An Uncertain Place (24 page)

‘Lie down,’ said Josselin, tapping his examination couch. ‘Lie on your back and take your shoes off. Maybe it’s just a touch of flu, but I’ll examine you all the same.’

Adamsberg hadn’t really intended, when he had come to the surgery, to end up on the padded table while the doctor moved his large fingers over his head. His feet had simply taken him away from the office and towards Josselin. He had just intended to talk. The fainting fit was a serious warning. Never would he tell anyone that the
Zerketch
claimed to be his son. Never would he admit to anyone that he had let him go without lifting a finger. Free as a bird. On the way to a fresh massacre, with a smile on his lips and his deathly shirt on his back.
Zerk
was easier to say than
Zerketch
and it was almost onomatopoeic, a sound of rejection and disgust. Zerk, the son of Matt or Loulou, the son of a pisspot. But all the same, no one had felt any remorse over the grocer’s wife.

The doctor put his palm across Adamsberg’s face and pressed two fingers against his temples. The immense hand easily covered the distance between his ears. The other hand was cupped under the base of his skull. Under this slightly perfumed hand, Adamsberg felt his eyes closing.

‘Don’t worry I’m just testing the PRM of the SBS.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Adamsberg with a slight question in his voice.

‘The primary respiratory movement of the sphenobasiliar symphysis, a simple basic check.’

The doctor’s fingers continued to move, like attentive moths, on to his nose, his jaws, touching his forehead, going into his ears.

‘Right,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘what we have here is a fibrillation incident, which is hiding your basic state. Some recent event has put the fear of death into you, and that has caused an overheating of the system. I don’t know what happened, but you didn’t like it. A major psycho-emotional shock. What it’s done is immobilise the parietal, block the pre-post sphenoid, and blown three fuses. Major stress episode, no wonder you weren’t feeling well. That must be why you fainted. Let’s get rid of this first, if we want to check the rest.’

The doctor scribbled a few lines and asked Adamsberg to roll on to his stomach He pulled up his shirt and felt the sacro-iliac joint. ‘I thought you said it was in my head.’

‘The head has to be reached through the sacrum.’

Adamsberg stopped talking and let the doctor move his fingers up his vertebrae, like kindly gnomes trotting up his back. He kept his eyes wide open, so as not to fall asleep.

‘Stay awake,
commissaire
, and lie on your back again. I’m going to relax the mediastinal fascia which are also completely blocked. Do you have some pain between your ribs on the right. Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good,’ said Josselin and put two fingers as a fork under the nape of his neck and then with the flat of his hand stroked his ribs as if he was ironing a shirt.

Adamsberg woke up groggily, with the unpleasant feeling time had passed. It was after eleven, he saw by the clock. Josselin had let him go to sleep. He jumped down, slipped on his shoes, and found the doctor sitting at the kitchen table.

‘Sit down, I’m having an early lunch because I’ve got a patient in half an hour.’

He pulled out another plate and cutlery and pushed the dish towards Adamsberg.

‘You put me to sleep?’

‘No, you just dropped off. The state you were in, there could be no better solution after the treatment. Everything’s back in position,’ he added, like a plumber reporting on a repair. ‘You were deep inside a well, totally inhibited from action, you couldn’t go forward. But it should settle down now. You might feel a bit drowsy this afternoon, and tomorrow you may feel a bit low and have a few aches and pains, but that’s only to be expected. Within three days, you ought to be back to normal. Better in fact. I had a go at the tinnitus while I was at it, and maybe a single session will be enough. Now it would be a good idea to have something to eat,’ he said, pointing to the dish of couscous and vegetables.

Adamsberg obeyed. He felt a bit stunned but also better, lighter, and very hungry. Nothing like the sickness and the feeling that he was carrying lead weights in his feet that had assailed him earlier. He raised his head to see the doctor give him a friendly wink.

‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘I saw what I wanted to. What your natural structure is.’

