This Night's Foul Work (15 page)

‘There are stems and stems,' said Mathias.

He moved his hand quickly from rose to rose, going round the grave on his knees and feeling the soil in various places, like a weaver testing the quality of silk. Then he raised his head and smiled at Adamsberg.

‘See it?' he asked.

Adamsberg shook his head.

‘Some of the rose stems move if you just touch them lightly, but others are embedded well in. All the ones here are still where they were left,' he said, pointing to the flowers at the bottom end of the grave. ‘But these ones are just loose on the surface – they've been moved. See?'

‘I'm listening,' said Adamsberg, with a frown.

‘What it means is that someone has dug into the grave,' said Mathias, carefully removing the flowers from the head of the grave, ‘but only part of it. Then the withered flowers were put back over the top, to make it look as if the earth hadn't been disturbed. But, you know,' he went on, standing up in a single movement, ‘it still shows. A man can move a rose stem and a thousand years later you can still tell he did it.'

Adamsberg nodded, impressed. So if he touched the petal of a flower tonight, in the dark, without telling anyone, a thousand years in the future some guy like Mathias would know all about it. The idea that all his actions might leave their ineradicable traces behind seemed a little alarming. But he was reassured by looking at the prehistorian, who was taking a trowel out of his back pocket and cleaning it with his fingers. Experts like Mathias didn't grow on trees.

‘It's very difficult,' said Mathias, pursing his lips. ‘It's a hole that's been filled in again with exactly the same earth. It's invisible. So someone dug a hole, but where?'

‘You can't find it?' asked Adamsberg, suddenly anxious.

‘Not by looking.'

‘How, then?'

‘With my fingers. When you can't see anything, you can always feel. But it takes longer.'

‘Feel what?' asked Justin.

‘The edges of the trench, the gap between its edge and the surrounding area. Where one bit of earth meets another. There's got to be a line, and it's just a matter of finding it.'

Mathias ran his fingers over the apparently uniform surface of the soil. Then he seemed to dig his fingertips into a phantom crack, which he slowly followed. Like a blind man, Mathias was not actually looking at the ground, as if the illusion provided by his eyes might have spoiled the search; he was concentrating entirely on his sense of touch. Gradually he traced the outline of a rough circle about one metre fifty across, which he then redrew with the tip of the trowel.

‘I've got it now, Adamsberg. I'm going to dig it out myself, so that I can follow the sides of the hole, if you can get your men to take the earth away. That'd be quicker.'

Eighty centimetres down, Mathias looked up, pulled off his shirt, and put his hands over the sides of the hole.

‘I don't think whoever it was was burying anything. We're too deep now. He was trying to reach the coffin. There were two people.'

‘Correct.'

‘One was digging and the other was emptying the bucket. At this point, they swapped over. No two people handle a pickaxe the same way.'

Mathias took up the trowel again and plunged into the hole. They
had borrowed spades and buckets from the keeper, and Justin and Veyrenc were emptying the soil out. Mathias held out some gravel to Adamsberg.

‘When they filled it in, they picked up a bit of gravel from the alleyway. The one with the pickaxe was getting tired, his strokes are less straight. They haven't buried anything in here – the hole's quite empty.'

The young man continued to dig for an hour in silence, breaking it only to say: ‘They've swapped over again' and ‘They've changed the pickaxe for something smaller.' Finally, Mathias stood up and leaned his elbows on the edge of the hole, which was now more than waist-deep.

‘By the state of the roses,' he said, ‘I suppose the man in the grave hasn't been there long.'

‘Three and a half months. And it's a woman.'

‘Well, this is the parting of the ways, Adamsberg. I'll leave the rest to you.'

Mathias pressed his hands on the edges of the hole and jumped out.

Adamsberg looked in.

‘You haven't reached the coffin. They stopped before it?'

‘I've reached the coffin. But it's open.'

The men of the squad exchanged glances. Retancourt moved forward. Justin and Danglard stepped back.

