, so to speak, too eventful. Ageing leaves its signs on faces that are regular and harmonious. But from childhood Adamsberg had had irregular, discordant features, and on the asymmetric muddle of his countenance, the subtle symptoms of advancing years were overwhelmed by the chaotic effect of the ensemble.

For safety’s sake, Camille made herself stop to look again at the face she had once put on a pedestal above all others. Basically it was all in his nose and lips. A large and fairly hooked nose, well-defined and dreamy lips. They did not match, they weren’t refined, they weren’t modest. As for the rest – swarthy complexion, hollow cheeks, receding chin, hastily swept back ordinary dark hair. Brown eyes, which rarely stopped moving and often looked distant, deeply set beneath bushy eyebrows. The face was all wrong. Camille’s rigorous intellect had never solved the mystery of its unique seductiveness. Maybe it came from its intensity. Adamsberg’s face was, so to speak, overloaded, overdefined, saturated.

Camille saw it all again and ran through the list of details dispassionately. Long ago the glow in Adamsberg’s
face
had been a source of warmth and light. Today she looked on it quite neutrally, as if she was checking the bulb in a lamp. That face wasn’t speaking to her any more; and her memory wasn’t going to come up with a prompt.

She walked up to him calmly, with almost ponderous indifference. Adamsberg must have heard her, but he did not budge and kept on watching the branch that was holding back the Rhône on its path to the sea. When she was ten paces away from him she stood stock-still. Adamsberg was still looking at the river. But his left hand was holding a pistol, and pointing it straight at her.

“Stay right where you are,” he said softly. “Freeze.”

Camille did as she was instructed, without a word.

“You know I can pull the trigger much faster than you can draw,” he went on without taking his eyes off the branch in the water. “How did you find me?”

“Danglard,” Camille replied.

At the sound of this unexpected voice Adamsberg slowly turned to face her. Camille well remembered Adamsberg’s slightly graceful, utterly casual low-speed movements. He gazed at her in amazement. Gently, he dropped his guard and rather embarrassedly put the gun down on the grass beside him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was expecting someone else.”

Camille nodded awkwardly.

“Forget the gun,” he went on. “It’s because of a girl who’s obsessed with the idea of killing me.”

“I see,” Camille said politely.

“Please sit down,” said Adamsberg, motioning to a patch of grass.

Camille wavered.

“Come on, sit down,” he insisted. “You came all this way so you might as well sit down.”

He smiled.

“I killed the girl’s partner. A shot from my gun did for him as I was knocked over. Here’s where she wants to lodge her bullet,” he said, pointing to his midriff. “And that’s why she won’t get off my back. Unlike you, Camille. You’ve been keeping out of my way. Avoiding me. You made yourself really scarce.”

Camille had ended up sitting down cross-legged fifteen feet from him while he pursued the conversation single-handedly. She was waiting for the questions. Adamsberg knew perfectly well that she had not sought him out for love, but because she needed him.

He looked her over for a moment. No doubt about it: that grey jacket that was too long for her, with its cuffs down to her knuckles, those pale jeans and black boots belonged to the girl he had seen on the television news. Camille had been in the square at Saint-Victor-du-Mont, leaning against the old plane tree. He looked away.

“Made yourself very scarce,” he repeated as he pushed his branch back into the water. “Something really fearsome must have made you come and find me. In response to some kind of higher authority.”

Camille said nothing.

“So what’s happened to you?” he asked gently.

Camille ran her fingers through the dry grass, restrained by her own embarrassment but tempted to run away again.

“I need help.”

Adamsberg lifted his branch out of the water and changed his position so as to be sitting facing her, with his legs crossed. Then carefully, meticulously, he placed the branch horizontally on the ground in front of him, and between the two of them. It wasn’t quite straight so with one hand he adjusted its lie. Adamsberg had very fine hands: strong, well-proportioned, and large in relation to his overall size.

“Someone wants to harm you?”

“No.”