‘Oh?’ said Adamsberg, who felt somewhat diminished alongside Josselin.

‘A bit as I had hoped. I’ve only ever seen one similar case, in an elderly woman.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a total absence of anguish. A rare case. To compensate of course, your emotional temperature is low. The desire for things is only moderate, there’s some fatalism, a temptation to walk away, some difficulty relating to people around you, blank spaces. Well, you can’t have everything. Even more interesting, there’s a sort of interaction between the conscious and the unconscious. You could say that the airlock is badly adjusted, that sometimes you forget to shut the gate. Take care all the same,
commissaire
. It can result in ideas of genius which seem to come from out of the blue – intuition as it’s sometimes wrongly called, for short – immense stocks of memories and images, but it also allows toxic elements to rise to the surface, things that absolutely ought to remain buried in the depths. Do you follow me?’

‘Sort of. And if these toxic elements come to the surface, what happens?’

Dr Josselin whirled a finger round near his head.

‘Then you can’t tell the true from the false, the fantasy from the real thing, the possible from the impossible, in short you will end up mixing saltpetre, sulphur and carbon.’

‘Explosive,’ Adamsberg concluded.

‘As you say,’ said the doctor, wiping his hands and looking satisfied. ‘Nothing to fear if you keep a grip on things. Keep up your responsibilities, carry on talking to other people, don’t isolate yourself too much. Do you have any children?’

‘One, he’s very little.’

‘Well, tell him about the world, take him for walks, hang on to him. That will help you throw down some anchors, you mustn’t lose sight of the harbour lights. I’m not going to ask you about women, I can see. Lack of confidence.’

‘In them?’

‘No, in yourself. That’s the only little worry, if it can be called that. I have to leave you now,
commissaire
. Make sure to shut the door when you go out.’

‘Which door – the apartment or the one in my head?’

T
HE
COMMISSAIRE
NOW FELT NO APPREHENSION AT THE IDEA
of going to the squad’s headquarters. On the contrary. The man with the golden fingers had set him right, had chased away the smoke from the accident, the ‘psycho-emotional shock’ which had blocked everything out for him only that morning. He most certainly had not forgotten that he had let Zerk go. But he would catch him, in good time, in his own way, just as he had tracked down Émile.

Émile was making progress (‘He’ll pull through,
mon vieux
’ was one of the messages on his desk). Lavoisier had transferred him, but as agreed was not revealing where he was now being treated. Adamsberg read the news about Émile to the dog. Someone had given Cupid a bath – someone kind, or who had lost patience – and his fur was now soft and smelt of soap. The dog rolled over in his lap and Adamsberg stroked his back. Danglard came in and crashed down like a bag of old clothes on to a chair.

‘You look well,’ he said.

‘I’m just back from seeing Josselin. He fixed me like an engineer fixes a boiler. The man’s a pro.’

‘Not like you to go and consult someone.’

‘I meant just to talk to him, but I passed out in his surgery. I’d been through two ghastly hours this morning. A burglar got into the house and got hold of both my guns.’

‘Good grief, I told you to keep them by you.’

‘And I didn’t. So this burglar grabbed them.’

‘And?’

‘When he realised I didn’t have any money, he left in the end. But I felt like a wet rag.’

Danglard looked at him with some suspicion.

‘Who washed the dog?’ asked Adamsberg, changing the subject. ‘Estalère?’

‘Voisenet. He couldn’t stand the smell any longer.’

‘I read the note from the lab. So the horse shit on Cupid matched the lot on Émile. They both picked it up from the same farm.’

‘That may take the pressure off Émile a bit, but he’s not out of the woods yet. Nor is Pierre junior, because he puts money on horses a lot, so he goes to the races and training stables where there’s no shortage of manure. He’s even supposed to be buying a horse.’

‘He didn’t tell me that. How long have you known?’