‘The wood of the lid has been forced in with a pick and pulled off. More earth has fallen inside. You called me to explore the earth, not the corpse. I don't want to see it.'

Mathias put his trowel back in his pocket and rubbed his large hands on his trousers.

‘Marc's uncle's expecting you for supper some day, you know,' he said to Adamsberg.

‘Yes.'

‘We don't have much money these days. Let us know ahead of time, so Marc can pinch a bottle and something to eat. Rabbit, shellfish? Would that do you?'

‘That would be perfect.'

Mathias shook hands with the
commissaire
, smiled briefly at the others, and loped off, carrying his shirt over his arm.

D
ANGLARD WAS EXAMINING HIS DESSERT, AN EXPRESSION OF SHOCK ON HIS
pale face. He had a horror of exhumations and other atrocious aspects of the profession. The idea that some diabolical grave-robber should be forcing him to look into an open coffin was driving him to the edge of psychic collapse.

‘Eat up, Danglard,' Adamsberg insisted. ‘You need some sugar. And drink your wine.'

‘Hell's bells, they must be seriously sick to want to put something in a coffin,' Danglard muttered.

‘To put something in, or perhaps to take something out.'

‘Whatever. Surely there are enough hiding places in the world not to go poking about there.'

‘Maybe this person was in a hurry. Or perhaps they'd put something into the coffin before they screwed it down.'

‘Must be something very precious if he had the stomach to go and fetch it three months later,' commented Retancourt. ‘Money or drugs, perhaps – it always comes back to that.'

‘What doesn't fit,' Adamsberg said, ‘is not so much whether this individual is sick. It's that he chose the head of the coffin and not the foot. After all, there's less room at the head, and it's much more distressing.'

Danglard nodded silently, still contemplating his dessert.

‘Unless whatever it was was
already
in the coffin,' said Veyrenc. ‘If he didn't put it there himself, he didn't have any choice.'

‘For instance?'

‘Earrings, maybe, or a necklace belonging to the dead woman.'

‘Jewel robberies are deeply uninteresting,' muttered Danglard.

‘People have been robbing tombs since the beginning of time,
capitaine
, and precisely for stuff like that. We're going to have to find out if this woman was rich. Anything on the register?'

‘Elisabeth Châtel, unmarried, no children, born at Villebosc-sur-Risle, near Rouen,' Danglard reeled off.

‘What is it with these people from Normandy? I can't seem to get away from them. What time are we expecting Ariane?'

‘Who's Ariane?'

‘The pathologist.'

‘Six o'clock.'

Adamsberg pushed his finger round the rim of his wineglass, producing a painful whine. ‘Eat the damn pudding,
capitaine
. You don't have to stick around for the rest of this.'

‘If you're staying, I'm staying.'

‘Sometimes, Danglard, you have a medieval way of carrying on. Hear that, Retancourt? I stay, he stays.'

Retancourt shrugged, and Adamsberg once more made a strident noise with his wineglass. The television set in the café was transmitting a rowdy football match. The
commissaire
stared for a while at the figures running all over the pitch, their movements followed with fascination by the dining customers, whose heads were all turned towards the screen. Adamsberg had never been able to understand this passion for football matches. If some fellows liked kicking a ball into a goal mouth, which he could well understand, why give yourself the bother of having to do it against another lot of characters who were determined to stop you? As if the world wasn't full enough
already of people who stopped you kicking the ball where you wanted it to go.

‘What about you, Retancourt?' Adamsberg asked. ‘Are you staying? Veyrenc can go home, he's exhausted.'

‘I'll stay,' said Retancourt rather sulkily.

‘How long for, Violette?'

Adamsberg smiled. Retancourt untied and redid her ponytail, then got up to go to the washroom.

‘Why are you bugging her?' Danglard asked when the other two were out of earshot.

‘Because she's getting away from me.'

‘Where to?'

‘To the New Recruit. He's powerful – he's going to drag her off.'

‘If he wants to.'

‘That's just it, we don't know what he wants. It's going to be a worry. He's trying to place his kick somewhere, but what kind of a kick and where? This isn't the kind of game where we can afford to be caught off guard.'

