This Night's Foul Work (7 page)

‘But the cops are so dumb they can't see it when it's staring them in the face. Stupid bastards.'

‘It's only a stag, though,' objected the objector.

‘You're stupid too, Alphonse. If I was a cop, I'd get going after this so-and-so – and quickly, too.'

‘Me too,' murmured Adamsberg.

‘Ah, you see, even this guy from the Pyrenees agrees with me. ‘Cos a massacre like that, Alphonse, you listen to me, it means there's some maniac loose out there. And you better believe me, I know what I'm talking about – you'll be hearing more about him before long.'

‘The Pyrenean agrees with that, too,' said Adamsberg, while the old man started to refill his glass for him.

‘Ah, see that, and he isn't even a hunter!'

‘Nope,' said Adamsberg. ‘He's a cop.'

Anglebert suspended his arm, holding the bottle of white wine over the glass. Adamsberg met his gaze. The challenge began. With a slight nudge, Adamsberg indicated that he would like the glass filled up. Anglebert didn't move.

‘We're not big fans of the cops round here,' said Anglebert, still not moving his arm.

‘Who is?' Adamsberg rejoined.

‘Ah, but here we're even less their fans than anywhere else.'

‘I didn't say I was their fan, I said I was a cop.'

‘You're not a fan, then?'

‘Wouldn't be much point, would there?'

The old man screwed up his eyes, concentrating all his attention on this unexpected duel.

‘So why are you a cop, then?'

‘Because of a lack of consideration.'

The rapid reply was above the heads of everyone there, including Adamsberg, who would have been hard put to it to explain what he meant. But nobody dared to reveal his puzzlement.

‘Stands to reason,' said the punctuator.

And as if a film had been paused for a moment, the movement of Anglebert's arm resumed, his elbow went up and the wine poured into Adamsberg's glass.

‘Or, you might say, because of this kind of thing,' Adamsberg added, pointing to the slaughtered stag. ‘When did it happen?'

‘A month back now. Keep the paper if you're interested. Because the Evreux cops don't give a damn.'

‘Stupid pricks,' said Robert.

‘What's that?' said Adamsberg, pointing to a stain on the animal's side.

‘The heart,' said Hilaire with disgust. ‘He's put two bullets into the ribs, than he's took out the heart with a knife and cut it to bits.'

‘Is that a tradition? To take the heart out?'

There was a fresh moment of indecision.

‘You tell him, Robert,' Anglebert ordered.

‘Surprises me, all the same,' said Robert, ‘that you're from the mountains and you don't know anything about hunting.'

‘I used to go out with the men on trips,' Adamsberg admitted. ‘And I went up in the pigeon-shooting hides we have down there, like all the kids.'

‘All the same.'

‘But nothing else.'

‘Well, now. When you make a kill,' Robert explained, ‘first you take the skin off to make a cover. Then you cut off the honours and the haunches. You don't touch its innards. You turn it over and you carve the fillets to keep. Then you chop off the head, for the antlers. When you've finished, you cover the animal with its skin again.'

‘That's right.'

‘But bloody hell, you don't go cutting its heart out. Yeah, in the old days, some people used to. But we've moved on from then. Nowadays you leave the heart inside.'

‘Who used to do it?' asked a voice.

‘Never you mind – it was way back.'

‘Whoever it was,' said Alphonse, ‘what he was after was killing it, then ripping its heart out. He didn't even take the horns, and that's the only thing people take when they don't know nothing about it.'

Adamsberg looked up at the large antlers displayed on the wall of the café, over the door.

‘No,' said Robert. ‘That's crap, that lot.'

‘Don't talk so loud,' said Anglebert, pointing to the counter, where the café owner was playing dominoes with a couple of youngsters too inexperienced to join in the gathering of the elders.

Robert cast a glance at the owner, then turned back to the
commissaire
.

‘He's from away,' he said.

‘Meaning?'

‘He's from Caen, not from round here.'

‘Caen's in Normandy, isn't it?'

There were a few exchanges of glances and pulled faces. Could they
really trust this mountain dweller with such intimate and painful information?

