Have Mercy On Us All (39 page)

“For instance?”

“For instance, right now, I’m concentrating on being heavy.”

“Have you got a torch? Mine’s washed out.”

Retancourt handed him her torch lamp and Adamsberg used it to get a view of his arrestee’s face. Then he handcuffed him to Retancourt. To a tree trunk, that is.

“Young man, last in the Journot line, this is where the vengeance comes to a stop, here, on Quai de Jemmapes.”

The lad looked up at him with bewilderment and hatred in his eyes.

“You’ve got the wrong man,” he said with a scowl. “The old fellow hit out at me, I was just acting in self-defence.”

“I was right behind you. You punched him in the face.”

“Because he had a gun! He said, ‘Is that you?’ and pulled a gun simultaneously! I hit him. I’ve no idea what the old geezer was after! Please, couldn’t you tell your lady officer to get off? I’m suffocating.”

“Sit on his legs, Retancourt.”

Adamsberg searched him, looking for his ID card. He found his wallet
in
the inside pocket of his jacket, and emptied it on to the ground in the beam of the torch.

“Let me go!” the young man yelled. “He attacked me!”

“Shut up. I’ve had just about enough of that.”

“It’s a case of mistaken identity! I’ve never heard of any Journots!”

Adamsberg furrowed his brow as he read the ID by the light of the torch.

“And you’re not called Heller-Deville either?” he said in surprise.

“No, I’m not! You can see you’ve got it wrong. The old fellow was trying to kill me!”

“Get him up, Retancourt,” Adamsberg said. “Put him in the car.”

Adamsberg stood up in his dripping clothes reeking of dirty canal water, and went over to Estalère with a worried look on his face. The lad was called Antoine Hurfin, born at Vétigny in the department of Loir-et-Cher. Could he be just one of Marie-Belle’s friends from down there? Set upon by an old man?

Estalère seemed to have resuscitated the old fellow, whom he’d propped up into a sitting position and was keeping upright by the shoulders.

“Estalère,” Adamsberg asked as he strode up, “why did you not run when I told you to?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I took a liberty. Retancourt can run three times faster than I can. The guy was already out of my reach, and I thought she was the only chance we had of getting him.”

“Isn’t it odd that her parents called her Violette.”

“You know, sir, a baby isn’t very big, you can’t imagine it developing into an armoured half-track. As well as a nice person.”

“Really?”

“When you get to know her, sir.”

“How is he?”

“He’s breathing, but the water had already got into his lungs. He’s still in a pretty bad way, he’s exhausted, there might be heart trouble. I’ve called in first aid, was that right, sir?”

Adamsberg knelt down and shone the torch on the face of the man leaning on Estalère.

“Bloody hell. Decambrais.”

Adamsberg cupped his chin and waggled it gently back and forth.

“Decambrais, wake up, it’s Adamsberg. Open your eyes, old fellow.”

Decambrais appeared to stir, then to struggle, and then lifted an eyelid.

“It was not Damascus,” he blurted out almost inaudibly. “The charcoal.”

The ambulance braked to a halt alongside and two men clambered out with a stretcher.

“Where are you taking him?” asked Adamsberg.

“To hospital, Saint-Louis, A & E,” said one of the stretcher-bearers who was lifting the old man on to the canvas.

Adamsberg watched Decambrais being installed on the stretcher and carried off to the waiting ambulance. He got his mobile phone out, and then shook his head.

“Mobile drowned,” he said to Estalère. “Give me yours.”

It struck Adamsberg that if Camille now wanted to ring him, she wouldn’t be able to. Mobile drowned. But who cares anyway, because Camille didn’t want to ring. Fine. So don’t ring. Be on your way, Camille. Be on your way.

Adamsberg rang the Hotel Decambrais and got Eva on the line, as she was still up.

“Eva, get Lizbeth for me, it’s urgent.”

“Lizbeth is on stage,” Eva replied curtly. “She’s singing.”

“Well, give me the cabaret’s number, then.”

“You cannot disturb Lizbeth when she’s performing.”

“That was an order, Eva.”

Adamsberg waited for a moment, wondering if he wasn’t turning just a little bit into a
flic
. He appreciated that Eva had a pressing need to punish the whole world, but this really was not the right time.

It took him ten minutes to get Lizbeth on the line.

“I was going to give up,
commissaire
. If you’re ringing to tell me you’re about to release Damascus, I’ll hear you out. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.”