As he talked, Adamsberg was leafing through the little pile of postcards which Gardon had put on the desk for him, taken from among Vaudel’s effects. They were mostly conventional holiday messages posted by his son.

‘The Avignon police found that out yesterday, and I did this morning. But hundreds of people go to the races. There are thirty-six major racecourses in France, hundreds of stud farms and riding schools and tens of thousands of racegoers. So there are vast quantities of horse manure all over the place. It’s one of the most widely distributed materials there is.’

Danglard pointed to the floor under Adamsberg’s desk.

‘More widespread, for instance, than pencil shavings and powder from pencil leads. If one were to find that at a crime scene, it would be a much better bit of forensic evidence than horse manure. Especially since people who like drawing don’t choose their pencils by chance. You don’t, for a start. What kind of pencil do you use?’

‘Cargo 401-B and Seril-H.’

‘So here on the floor, that would be shavings from Cargo 401-B and Seril-H? Bit of charcoal too perhaps?’

‘Well, naturally, Danglard.’

‘So that would be much more helpful at a crime scene, wouldn’t it? Better than some damn horse shit.’

‘Danglard,’ said Adamsberg, fanning himself with a postcard, ‘get to the point.’

‘I’m not that keen to. But if something’s going to fall on us, better get there first. Like in cricket, you have to dash to catch the ball before it hits the ground.’

‘All right, dash for the ball, Danglard, I’m listening.’

‘A team went to look for the spent cartridges, on the ground, out at the farm where Émile got shot.’

‘Yes, that was a priority.’

‘And they found three.’

‘Well, for four shots, that’s pretty good.’

‘And then they found the fourth,’ said Danglard, getting up and clenching his fingers in his back pocket.

‘Where was that then?’ asked Adamsberg, stopping fanning himself with the postcard.

‘At Pierre’s house, Pierre the son. It had rolled under the fridge. But they couldn’t find the revolver.’

‘So who found it? Who asked for his house to be searched?’

‘Brézillon. Because of the link between Pierre and the horses.’

‘And who told the
divisionnaire
about that?’

Danglard spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance.

‘So who went to look out at the farm for the cartridges?’

‘Maurel and Mordent.’

‘I thought Mordent was supposed to be with Froissy.’

‘Well he wasn’t, he wanted to go with Maurel.’

There was a silence, and Adamsberg ostentatiously sharpened a pencil over his waste-paper basket, letting shavings of Seril-H fall there before blowing on the lead, and fetching a piece of paper to rest on his thigh.

‘So what does all this mean?’ he asked quietly, as he began to draw. ‘Pierre fired four shots, but only took one cartridge away with him?’

‘They think it might have got stuck in the barrel.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘The Avignon police.’

‘And that doesn’t bother them? Pierre gets rid of the gun, but first he ejects a jammed cartridge? Then he saves this precious little cartridge? Until he stupidly drops it in his kitchen, where it rolls under his fridge. And why did they go to such lengths in the search? Moving a fridge? Did they know there was something underneath?’

‘The wife apparently said something to them.’

‘Now that would really amaze me, Danglard. The day that woman betrays her husband, Cupid will have given up on Émile.’

‘Well, precisely, that’s what bothered them. Their top guy isn’t the sharpest knife in the box, but he got to thinking maybe someone had planted it. Especially since Pierre is swearing black and blue he’s innocent. So they got out the whole shenanigans: vacuum cleaner, sieve, microscopic samples. And they found something. That,’ said Danglard, pointing to the floor.

‘That what?’

‘Bits of pencil lead and shavings probably off someone’s shoes. But Pierre never uses pencils. We’ve only just received this information.’

Danglard was now tugging at his shirt collar, and went into his own office to get a glass of wine. He was looking deeply unhappy. Adamsberg waited.

‘They’re going to send the stuff to the lab, expecting results in two or three days – what kind of lead, what make of pencil. It’s not simple apparently. Of course, it would be easier if they had a sample to compare and I think they are quite soon going to know where to look.’