An Uncertain Place (6 page)

‘That I don’t know.’

‘There’s an even older story, isn’t there?’ asked Adamsberg. ‘Or Stock wouldn’t have been so frightened.’

‘I don’t want to get into that,’ muttered Danglard.

‘But Stock knows it,
commandant
. So we ought to know about it too.

‘It’s his problem.’

‘No, we saw it too. So when does the old story go back to?’

‘Eighteen sixty-two,’ said Danglard with extreme reluctance. ‘Twenty-three years after the cemetery was created.’

‘Go on.’

‘That year, a certain Elizabeth Siddal, known as Lizzie, was buried there. She’d overdosed on laudanum. A kind of dope they had in Victorian times,’ he added, for Estalère’s benefit.

‘I see.’

‘Her husband was a famous man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite painter and a poet. Some manuscripts of her husband’s poems were buried with her in the coffin.’

‘It’s not long till we get there,’ said Estalère, looking suddenly alarmed. ‘Will we have time for this?’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t take long. Seven years later, the husband had the grave opened. Then there are two versions of this. The first says that Rossetti regretted his romantic gesture and wanted to get his poems back in order to publish them. According to the second version, he couldn’t bear living without his wife, and he had this rather scary friend, called Bram Stoker. Have you heard of him, Estalère?’

‘No, never.’

‘Well, he’s the creator of Count Dracula, a very powerful vampire.’

Estalère looked alarmed once again.

‘It’s only a novel,’ Danglard explained, ‘but we do know that the whole subject had an unhealthy fascination for Bram Stoker. He knew all these rituals that relate the living to the undead. So anyway, he was a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s.’

In his effort to concentrate, Estalère was twisting another paper napkin, anxious not to miss a word.

‘Some champagne?’ Danglard asked. ‘We’ve got plenty of time. It’s not a nice story but it’s quite short.’

Estalère shot a glance at Adamsberg, who seemed indifferent, and accepted. If he was making Danglard tell the story, it would be only polite to drink his champagne.

‘Bram Stoker was passionately interested in Highgate Cemetery,’ Danglard continued, stopping the drinks trolley again. ‘He made one of his heroines, Lucy, go wandering there, and he made the place famous. Or perhaps, some people say, he was driven to it by the Entity itself. According to the second version, it was Stoker who persuaded Rossetti to look once more at his dead wife. Well, anyway, Rossetti did break open the coffin seven years after her death. And it was then, or perhaps earlier, that the Highgate catacomb was first opened.’

Danglard stopped speaking, as if he too were caught up in Dante Gabriel’s dark wanderings, faced with the keen gaze of Adamsberg and the bemused expression of Estalère.

‘Right,’ said Estalère, ‘he broke open the coffin – and he saw something?’

‘Yes. Well. He discovered with dread that his wife was perfectly preserved. She had kept her long auburn hair, her skin was as fresh and pink and her nails as long as if she had just died, even better than she had looked in life. That’s the truth, Estalère. As if the seven years had done her nothing but good. Not a trace of decomposition.’

‘Is that really possible?’ asked Estalère, gripping the plastic cup.

‘It’s what happened in any case. She had the “rosy glow” of the living – in fact, she was rosier than ever. It was described by witnesses, I’m not making this up.’

‘But the coffin was normal? Just a wooden one?’

‘Yes. And the miraculous conservation of Lizzie Siddal caused a big scandal in England and beyond. People immediately started connecting it with the Master – the Highgate Vampire – and saying he had taken possession of the cemetery. There were ceremonies, people saw apparitions, they chanted incantations to the Master. From that time, the catacomb was open.’

‘So people went in.’

‘They certainly did, thousands of them. Until the two girls who were followed, more recently.’

The train braked, as they approached the Gare du Nord. Adamsberg sat up, shook out his jacket which he had rolled into a ball, and patted down his hair.

‘And what’s Stock’s connection to all that?’ he asked.

