Have Mercy On Us All (22 page)

Adamsberg called the pathologist without shifting from his buttress position. The man was in the middle of examining Viard. Adamsberg looked at his memory-jogger while waiting for the medic to come to the phone. He got the name just in time.

“Hallo, Romain, Adamsberg calling. Sorry for the interruption. Can you confirm death by strangulation?”

“No doubt about it. The killer used a sturdy line, probably a length of plastic-coated wire. There’s a fairly obvious trauma in the lower rear area of the cranium. It might have been made by a slip-knot or a garrotte. The killer would only have to pull it to the right, not very much strength needed. Incidentally, he’s improved his technique now he’s gone wholesale. Both victims got a good whiff of high-strength tear gas. By the time they got their wits back they must have been in the noose already. It’s a quick and fail-safe way of doing things.”

“Did Laurion have any bites on his body – flea bites, I mean?”

“Good Lord, I forgot to put that in the autopsy report. It hardly seemed relevant at the time. But yes, he had fairly recent flea bites in the groin. There are some on Viard as well, on the inside of his right thigh and on his neck, but those are less recent. I’ve not had time to look at the third man yet.”

“Do fleas bite corpses?”

“No, Adamsberg, they would never do that. They would leave any host as soon as it began to lose heat.”

“Thanks, Romain. Please test for the bacillus, same as for Laurion. You never know.”

Adamsberg snapped his mobile back into his pocket and pressed his fingers to his eyelids. So he’d been wrong. The plague-monger didn’t open his flea bag at the same time as he got the rope round his victim’s neck. There must have been a time lag between his releasing the insects and his strangling because the fleas had had time to bite a warm body. Quite a substantial lag in the case of Viard, since the pathologist said the bites on his body were not recent ones.

He paced around the room with his hands clasped behind his back. The madman had a method that seemed truly insane: first, he slipped into the building, slit his flea-laden envelope open, pushed it under the door and went away again. Then he came back some time later with a lump of apple-wood charcoal in his pocket, picked the lock and strangled his victim. A two-stroke murder machine. One, fleas; two, neck. And that’s leaving the diabolical distribution of the 4s and the “specials” out of the count. Adamsberg felt he was losing it ever more completely. The leads crossed over, the way ahead was lost in fog, and this ritual killer seemed to grow ever more distant, ever more alien. On the spur of the moment he dialled Camille’s number and half an hour later he was on her bed, naked beneath his clothes, and shortly after, naked without his clothes. Camille lay on top of him and he closed his eyes. A minute later he’d completely forgotten that he had twenty-seven men combing streets and servers under his command.

One hundred and fifty minutes later he was on his way back to Place Edgar-Quinet in far better spirits and with that slightly wobbly feeling in his upper legs giving him a sense of warmth and safety.

“I was going to call you,
commissaire
,” said Decambrais as he came out of his front door to greet him. “There weren’t any yesterday, but one came today.”

“Nobody was seen putting it in the urn,” Adamsberg pointed out.

“It came by post. He’s switched tactics. He’s not taking the risk of dropping it in in person any more. He puts it in the post.”

“Addressed to whom?”

“To Joss Le Guern, at this address.”

“So he knows the town crier’s name?”

“Lots of people know the name.”

Adamsberg followed Decambrais into his cubbyhole and opened the outsize envelope.

To my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City, in two parishes together. They said […] that both had been found with tokens that could not be denied or mistaken.

“Did Le Guern read it out?”

“Yes, at the noon newscast. You did say we should carry on.”

“This message is much clearer, now that our man has started killing. What sort of audience reaction did Le Guern get?”

“Murmurs in the crowd, questions and a lot of talk afterwards at the Viking. I think there was a journalist in the bar. He was firing off questions at Joss and other people. I don’t know how he got on to us.”

“Gossip points the way, Decambrais. Can’t be helped. The latest specials, the public warning and the corpse have set tongues wagging. It had to happen. Our plague-monger might even have cranked it up by putting out a press release, just to be sure that he’s got ignition.”

“Yes, he could have done just that.”

“Yesterday’s postmark,” Adamsberg said as he turned the envelope over. “Mailed from the first arrondissement.”

