Have Mercy On Us All (21 page)

“So surveillance is pointless, then?”

“We’re doing it as a matter of principle. And for another reason.”

“So tell me, what brought Decambrais-Ducouëdic down?”

“Attempted rape of a minor at the school where he taught. He was hounded by every newspaper in the land. He was nearly lynched, at the age of fifty-two. He needed police protection until the trial.”

“Ah yes, I remember, the Ducouëdic affair. Some poor girl who was attacked in the lavatory. You really wouldn’t think he was like that, would you, when you look at him now.”

“You’ve forgotten his side of the story, Danglard. Three twelve-year-old boys had been beating up the girl during lunch break when there was
no-one
around. Ducouëdic came across the fight, laid into the lads really hard, and carried the girl out of the lavatory in his arms. Half the girl’s clothes had been torn off in the fight, so there was teacher running down the corridor with a half-naked girl screaming her head off in his arms. That’s what all the kids in the school saw. The three boys told a different story: Ducouëdic had been raping the girl, they intervened, so the teacher hit them hard and then ran off with the girl. It was their word against his. Ducouëdic lost. His girlfriend dropped him on the spot, the teachers turned the other way. In the absence of certainty. You know, Danglard, doubt is a void, and doubt goes on and on. That’s why he’s taken the name of Decambrais. Ducouëdic died at the age of fifty-two.”

“How old would those schoolboys be now? Thirty-two, thirty-three, roughly? Roughly Laurion’s age?”

“Laurion went to school in Périgueux. Ducouëdic taught at Vannes. That’s a long way away.”

“But he could be displacing as well, using substitutes for his real enemies.”

“Him as well?”

“But it’s perfectly comprehensible. There are heaps of old men who detest everyone under thirty-five.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“We’ve got to dig deeper into these two men. Decambrais is well placed to be the message-sender and he’s obviously capable of writing the ‘specials’. After all, he’s the one who decoded them. Supposedly because a single Arabic word led him to Avicenna. He’d have to be a genius to have worked that one out from scratch!”

“We have to get to the bottom of those two in any case. I’m convinced that the killer comes to the newscasts. We’ve agreed that he must have started his campaign that way because he had precious little alternative. But I also reckon he’s been familiar with the urn for a good while, at close quarters. What looks to us like a loopy mode of communication must have seemed to the killer to be the obvious way of talking to the world. I mean, look at the size of the audience: using the town crier has become part of normal life round there. I know I’m on the right track. I’m sure he comes to listen to his own ‘specials’. He’s there at the newscasts. I’ll swear to that.”

“I can’t see why you’re so sure,” Danglard objected. “He’d be putting himself at risk.”

“You can’t see why, and I don’t mind, because I know he’s there, he’s one of the people in the crowd. That’s why we’re not taking the watch off the square.”

Adamsberg got up and they both went to the incident room, where the chief stood with his back to the Paris wall map. All eyes were on them, but Adamsberg realised that the object of interest and attention was not himself but Danglard in his outsize sleeveless black T-shirt. He raised his arm, and eyes swivelled left.

“The premises will be evacuated at 1800, for pest control. When you all get home, you will shower immediately, body-wash and hair-wash obligatory, and you will place all your clothes, repeat all your clothes without exception, in the washing machine. Set water temperature to very hot, and run a full wash cycle. Objective: to kill any fleas you may have picked up.”

Smiles and grumbles.

“That was not a suggestion but an order,” Adamsberg said. “It applies without exception to everyone in this team but most especially to the three officers who came with me to Laurion’s flat. Now, has anybody been bitten since yesterday?”

A hand rose timidly. Kernorkian. The others stared at him, apprehensively.

“
Lieutenant
Kernorkian.”

“Now don’t worry too much,
lieutenant
. You’re not alone.
Commissaire
Danglard got bitten yesterday too.”

“My shirt will be wrecked if I put it through a hot wash,” someone piped up.

