Seeking Whom He May Devour (33 page)

He stopped walking and sat for a long while with his back propped against a tree-trunk as he sounded out his thoughts. A quarter of an hour later he got up slowly and, turning back on himself, made for the
gendarmerie
at Châteaurouge.

Halfway along, at the head of the path between the maize and the flax, he drew up short. Five or six metres away from him a broad-shouldered, hunched and hulking black shadow barred his way. It was too dark for Adamsberg to be able to make out the face. But he knew instantly that what was standing in front of him was the werewolf. The itinerant killer, the escape artist, the man who had been evading him for two weeks now, had at last come into the open for the bloody duel. Not one of his previous targets had survived. But none of them had been armed. Adamsberg stepped back a few yards, measuring the impressive bulk of his adversary, who came slowly forward, silently, with a sailor’s gait.
Bright as a flaming brand, they are, my lad. You can see a wolf’s eye a mile off in the dark
. With his left hand Adamsberg got his pistol out of its holster. From the weight of it he could tell that it wasn’t loaded.

The man rushed at him and knocked him off his feet with a single heavy body blow. Adamsberg was flat on his back on the ground with the man pinning him down, pressing his knees hard on both his shoulders. He winced from the pain, but tried to push the ton weight off him all the same, with his left arm. To no avail. He gave up the struggle and sought out his adversary’s eyes in the dark.

“The man I was looking for,” he said under his breath. “Stuart Donald Padwell.”

“Shut your trap,” Johnstone said.

“Get off me, Padwell, I’ve already alerted the
flics
.”

“Not true,” Johnstone replied.

The Canadian reached inside his jerkin and Adamsberg saw what he had got out when it he brought it right up to his face. An immense white jawbone.

“The skull of an Arctic wolf,” Johnstone said with a smirk. “Won’t die without knowing the solution.”

There was a loud bang. Johnstone started and turned, without releasing Adamsberg. Soliman was on him in a flash, pressing the barrel of the rifle into his ribs.

“Don’t make a move, trapper!” he yelled, “or I’ll put lead inside you! Lie down! Lie down! Lie down and roll over on your back!”

Johnstone did not lie down. He got to his feet, slowly, with his hands up, and stood in a posture that was not at all submissive. Soliman kept him at gunpoint and made him retreat towards the cornfield. Soliman’s long slim body looked pathetically dainty in the dark of the night. With or without a gun the lad wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. Adamsberg cast around with his good hand, found a large piece of rock and aimed at the wolf-man’s head. Johnstone collapsed. He had taken the stone on his temple. Adamsberg pulled himself off the ground and went over to examine the man.

“That’s fine,” he said with relief. “Give me something to tie him up with. He’s not going to stay like that for long.”

“I don’t have anything to tie him up,” Soliman said.

“Take off your clothes.”

Soliman obeyed, and Adamsberg undid his holster straps and took off his shirt to use as rope.

“Keep your T-shirt on,” said Adamsberg. “Give me your jeans.”

In his underpants, Soliman made a good job of securing the arms and legs of the Canadian, who was now groaning as he lay on the ground.

“He’s bleeding.”

“He’ll recover, Sol. Just look at this, Sol. Look at the beast.”

Holding it carefully by the occipital cavity, Adamsberg showed Soliman the skull of the great white Arctic wolf. In the fitful moonlight Soliman brought his hand up to touch and ran his finger along the row of fangs.

“He’s filed the tips,” he said. “They’re as sharp as bayonets.”

“Have you got your mobile with you?”

Soliman felt around in his trousers and took out his phone. Adamsberg called the Châteaurouge
gendarmerie
.

“They’re on their way,” he reported, sitting down beside the body of the Canadian. He rested his head on his knees and concentrated on slowing down his breathing.

“How did you know where I was?” he asked.

“After you’d gone I went to bed. Johnstone stole past me and out of the lorry with his clothes under his arms and dressed outside. I lifted the canvas on the side and through the slats I saw him walking off the same way you’d gone. I reckoned he was off to find you to have a proper row over Camille, and I told myself that wasn’t any of my business. Right? But Watchee sat bolt upright in bed and said: ‘Go after him, Sol.’ He reached under his bed, got the rifle, and shoved it in my hand.”

“Watchee watches over us,” Adamsberg said.