Adamsberg took out his notebook, its pages now sticking together, wrote four names on it and tore out the sheet.

‘When you've got a moment, Danglard, can you get me some info on these four names?'

‘Who are they?'

‘They're the ones who cut up his scalp when he was a kid. It's left visible traces on the outside, but much worse ones on the inside.'

‘What am I looking for?'

‘I just want to know if they're alive and well.'

‘Is this serious?'

‘Shouldn't be. I hope not.'

‘You said there were five of them.'

‘Yes, there were.'

‘So what about the fifth one?'

‘Well?'

‘Well, what do we do about him?'

‘The fifth one, Danglard, I'll take care of personally.'

M
ORDENT AND
L
AMARRE, WHO WERE PART OF THE DAY SHIFT, WERE BOTH
wearing breathing masks as they finished extracting the sediments that had fallen into the coffin. Adamsberg was kneeling at the edge of the pit and passing buckets to Justin. Danglard was sitting on a tombstone about fifty metres away, with his legs crossed and the air of an other-worldly English aristocrat. He was staying at the scene as promised, but keeping his distance. The more oppressive reality became, the more Danglard cultivated an elegant stance, self-control combined with a kind of cult of nonchalance. The
commandant
had always counted on the cut of his British-style suits to compensate for his unprepossessing appearance. His father – not to mention his grandfather, a coal miner in Le Creusot – would have detested this kind of attitude. But then his father should have made more of an effort to have a better-looking son; he was simply reaping what he had, literally, sown. Danglard dusted off his lapels. If only he had had a crooked smile and a tender cheek, like the New Recruit, he would have tried to lure Retancourt away from Adamsberg. The others in the squad dismissed her as ‘too fat' or ‘too big to handle', the cruel judgement bandied about in the
Brasserie des Philosophes
. But Danglard considered her perfect.

From his observation post, he watched the pathologist in turn go
down into the pit, using a ladder. She had put a set of green overalls on top of her clothes, but had not bothered to put on a mask, any more than Roman would have. These pathologists had always amazed Danglard. They were so unconcerned, tapping corpses casually on the shoulder, sometimes making childish jokes, and yet they had to spend their days in abominable surroundings. But the truth was, Danglard reflected, that they were professionals, relieved not to have to deal with the anguish of the living. Perhaps in this branch of post-mortem medicine there was a measure of tranquillity.

Night had fallen, and Dr Lagarde was completing her work under the light of arc lamps. Danglard watched her climb easily back up the ladder, pull off her gloves and toss them casually on to the heap of soil before going over to Adamsberg. From a distance, it seemed to him that Retancourt was sulking. The familiarity that linked the
commissaire
and the pathologist visibly irritated her. All the more since Ariane Lagarde had a formidable reputation, and even in her earth-stained overalls she was still a very beautiful woman. Adamsberg took off his mask and led the doctor away from the pit.

‘Jean-Baptiste, there's nothing to be seen but the head of a woman who's been dead three or four months. No mutilation, no violence. Everything's there, and all present and correct. No more, no less. I wouldn't suggest you bother to bring the whole coffin up, you'll just find the cadaver inside.'

‘Ariane, I'm trying to understand what's gone on. The grave-robbers were paid handsomely to open up this tomb. Then they were killed to shut them up. Why?'

‘You're tilting at windmills. We can't always tell what lunatics are after. I'll compare the earth here with the earth that was under Diala and La Paille's fingernails. Did you get me some samples?'

‘Every thirty centimetres.'

‘Perfect. You should eat something, then go home and get some sleep. I'll come with you.'

‘He must have wanted something from the body, Ariane, this killer.'

‘
She
wanted, you mean. I told you it was a woman, for heaven's sake.'

‘OK, for the sake of argument.'

‘I'm certain about that, Jean-Baptiste.'

‘If it's just a question of height, that isn't enough.'

‘I've got other indications.'

‘All right. So the
female
killer wanted to collect something from the body in the grave.'