An Uncertain Place (5 page)

‘Don’t worry, she’ll be in touch,’ Adamsberg told him.

‘Who?’

‘Abstract.’

‘Logically,’ Estalère interjected, still following his train of thought, ‘the nephew ought to have left the bear alive, and brought some of its droppings to the aunt. After all, the uncle was inside the bear, but not in its skin.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Adamsberg, looking satisfied. ‘It all depends on the attitude the nephew had both to the uncle and to the bear.’

‘And to his aunt,’ added Danglard, who was feeling calmer on hearing Adamsberg’s certainty about Abstract getting back in touch. ‘We don’t know the aunt’s reactions either, whether she would rather have had the bearskin or the droppings.’

‘It all depends on what was going on in the nephew’s mind. Was it that his uncle’s soul had gone into the bear, right to the tips of its fur? And what idea did the thekophagist have of the wardrobe? And what was the foot-chopper thinking about? Whose soul is inside the wooden panels, or on the ends of people’s feet? What did Stock say, Danglard?’

‘Forget the feet,
commissaire
.’

‘They remind me of something,’ Adamsberg said in a hesitant voice. ‘A picture somewhere, a story?’

Danglard stopped the attendant passing with the drinks trolley and bought some champagne for himself and for Adamsberg, and put them both on his side of the table. Adamsberg drank very rarely and Estalère not at all, since alcohol went to his head. It had been explained to him that that was exactly the point, and he had been astonished. When Danglard had a drink, Estalère looked at him with intense puzzlement.

‘Perhaps,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘it’s some vague story I seem to recall about a man looking for his shoes in the night. Or who came back from the dead to find his shoes. I wonder if Stock knows it.’

Danglard quickly knocked back his first glass of champagne, and wrenched his gaze away from the carriage roof to look at Adamsberg, half enviously, half in despair. There were times when Adamsberg converted himself into a compact and dangerous attacker. Not often, but when he did it was easy to counter him. On the other hand, it was less easy to seize hold of him when his mental equipment was dislocated into several moving parts, which was his usual state. But it became completely impossible when this state intensified to the point of dispersal, as at present, assisted by the movement of the train which shook up any coherence. Adamsberg at such times seemed to move like a diver, his body and mind swooping gracefully without any precise objective. His eyes followed the movement, taking on the look of dark brown algae and conveying to his interlocutor a sensation of indeterminacy, flow, non-existence. To accompany Adamsberg in these extremes of his activity was like swimming into deep water, alongside slow-moving creatures, slimy mud, floating jellyfish, a world of vague outlines and swirling colours. Spend too much time with him and you might go to sleep in the warm water and drown. At these particularly aqueous moments, there was no point in arguing with him any more than with foam, mist or sea spray.

Danglard was furious with his boss for pulling him towards this liquidity just as he was suffering from the double anguish of the Channel Tunnel and uncertainty about Abstract. He was also furious for allowing himself to be drawn so often into Adamsberg’s misty moods.

He swallowed down the second glass of champagne, the one for Adamsberg, and recalled Radstock’s report quickly in order to extract from it some precise, clear and reassuring factual details. Adamsberg could see that, and was himself not anxious to explain to Danglard the state of terror into which the sight of those feet had thrown him. The wardrobe-eater and the story about the polar bear had been trivial distractions to help him blot out the image of what he had seen on the pavement in Highgate, to take him out of himself and away from the impressionable Estalère.

‘There were actually seventeen feet,’ Danglard said. ‘Eight matched pairs and one isolated foot. Nine people then.’

‘People or corpses?’

‘Corpses. It seems that the feet were amputated after death, with a saw. Five men, four women, all adults.’

Danglard paused, but the deep-sea gaze of Adamsberg was intensely waiting for more details.

‘The feet were definitely taken from the cadavers before they were buried. Radstock has made a note “In the morgue? Or in the cold stores of the undertakers?” and also, according to the styles of the shoes, though that has to be checked, it looks as if all this happened between ten and twenty years ago, spread over a long period. In short, this was someone who cut off a pair of feet here, then another there, from time to time.’

‘Until he got tired of his collection.’

‘What’s there to say he got tired?’

‘The event we’ve witnessed. Just cast your mind back, Danglard. This man amasses his trophies for ten or twenty years, a diabolically difficult thing to do. He fanatically stores them in a freezer. Did Stock say anything about that?’

‘Yes, he says they had been frozen and defrosted several times.’

‘So the foot-chopper took them out now and then to look at them for God knows what purpose. Or perhaps to move them.’

Adamsberg leaned back against his seat and Danglard glanced up at the roof again. Another few minutes and they would be out from under the sea.

‘And one night,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘despite all the trouble he had taken to build up his collection, the foot-chopper abandons his precious loot. Just like that, on a public street. He leaves it all behind as if it doesn’t interest him any more. Or – and that would be even more disturbing – as if it wasn’t
enough
for him any more. Like those collectors who junk one lot of stuff to go off in search of something new, moving up a stage. The foot-chopper switches to a more worthwhile quarry. Something better.’

‘Or worse.’

‘Yes. He’s going deeper into his tunnel. No wonder Stock is upset. If he follows this trail, he’ll get to some worrying levels.’

‘Where will he get to?’ asked Estalère, meanwhile closely observing the effect the champagne was having on Danglard.

‘He’ll go on until he reaches some unspeakable, cruel, devastating event, the one that has triggered the whole story, a story that ends in cut-off feet, or eating wardrobes. Then the dark tunnel opens up with its stairways and its caves, and Stock will have to go down into it.’

Adamsberg closed his eyes, passing without any visible transition to an apparent state of sleep or escape.

