The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg) (22 page)

‘I’ve seen doctors, you know,’ said Lina, savouring her mouthful. ‘They put me through a battery of tests at the hospital in Lisieux, physiological and psychiatric tests, two years’ worth. I was an interesting case, because of St Teresa of Lisieux, of course. You’re looking for some kind of
reassuring explanation, but I’ve been there too. There isn’t one. They couldn’t find any lithium deficiency or anything else that makes you see the Virgin Mary here and there, or hear voices. They said I was perfectly well balanced, stable, and even that I seem to be a very reasonable person. And they let me go home without giving me any diagnosis.’

‘So what
is
the diagnosis, Lina? That these ghostly horsemen really exist, that they really come galloping along the Chemin de Bonneval, and that you really see them?’

‘I can’t tell you if they exist, commissaire. But I can tell you I’ve seen them. As far back as people can remember there’s always been someone here who sees the Riders of Ordebec go past. Perhaps there’s an ancient cloud round here, some mist, a disturbance, a memory still hanging in the air. And I just walked into it like walking into a fog bank.’

‘So what does he look like, this Lord Hellequin?’

‘Oh, very striking,’ Lina replied at once. ‘A grand majestic head, and he has long blond hair, kind of bedraggled, flowing to his shoulders, over his armour. But terrifying. Well,’ she added hesitantly and in a much lower voice, ‘it’s because his skin isn’t normal.’

Lina interrupted herself, in order to clear her plate, well ahead of Adamsberg. Then she leaned back in her chair looking even more glowing and relaxed after eating her fill.

‘Enjoy the food?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘Fantastic,’ she replied sincerely. ‘I’ve never been here before. Can’t afford it.’

‘We’ll order some cheese and dessert,’ said Adamsberg, hoping that the young woman would reach a state of complete relaxation.

‘Finish your dish first,’ she said kindly. ‘You don’t eat fast, do you? And people say policemen do everything in a rush.’

‘I’m incapable of doing anything in a rush. Even when I run, I run slowly.’

‘Anyway,’ Lina was saying, ‘to prove I’m telling the truth, the first time I saw the Riders, nobody’d ever told me about them.’

‘But I hear that in Ordebec everyone knows about them, even without being told. Apparently people drink it in with their mothers’ milk.’

‘Not in our house. My parents always lived a bit away from everyone. I bet you’ve been told that people didn’t want to know my father.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s quite true. When I told my mother what I’d seen – I was crying and screaming back then – she thought I was ill, nervous exhaustion, as they used to say in those days. She’d never heard of Hellequin and his Riders, nor had my father. And he used to come back late from hunting, by the Chemin de Bonneval. But everyone who
knew
about this legend, they took good care not to go down that path after nightfall. Even people who don’t believe it avoid going there.’

‘So when was the first time you saw the Riders?’

‘I was eleven. It was just two days after my father had been killed – his skull was split open with an axe. I’ll have some floating islands, with a lot of flaked almonds please,’ she said to the waitress.

‘An axe?’ said Adamsberg, somewhat stunned. ‘Was that how your father died?’

‘Yep, felled like a pig,’ said Lina and calmly mimed the action, bringing down the edge of her hand on the tabletop. ‘He was struck on the head and chest.’

Adamsberg observed this lack of emotion and reflected that his honey
kouglof
was perhaps without a soft centre.

‘After that I had nightmares for ages, and the doctor gave me sedatives. Not because of my father being chopped in two, but because I was terrified of seeing those horsemen again. You have to realise they’re all rotten, decayed, like Lord Hellequin’s face. Decomposed,’ she added with a shudder. ‘They don’t have all their limbs, the men or the horses, they make this horrible noise, but the cries of the living creatures they take away with them, they’re even worse. Well. Luckily nothing happened after that for about eight years, and I thought I was out of it and it had just been, you know, some nervous thing when I was little. But then when I was nineteen, I saw them again. You do understand, don’t you, commissaire, this isn’t a nice story, it’s not one I’m making up to show off. It’s ghastly, it’s a burden, it’s my fate, and I even tried to kill myself twice. Then this psychiatrist from Caen, he managed to make me accept I’ve got
to live with the Riders. They scare me and I don’t want to see them, but at least now they don’t stop me living my life more or less normally. Could I have a few more almonds please?’

‘Of course,’ said Adamsberg, raising his hand to call the waitress over.

‘It’s not going to cost too much?’

‘The police will pay.’

Lina laughed, as she waved her spoon. ‘For once the police will pay to make amends.’

