Seeking Whom He May Devour (32 page)

At three thirty the lab results from the IRCG landed on
Adjudant
Aimont’s desk, and he forwarded them to Fromentin within five minutes. Hairs found on the corpse of Paul Hellouin belonged to the species
Canis lupus
, the common wolf. Straight away Adamsberg sent the information on to Hermel, to Montvailland and to
Adjudant-chef
Brévent, at Puygiron. He had nothing against getting up the nose of a man who had still not sent in the long-awaited paperwork on Auguste Massart.

That morning Massart’s photograph had been published in the papers, and there was rising pressure in editorials, on television and on radio. The murder of Paul Hellouin and the subsequent slaughter of the Châteaurouge sheep had finally got the press and the police going all-out. The werewolf’s bloody progress was mapped out in every daily paper. They showed the route covered so far by the homicidal maniac in bold, and the route he was expected to follow thereafter towards Paris in a dotted line. It was a route he had laid out himself, and which he had followed quite scrupulously throughout, with the exceptions of his side-trips to Vaucouleurs and Poissy-le-Roi. Public interest announcements were being put out all the time, warning the inhabitants of villages and towns on the wolf-man’s route to exercise extreme caution and above all to avoid going out after dark. Police stations all over France were now getting floods of calls making denunciations and reporting varied sightings. For the time being they were not following up any of these leads unless they were located on or very near Massart’s red-line route. The scale of the case now made it imperative to coordinate the various local efforts. The national director of the
police judiciaire
stepped in to put Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg in overall charge of the werewolf affair. He got the news around five in the afternoon, at Châteaurouge. From that moment on
Adjudant
Fromentin squirmed at Adamsberg’s feet and did his best to foresee and to fulfill the
commissaire
’s every whim. But Adamsberg did not need anything very much. He was waiting for the Interpol file. Unusually for him, he did not go out for a walk in the fields one single time that
Saturday
evening. Instead he sat around with his ear alert for the chirruping of the fax machine, filling time by doodling in his jotter. He was trying to sketch a likeness of
Adjudant
Fromentin.

The documents spewed out of the fax just before six, dispatched to him by Police Lieutenant J. H. G. Lanson, of Austin, TX. Adamsberg swooped on the sheets in impatient expectation and took them over to the window to read. As they were in English he had to ask Fromentin to translate for him.

The marital and criminal history of John N. Padwell seemed to match in all details the story told by the sister of Paul and Simon Hellouin. He was born in Austin, TX, and went to work in the metal industry. He married Ariane Germant at the age of twenty-six, and they had a son, Stuart D. Padwell. After eleven years of marriage, he had tortured his wife’s lover, Simon Hellouin, and then shot him through the heart. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail, served eighteen of them, and came out seven years and three months ago. Since which time J. N. Padwell had not left the United States and had had no subsequent criminal record.

Adamsberg spent a long time poring over the pictures of the killer that his American colleagues had forwarded. One was full-face, the other two side-on, from left and from right. He had a square face and a firm look and seemed to be fair-skinned. Rather vacant eyes, thin and slightly cunning lips. There was malice as well as blinkered obstinacy in that face.

He had died of natural causes in Austin, TX, on 13 December, one year and seven months ago.

Adamsberg shook his head, rolled up the fax sheets, and tucked them into his jacket.

“Interesting?” asked Fromentin, who had been waiting with his question until the
commissaire
had finished reading.

“That’s the end of that,” said Adamsberg with a look of glum disappointment. “The man died last year.”

“That’s a pity,” said Fromentin, who had taken no interest at all in the Padwell lead.

Adamsberg bade him goodnight with a left-handed handshake and departed the
gendarmerie
at an even slower pace than usual. His temporary equerry fell into step and accompanied him to the small car he had been allocated. Before getting in, Adamsberg took the roll out of his jacket pocket and studied the photograph of J. N. Padwell once again. Then he put the papers back, lost in thought, and slid into the passenger seat. The
gendarme
dropped him fifty metres from the lorry.

What he saw first was the black motorbike on its kickstand by the side of the road. Then Johnstone came into view. He was on the lorry’s nearside wing, arranging a heap of photographs that he laid out on the ground. Adamsberg did not experience anything unpleasant, only a gnawing regret at not having Camille to hold in his arms tonight, and a fleeting, barely noticeable pang of fear. The Canadian was a much more serious and reliable proposition than he was. Basically, if reason were his sole guide, he would give the man a hearty recommendation. But
desire
and self-interest went in the other direction and prevented him from just letting go of Camille in favour of the tall chap with the wardrobe chest.