‘We can’t say that the foot-chopper has moved on to a new phase,’ Danglard interjected, before Adamsberg escaped from him altogether. ‘Or that he is getting rid of his collection. What we do know is that he deposited it outside Highgate Cemetery. And, good grief, that’s not a matter of indifference. It’s almost as if he were making an offering.’

The Eurostar sped out into the daylight, and Danglard’s brow cleared. His smile encouraged Estalère.

‘But,
commandant
,’ Estalère whispered, ‘what
did
happen in Highgate?’

As so often and without meaning to, Estalère was putting his finger on the crucial spot.

‘I
DON’T KNOW THAT IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO TELL THE
H
IGHGATE
story,’ said Danglard, who had by now ordered a third glass of champagne, for Estalère, and was drinking it on his behalf. ‘Perhaps it’s better not to keep telling it. It’s one of those dark tunnels people dig, isn’t it,
commissaire
, and this one is very old and long-forgotten. Perhaps we should just let it collapse into itself. Because the problem, when some madman opens up a tunnel, is that other people can get into it, which is really what Radstock was telling us in his own way. And that’s what happened in Highgate.’

Estalère was waiting for him to go on, with the happy expression of a man who is about to hear a good story. Danglard looked at his bland, naive face and was unsure what he should do. If he took Estalère into the Highgate tunnel, he might damage that innocence. In the squad they tended to refer to Estalère’s ‘innocence’ rather than to his stupidity. Four times out of five, Estalère just didn’t get it. But his naivety sometimes generated the unexpected benefits of unsullied innocence. His blunders sometimes opened up avenues so obvious that nobody else had thought of them. Most of the time, though, Estalère’s questions merely held things up. People tried to treat them with patience, partly because they liked Estalère, and partly because Adamsberg had decreed that one of these days he’d come out of it. The others made an effort to believe this, and the collective effort had become a habit. In fact, Danglard liked talking to Estalère when he had plenty of time, because he could expound vast quantities of knowledge without the young man becoming impatient. He glanced over at Adamsberg, whose eyes were closed. But he knew the
commissaire
wasn’t sleeping and could hear every word he said.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘The feet are for Radstock to deal with. They’re behind us on the other side of the Channel now.’

‘You said it might be an offering. Who to? Is the cemetery owned by someone?’

‘In a manner of speaking. There’s a master.’

‘What’s he called?’

‘The Entity,’ replied Danglard with a smile.

‘Since when?’

‘The west end of the cemetery, the oldest part, where we were the day before yesterday, was opened in 1839. But of course the master might have lived there before that.’

‘Right.’

‘Some people say that it was because the Entity lived there already in the ancient chapel on Highgate Hill that the place was chosen as a site for a cemetery.’

‘A woman?’

‘No, a man. More or less. And it was his power that drew the dead and the cemetery towards him, you see?’

‘Yes.’

‘They don’t bury anyone now in the west section, it’s become a well-known historical site, it’s famous. There are extraordinary monuments there, strange things of all kinds, and the graves of famous people, like Dickens or Marx.’

A flicker of anxiety crossed the face of the young
brigadier
. Estalère never tried to conceal either his ignorance or the great embarrassment it caused him.

‘Karl Marx,’ Danglard explained. ‘He wrote an important work on the class struggle, the economy, that kind of thing. He’s the father of communism.’

‘Right,’ said Estalère. ‘But is that something to do with the owner of Highgate?’

‘Call him the Master, most people do. No, Marx is nothing to do with him. It was just to show you that West Highgate Cemetery is famous worldwide. And feared.’

‘Yes, Radstock was afraid. But why?’

Danglard hesitated. Where to begin this story? If he told it at all.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘nearly forty years ago, in 1970, two girls were coming home from school and they took a short cut across the cemetery. They arrived home in distress, saying they had been chased by a black shape, and that they had seen the dead rise from their graves. One of the girls fell ill and started sleepwalking. When she did this, she used to go into the cemetery and always walked towards the same catacomb, the Master’s catacomb, as they called it. The Master must have been calling her. They kept a watch and followed her, and found several dead animals drained of all their blood. The neighbourhood began to panic, the rumour spread, the papers got hold of it and it snowballed. So some sort of self-styled priest decided to go along with other people who were equally worked up to exorcise the Master of Highgate. They went into the vault and found a coffin without a name, somewhat apart from the others. They opened it up. You can guess the rest.’

‘No.’

‘There was a body in the coffin, but it looked neither living nor dead. It was lying there perfectly preserved. A man, but an unknown and nameless person. The exorcist hesitated to put a stake through his heart, because the Church forbids it.’

‘Why would he want to do that anyway?’

‘Estalère, don’t you know what one’s supposed to do to vampires?’

‘Ah,’ the young man said, ‘so this was a
vampire
.’

Danglard sighed, and wiped some condensation from the train window.

‘Well, that’s what the people thought, and they’d come along with crucifixes, garlic and stakes. And their leader pronounced an exorcism in front of the open coffin: “Get thee gone, wicked being, bearer of all evil and falsehoods! Depart this place, creature of vice.”’

Adamsberg opened his eyes wide.

‘You know this story?’ said Danglard, slightly combatively.

‘Not this one, I know others. At this moment in the story, there’s usually an unearthly cry.’

‘Precisely. There was a great sound of roaring in the vault. The exorcist threw some garlic in and got out, and they stopped up the entry to the catacomb with bricks.’

Adamsberg shrugged.

‘You don’t stop vampires with bricks.’

‘No, and it didn’t work. Four years later, there was gossip that a nearby house was haunted, an old Victorian house in Gothic style. The same exorcist searched the house and found a coffin in the basement, which he recognised as the very same one he had bricked up four years earlier.’

‘And was there a body inside?’ asked Estalère.