Adamsberg looked blank.

‘Amends, almonds, just a joke.’

‘Sorry, I’m a bit slow on the uptake. Would you mind telling me a bit more about your father? Did they find out who killed him?’

‘No, never.’

‘Was anyone suspected?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Who?’

‘Me,’ said Lina, smiling again. ‘I heard this yelling and I ran upstairs, and I found him in his bedroom, covered in blood. My brother Hippo, who was only eight, saw me holding the axe. And he told the gendarmes. He didn’t mean any harm, he was just answering their questions.’

‘What do you mean, you were holding the axe?’

‘I picked it up. The gendarmes thought I’d wiped the handle, because they didn’t find any fingerprints on it except mine. In the end, after Léo and the count came along and helped us, they left me in peace. The window was open, it would have been easy for the killer to get away. Nobody liked my father, just like nobody liked Herbier. Whenever he had one of his violent turns, people said it was the bullet shifting inside his head. I didn’t understand what they meant when I was little.’

‘Neither do I. What was shifting?’

‘The bullet. My mother says before the Algerian war, when she married him, he was more or less OK. But when he was over there, he got this bullet lodged in his brain and they couldn’t get it out. He was taken off active service and they put him on to interrogations. Torturing people. I’m going to leave you for a few minutes, I’m going outside for a smoke.’

Adamsberg joined her, taking out a half-crushed cigarette from his pocket. He had a close-up view of the honey-coloured hair, unusually thick for a woman from Normandy, and the freckles on her gleaming shoulders when the shawl slipped, though she quickly twitched it back.

‘Did he beat you?’

‘Did yours?’

‘No. He was a shoemaker.’

‘That’s nothing to do with it.’

‘No.’

‘Well, he never touched
me.
But he beat my brothers to pulp. When Antonin was a baby, he picked him up by his heels and threw him downstairs. Just like that. Fourteen fractures. He was in plaster from head to foot for a year. And Martin wouldn’t eat his food. He used to secretly put stuff from his plate into the hollow leg of the table. One day my father saw him, and he made him get it back out of the table leg with a hook and eat it all. It was rotten of course. Stuff like that, that’s how he was.’

‘What about Hippo?’

‘Even worse.’

Lina ground out her cigarette underfoot and pushed the stub neatly into the gutter. Adamsberg got out his mobile – the second secret one – feeling it vibrate in his pocket.

Arriving tonite, address svp. LVB

Veyrenc. Veyrenc would snatch his lovely
kouglof
from under his nose, with his tender face and his girlish mouth.

No! all OK here
, he texted back.

All not OK. Address svp.

Phone me.

Fckng address fast.

Adamsberg came back to the table and typed in Léo’s address unwillingly, his mood darkened. Clouds gathering in the west, rain tonight.

‘Problems?’

‘A colleague is coming out here,’ said Adamsberg, pocketing the mobile.

‘Well, we were always round at Léo’s,’ Lina continued regardless. ‘She educated us, her and the count. They say she isn’t going to survive, that
her mechanism can’t function any more. You found her, they say. And she said something to you.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Adamsberg, holding up his hand to make her stop. He took out a pen and wrote ‘mechanism’ on his paper napkin. A word which the doctor with the name of a fish had used. A word that made his eyes mist over, and awakened an idea in there somewhere, but he couldn’t identify it. He put the napkin in his pocket and looked at Lina with the eyes of a man waking from sleep.

‘So did you see your
father
among the Riders, when you were eleven?’

‘There was one man with them, yes, but there was all this flame and smoke, he had his hands up to his face, screaming. So I couldn’t be sure it was him. But I suppose it was. I recognised his shoes.’

‘And was anyone seized the second time?’

‘That time, there was an old woman. We knew her, she used to go round throwing stones at people’s shutters, and shouting curses, she was the kind of woman who scared the local kids.’

‘Was she supposed to have murdered anyone?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Unless perhaps her husband. He’d died long before.’

‘And did she die?’

‘Yes, nine days after the army appeared. But peacefully, in her bed. After that I never saw the Riders until this last time, a month ago.’

‘And the fourth living person, did you not recognise them? Man, woman?’

‘A man, but I’m not sure. Because a horse had fallen on him, and his hair was on fire, you see. I couldn’t make out his face.’

Lina put her hand on the curve of her stomach, as if to appreciate with her fingers the meal she had eaten so voraciously.