“Well, put it in the incinerator instead. That’s your only alternative. If you’re thinking of disobeying orders, let me emphasise that you would be running the risk of catching the plague. I repeat: a risk, not a certainty. I am personally convinced that the fleas in Laurion’s flat are perfectly healthy and just another part of the set-up. Nonetheless, my order stands, and the hygienic measures required are not optional. Fleas bite mostly
at
night, which is why I insist you get on with personal hygiene the moment you get home. Second: after scrub-down and putting on the washing machine, you must all use the foggers which you can pick up from the changing rooms on your way out. OK. Now for tomorrow. Noël and Voisenet, your job is to check out the alibis of these four academics who know a lot about plague and are therefore provisionally suspect. And you,” said Adamsberg to the smiling face with thinning grey hair above it …

“
Lieutenant
Mercadet,” the man said as he half stood up in order to bow.

“Mercadet. Your job is to check out the ironing story with Mme Toussaint in Avenue de Choisy.”

Adamsberg gave out two slips of paper which were handed along the rows to Mercadet and to Noël. Then he pointed straight at the quaking green-eyed baby-face and then at the ramrod from the Channel coast.

“
Brigadier
Lamarre,” the pikestaff said as he stood up to attention.

“
Brigadier
Estalère,” said baby-face.

“Your job is to check the unmarked doors in all twenty-nine of the affected buildings. I want you to find any trace you can of an oily or greasy substance – skin cream, dripping, anything like that – on the keyhole, bell push, or doorknob. Take proper precautions and wear gloves at all times. Now, who’s been working on the twenty-nine residents of the unmarked flats?”

Noël, Danglard, Justin and Froissy each raised a finger.

“What’s come up? By way of connections?”

“Negative so far,” Justin said. “Statistical analysis of the sample has produced no significant result.”

“Statements from the other residents in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”

“Useless. Nobody saw an intruder. Neighbours heard nothing.”

“The door code?”

“That’s an easy one. The five numbers have completely worn away from over use. So given that you know which keys to punch, you’ve got only 120 combinations to try out, and that takes less than ten minutes.”

“Who took statements from the residents of the other twenty-eight buildings? Did anyone get a glimpse of the phantom painter?”

The big woman officer with the rock-hewn face held her hand up forthrightly.

“
Lieutenant
Retancourt,” she said. “Nobody saw the dauber. He works at night, obviously, and his brush makes no sound. With all the practice he’s had, he gets the job done in no more than half an hour.”

“Door codes?”

“We found traces of plasticine on several of the keypads, sir. The murderer slaps the stuff on the whole set of keys and then peels it back. It shows you which keys have been used because greasy fingermarks show up on plasticine.”

“That’s trade,” Justin said. “Means he’s been inside.”

“But it’s child’s play,” said Noël. “Anyone could think it up for himself.”

Adamsberg looked at the wall clock.

“Ten to,” he said. “Time to evacuate the premises.”

The biologist rang at 3 a.m. and woke Adamsberg up.

“No bacilli,” a sleep-deprived male voice said. “Result negative. Negative re fleas from clothing, negative re insect in envelope, negative re twelve specimens brought direct from the flat. Fine healthy fleas, sir. They’re as clean as a pig’s whistle.”

Adamsberg was aware of a feeling of relief.

“And they’re all rat fleas, are they?”

“Rat fleas every one, sir. Five male, ten female.”

“Wonderful. Keep them safe under lock and key.”

“But they’re already dead,
commissaire
.”

“Forget about the funeral announcement, would you. Keep them in a jar.”

Adamsberg sat up in bed, switched on the light, and rubbed his head. Then he called Danglard and Vandoosler with the news from the lab. Then he dialled all twenty-six other members of the team, the police pathologist who’d been in the flat, and Devillard. Not a single one grumbled about being woken up in the middle of the night. Adamsberg’s head was swimming with all these
lieutenants
and
brigadiers
and he was afraid his telephone book wasn’t up to date. He’d not had time to keep up his
memory-jogger
either. Or to call Camille to find out when they could get together again. The plague-monger was eating up his life. He wasn’t going to get much sleep for a while.

At half past seven in the morning he got a call on his mobile as he was walking to the office from his flat in the fourth arrondissement.