‘Radstock was part of a team of policemen sent up there when they heard about the exorcism sessions in the 1970s. He saw the preserved body of the man, and he heard the exorcist addressing the vampire. I guess he was young and impressionable at the time. And then finding these dead people’s feet in the same place the other day must have upset him a lot. Because they say the Entity – or the Vampire if you like – still reigns in the dark reaches of Highgate.’

‘Is that why you talked about an offering?’ asked Estalère. ‘The foot-chopper was making an offering to the Entity?’

‘That’s what Radstock thinks. He’s afraid some madman wants to start the whole nightmare up again, and “revive” the powers of the sleeping Master. But I guess it isn’t really likely. The foot-chopper wants to offload his collection, right? He can’t just chuck it all in the bin, any more than we can bear to throw away our childhood toys. He wants to find a suitable place for them.’

‘And he chooses a place worthy of his fantasies,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He chooses Higg-Gate, where the feet could go on living.’

‘Highgate,’ Danglard corrected. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean the foot-chopper believes in the Vampire. It’s the character of the place that counts. Well, anyway, all that’s well behind us now, and on the other side of the Channel.’

The train pulled in to the platform and Danglard seized his bag brusquely, as if to mark with a decisive action an end to the numbing effect of his story.

‘But when you’ve seen something like that,’ said Adamsberg softly, ‘a bit of it sticks and stays inside you. Any experience that’s too beautiful or too horrific always leaves some fragment of itself in the eyes of people who have witnessed it. We know that. In fact, that’s how you recognise it.’

‘Recognise what?’

‘Something either overwhelmingly beautiful or overwhelmingly terrible, Estalère. You recognise it by the shock, the little splinter that remains.’

As they walked back up the platform, Estalère tapped the
commissaire
on the shoulder, Danglard having parted from them in haste, as if regretting having said too much.

‘The little fragments of things we’ve seen, what happens to them?’

‘You put them away, you scatter them like stars in the big box we call memory.’

‘You can’t get rid of them?’

‘No, that’s not possible, the memory doesn’t have a compartment marked trash.’

‘So what happens if we don’t like them?’

‘Either you have to lie in wait for them and destroy them, like Danglard, or you leave them well alone.’

In the metro, Adamsberg wondered in which compartment of his memory the ghastly feet in London were going to lodge, on which galaxy of stars, and how long it would take for him to think he had forgotten them. And come to that, where would the wardrobe man go, or the bear and the uncle, or the girls who had seen the vampire and were trying to get back to him? What had happened to the one who had gone to the catacomb? And the exorcist?

Adamsberg rubbed his eyes, looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep. Ten hours, why not? But in the event, he got only six hours.

S
EVEN THIRTY NEXT MORNING
. T
HE
COMMISSAIRE
, THUNDERSTRUCK
, was sitting on a chair, and gazing at the crime scene, under the anxious eyes of his colleagues – so abnormal was it for Adamsberg to be thunderstruck, or indeed to be sitting on a chair. But he remained where he was, his face expressionless, and his eyes darting around, as if he had no wish to see, and was projecting his gaze far away so that nothing should lodge in his memory. He was forcing himself to think back, to 6 a.m., when he had not yet seen this room drenched in blood. When he had been dressing quickly, after the phone call from
Lieutenant
Justin, putting on the white shirt from the day before and the elegant black jacket lent to him by Danglard, both of them completely inappropriate to the situation. Justin’s choked voice had foretold nothing good; it was the voice of someone who was sick to the stomach.