“Two deaths foretold.”

Adamsberg looked Decambrais straight in the eye. “That’s already history, I’m afraid. You’ll hear all about it on the evening news. Two men dumped in the road like sacks of potatoes. In their birthday suits, and charcoaled.”

“Two at a go!” Decambrais muttered. He pursed his lips, puckering his ageing skin with a thousand wrinkles.

“In your opinion, Decambrais, do plague victims turn black before they die?”

The former teacher furrowed his brow.

“
Commissaire
, I’m no expert on the plague, and I’m not a medical historian. That’s why it took me so long to work out where those ‘specials’ were coming from. But I can tell you that physicians of the period don’t
mention
discoloration of the skin. They say plenty about pustules, blotches, buboes, lumps – ‘the tokens’, they were called – but not about people turning black. The black business is a part of folk culture, and it’s far less ancient than the great plague epidemics. All due to semantic drift, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“It didn’t matter because the mistake got entrenched, and now everyone knows that ‘Black Death’ means bubonic plague. But the phrase itself is probably critical for our killer, because words spread havoc. He’s trying to impress, trying to make a big impact, and it doesn’t matter if what he uses for that purpose is true or false. ‘Black Death’ hits people like a bullet.”

Adamsberg took a pew at the Viking, which wasn’t too noisy at that hour, and asked the big barman, Bertin, to bring him a black coffee. He had a good view of the whole square from where he was sitting. Danglard rang him fifteen minutes later.

“I’m at the Viking.”

“Go easy on the
calva
,” Danglard advised, “it is rather peculiar. It empties your brain in no time at all.”

“My brain’s empty as it is. I’m all at sea. I think he’s bust my compass and turned my head inside out. He’s won. He’s beaten me hollow.”

“You mean Bertin and his apple brandy?”

“No, the plague-monger. Our man CLT. By the way, Danglard, drop those initials.”

“You mean drop Christian Laurent Taveniot?”

“Leave that man alone, Danglard. CLT is the electuary of the three adverbs.”

Adamsberg got out his pad and turned it to the page where Marc Vandoosler had scribbled his notes. He was waiting for Danglard to respond, but there was just silence on the line. Danglard couldn’t cope either. He was losing it. Drowning.

“
Cito, longe, tarde
,” Adamsberg recited. “‘Scram now and take your time coming back.’”

“Shit,” Danglard hissed after a long pause. “Why didn’t I remember that?”

“Because he’s addled our minds, yours included. He’s running rings round us.”

“
Cito, longe fugeas et tarde redeas
. Same thing as LHM.”

“What’s LHM?”

“Short for ‘The Lord Have Mercy on Us All’. You come across it in all the old books about the plague. Who put you on to CLT, anyway?”

“Marc Vandoosler.”

“I’ve got a whole file on him for you.”

“You can drop that too. He’s out of the picture.”

“Did you know his uncle was a
flic
and got sacked just before retirement?”

“Yep. I’ve supped with the man. Octopus.”

“Oh, I see. Did you know the nephew, Marc, got mixed up in a case?”

“An actionable case?”

“Yes, but as part of the action. He’s a bright lad.”

“I’d realised that.”

“I was calling to report on the other four plague specialists. Their alibis are watertight. Beyond all reasonable doubt. They’re completely in the clear.”

“So we’ve drawn a blank there too.”

“Yes, sir. Nobody else in the picture at all.”

“I can’t even see the bloody picture any more. I’m blind as a bat on a beach.”

Danglard could have gloated over the demise of Adamsberg’s intuitive method. But to his own surprise he found he was dismayed, and he tried to put some spine back into his boss.

“Now come on, sir,” he said sharply. “You must have sniffed something. Just a little something.”

“Just a little something,” Adamsberg parroted. And after a pause, “It still smells the same, you know.”

“And what does it smell of? Tell me.”

Adamsberg looked right round the square. People were beginning to gather in little knots, others were stumbling out of the bar, all were getting ready for Joss’s late final newscast. People standing under the big plane tree on the other side were laying bets on whether that day’s crew would be “all saved” or “lost at sea”.

