An Uncertain Place (21 page)

‘I don’t imagine our paths will automatically cross again,
commissaire
, because I’ve told you all I know about Vaudel. But would it perhaps be too much to ask of you to come back one day?’

‘You want to look inside my head, don’t you?’

‘Yes, indeed. But we might find a less intimidating problem. No back pains? Stiffness, oppression, digestive troubles, circulation problems, sinusitis, neuralgia? No, none of those.’

Adamsberg shook his head, smiling.

The doctor screwed up his eyes.

‘Tinnitus?’ he suggested, almost like a street trader offering something for sale.

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘How did you know?’

‘No magic! The way you keep rubbing your ears!’

‘I have been to someone. Nothing to be done about it, apparently, I just have to live with it and try to forget it. Which I’m quite good at.’

‘You’re indifferent, you don’t mind too much,’ said the doctor, as he accompanied Adamsberg into the hall. ‘But tinnitus doesn’t fade away like a memory. I could help you with it. Only if you want me to, of course. Why should we carry our burdens round with us?’

A
S HE WALKED BACK FROM
D
R JOSSELIN’S HOUSE
, A
DAMSBERG
turned over in his pocket the squashy little silk heart. He stopped under the porch of Saint-François-Xavier’s to call Danglard.

‘
Commandant
, it doesn’t make sense. That code in the love letter, it’s all wrong.’

‘What love letter, what code?’ Danglard asked cautiously.

‘The one from Vaudel. “Kiss lover”. The message for the old lady in Germany. He just wouldn’t say that. He was old, he was cut off from the world, he was a traditionalist, he used to drink Guignolet, sitting on a Louis XIII armchair, he just wouldn’t write “kiss lover” on a letter. No, Danglard, and especially not if it was a last message to be read after his death. It’s too cheap for his style. He wasn’t going to write silly slogans like you get on toy hearts.’

‘Toy hearts?’

‘Never mind, Danglard.’

‘Nobody’s above doing silly things,
commissaire
. Vaudel was eccentric.’

‘Silly things in Cyrillic script?’

‘If he liked secrets, why not?’

‘Danglard, this alphabet, is it only used in Russia?’

‘No, it’s used in other Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe; it’s a Slavonic alphabet, derived from ancient Greek.’

‘Don’t tell me where it comes from, just tell me if it’s used in Serbia.’

‘Yes, of course it is.’

‘You told me you had an uncle who was a Serb. Were all those cut-off feet Serbian too?’

‘I’m not sure they were my uncle’s, actually. It was your story about the bear made me think that. They could be someone else’s.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, a cousin maybe, or a man from the same village.’

‘But it is a
Serbian
village, isn’t it, Danglard?’

Adamsberg could hear Danglard banging his glass down on the table.

‘Serbian word, Serbian feet, are you trying to make something of it?’

‘Yes. Two Serbian signals in a few days – that doesn’t happen very often.’

‘They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Plus,
you
didn’t want us to have anything to do with the feet in Highgate.’

‘The wind’s changed,
commandant
. What can I do? And right now, it’s blowing from the east. Find out what this “kiss lover” stuff could mean in Serbian. Start by investigating your uncle’s feet.’

‘Look, my uncle didn’t know many people in France. And certainly not any rich legal eagles in Garches!’

‘Don’t shout, Danglard. I’ve got tinnitus and it hurts my ears.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since Quebec.’

‘You never said.’

‘Because before it didn’t matter. Now it does. I’ll fax you Vaudel’s letter. Think, Danglard, something starting with
kiss
. Anything. In Serbian.’

‘Tonight?’

‘He was your uncle, wasn’t he? We’re not going to leave him inside the bear.’

