Have Mercy On Us All (7 page)

Joss drained his glass of wine and put it down rather sharply. Then he shrugged his shoulders and all of a sudden calmed down. The Le Guerns had been through much worse in their time.

“That’s fine,” he said as he poured himself another glass. “Keep your room. I can see your point of view. You’re not my kind of bloke, and I’m not yours, and that’s the end of it. Can’t do a thing about it. You can have your bloody messages if that’s what you’re excited about. Meet me at Damascus’s place this evening, just before the 1810 newscast.”

Decambrais turned up on time at Rolaride. Damascus was busy adjusting a customer’s rollerblades. His sister, standing behind the till, beckoned to the bookworm.

“Monsieur Decambrais,” she whispered, “please, could you tell him to put on a pullover. He’s going to catch his death, you know. His lungs aren’t that good. I know he listens to what you say, no two ways.”

“I’ve already spoken to him about that, Marie-Belle. It’s a slow business, trying to get something into his skull.”

“I know,” said Marie-Belle, biting her lip. “But couldn’t you try just one more time?”

“All right, at the next opportunity. Cross my heart. Is the sailorman around?”

“He’s out the back,” said Marie-Belle, waving towards a door.

Decambrais hunched his shoulders to get under all the bicycle wheels hanging from the ceiling and made his way through the stacks of surfboards to the workshop, itself brimful of roller skates of every size and
description
. One end of the workbench was occupied by Joss and his urn.

“I’ve laid them out for you down the end of the table,” Joss said without looking up.

Decambrais picked up the sheets and took a quick glance at them.

“And here’s this evening’s addition,” Joss added. “Special preview, just for you. The nutter is picking up speed. I’m getting three a day now.”

Decambrais unfolded the latest message and read the following:

That special care be taken that no tainted fish, or unwholesome flesh or musty corn or other corrupt fruits of what fort foever be suffered to be sold about the city, or any part of the fame.

“I don’t know what forts these are,” Joss said, still poring over his evening news messages.

“Sorts, if I may be so bold.”

“Look here, Decambrais, I don’t want to seem unfriendly, but would you mind your own business. The Le Guerns know how to read the alphabet, thank you. Nicolas Le Guern was town crier as far back as the Crimean War. So you’re not going to teach me the difference between forts and sorts, dammit.”

“Look here, Le Guern, these are copied out from texts from long ago. Our nutter has copied them out and used special letters. At the time, people made the letter ‘s’ almost the same way as the ‘f,’ at least in some positions in the word. So what you read out at the lunchtime newscast today wasn’t about things being pofted or about houfes, and it wasn’t addressed to juftices either.”

“What, you mean they were all ‘s’s?” Joss stood up straight at last, and his voice was getting louder.

“That’s right, Le Guern, they’re ‘s’s.
Post, house, justice
. Old-style ‘s’s shaped like ‘f’s. Look at them closely and you’ll see for yourself that they’re not quite the same.”

Joss grabbed the letter from Decambrais’s hand, and looked closely at the script.

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “But supposing you’re right, so what?”

“It’ll just make it easier for you to read. I wasn’t trying to get up your nose.”

“Well, you did. Take your bloody screeds and get going. Because reading is my job, not yours. I don’t poke my nose in your funny affairs, do I now.”

“What did you say?”

“Look, I know a fair bit about you, what with all these poison pen messages lying around,” said Joss, pointing to the pile of “better nots”. “As my great-great-grandfather Le Guern reminded me only the other evening, people have loads of muck between the ears. You’re lucky that I filter out the worst of the shit.”

Decambrais went quite white and cast about for a stool to sit on.

“Good Lord,” said Joss, “there’s no need to panic.”

“Le Guern, do you still have those … poison pen messages?”

“Sure, I put them in with the rejects. Do they interest you?”

Joss rummaged about in his pile of “return to senders” and picked out two messages for Decambrais.

“After all, it’s always useful to know your enemies,” he said. “Forewarned is forearmed, that’s what I say.”

Joss watched Decambrais as he unfolded the sheets with trembling hands. For the first time he felt a little bit sorry for the old fellow.