“He surely does. Then I saw the trapper blocking your
road
and I reckoned you were going to have a right old bust-up. Then it got really rough and I heard you say ‘Hallo Padwell’ or something. Which is when I twigged this wasn’t a row over Camille.”

Adamsberg smiled.

“You were going to get yourself murdered.”

Adamsberg frowned. “We were on the next bus behind him, right from the start. We made up some of the time, but we were still a few hours short of catching up.”

“I thought Padwell was dead.”

“This is his son. Stuart.”

“You mean the son’s carrying out his father’s wishes?” Soliman said, looking at Johnstone’s supine body.

“When Padwell killed Simon Hellouin, his kid was ten years old. Stuart saw the murder happen, and that screwed him up for life. Especially as his mother ran away straight after with Hellouin’s brother. For eighteen years, all through his prison sentence, Padwell must have filled his son’s head with the idea of taking revenge and eliminating all the men who’d taken the boy’s mother away and kept her out of reach.”

“What about the other two guys, Sernot and Deguy?”

“They have to have had affairs with the mother. There’s no other explanation.”

“And Suzanne?” asked Soliman in a ghostly voice. “What’s she got to do with the whole story? Did she know all about the trapper?”

“Suzanne didn’t know a thing.”

“Did she see him slaughtering the sheep with his bloody wolf’s head?”

“She saw nothing, I tell you. He didn’t kill her because she spoke out of turn about a werewolf. He killed her because she
had not
said anything about a werewolf and never would. But once she was dead he could have her say anything he wanted, she wouldn’t be around to deny it. That’s what Suzanne could do for him. Being unable to say she never said it.”

Soliman’s voice was all aquiver as he burst out: “But for heaven’s sake, what was the purpose?”

“To get the wolf story going. That’s the only reason, Soliman. He wanted to avoid the mistake of starting the rumour himself.”

The young man sighed in the dark. “I don’t get this wolf business. Not one bit.”

“He had to get people believing there was a madman committing random murders out there, and he needed a scapegoat. He certainly managed to get people obsessed with Massart the bloodthirsty werewolf. He had all it took – skills, knowledge, all the tools of the trade. He also had an alibi for being in the Mercantour.”

“What about Massart?”

“Massart’s dead. Has been since the beginning of the whole story. Padwell probably buried him somewhere on Mont Vence. Here come the
flics
, Sol.”

With one of them without a shirt and the other in his underpants, Adamsberg and Sol went to meet the
gendarme
s. Fromentin had called in reinforcements from Montdidier as well, since ten men didn’t seem too many for getting the big bad wolf-man under control.

“There you are,” Adamsberg said, pointing to Johnstone
on
the ground. “Call a doctor in. I wounded him in the head.”

“Who is this?” asked Fromentin, shining his torchlight into the Canadian’s face.

“Stuart Donald Padwell, son of John Padwell. He’s known here as
Laurence
Donald Johnstone. And this, Fromentin, is the murder weapon.”

“Fuck,” he said. “So it wasn’t a wolf.”

“Just a lupine mandible. You’ll find the paws and claws somewhere in the panniers on his motorbike.”

The
adjudant
, fascinated, shone his torch on the skull-bone.

“It’s an Arctic wolf,” Adamsberg said. “He set the whole thing up before coming over.”

“I see,” said Fromentin with a nod. “Arctic wolves are the biggest wolves of all, by a long chalk.”

Adamsberg looked at him, amazed.

“I like animals,” Fromentin explained, abashed. “So I read up on them when I can.”

He shone his beam onto Adamsberg’s arm.

“You’re bleeding, sir,” he said.

“Yes,” Adamsberg said. “He reopened the wound when he jumped on me.”

“Whatever made him come out in the open?”

“It was the evening. I gave him a look.”

“And then?”

“I saw John Padwell’s features on his face. He knew that I had not let his father’s case out of my mind, and he realised I was on the point of coming up with the right answer.”

Adamsberg watched Johnstone being walked to the car by two
gendarme
s. Another
flic
gave him back his shirt and holster-strap, and returned Soliman’s trousers to their owner.

“Did you spend the evening with him?” Fromentin asked with a frown as he fell in step behind his
gendarme
s.

“He was never absent,” Adamsberg said as he followed on in turn. “He created the rumour about a wolf-man, just as he got that threesome to track him down, just in order to keep the story alive. He got daily reports on the progress of the pursuit. We weren’t on his tail. He was wagging us.”