H
IS FEET UP AGAINST THE BRICK FIREPLACE
, A
DAMSBERG WAS
dozing in front of the ashes of his fire, his index finger held tightly against his ear. Not that it helped, because the noise was inside his ear, humming like high-tension cables. It must be affecting his hearing by now, and he was already absentminded, so maybe one day he would end up like a bat without radar, understanding nothing about the world. He was waiting for Danglard to get to work. By now his deputy would surely have changed out of his elegant daytime wear into the work clothes his father used to wear down the pit. Adamsberg could picture him sitting there in his vest and trousers, cursing his
commissaire
.

Danglard looked at the Cyrillic word from Vaudel’s letter and did indeed mutter something about his
commissaire
, who unlike him had not been the least bit interested in the feet when he was in London. And now, just when he, Danglard, had decided to leave them in peace, Adamsberg was suddenly opening up that can of worms again. Without saying why, in his usual impromptu and mysterious way, which was destabilising Danglard’s normal defence mechanisms – indeed, undermining them radically, if Adamsberg should turn out to be right.

Which was not impossible, he admitted to himself, as he spread out on the table the few archives he had inherited from his uncle, Slavko Moldovan. And it wouldn’t do at all – that was true at least – to leave him inside some bear, without trying to do something. Danglard shook his head in irritation, as he did whenever Adamsberg’s vocabulary infiltrated his own. He had been fond of this Uncle Slavko, his aunt’s husband, who had made up stories all day, who had put his finger to his lips to keep a secret, a finger smelling of pipe tobacco. Danglard used to believe that this uncle had been specially invented for him, to be at his service. Slavko Moldovan had never tired, or at least had never shown it, of telling him about fantastic and terrifying aspects of existence, full of mystery and weird lore. He had opened windows, shown new horizons. When he went to stay with them, the young Adrien Danglard used to follow him all round the house, his uncle in his gold-stitched moccasins with red pompoms, which he sometimes used to repair with a shiny thread. You had to take care of them, because they were for feast days back home in the village. Adrien helped him, he threaded the needle with the golden thread. So of course he was very familiar with those shoes, and then had found them ignominiously mixed up in the sacrilegious pile in Highgate. True, these pompoms could have belonged to anyone else from the same village, which was what Danglard was fervently hoping. DCI Radstock had made some progress. He had established that the collector must have gone into mortuary buildings, or funeral parlours when a body was laid out. He would take away his fetish feet, then screw down the coffin again. The feet were clean and their nails trimmed. And if this foot-chopper was French or English, which was most likely, why on earth and how the devil had he managed to find the feet of a Serb in an undertaker’s parlour? How could he have gone unnoticed in a little village? Unless, that is, he was from the village in the first place.

Slavko had described village life to him in every season. It was a place full of folklore, fairies and demons: his uncle was favoured by the former and fought the latter. There was one great demon, who hid deep in the earth but who prowled around the edge of the wood, he would say, dropping his voice and putting his finger to his lips. Danglard’s mother had disapproved of Slavko’s stories and his father had scoffed, ‘Why’re you telling the kid all this stuff? He won’t sleep of nights!’ ‘Just my nonsense,’ Slavko would say, ‘the kid and me, we’re having fun.’

And then his aunt had left Slavko for some cretin called Roger. Slavko had gone back home.

Back over there.

To Kiseljevo.

Danglard gasped, poured himself a glass and dialled Adamsberg’s number. The
commissaire
picked up the phone at once.

‘So it doesn’t mean “kiss lover”, eh?’

‘No, it means Kiseljevo, which is the name of my uncle’s village.’

Adamsberg frowned and pushed a log with his foot.

‘Kiseljevo? That doesn’t sound the same as Estalère pronounced it. He said “kiss lover”.’

‘It is the same. In the west, Kiseljevo is called Kisilova. Like Beograd is called Belgrade.’

Adamsberg took his finger out of his other ear.

‘Kisilova,’ he repeated. ‘That is extraordinary, Danglard. There’s a chain running from Highgate to Garches, through the tunnel, the dark tunnel.’