“You mustn’t let it affect you, really,” he said. “They’re the real dregs, the people who write that sort of muck. You wouldn’t dream what filth I have to read. You should let sewage slip down the pipe and out to sea.”

Decambrais read the two messages and smiled weakly as he laid them on his lap. He seemed to be breathing more normally, Joss reckoned. What was it that had made the toff so scared?

“There’s nothing wrong with lace-making. My father used to make nets. Same thing, really, isn’t it, except the thread is thicker.”

“That’s true,” said Decambrais. He gave the messages back to Joss, then added: “But it’s better for it not to get around. People can be very petty.”

“Indeed,” said Joss as he went back to sorting the evening newscast.

“I learned how to make lace from my mother. Why didn’t you read these messages out in the usual way?”

“Because I don’t like bloody idiots.”

“But you don’t like me either, Joss Le Guern.”

“True. But I don’t like bloody idiots either.”

Decambrais got up and started to leave. But just as he was going through the low doorway to the front shop, he turned round and said:

“The room’s yours, Le Guern.”

VI

AS HE WAS
going back through the archway into his new HQ around one o’clock, Adamsberg was intercepted by a junior he’d never seen before.

“
Lieutenant
Maurel, sir,” the young man said. “There’s a young woman waiting for you in your office and she insists on speaking to you alone. Name of Maryse Petit. She’s been there for about twenty minutes. I took the liberty of shutting your door because Favre was wanting to give her a counselling session.”

Adamsberg frowned. It was the woman who’d come in yesterday about the graffiti. Good Lord, he must have been too nice to her. If she was going to drop in every day for a chat from now on, things could get very tangled.

“Have I put a foot wrong, sir?” Maurel asked.

“No,
Lieutenant
Maurel, not a bit. All my own fault.”

Maurel was made up of: tall, slim, dark, acne, prognathous jaw and solicitude.
Acne
plus
jutting
plus
solicitude
equals
Maurel
.

Adamsberg went into his office with a degree of circumspection, sat down at his desk and nodded curtly.

“Oh,
commissaire
, I’m really sorry to take up more of your time,” Maryse began.

“One moment, please.” Adamsberg pulled a sheet of paper out of a drawer and pored over it with a pencil in his hand.

It was a well-worn trick used by
flics
and bosses since time immemorial to pull rank and make people on the wrong side of the desk aware of their own insignificance. Adamsberg resented having to use the ploy. You think
you’re
a million miles from the likes of Noël and his authoritarian zipper, then all of a sudden you’re behaving a lot worse than that. Maryse had stopped her chatter and lowered her head, and her reaction told Adamsberg she was used to being put in her place, by a boss or whoever. She was quite pretty and the way she was sitting gave a good view through the top of her blouse. You think you’re a million miles from the likes of Favre, and when occasion arises, there you are puddling about in the same pigsty. Adamsberg wrote on his staff list, with time-wasting precision:
acne, prognathous, solicitude, Maurel
.

“Yes?” Adamsberg looked up as he spoke. “Still frightened, are we? Maryse, you do remember, don’t you, that this is the murder squad? If you are really disturbed, maybe you should see a doctor instead.”

“Oh, well, perhaps.”

“It’s all right,” Adamsberg said as he stood up. “Stop fussing over it. Graffiti never broke any bones.”

He opened the office door wide and smiled at Maryse to indicate that it was time for her to leave.

“Hang on a minute. I haven’t told you about the other blocks.”

“What other blocks?”

“Two apartment blocks at the other end of Paris, in the eighteenth arrondissement.”

“And so?”

“Black 4s. On every door. It actually happened over a week ago, so it was before the writing on my own block.”

Adamsberg stood still for a minute, then closed the door quietly and motioned the young woman to sit down again.

“Teenage paint-sprayers, don’t you think,
commissaire
, they usually do their stuff in their own streets,” Maryse suggested timidly as she sat down. “I mean, don’t they usually mark their own patch, like just a street or two? They don’t go around putting their graffiti on one block and then on another one at the other end of town, do they? Am I right, do you think?’

“Unless they live at both ends of town.”

“Oh, I’d not thought of that. But don’t gangs usually come from the same patch?”

Adamsberg held his counsel and got out his notepad.