“I’m ringing to say Decambrais has been assaulted. He’s on his way to A & E at Saint-Louis … No, Lizbeth, I think he’ll pull through … No, it was a young man … I don’t know, we’ll be asking him that very soon.
Look
, be so kind as to put his things in a bag, and don’t forget he’ll want a couple of books, and go down to see him. He’s going to need you.”

“It’s all your fault. Why did you make him come out there?”

“Out where, Lizbeth?”

“Where you said when you rang him. Haven’t you got enough guys in the police already? Decambrais’s not in the reserve, you know.”

“But I did not ring him, Lizbeth.”

“It was one of your officers,” Lizbeth declared. “He was calling for you. I’m not crazy, it was me who took down the message with the meeting place.”

“Quai de Jemmapes?”

“Opposite number 57, at 11.30 p.m.”

Adamsberg nodded his head in the dark.

“Lizbeth, Decambrais must not leave his room, not by an inch, not for any reason whatever, no matter who says he’s calling.”

“So it wasn’t your call, right?”

“No, it wasn’t, Lizbeth. Stay with him. I’ll send you a relief officer.”

Adamsberg hung up and then called the squad.

“
Brigadier
Gardon here,” said the voice at the other end.

“Gardon, send a man down to Saint-Louis A & E, to stand guard on the ward where Hervé Ducouëdic is staying. And another two to relieve the team watching Marie-Belle’s flat in Rue de la Convention. No, no change, just keep close watch on the building. When she goes out in the morning, bring her in to me.”

“Remand in custody, sir?”

“No, just to help with inquiries. How’s the old lady getting on?”

“She had some kind of a discussion with her grandson, through the bars of his cell. Now she’s gone to sleep.”

“What kind of a discussion, Gardon?”

“It was a game, actually, sir. Like charades. We used to call it Chinese portraits. You ask questions like ‘If he was a colour, what colour would he be?,’ ‘If he was an animal, what animal would he be?,’ ‘If he was a noise,’ and so on. You have to guess the person being hidden behind the answers. It’s dead hard, sir.”

“Doesn’t look like they’re worried about the future, does it?”

“No, sir, no change on that. The old lady actually cheered the station up a bit. Heller-Deville is a decent fellow too, he shared his girdle cakes with us. Usually Narnie makes them with the skin of the milk, but seeing as you can’t –”

“Don’t tell me, Gardon. She uses cream. Have we got the lab results for Clémentine’s charcoal?”

“An hour ago. I’m sorry sir, it’s no go. Not a trace of apple wood. It’s ash, elm and acacia, mixed stuff you can get from any firewood supplier.”

“That’s a bugger.”

“I know, sir.”

Adamsberg began to shiver in his sticky wet clothes as he went back to the car. Estalère was at the wheel, Retancourt was in the back handcuffed to the prisoner. He leaned through the side window.

“Estalère, was it you who picked up my shoes?” he asked. “I can’t see them anywhere.”

“No, sir, I haven’t seen them.”

“Well, I’m not going to fuss about that,” said Adamsberg as he got into the front seat. “We can’t spend all night looking for them.”

Estalère drove off. The young man in the back had stopped protesting, as if the imposing mass of Retancourt had depressed his spirits.

“Drop me off at my place,” said Adamsberg. “Tell the night roster to start interviewing this Antoine Hurfin Heller-Deville Journot or whatever his name is.”

“Hurfin,” growled the back-seat passenger. “Antoine Hurfin.”

“Run an ID check, go through his flat, check his alibis, the whole works. I’m going to concentrate on this bloody charcoal.”

“Where, sir?”

“In bed.”

Adamsberg lay down in the dark and closed his eyes. Through his fatigue and the whirl of the day’s events, he saw three things outstanding, or standing out. Clémentine’s cakes, his drowned mobile and the charcoal. He put the girdle cakes out of his mind, they weren’t relevant to the investigation, even
if
they were the flourish that kept the monger and his forebear in a state of mental calm. His waterlogged mobile kept coming back to him, like flotsam on the rising tide, like a lost hope, like one of those wrecks that Joss Le Guern put into his
Everyman’s History of France
.

The good ship
Adamsberg Mobilphone
, long-life battery, under ballast out of Rue Delambre, struck the bank of the Saint-Martin Canal and sank at her mooring. All crew lost. Female passenger, Camille Forestier, unaccounted for.