Camille was sitting rather stiffly beside Johnstone and concentrating entirely on the pictures of the wolves of the Mercantour spread out on the scorched grass. The trapper gave a staccato commentary for Adamsberg’s benefit: Marcus, Electre, Sibellius, Proserpine, and the snout of the late Augustus. Johnstone was calm and quite welcoming, but he was still giving Adamsberg that quizzical look that said: “What’s your game?”

Soliman laid supper on the wooden crate while Watchee sat stoking the campfire with his bad leg resting on the bowl. With a jut of his jaw Johnstone asked the old man what was wrong with his leg.

“He fell trying to get down from the cab,” Soliman explained.

“Any news from Texas, young fella?” Watchee asked Adamsberg, to change the subject.

“Yes. Austin faxed me the man’s
vita
.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Your
vita
is the story of your life. Vital, as it were.”

“Good. I do like to understand.”

“But”, said Adamsberg, “our man’s vital no longer. Padwell died a year and half ago.”

“You were wrong,” Soliman observed.

“Yes. You’ve already told me that once.”

With his injured arm Adamsberg gave up the idea of sleeping doubled up in the car. He called the
gendarmerie
and at last had himself driven over to that hotel in Montdidier. He spent all day Sunday in a small, hot and stuffy room listening to the news, keeping abreast of the Sabrina case, and rereading all the files that had amassed over the last week. Now and again he unrolled the faxed photograph of J. N. Padwell and looked at it with a mixture of curiosity and regret, turning the man’s image this way and that to catch it in light and in shade. He looked at it the right way round, then the wrong way round. He rotated it every which way. He stared deep into those empty eyes. He got away three times to the hidey-hole he had found in a deserted, overgrown kitchen garden. He made a sketch of Watchee sitting bolt upright with his right leg on the bowl, his beribboned hat pulled down over his eyes. He drew a picture of Soliman: bare to the waist, eyes on the horizon, leaning slightly forward in one of the proud and haughty poses he liked to adopt, and every one of which he had copied from Watchee. He did a sketch of Camille seen side-on as she gripped the lorry’s steering wheel and stared hard at the road ahead. He drew Johnstone leaning on his motorbike and looking straight at you with that silent, serious question hovering about his blue gaze.

There was a knock on the door around seven thirty in the evening, and Soliman came in, gleaming with sweat. Adamsberg looked up and shook his head, meaning to tell the youngster that there was nothing to report. Massart was having a quiet patch.

“Is
Laurence
still around?” he asked.

“Yes,” Soliman said. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t
come
over, right? Watchee’s going to barbecue some beef on the chicken wire. He’s expecting you. I came to collect you.”

“Has he had any news of George Gershwin?”

“You don’t give a damn for George Gershwin.”

“Maybe I give a bit more than you think.”

“It’s the trapper who’s keeping you away, isn’t it?”

Adamsberg smiled. “There are four beds. There are now five of us.”

“One man too many.”

“Quite.”

“You’re making yourself scarce,” said Soliman, “but it’s a ploy. As soon as the trapper’s turned his back, you’ll move back into his spot. I know what you’re up to. Can’t fool me.”

Adamsberg said nothing.

“And I’m wondering if that’s altogether straight,” Soliman pursued with difficulty, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m wondering if it’s altogether regular.”

“Regular with respect to what, Sol?”

Soliman hesitated.

“With respect to the rules,” he said.

“I thought you didn’t give a tinker’s fart for rules.”

“True enough,” Soliman said, getting worried.

“So?”

“Even so. You’re going behind the trapper’s back.”

“He’s facing me front-on, Sol. And he’s not a new-born babe.”

Soliman shook his head discontentedly.

“You’re diverting the current,” he said, “you’re redirecting
the
river, you’re taking all the water for yourself and you’re jumping into the trapper’s bed. That’s theft.”

“It’s the absolute opposite, Soliman. All Camille’s lovers – because we are talking about Camille, aren’t we? – draw water from my river, and all my lovers take water from Camille’s. At the source of the water there’s only her, and me. Downstream there can be quite a crowd. On account of which the headwaters are much less muddy than lower down the stream.”