‘No,’ said Danglard, who was putting up a frantic final defence. ‘Over there, lots of names start with K. And there’s another obstacle, don’t you see?’

‘I can’t see anything, I’ve got this tinnitus.’

‘I’ll speak louder. The obstacle is that it would be a truly massive coincidence if there was any link between my uncle’s shoes and the bloodbath in Garches. Something linking both of us, you and me, in two different cases. And you know what I think about coincidences.’

‘Exactly. So it means we have been gently led by the hand to that pile of shoes in Higg-gate.’

‘Who by?’

‘By Lord Fox, perhaps. Or more likely by his Cuban friend who disappeared so fast. He knew Stock would be along, and that we would be with him.’

‘And pray why would we have been gently led there?’

‘Because Garches, being such a catastrophic case, was certain to be sent to us. The killer knew that, and even if he was passing on to some new stage by getting rid of his collection – perhaps it had got too dangerous – he didn’t want to just throw it away without getting any recognition. He wanted there to be a trail between the operations of his youth and those of his maturity. He wanted it to be
known
. That we would still be thinking about Higg-gate when Garches happened. The foot-chopper and the
Zerquetscher
belong in the same story. Remember that the murderer paid special attention to the feet of both Vaudel and Plögener. And where’s this Kissilove?’

‘Kisilova. On the south bank of the Danube, very close to the Romanian frontier.’

‘Is it just a little village or a small town?’

‘Just a village, only about eight hundred inhabitants.’

‘If the foot-chopper had followed a corpse there, people would have noticed.’

‘After twenty years, not many people are going to be able to remember.’

‘Did your uncle ever say whether there was any kind of vendetta between families in the village, some kind of clan warfare? The doctor said that Vaudel was living with some kind of obsession like that.’

‘No, never,’ said Danglard, after pausing for thought. ‘The place was full of enemies: ghosts, ogres, ogresses, and of course the “great demon” who lived in the wood. But no family feuds. In any case,
commissaire
, if you’re right, the
Zerquetscher
is watching us.’

‘Since London, yes.’

‘And he won’t let us get into the Kiseljevo tunnel, whatever’s in there. I advise you to take care. I don’t think we can handle this.’

‘No, probably not,’ said Adamsberg, thinking of the blood on the piano.

‘Have you got your gun?’

‘It’s downstairs.’

‘Well, keep it by your bed.’

T
HE STAIRS IN THE OLD HOUSE WERE COLD ON THE FEET
, being made of traditional red tiles and wood, but Adamsberg didn’t mind. It was 6.15 a.m., and he was coming down in peaceful mood, as he did every morning, having quite forgotten his tinnitus, Kisilova and the rest of the world, as if sleep had restored him to a naive, absurd and illiterate state, with his waking thoughts directed exclusively at eating, drinking and washing. He stopped on the last but one stair, as he saw in his kitchen a man with his back to him, framed in the morning sun, and wreathed in cigarette smoke. The intruder was of slight build with dark, curly, shoulder-length hair. Probably young, he was wearing a black T-shirt that looked new, decorated with a white design showing a ribcage from which drops of red blood were dripping.

The silhouette was unfamiliar, and alarm bells went off in his vacant brain. This man’s arms looked strong, and he was waiting with a definite purpose. Plus he was fully clothed, whereas Adamsberg was naked, on the stairs, without a plan and without a weapon. The gun that Danglard had advised him to put by his bed was lying on the table within reach of the stranger. If Adamsberg could manage to turn left to the bathroom without making a sound, he would be able to get to his clothes and the P38 wedged between the lavatory cistern and the wall.

‘Put some clothes on, scumbag,’ said the man without turning round. ‘And forget about the gun, I’ve got it.’

He had quite a high-pitched voice but was talking tough-guy stuff, a bit
too
tough-guy, signalling danger. The man lifted the back of his T-shirt to show the butt of the P38 jammed into the top of his jeans, against his tanned back.