Have Mercy On Us All (16 page)

Danglard frowned deeply.

“So it is plague,” he said. “The
Black Death
.”

“Precisely. But I don’t think the man died of it.”

“What makes you think that?”

Adamsberg shrugged. “I don’t know. It seems over the top. Anyway, plague has been extinct in France for God knows how long.”

“You can infect people on purpose, though. That’s not very difficult.”

“Providing you have the bacillus. You can’t exactly buy it off the shelf.”

“Sure, but there must be plenty of it stacked away in research institutes here in Paris, places we’ve all heard of. The battle against bubonic diseases isn’t over yet. Anyone with inside knowledge and a warped mind could go into one of those high-security labs and walk out with a test tube full of Yersinia.”

“Yer what?”

“It’s the identity of the guilty party, sir. Family name
Yersinia
, given name
pestis
. Alias bacillus of the plague. Serial killer
extraordinaire
. Keeps a tally of its victims in powers of ten. Must be around seven by now, maybe eight. Motive: chastisement of the wicked.”

“Chastisement?” muttered Adamsberg. “Are you sure?”

“It never occurred to anyone in a thousand years to doubt that the Lord
Almighty
sent down the plague to punish humankind for all its sins.”

“I must say I wouldn’t like to bump into the Lord Almighty on a dark night. Are you making this all up, Danglard?”

“It’s gospel, sir. The plague is the most obvious example of a
holy scourge
. Just think what it could do to a man’s mind to strut around Paris with a tube of divine retribution in his pocket. It could blow it to smithereens. Paris, too.”

“Think a bit, Danglard. What if it’s really something else? What if someone just wants us to believe there’s a nutter walking around with the holy scourge in his pocket? That would be even worse. If it got out it would spread like wildfire and set off mass panic. The whole of Europe would go psychotic. It would be huge.”

Adamsberg called HQ from the car.

“This is the Brigade Criminelle,
Brigadier
Noël speaking,” said Noël, curtly.

“Look, Noël, get yourself over here and bring someone with you, someone who can handle himself properly, no, I mean, bring that woman, the brunette who doesn’t say much …”

“
Brigadier
Hélène Froissy, sir?”

“As I was saying, could you both get in a squad car and go straight to the junction of Edgar-Quinet and Rue Delambre. Keep a low profile and make sure that a Monsieur Decambrais is at home, it’s the block on the corner of Rue de la Gaîté, and wait there until the evening newscast.”

“Newscast, sir?”

“You’ll know what it is when you see it. A guy on a box, just after 6 p.m. Stay there until I send a relief team, and keep your eyes peeled. Especially for the people who are there to listen to the town crier. I’ll be in touch.”

Adamsberg and his four assistants clambered up the staircase to the fifth floor, where the district
commissaire
was waiting for them. On their way up they noticed that although the front doors of all the apartments had been wiped clean, they still bore clearly visible shadow-marks from the black paint.

“
Commissaire
Devillard,” Danglard whispered in Adamsberg’s ear just before they got to the top landing.

“Thanks.”

“I understand you’ve taken over the case?” Devillard said as he shook the detective’s hand. “I’ve just had Breuil on the line.”

“That’s right,” said Adamsberg. “I’ve been working on it since before it happened.”

“That’s fine by me,” said Devillard, who looked worn out. “I’ve got a really big video-store break-in to deal with, and thirty-odd torched cars on my patch. More than enough to keep me going for the week. So, you know who did this?”

“I don’t know anything, Devillard.”

As they were talking, Adamsberg pulled back the front door so as to look at it from the outside. Clean as a whistle. Not the faintest shadow of paint.

“René Laurion,” Devillard read out from his notebook. “Single man, aged thirty-two, garage mechanic. No criminal record. Body found by the cleaner. She comes in once a week, on Tuesday mornings.”

“Rotten luck for her.”

“Yes. She went hysterical, her daughter had to come and take her home.”

Devillard handed over his file of notes. Adamsberg nodded thanks. He went over to see the body, and the forensic team stood back to let him get a view. The victim was lying stark naked on his back, with his arms crossed on his chest. There were a dozen soot-black patches on his thighs, chest, one arm and face. His tongue was pulled out and was also blackened. Adamsberg knelt down.

“Is that fake?” he asked the pathologist.

“Don’t play games,” the medic snapped back. “I’ve not yet examined the corpse but I can tell you this guy is as dead as a dodo and has been so for some length of time. By strangulation, I’d say, because of the marks on his neck that you can see through the soot.”

“Sure,” Adamsberg said softly. “That’s not what I meant.”

He scooped up some of the black powder that had spilled on to the floor, rubbed his fingers and wiped them on his trouser leg.

“Charcoal,” he mumbled. “He’s been rubbed down with charcoal.”

“Looks like it,” said one of the forensics.

Adamsberg looked around.

“Where are his clothes?”

“Neatly folded in the bedroom. Shoes under the chair,” said Devillard.

“Any damage done? Any signs of a break-in?”

“No. Either Laurion opened the door or the murderer picked the lock very quietly. The latter seems the most likely at the moment. If we’re right, it would speed things up a lot.”

“You mean, it would have to be a specialist?”

“Exactly. You don’t learn how to pick locks properly at primary school. The murderer would have to be someone who’d done quite a lot of time and had used it to learn the trade. If so, he’s on file. Even a single smudgy print will give him away in ten seconds flat. I couldn’t wish you a better solution,
commissaire
.”