OK, don’t ring, Camille. Off you go. Who cares anyway.

That left the charcoal.

That’s where they were at. Almost back at the beginning.

Damascus was a real expert on the plague and he’d made a
bloody great howler
. The two statements were mutually contradictory. Either Damascus knew next to nothing about bubonic plague and he’d been making a widespread and popular mistake by smearing his victims with charcoal. Or else Damascus knew what he was about, in which case he would never have dared make such a blunder. A fellow like Damascus couldn’t have done that. Not a guy who had such religious respect for historic documents that he indicated explicitly every omission he made. Damascus didn’t have to put in those
points of suspension
that made the town crier’s job so much harder. That was the key to it all: those
dot dot dots
set down to blind us and also to signal an unflinching scholarly respect for originals. The respect of a historian of the plague. Who doesn’t mess around with the words of an Authority, who doesn’t blend them to suit as if they were plain birdfeed. Who honours and respects Authority, who treats it with reverence, like a true believer who would not think of taking the Lord’s name in vain. Someone who uses dot dot dots like that wouldn’t go and smear bodies with charcoal, he wouldn’t commit a bloody great howler. It would be an offence and an insult to the scourge of the Lord in the hands of a worshipper. If you think you’re the lord of a cult then you are necessarily a follower. Damascus made use of the Journot force. He was the last man alive who would mock it.

* * *

Adamsberg got up and wandered around his two-room flat. Damascus had not fiddled his historical sources. Damascus had put in those points of suspension. Ergo, Damascus had not charcoaled the corpses.

Ergo, Damascus was not the murderer. The charcoal distinctly obscured the strangulation marks. The smearing was the final flourish, after death, and it hadn’t been done by Damascus. No charcoaling, no strangling. Nor had he undressed them. Nor had he forced the doors.

Adamsberg stood by his telephone. All that Damascus had done was to carry out what he believed in. He was a lord of the plague, he’d sent in the letters, he’d painted the 4s, he’d released plague fleas. Messages forewarning of a recurrence of a real plague which would relieve the man of his burden. Messages that set off a mass panic, reinforcing his belief that he had got his lordship back. Messages spreading confusion, leaving him with his hands free to act. The 4s to reduce the amount of damage he thought he was doing and salving the conscience of a phantom killer beset with scruples. A lord doesn’t make mistakes about who his victims are. The 4s were necessary to check the insects’ appetites, to keep the aim on target, to avoid collateral damage. No way was Damascus going to slaughter a whole block of flats for the sake of killing one of its inhabitants. For a Journot, that kind of clumsiness would have been simply unforgivable.

That’s what Damascus had done. He’d believed in what he’d done. He’d unleashed his force on the people who had destroyed him so he could be born again. He’d released harmless fleas under five front doors. Clémentine had “finished the job” by letting out fleas under the doors of the three remaining thugs. The victimless crimes of the self-mystified plague-monger added up to no more than that.

But someone was doing real murder behind Damascus’s back. Someone who’d donned the cloak of his phantom and was standing in for him, but for real. Somebody with a practical cast of mind who didn’t believe a word of the plague story and who didn’t know the first thing about the disease. Someone who believed that people who died of bubonic plague turned black. Someone who could make a
bloody great howler
. Someone who was pushing Damascus into the hole he’d dug for himself, driving him inexorably into the pit. The operation looked simple enough. Damascus thought
he
was dealing out death, and the other man was committing murder on his behalf. The case against Damascus was overwhelming, it slotted together like a Meccano set – what with the rat fleas, the charcoal and everything else in between, the evidence alone would get him sent down for his natural life. Who would have the courage to base a counter-case on a mere handful of dot dot dots? You might as well ask a twig to stop a tidal wave. No juror was going to hang his decision on those points of suspension.

Decambrais had twigged. He’d tripped on the contradiction between the monger’s meticulous erudition and the crass mistake of his finishing touch. He’d tripped on the charcoal and he was about to deduce the only possible explanation:
there were two of them
. A monger and a murderer. And Decambrais talked too much down at the Viking, after dinner. The murderer had realised that. He’d seen what his howler was leading to. Only a matter of hours before the old schoolteacher would work it all out in his head and then go blab to the
flics
. It was staring him in the face: the old man had to be made to keep his mouth shut. No time for subtlety. So what was left? A nasty accident, falling in water, one of life’s shitty turns.