‘Caen's in
Lower
Normandy,' Anglebert explained. ‘Here you're in Upper Normandy.'

‘And that's important?'

‘Let's just say you don't compare them. The real Normandy's the Upper one, here.'

Anglebert's gnarled finger pointed to the wooden table. As if Upper Normandy could be reduced to the size of the café in Haroncourt.

‘But you watch out,' Robert added. ‘Over there in Calvados, they'll tell you different. But don't you listen to them.'

‘All right,' Adamsberg promised.

‘And over there, it rains all the time, poor sods.'

Adamsberg looked up at the windows, against which the rain was beating continuously.

‘There's rain and rain,' Oswald explained. ‘Here, it doesn't rain, it's just a bit damp. Don't you have them where you come from? Outsiders?'

‘Yes,' Adamsberg agreed. ‘There's bad feeling between the people in the Gave de Pau valley and the Gave d'Ossau valley.'

‘Yeah, course there is,' agreed Anglebert, as if he already knew all about that.

Although he was well used to the ponderous music of the evening male ritual, Adamsberg understood that the Normans, true to their reputation, were more difficult to get through to than other people. They didn't say much. Here their sentences came out cautiously and suspiciously, as if testing the ground with every word. They didn't speak loudly, nor did they tackle their subjects head-on. They went round them, as if putting a subject directly on the table was as indelicate as throwing down a piece of raw meat.

‘So why is that crap?' Adamsberg asked, pointing to the antlers over the door.

‘Because those are
cast
antlers. OK for decoration, to show off. Go
and have a look if you don't believe me. You can see the bump at the base of the bone.'

‘It's a bone?'

‘Don't know a thing, do you?' said Alphonse sadly, sounding regretful that Angelbert had allowed this ignoramus to join them.

‘Yes, it's a bone,' the old man confirmed. ‘It grows out of the skull – only the deer family does that.'

‘What if
we
had skulls that bulged out?' wondered Robert fancifully.

‘With ideas growing on ‘em,' said Oswald with a thin smile.

‘Wouldn't be a big bulge in your case, Oswald.'

‘Practical for the cops,' said Adamsberg. ‘But risky. You'd be able to read people's thoughts.'

‘Stands to reason.'

There was a pause for thought and for a third round of drinks.

‘So what
do
you know about? Apart from police stuff?' asked Oswald.

‘No questions,' decreed Robert. ‘He knows what he knows. He's asking you what you know about.'

‘Women,' said Oswald.

‘So does he. Or he wouldn't have lost his.'

‘Stands to reason.'

‘There's knowing about women and knowing about love, and it's not the same thing. Specially with women.'

Anglebert sat up as if dispelling a memory.

‘Explain it to him,' he said, gesturing towards Hilaire and tapping his finger on the photo of the stag that had been slit open.

‘Right. So a red deer stag, he loses his antlers every year.'

‘What for?'

‘'Cos they get in the way. The only reason to have antlers is for the rut, to get the hinds. So when the rutting season's over, they fall off.'

‘What a pity,' said Adamsberg, ‘when they're so beautiful.'

‘Like everything beautiful,' said Anglebert, ‘they're complicated.
They're heavy, you got to understand, and they catch on the branches. So after the fighting they fall off.'

‘It's like laying down his arms, if you like. He's got his females, he drops his weapons.'

‘Females, now, they're complicated,' said Robert, still pursuing his train of thought.

‘But beautiful.'

‘Like I said,' muttered the old man, ‘more beautiful they are, more complicated. No good trying to understand everything in this world.'

‘No, right,' said Adamsberg.

‘Ah, well.'

Four of the men took a mouthful of wine at the same time, with no apparent coordination.

‘So it falls off, and that's what we call cast antlers,' Hilaire went on. ‘You can find them in the forests like mushrooms. But antlers from a kill, they've been cut off from the animal you hunted. See?
Living
bone.'

‘And this killer doesn't care about living bone,' said Adamsberg, returning to the murdered stag. ‘He's just interested in death. Or the heart.'

‘That he is.'