“How did you know about this?”

“I’d taken my son to the therapist – he’s dyslexic, you know. While he has his session I always while away the time in the café downstairs. So I was leafing through the local free sheet, you know, the one that has local news and political bits in it. There was a whole story about graffiti, on one block in rue Poulet and another in rue Caulaincourt. Black 4s, on the front doors of all the flats.”

Maryse paused.

“I brought you the cutting,” she said, and slipped a piece of old newspaper on to the table. “So you can see I’m not telling you stories. I mean, I’m not trying to make myself interesting or anything.”

As Adamsberg ran his eye down the article, Maryse got up to go. Adamsberg glanced at his now empty waste-paper basket.

“One moment,” he said. “Let’s go over this again, from the top. Name, address, the shape of these 4s and so on.”

“But I told you all that yesterday.”

“I’d still like to go over it again. As a precaution, if you follow me.”

“Oh, all right then,” said Maryse, and she sat down again obediently.

When Maryse had left Adamsberg went for a walk, since he had just spent a whole hour at his desk, and that was as long as he could manage comfortably in a sitting position. Dining out, going to the cinema or to a concert, or spending a long evening on a soggy sofa were experiences that Adamsberg enjoyed at the start but which left him at the end in a state of physical distress. His irrepressible desire to go out and walk, or at least to stand up, would always in the end overwhelm his attention to the conversation, the movie or the music. But this personal handicap had its advantages. It allowed him to understand what other people meant when they spoke of agitation, impatience, even panic – for he never felt those emotions in any of life’s circumstances, except when he had to stay sitting down for too long.

Once he was up and away on his two feet, Adamsberg’s agitation subsided as quickly as it had risen, and he resumed his natural tempo – slow, steady and calm. He circled round and back towards the Brigade without having
thought
very much during his walk, but he had the feeling that these graffiti were not some teenagers’ stunt, nor any kind of tit-for-tat. There was something unpleasant about those sets of numbers; something awkward; something vaguely sinister.

The Brigade building came into view, and Adamsberg knew that he should better not mention any of this to Danglard. Danglard hated seeing his boss’s mind drift on a swell of unsubstantiated feelings, the root cause, in his view, of all the mistakes the police ever made. At best Danglard would call it all a waste of time. Adamsberg had given up trying to explain that wasting time was never a waste of time, because Danglard remained totally resistant to what he saw as an illicit mode of thought – thinking unsupported by rationality. Adamsberg’s problem was that he had never known how to think any other way. He didn’t have a system, in fact, or a philosophy or a persuasion or even a liking for his kind of musing. It was just the way he worked; it was the only way he could.

Danglard, looking stolid after a copious lunch, was at his desk, testing the computer network that had just been booted.

“I can’t manage to download the fingerprint files from the central server,” he grumbled as Adamsberg wandered past. “What are they playing at, I ask you? Do we have authorised access or do we not?”

“It’ll download eventually,” Adamsberg said soothingly. It was easier for him to keep calm about it, as he never got too involved with computers.

Adamsberg’s informatic incompetence didn’t bother Danglard one bit, since he was as happy as a sandboy when playing with data bases. His capacious and well-ordered mental faculties were entirely suited to saving, sorting and merging as many megabytes as came his way.

“There’s a message on your desk,” Danglard said without raising his eyes from the screen. “Queen Matilda’s girl. She’s back.”

Danglard only ever called Camille “Queen Matilda’s girl”; the habit went back to the time when the Matilda in question had given him quite an upset, of an aesthetic and sentimental sort. He worshipped Queen Matilda and his devotion spilled over on to her daughter Camille. Danglard thought Adamsberg fell far short of the level of care and attention that Camille deserved; some of Danglard’s grunts and his silent reproaches made
Adamsberg
quite aware of the disapproval of his number two, despite the fact that the latter was generally quite careful not to meddle in other people’s business. The present moment was a case in point: without saying anything directly, Danglard was making it clear that Adamsberg had been wrong not to try to get news of Camille for the past two months. And he blatantly disapproved of Adamsberg going around of an evening with another girl on his arm, no more than a week ago. On that occasion neither man had said a word to the other.