“
Commissaire Principal
Adamsberg?” The caller was out of breath. “This is
Brigadier
Gardon, on the night roster. We’ve got two corpses. They were lying in the street, in the twelfth arrondissement, one in Rue de Rottembourg and another not far away on Boulevard Soult. Both laid out stark naked on the roadway, both bodies smudged with charcoal. Both male.”

XXI

BY NOON THE
two bodies had been bagged and taken off to the mortuary and the police cordons at the crime scenes had been taken down. The outdoor staging of the murders destroyed any chance of keeping the story under wraps. It was bound to break on the eight o’clock television news, and it could hardly fail to make the front page in the morning papers. No way of withholding the victims’ identities either. The link between their home addresses in Rue Poulet and Avenue de Tourville and the unmarked doors on the two blocks that had been daubed with backwards 4s would be made in a trice. Two males, aged thirty-one and thirty-six respectively. One married with kids, the other living with a partner. Three-quarters of the murder squad were out on the job, looking for witnesses to the dumping of the bodies, or going through the blocks of flats where the victims had lived, or interviewing relatives and trying to find any kind of connection between these men and René Laurion. All the others were at their keyboards, logging the details and writing up.

Adamsberg stood leaning against the wall of his office, near the window with its brand new iron bars, vaguely aware of normal life flowing past down the street. He was trying to get a grip on what was now a vast skein of leads and all the stuff that came
after the fact
. The tangled ball had got too big for a single brain, at any rate for his brain. He couldn’t get a grip on it, and he felt it was about to crush him. There were the “specials” with their weird contents, there was local trivia down at the square, then the louche backgrounds of Le Guern and Ducouëdic; there was the mysterious
topography
of the door-daubing, the question of who the murdered men really were, and who their relatives, their neighbours and their friends might be; there was the charcoal business, and the fleas, and the envelopes, and results from the path lab and the autopsy reports and the hypothetical psychology of the culprit. A thousand strands that tied him in knots, a spiderweb of deception that stopped him standing up and seeing the lie of the land. He was drowning in a sea of detail. For the first time he wondered whether Danglard and his computer wouldn’t get the better of his woolly mind all on its own in a howling storm.

One night, two stiffs. Two at a go. Their front doors had been under guard. So the killer must have made them go somewhere else to get killed. It was an elementary diversion, no more subtle than the Germans flying their troops across the Maginot line in 1940 because the land routes were cut off by the army. The
lieutenants
on duty in Rue de Rottembourg outside the flat of Jean Viard saw the man go out around 8.30 p.m. It wouldn’t have been right to make a man miss his date, now would it? In any case, Viard didn’t give a damn for “all that bloody 4 nonsense,” as he said to the man on duty. The other victim, François Clerc, went out around ten – for a walk, so he’d said. He was feeling claustrophobic with two
flics
outside the door, it was a lovely evening, he felt like a drink in a bar. What’s wrong with that? You can’t tell a man he’s not to have a pint, now can you? Both men had been strangled to death, like Laurion. About an hour between the two murders. Serial slaughter. The bodies had then been moved, presumably in the same vehicle, and probably stripped and charcoaled in it together. Then dumped on the highway with all their belongings, near the outer edge of the city. This time the plague-monger hadn’t taken the risk of being seen. Instead of stopping to lay out the limbs in a spread-eagle position, he’d pushed the dead men out the back of a van or a hatchback and left them in the road as they fell. Adamsberg imagined the killer being agitated about having had to skimp on the final ritual touches. Laurion had been arranged to look like a crucifixion, and that could not have been by chance. Anyway, the deed had been done in the dark of night, and there were no witnesses to be found for love or money. At 4 a.m. on a weekday, despite its millions of inhabitants, Paris can be as deserted as a Pyrenean village. Just because
it’s
the capital city doesn’t make any difference. Down time is down time on Boulevard Soult just as it is on the Tourmalet.

The only new fact to emerge so far was that all the victims were males over thirty. It was a pretty weak kind of common denominator but that was all there was. In other respects the victims could hardly be more different. Jean Viard hadn’t been a slacker in a bad neighbourhood school like Laurion. He came from a pampered background, worked in computers and was married to a lawyer. François Clerc had started lower down, he’d grown into a large and broad-shouldered fellow, and he worked as a delivery man for one of the major French wine distributors.