‘We’re using all the platforms,’ he had said. That meant the plastic stands which were put on the ground to prevent any contamination of a crime scene by people’s feet. ‘All the platforms’. That meant the whole surface of the crime scene could not be trodden on. Adamsberg had left home hurriedly, avoiding Lucio, the tool shed, and the cat. Up to that point, he had been quite all right, he had not yet entered that room, he had not yet sat down on this chair, in front of carpets soaked in blood and strewn with entrails and splinters of bone, between four walls spattered with organic matter. It was as if the old man’s body had literally exploded. The most revolting thing was perhaps the scraps of flesh on the black shining lid of the half-size grand piano, as if on a butcher’s slab. Blood had also dripped on to the keys. This was another phenomenon for which there was no word: someone had reduced the body of another man to mincemeat. The word ‘killer’ was inadequate and derisory.

Leaving the house, he had called up his most trusty
lieutenant
, Retancourt, who in his view was the person best able to stand up to anything under creation. To thwart or redirect things as she wished.

‘Retancourt, get over there to Justin, they’ve got all the platforms out. I don’t know what’s happened. The address is a villa on a private road in Garches, leafy suburb, old man, and apparently an indescribable scene in the house. From Justin’s voice it sounded really bad. Fast as you can.’

With Retancourt, Adamsberg alternated between ‘
tu
’ and ‘
vous
’ without thinking about it. Her first name was Violette, an unlikely one for a woman who stood over 1m 80 and weighed 110 kilos. Adamsberg called her by her first name, or her surname, or her rank, depending on which was uppermost in his mind: his respect for her enigmatic abilities or his warm appreciation for the safe refuge she offered him – when she was so moved, and
if
she was so moved. This morning he was waiting for her, in a passive state, making time stand still, while his men spoke in low voices in the room and the blood dried on the walls. Perhaps she had been held up by something crossing her path. He heard Retancourt’s heavy tread before he saw her.

‘Bloody tailback all the way down the boulevard,’ Retancourt was grumbling. She did not appreciate being held up.

Despite her remarkable size, she trod nimbly over the platforms and sat down heavily at his side. Adamsberg gave her a grateful smile. Did she know that to him she represented his tree of salvation, a tree with tough and miraculous fruit, the kind of tree you put your arms round without being able to encircle it, the kind of tree you climb up into when the mouth of hell opens? You build yourself a tree house in its highest branches. She had the strength, the ruggedness and the self-contained quality of a tree concealing a monumental mystery. Her shrewd gaze now took in the room, the floor, the walls, the men.

‘It’s like a slaughterhouse! Where’s the body?’

‘Everywhere,
lieutenant
,’ said Adamsberg, stretching out his arms to encompass the whole room. ‘It’s been chopped up, pulverised, scattered. Wherever you look, you see parts of it, and when you see it all, you can’t see any of it. There’s nothing but the body, but the body isn’t there.’

Retancourt inspected the scene in a more systematic manner. From one end of the room to the other, organic fragments were scattered on the carpets, the walls, in ghastly chunks alongside the legs of the furniture. Bones, flesh, blood, something burnt in the fireplace. A disaggregated body, which did not even arouse disgust, in the sense that it was impossible to associate these elements with anything resembling a human being. The officers were moving around cautiously. Every step carried the risk of touching some unseen piece of the invisible corpse. Justin was talking in a low voice to the photographer – the one with freckles whose name Adamsberg could never remember – and his short blond hair was soaked and clinging to his scalp.

‘Justin’s in shock,’ said Retancourt.

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He was the first to get here, and he’d no idea what he’d find. The gardener had raised the alarm. The duty officer at Garches called his boss, who called us when he realised what they were up against. Then Justin walked right in on it. You should relieve him. Can you co-ordinate the takeover with Mordent, Lamarre and Voisenet? We’ll have to do a spot check, inch by inch, make a grid and collect the remains.’

‘How on earth did he do it? Think how long it must have taken.’

‘At first sight, it looks like he had a chainsaw and a blunt instrument of some kind. Between eleven last night and four this morning. He was able to get on with it because these villas are quite a long way apart, with big gardens and hedges. No very close neighbours and most of them are away for the weekend anyway.’

‘An old man, you say. What do we know about him?’

‘That he lived here, alone, and that he had plenty of money.’