‘Very interesting,’ said Clémence, ‘but now I’d like you to help me write my letter to my M., 66.’
‘Night-night, children,’ said Mathilde on the way out.
She was already in action, striding towards the stairs, in a hurry to be off to the Saint-Georges station. But Adamsberg had never been able to hurry.
‘Saint George,’ Mathilde called to him, as they scanned the street for a taxi. ‘Isn’t he the one who killed the dragon?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Adamsberg.
The taxi dropped them at the Saint-Georges metro station at five past ten.
‘It’s OK,’ said Mathilde. ‘We’re still in time.’
By half past eleven, the chalk circle man had still not shown up. There was a pile of cigarette ends around their feet.
‘Bad sign,’ said Mathilde. ‘He won’t come now.’
‘Perhaps his suspicions have been aroused,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Suspicions? What about? That he’d be accused of murder? Rubbish! We don’t know if he even listens to the radio. He might not even know about the murder. You already know he doesn’t go out every night, it’s as simple as that.’
‘It’s true, he might not have heard the news yet. Or else perhaps he did hear it, and it made him wary. Since he knows someone’s watching him, he may be changing his haunts. In fact, I’m sure he will. It’s going to be the devil’s own job to find him.’
‘Because he’s the murderer – is that what you mean, Adamsberg?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How many times a day do you say “I don’t know,” or “Maybe”?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I know about all your famous cases so far, and how successful you are. But all the same, when you’re here in the flesh, one wonders. Are you sure you’re suited to the police?’
‘Certain. And anyway, I do other things in life.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as drawing.’
‘Drawing what?’
‘The leaves on the trees and more leaves on the trees.’
‘Is that interesting? Sounds pretty boring to me.’
‘You’re interested in fish, aren’t you?’
‘What do you all have against fish? And anyway, why don’t you draw people’s faces? Wouldn’t it be more fun?’
‘Later. Later or maybe never. You have to start with leaves. Any Chinese sage will tell you.’
‘Later? But you’re already forty-five, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but I can’t believe that.’
‘Ah, that’s like me.’
And since Mathilde had a hip flask of cognac in her pocket, and since it was getting seriously cold, and since she said, ‘We’re into a section two of the week now, we’re allowed to have a drink,’ they did.
When the metal gates of the metro station closed, the chalk circle man had still not appeared. But Adamsberg had had time to tell Mathilde about the petite chérie and how she must have died somewhere out in the world, and how he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Mathilde appeared to find this story fascinating. She said that it was a shame to let the petite chérie die like that, and that she knew the world like the back of her hand, so she’d be able to find out whether the petite chérie had been buried, with her monkey, or not. Adamsberg felt completely drunk because he didn’t usually touch spirits. He couldn’t even pronounce ‘Wahiguya’ properly.
At about the same time, Danglard was in an almost identical condition. The four twins had wanted him to drink a large glass of water – ‘to dilute the alcohol,’ the children said. As well as the four twins, he had a little boy of five, just now fast asleep in his lap, a child whom he had never dared mention to Adamsberg. This last one was the unmistakable offspring of his wife and her blue-eyed lover. She had left this child with Danglard one fine day, saying that all in all it was better that the kids should stay together. Two sets of twins, plus a singleton who was always curled up in his lap, made five, and Danglard was afraid that confessing to all this would make him look a fool.
‘Oh, stop going on about diluting the alcohol,’ said Danglard. ‘And as for you,’ he said, addressing the first-born of the older set of twins, ‘I don’t like this way you’ve got of pouring white wine into plastic cups, and then pretending that you’re being sympathetic, or that it looks nice, or that you don’t object to white wine so long as it’s in a plastic cup. What’s the house going to look like with plastic cups everywhere? Did you think of that, Édouard?’
‘That’s not the reason,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s because of the taste. And then, you know, the flakiness afterwards.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ said Danglard. ‘And if we’re talking about flakiness, you can take a view on that when the vicomte de Chateaubriand, the greatest writer in French literature, and about ninety-nine beautiful girls, have all rejected you, and when you’ve turned into a Paris cop who may be a sharp dresser but is all mixed up inside. I don’t think you’ll ever manage that. What about a case conference tonight?’
When Danglard and his kids had a case conference, it meant they got to talk about his police work. It could last hours, and the kids adored it.
‘Well, for a start,’ said Danglard, ‘and can you beat this? St John the Baptist walked out and left us to deal with this shambles for the rest of the day. That got me so worked up that by three o’clock I was well away. And yes, it’s clear that the man who wrote that stuff on the other circles is the same one who wrote the stuff round the circle with the murdered woman in it.’
‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?’ chanted Édouard. ‘Or you might as well say “Marcel, go to hell, on your bike and ring the bell” or “Maurice, call the police, give us all a bit of peace” or-’
‘OK, OK, said Danglard, ‘but yes, “Victor, woe’s in store” does suggest something vicious: death, bad luck, a threat of some kind. Needless to say, Adamsberg was the first to get a sniff of that. But is that enough for us to charge this man? The handwriting expert’s quite positive about it: the man’s not mad, he’s not even disturbed, this is an educated person, careful about his appearance and his career, but discontented and aggressive as well as deceptive – those were his words. He also said, “This man’s getting on in years, he’s going through some crisis, but he’s in control; he’s a pessimist, obsessed about the end of his life, therefore about his afterlife. Either he’s a failure on the brink of success, or a successful man on the brink of failure.” That’s the way he is, kids, our graphologist. He turns words inside out like the fingers of a glove, he sends them one way, then the other. For instance, he can’t talk about the desire for hope without mentioning the hope for desire, and so on. It sounds intelligent the first time you hear it, but after that you realise there’s nothing there really. Except that it is the same man who’s been doing all the circles so far, a man who’s clever and perfectly lucid, and that he’s either about to succeed in life or to fail. But as for whether the dead woman was put into a circle that had already been drawn or not, the lab people say it’s impossible to tell. Maybe yes, maybe no. Does that sound like forensic science to you? And the corpse hasn’t been much help, either: this is the corpse of a woman who led a totally uneventful existence, nothing odd at all, no complicated love life, no skeletons in the family cupboard, no problems with money, no secret vices. Nothing. Just balls of wool and more balls of wool, holidays in the Loire Valley, calf-length skirts, sensible shoes, a little diary that she wrote notes in, half a dozen packets of currant biscuits in her kitchen cupboard. In fact she wrote about that in her diary: “Can’t eat biscuits in the shop, if you drop crumbs the boss notices.” And so on and so forth. So you might say, well, what on earth was she doing out late at night? And the answer is she was coming back home after seeing her cousin, who works in the ticket office at the Luxembourg metro station. The victim often used to go over there and sit alongside her in the booth, eating crisps, and knitting Inca-style gloves to sell in the wool shop. And then she would go back home, on foot, probably along the rue Pierre-et-Marie Curie.’