“I know he’s here,” Adamsberg said.

“Here where?”

“Right here. The killer is on the square.”

Adamsberg had got rid of his television and his habit was to drop in to the Irish pub on the corner when he needed to watch the news, despite the loud music and the reek of Guinness. Enid, the barmaid he’d known for ages, let him use the portable set she kept switched on under the counter. So he breasted the swing doors of the Waters of Liffey at 7:55 p.m. and took his place behind the bar. The pub’s name seemed about right, as he felt he’d been drinking deeply of oblivion all day long. While Enid put a monstrous baked potato with bacon filling on his plate – where did Irish pubs get such outsize spuds? a mystery worth investigating when he had the time, that’s to say when his brain wasn’t entirely consumed by a plague-monger – Adamsberg listened in to the eight o’clock news. It was nearly as disastrous as he had feared.

The anchorman announced that three men had been murdered in Paris, late Monday and late Wednesday night. The circumstances were a cause of considerable concern. All the victims lived in buildings that had had their doors painted with 4s, about which the police had put out a public warning two days previously. The police had made no comment about the significance of the signs but their meaning was now known thanks to a brief communiqué sent to Agence France-Presse by the painter himself. The message was to be regarded with extreme circumspection and a hoax could not be ruled out. The anonymous informant claimed that the three men had died of plague and declared that he had been trying to warn Parisians of the scourge through numerous messages read out to passers-by at the Edgar-Quinet–Rue Delambre crossing. The claim suggested strongly that the informant was mentally unbalanced. Although the bodies did show external symptoms of the Black Death, the Paris police had stated that they were certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that death had been caused by strangulation, and the three unfortunate men were the victims of a vicious serial killer. Adamsberg heard his own name mentioned.

Next came shots of doors that had been daubed, with a pedantic
commentary
, then interviews with neighbours and a clip of the square, before a live cut to the office of the Chief Superintendent in person. Superintendent Brézillon solemnly declared that all persons at risk were under tight protection, that the plague story was nothing but a fantasy in the mind of the man they were now looking for with all available resources, and that the black blotches on the bodies were nothing more than charcoal smudges. But instead of closing the item after these sensible reassurances, the anchorman went on to introduce some truly horrifying excerpts from an old documentary about the Black Death in France.

Adamsberg went back to his seat in the bar and began mechanically to demolish the vast tuber on his plate. He didn’t really notice what he was eating.

At the Viking, Bertin turned up the volume on the television set, put back the time of serving mains, and also delayed his evening thunder-roll. Joss was in the thick of it, fielding questions as best he could, with Decambrais behaving impeccably as his cool-headed deputy. Damascus didn’t really know what he could usefully do, but because he realised that a tense and complicated situation had arisen he stood like a centurion at Joss’s left side. Marie-Belle burst into tears and Damascus was in dismay.

“Lord have mercy! Has plague come back?” she shouted out in the middle of the item. Nobody else dared say it so plainly but that was what everyone felt and feared.

“Didn’t you hear, Marie-Belle?” boomed Lizbeth over the din. “These guys did not die of plague, they were strangled to death. Didn’t you hear what the man said? You should pay more attention, missy!”

“How do you know the boys in blue aren’t pulling the wool over our eyes?” said a man at the bar. “You don’t think they would actually tell us on the TV news if there was an outbreak of plague, do you? They never let all their cats out of the bag, do they now. Like all the stuff they put in cows and corn nowadays. They don’t shout the formula from the rooftops, do they?”

“Yeah, and meanwhile, what do we do? We go on eating the corn.”

“Not me. I won’t eat sweetcorn any more,” said a woman’s voice.

“You never have,” her husband butted in. “You don’t like it.”

“I bet it’s another cock-up,” said another man at the bar. “The idiots in white coats probably forgot to close the fridge door and let the bloody germs blow away on the wind. You know that plague of algae in the Med? Do you know how that got there?”

“Yeah,” someone said. “And there’s no way you can put it back in the bottle. Same as for maize and beef.”

“Three down already! Do you realise what that means? And how are they going to stop it from spreading? I bet they haven’t got a bloody clue.”