Johnstone was taken to the hospital in Montdidier while Fromentin himself drove Adamsberg and Soliman back to the lorry.

“If the Canadian’s in a fit state, we’ll do the interview tomorrow afternoon at three. Tell the prosecution service, and at the first opportunity tell Montvailland at Villard-de-Lans, Hermel at Bourg-en-Bresse and Aimont at Belcourt. I’ll call Brévent myself at Puygiron and get them to spade up the ground around Massart’s shack.”

Fromentin made no comment, signalled to one of his men to have Johnstone’s motorbike taken in, and drove off.

“Bloody hell!” Soliman suddenly exclaimed as he watched the
gendarme
’s estate car disappearing down the road. “Good heavens! What about the hair? And the fingernails? How do you account for that?”

“The fingernail issue is now settled.”

“But they were Massart’s fingernails! How can you make that fit?”

“They
were
Massart’s fingernails,” Adamsberg repeated as he paced up and down beside the road, “and they had been cut with a nail-clipper. Now, Brévent did not find a single piece of fingernail in the bathroom at Massart’s place on Mont Vence. Only when Hermel had the bright idea of combing the bedroom did any nail fragments turn up. But they were fragments that had been bitten off, Soliman. That’s what really clashed. On the one hand you had a guy who uses clippers, and on the other a guy who bites his nails in bed. Sol, it’s always one or the other, not both. With that worked out, I reckoned we’d been really lucky boys to unearth the hotel he was using and to get that hair and those two bits of fingernail. Really lucky, yes indeed. The map made me doubt whether Massart was a random killer. The fingernails made me doubt whether Massart existed.”

“Bloody hell,” Soliman said. “Explain the fingernails!”

“Johnstone cut the nails on Massart’s corpse, Soliman.”

Soliman winced in disgust.

“It never occurred to him that Massart kept his nails short by biting them. He just couldn’t imagine anything like that. He was too clean, too fastidious. That was his first mistake.”

“Did he make any other mistakes?” asked Soliman, his eyes glued to Adamsberg’s lips.

“A few. The candle thing, and arranging the murders at the foot of a cross. I don’t know if Johnstone found out about Massart’s superstitiousness for himself or if Camille gave him the information unwittingly. He enjoyed making use of it precisely because it seemed to get you
interested
. But when he had the
flics
breathing down his neck at Belcourt, he did his deed a long way from a Calvary or a cross. Truly superstitious people don’t do that. They pursue and persist and get all the more frantic if the challenge is serious. The last thing an obsessive would do in the face of difficulty would be to drop the obsession as if it didn’t really matter. Our man murdered Hellouin in an open field, and that told me that the placing of the previous murders beneath religious symbols was just stuff and nonsense, like the candles. Which brought me back to the same thought: that Massart was not Massart. You see, Sol, I was ready for the Padwell line. I was ready and waiting for it.”

“But,” said Soliman with a trace of anxiety, “if it hadn’t been for the son’s physical resemblance to the father, you’d never have put your finger on Lawrence. Not in a million years.”

“Yes I would. It would have taken a bit longer, that’s all.”

“How come?”

“If we’d kept on investigating to the bitter end, the link between the Sernot, Deguy and Hellouin cases would eventually have shown up: their common denominator is Ariane Germant. That would have led us back to the Padwell case. Padwell is dead, but he has a son, a son who was present at the original murder. I’d have followed that lead, I’d have got a photograph of the son. And it would have been a photograph of Lawrence Donald Johnstone.”

“And what if you hadn’t kept on to the bitter end?”

“I would have.”

“And what if you hadn’t followed the lead on the son?”

“But I would have followed it, Sol.”

“But if you hadn’t?”

“Well, if I hadn’t, the whole thing would have taken even longer. Who knows about wolves? Johnstone does. Who was the first person to mention a werewolf? Johnstone was. Who went to look for Massart? Johnstone did. Who put about the idea that Massart had murdered Suzanne? Johnstone once again. We’d have got him in the end, Sol.”

“And maybe you wouldn’t.”

“Maybe, maybe. But there were the wolf hairs, Sol. We wondered why there weren’t any – and hey presto, some hairs turn up. Who was in the know? Only the five of us, and the police.”