Her heart sank at the prospect of having to spew out the whole convoluted story of the sheep and the man without hair, Soliman and his stink-pond, the lorry and their fruitless pursuit. She was trying to find the least outlandish angle.

“But there’s the business about the sheep,” said Adamsberg. “The beast of the Mercantour.”

Camille looked up in surprise.

“Something went wrong,” the
commissaire
continued. “Something happened that you didn’t like. You’ve plunged into it without telling anyone. Your local
gendarmerie
isn’t in the know. You’re freelancing, and now you’re stuck. You’re looking for a
flic
to get you out of trouble – one who’s not going to tell you to go jump in a lake. As you’re at the end of your tether, and also because you don’t really know any other policemen, you’ve come looking for me, with very mixed feelings. Now you’ve found me. But all of a sudden you can’t remember how you got here. You don’t give a damn for the sheep. What you really want to
do
right now is to be off. To walk away from me. To take flight.”

A smile flitted over Camille’s face. Adamsberg had always fathomed things nobody else could work out. Conversely there were masses of things other people knew which remained entirely beyond him.

“How do you know that?”

“Vague smell of the mountains and sheep grease about you.”

Camille looked down at her jacket and started rubbing the sleeves, instinctively.

“Yes,” she said. “The smell does cling.”

She looked up at him. “How do you know that?”

“I saw you on the news, when it broadcast a shot of the village square.”

“Do you remember the story about the sheep?”

“Reasonably well. Huge fang-marks found in thirty-one savaged animals at Ventebrune, Pierrefort, Saint-Victor-du-Mont, Guillos, La Castille and, most recently, at La Tête du Cavalier near the village of Le Plaisse. But the main thing was the woman at Saint-Victor who met the same fate as the sheep. I therefore suppose that you knew the woman, and that’s what has been your motive for getting involved.”

Camille stared at him, unbelieving.

“Did the police take any notice of any of it?” she asked.

“The police are totally uninterested in the story,” Adamsberg said. “Apart from me.”

“Because of the wolves? Your grandfather’s wolves?”

“Maybe. Then there’s that huge monster, like something
out
of a time-warp. In the midst of so much darkness. That sparked my interest.”

“What darkness?” Camille did not understand.

“The darkness enveloping the whole story. It has a gloomy, nocturnal feel to it; you can’t see through it, but you can think through it. That’s what I’d call darkness.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. I wondered if there was someone leading the monster on. It’s done a lot of killing, brutally, not out of a need to survive. Like a mad dog, but in fact, more like a man. Then there’s Suzanne Rosselin. I don’t understand how an animal would have attacked her. Unless the beast was crazy or rabid. What I also don’t understand is the failure to capture the animal so far. Much darkness.”

Adamsberg looked at Camille and said nothing for a while. He had never found silence awkward, however long it lasted.

“Tell me what you’re up to in all this,” he said softly. “Tell me what’s gone wrong. Tell me what you expect me to do.”

Camille explained the whole story from the beginning: the Ventebrune sheep, then the wolf-hunt, then Massart and his squat figure, smooth skin and twisted legs; then there was the mastiff, the size of the bite-marks, Crassus’s disappearance and the murder of Suzanne; Soliman shutting himself in the toilet, Watchee standing stock-still, Massart gone missing; then there was the map, the pencil-marks, the werewolf with his hair inside, the abattoir in Manchester; kitting out the sheep-truck, Woops or whatever the hell the dog was called, Soliman’s definitions and
the
five candles laid out like a M; then the murder of the Sautrey pensioner; then the dead end they’d got into, the brick wall they were up against, and the pond where the soul of Suzanne still lay trapped.

Unlike Adamsberg, Camille had a mind that was fast, sharp and orderly. It took her no more than fifteen minutes to tell the whole tale.

“Did you say Sautrey? I didn’t pick that up from the news. Where is it?”

“Not far beyond the Col de la Croix-Haute, downhill from Villard-de-Lans.”

“What did you find out about that murder?”