A
DAMSBERG TRIED TO EXPEL THE STAG FROM HIS MIND. HE DIDN'T WANT TO
go into the hotel room with all that blood in his head. He paused in front of the door, wiping his thoughts, clearing his brow, and forcing himself to think about clouds, marbles and blue skies. Because in the hotel room a child aged nine months was asleep. And with children you never know. They can penetrate your skull, hear the ideas moving around, feel the sweat of anguish and maybe even see a picture of a slaughtered stag in their father's head.

He pushed the door open quietly. He had not told the male assembly the truth. Accompanying, yes, out of consideration, yes, but so as to babysit the child, while Camille played her viola up at the chateau. Their last break-up – had it been the fifth or the seventh? he wasn't sure – had led to an unforeseen catastrophe. Camille had become a good friend, a comrade, something that drove him to desperation. Towards him she was absent-minded, smiling, affectionate and familiar: in short, and tragically, just a good friend. This new state of affairs disconcerted Adamsberg who was trying to find the fault line, to dislodge the feeling beating under this natural mask, like a crab under a rock. But Camille seemed really to be walking away into the distance, freed of her former stress. And as he said to himself, as he greeted her with a polite kiss, trying to bring an exhausted friend back towards a renewal of love was
a near-impossible task. He was therefore concentrating, in a fatalist manner and to his own surprise, on his paternal function. He was a beginner in that domain, and was still trying to assimilate the information that the child was his son. He thought he would have put in as much effort if he had found the baby on a park bench.

‘He's not asleep yet,' said Camille, putting on her formal black jacket.

‘I'll read him a story. I've brought a book.'

Adamsberg pulled a large volume out of his overnight bag. The fourth of his sisters had taken it upon herself to try and cultivate his mind and complicate his life. She had packed for him a four-hundred-page book on architecture in the Pyrenees, something he had no interest in, and given him the assignment of reading it and telling her what he thought of it. His sisters were the only people Adamsberg obeyed.

‘Buildings of the Béarn,'
he read.
‘Traditional techniques from the twelfth to the nineteenth century.'

Camille shrugged and smiled, unmistakably taking on the role of a sympathetic friend. As long as the child went to sleep – and on this point she trusted Adamsberg absolutely – his oddities didn't matter. Her thoughts were entirely concentrated on the concert that evening – a heaven-sent engagement for her, and no doubt due to Yolande's regular prayers to the Powers-that-be.

‘He likes this one,' Adamsberg said.

‘Yes, why not?'

No criticism, no irony. The blank neutrality of authentic friendship.

Once he was alone, Adamsberg examined his son, who was looking at him with a philosophical expression – if that can be said of a nine-month-old baby. The child's concentration on something far away, his indifference to little worries, even his placid absence of desires concerned Adamsberg, since so much of that resembled him. Not to mention the dark eyebrows, the nose which looked as if it would later be dominant,
and a face so unusual in every respect that he looked two years older than his age. Thomas Adamsberg was a chip off the old block, which was not what the
commissaire
would have wished on him. But through the resemblance, Adamsberg was starting to see, in fits and starts, that this child really was the fruit of his own loins.

He opened the book at the page marked by the metro ticket. He usually turned down the corner of the page, but his sister had asked him not to spoil this book.

‘Tom, now listen to me, we're both going to be educated, we've got no choice. Remember what I read you last time about north-facing façades? Remember all that? Now, this is how it goes on.'

Thomas looked up calmly at his father, his expression attentive but indifferent.

‘… “The use of stones from the river bed to build walls, a combinatory approach indicating an organisation adapted to local resources, is a widespread, though not universal practice.”
Like the sound of that, Tom? “
The introduction of the opus piscatum into many of these walls constitutes a compensatory mechanism, occasioned by the small dimensions of the materials and the weakness of the unstable mortar.” '

Adamsberg put the book down, meeting his son's gaze.

‘I don't know what the hell the
“opus spicatum”
is, son, and I don't care. So we can agree about that. But I'm going to teach you how we resolve a problem like this when it crops up in our lives. How to proceed when you don't understand something. Just watch.'