“Really?” Soliman said, somewhat bewildered.

“I’ve simplified it somewhat,” said Adamsberg.

“So right now,” said Soliman hesitantly, “you’re paddling back upstream?”

Adamsberg nodded.

“Do you mean to say,” Soliman went on, “that if I’d made it over those last bloody fifty metres, if I’d been able to touch her, I’d have ended up at the fag end of your loony drainage system?”

“Something like that,” said Adamsberg.

“Does Camille know that or are you making it up for yourself?”

“She knows.”

“What about the trapper? Does he know?”

“He’s wondering.”

“But Watchee’s expecting you this evening. He’s been bored out of his mind all day with his foot up on the bowl. He’s waiting for you. Actually, he gave me an order to bring you back.”

“That’s different, then,” said Adamsberg. “How did you get here?”

“On the moped. Just hang onto me with your left arm.”

Adamsberg rolled up the papers and stuck them in an inside pocket.

“Are you bringing all that stuff with you?” Soliman asked.

“Sometimes I absorb ideas through my skin. I prefer to have them close to me.”

“Do you really hope to make any headway?”

Adamsberg winced as he put on the jacket weighed down with its load of documents.

“Have you got an idea?”

“Only subliminally.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I can’t see it. It’s hovering on the edge of my field of vision.”

“That’s not very practical.”

“No.”

Soliman was telling his third African story of the evening to a tensely silent audience. His floods of words served to submerge the pregnant glances darting about between Camille and Adamsberg, between Adamsberg and Johnstone, between Johnstone and Camille. Adamsberg, unsteadily so to speak, occasionally raised his eyes to look at the trapper. He’s giving in, Soliman thought, he’s giving in. He’s going to walk away from his river. When Johnstone looked back at him, somewhat aggressively, the
commissaire
put his nose in his dinner plate, as if he were mindlessly fascinated by the decorative pattern on the china. Soliman went on with his story, a mightily
muddled
affair involving a vindictive spider and a terrified bird, a muddle Soliman wasn’t quite sure he knew how to untangle.

“When the marsh god saw the brood on the ground,” he pursued, “he was seized with such anger that he went to see the son of Mombo the spider. ‘Son of Mombo,’ he said, ‘it was thee who cut the branches in the trees with thy disgusting mandibles. Henceforth thou shalt never again cut wood with thy mouth, but instead spin thread with your backside. And with that thread, day after day, thou shalt tie the branches back to the trees and leave birds to hatch their eggs in their nests.’ ‘Like hell I will,’ said the spider, son of Mombo . . .”

“For God’s sake,” Johnstone interrupted. “Don’t understand.”

“You’re not supposed to,” Camille said.

By half past midnight only Adamsberg was left alone with Soliman. He turned down the boy’s offer to take him back to the hotel. The one-way trip on the moped had been quite an ordeal for his arm.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll walk back.”

“It’s eight kilometres.”

“I need a good walk. I’ll take a short cut across the fields.”

Adamsberg’s eyes were so distant and lost that Soliman did not insist. The
commissaire
sometimes wandered off into a world of his own, and at such times no-one really felt like keeping him company.

* * *

Adamsberg turned off the road to get to the narrow path that had a crop of sprouting maize on one side, and on the other flax. The night was rather dark and windy: cloud cover had come in from the west earlier on that evening. He proceeded slowly, with his right arm held tight in its sling and his head down, following the wavy white line made by the pebbles that marked out the path. He came down to the flatland and took his bearings from the steeple at Montdidier which loomed black in the far distance. He could barely understand what had struck him so forcibly this evening. The river story must have muddied his vision and twisted his mind. But all the same, he
had
seen it. The hazy idea that had been quivering on the edge of his eye earlier on was beginning to acquire shape and consistency. An unacceptable and frightening consistency. But he had seen with his eyes. And all the things that creaked like ill-fitted hinges in the story of the man and the big bad wolf were eased by the hypothesis. The absurd murder of Suzanne Rosselin, the unwavering itinerary, Crassus the Bald, Massart’s fingernails, the missing cross, all these clues fitted back into the picture. The hypothesis smoothed off all the awkward corners and left a single, smooth, obvious and well-lit path ahead. And Adamsberg could now see the whole of that path from its beginning to its end, with its diabolical ingenuity, its anguish and cruelty, and its spark of genius.