*   *   *

It was four thirty by the time Adamsberg arrived back at Léo’s house on foot. His body was feeling the strain from having struggled against its desires. From time to time, he took out the paper napkin, looked again at the word ‘mechanism’ and put it back in his pocket. No, the word meant
absolutely nothing to him. If there was an idea in there somewhere, it must be lying in the deepest recesses, wedged under a rock in the ocean and masked by fronds of seaweed. Sooner or later, it would release itself and float zigzagging up to the surface. It was the only way Adamsberg knew how to think. Wait, cast his net across the surface of the water, and see what it caught.

In the guest house, Danglard, his sleeves rolled up, was in charge of preparations for supper, while holding forth under the attentive gaze of Zerk.

‘It’s very rare for anyone’s little toe to look good,’ he was saying. ‘It’s usually twisted, deformed and turned under, not to mention the nail, which is very reduced in size. Now, when they’ve browned on one side, you can turn them over.’

Adamsberg leaned against the jamb of the door and watched as his son obeyed the commandant’s instructions.

‘And it’s our shoes that do that to it?’ Zerk was asking.

‘Evolution. We walk less than we did, so the little toe has atrophied, it’s gradually disappearing. One day, thousands of years from now, it will just be a fragment of toenail on the side of the foot, like on a horse. But shoes don’t help of course.’

‘Like wisdom teeth. They don’t have room to come through.’

‘Correct. The little toe is the wisdom tooth of the foot, so to speak.’

‘Or the wisdom tooth is the little toe of the mouth.’

‘Yes, but if you put it that way, it’s less easy to understand.’

Adamsberg came inside, and poured himself a cup of coffee.

‘How did it go?’ Danglard asked.

‘She irradiated me.’

‘Bad vibes?’

‘No, golden. She’s a bit plump, her teeth stick out a bit, but she irradiated me.’

‘Dangerous,’ commented Danglard disapprovingly.

‘I don’t know if I ever told you about this kind of honey cake I once had at my aunt’s when I was little, called a
kouglof.
She’s like that, only life-size.’

‘Remember that this Vendermot woman is a morbid fantasist.’

‘Possibly. But that’s not the way she seems. She’s both confident and childlike, chatty and prudent.’

‘Perhaps her toes are not so pretty.’

‘Shrinking with evolution,’ put in Zerk.

‘Doesn’t bother me.’

‘If it’s reached that stage,’ Danglard said, ‘you’re no longer fit to pursue this inquiry. You can cook the dinner and I’ll take over from you.’

‘No, I’m going to visit her brothers at seven. Veyrenc is coming down this evening, commandant.’

Danglard took the time to pour half a glass of water on to the pieces of chicken, covered the pan and turned down the gas.

‘Now you let it simmer for an hour like that,’ he said to Zerk, before turning to face Adamsberg again. ‘We don’t need Veyrenc. Why did you ask him to come?’

‘He invited himself, for no reason. Danglard, in your view, why would a woman put a shawl round her shoulders if it’s a hot day?’

‘It might rain,’ said Zerk. ‘There are clouds in the west.’

‘To hide something she’s ashamed of,’ Danglard contradicted him. ‘A blemish perhaps or the mark of the devil.’

‘Well, it still doesn’t bother me,’ Adamsberg repeated.

‘Those who see the Furious Army, commissaire, are not sunny, benevolent individuals. They must be dark and sinister souls. Irradiated or not, you’d do well to bear that in mind.’

Adamsberg didn’t answer, but brought out his napkin once more.

‘What’s that?’ Danglard asked.

‘It’s a word that doesn’t mean anything to me, “mechanism”.’

‘So who wrote it?’

‘I did of course.’

Zerk nodded, as if he understood perfectly.

XXIII

Lina showed him into the main room, where three men were waiting, lined up behind the large table and looking wary. Adamsberg had asked Danglard to come along, so that he could verify the irradiation for himself. The commissaire easily identified the middle brother, Martin: tall, skinny and brown, like a branch of dried wood, the one who had had to eat the food scraped out of the table leg. Hippolyte, the oldest brother, aged about forty, had an impressive head, and blond hair rather like his sister’s, but without the same radiance. Tall and solidly built, he was extending a large, slightly deformed hand. At the end of the table, Antonin watched apprehensively as the two men approached. Thin and dark like Martin, but better proportioned, he was holding his arms folded tightly across his waist in a posture of protection: the youngest one, the one made of clay. About thirty-five, looking a bit older perhaps, because of his drawn face, in which his anxious eyes seemed very large. From her armchair in an inconspicuous corner of the room, the mother made only a slight movement of her head. She was wearing a shabby grey blouse instead of the flowered overall.