The three-man forensic team worked away quietly. One of them dealt with the body, one with the lock and one with the furniture in the room. Adamsberg made a careful tour of the premises, looking closely at the main room, the bathroom, the kitchen and the small, tidy bedroom. He’d put on gloves and mechanically opened doors and drawers in the wardrobe, the bedside table, the chest, desk and sideboard. As he was looking through the kitchen, the only room that showed some signs of muddle and life, his eyes alighted on an ivory envelope lying across a stack of letters and newspapers. It had been neatly slit open. He stood staring at it, patiently waiting for the image to click as per instructions to his memory. The image wasn’t very deep down, it wouldn’t take more than a minute or two. Adamsberg’s incapacity to log names, titles, brands, spelling, grammar rules and everything else related to writing was counterbalanced by extraordinary powers of recall for visual material. He was a genius of the inner eye: his peculiar mind registered whole frames with all their details intact, from the shadow made by clouds to the missing button on Devillard’s cuff. He could retrieve this frame too, and adjust the focus on Decambrais sitting opposite him in the station office and extracting his stack of “specials” from an oversize, thick ivory envelope with pearl tissue lining paper. That was also what he could see in front of him on the stack of newspapers. He signalled to the photographer to take a few shots while he scrabbled through his memory-jogger to look for the name.

“Thanks, Barteneau,” he managed, just in time.

He picked up the envelope and looked inside. Empty. He went through the pile of mail pending and checked all the envelopes: all of them had been opened raggedly with a finger, and they all still had their contents inside. In the waste bin, among rubbish that was at least three days old, Adamsberg found two ripped envelopes and several crumpled sheets of paper, but none of them were the right size to have come from the thick ivory envelope. He got up and rinsed his gloves under the kitchen tap. Why had the dead man kept the empty envelope? Why hadn’t he opened it quickly with his finger, the way he opened all the rest of his mail?

He went back into the main room where forensics were cleaning up.

“All right if we leave now?” asked the pathologist, unsure whether his question should be answered by Devillard or by Adamsberg.

“Off you go,” said Devillard.

Adamsberg slid the ivory envelope into a plastic sheath and gave it to one of the men in the forensic team.

“This needs to go to the lab with the rest of the stuff,” he said. “Only it’s very special. Mark it ‘urgent’.”

He stayed on for another hour, until they came to fetch the body bag. Two of his men remained on site thereafter, to conduct interviews with all the residents.

XVII

AT FIVE IN
the afternoon Adamsberg stood in front of twenty-three members of the murder squad – the full team save for Noël and Froissy, who were keeping watch at Place Edgar-Quinet, and the two officers on duty at Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They were all sitting on chairs set out in rows amid the unending decorators’ mess.

The
commissaire principal
had thumbtacked a large map of central Paris on to the recently decorated wall. He said nothing while he inserted red-capped drawing pins at spots listed in his notepad, at the addresses of the fourteen buildings that had had their front doors daubed with the talisman. A green pin went in at the crime scene.

“On August 17,” Adamsberg told his audience, “some alien turned up without warning. He intended to use his powers to do people in. Let’s call him CLT. CLT isn’t the sort of alien who cuts people’s throats just like that. No. He takes a whole month to set up his scenario, and he’d probably spent much longer than that working it out in advance. His plan is a two-pronged affair. Prong A involves a specific set of residential blocks in central Paris. He goes round at night painting a number in black on the front doors of the flats.”

He switched on the projector and showed a slide of the reverse 4 on the blank wall of the incident room .

“It’s a very particular version of the number 4. It’s inverted left-for-right but not top-for-bottom, the downstroke is splayed at the foot and there are two little notches on the outer extension of the cross. All observed instances
have
these specific features. And beneath the figure, you can see a kind of signature, in three upper-case letters: CLT. Unlike the digit, the letters are graphically plain, without flourishes. Our alien puts this sign on every door in the block
bar one
. The location of the undaubed door seems to be random. The choice of the blocks to be daubed seems equally haphazard. They are located in eleven different arrondissements, some are in main thoroughfares, others in side streets. The street numbers are varied, some are odd, some are even. There’s no consistency about the type of building either. Some of them are old and others new, some of them are upmarket and others are quite run-down. It looks like CLT wanted his sample to be as varied as possible. That might mean he wanted to say that he can get at anyone, that there’s no way of avoiding him.”

“What about the residents?”

“I’ll come on to that later,” Adamsberg said. “The meaning of the backward 4 has been established beyond doubt. It is a sign that served long ago as a talisman to ward off the plague.”

“What plague?” someone asked.

Adamsberg immediately recognised the
brigadier
’s bushy eyebrows.

“
The
plague,
Brigadier
Favre. It doesn’t come in fifty-seven varieties. Danglard, could you please say a few words about it.”

“Plague came to Europe in 1347,” Danglard began. “In the next five years it wrought havoc right across the Continent, from Naples to Moscow, and killed around thirty million people. This dreadful chapter of human history is known as the Black Death. The name is important to remember in the case we are dealing with. Originating in –”

“I said a few words, Danglard.”

“It reappeared periodically thereafter, once every ten years or so, and cut down whole regions at a time. It didn’t die out completely until the eighteenth century. – I’ve not said anything about the early Middle Ages, or plague today, or the Far East, sir.”

“That’s fine, you’ve said quite enough to give us a handle on what we’re dealing with. That’s to say, the Black Death. It leaves you dead in five to ten days.”

This set the whole room abuzz with questions and comments. Adamsberg
stood
there with his hands in his pockets and his head hanging down until the hubbub died away.

Someone raised a fearful voice to ask: “Did the man in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau die of plague?”

“I’ll come to that. Prong B. Also on August 17, CLT makes his first public announcement. He picks on the square at the corner of Edgar-Quinet and Rue Delambre, where some fellow has resurrected the ancient trade of town crier – rather successfully, as it happens.”

A hand went up on the right-hand side of the room.

“What’s that, sir?”

“The fellow in question leaves a wooden box on a tree round the clock, and people drop in messages they want to have read out aloud, for a modest consideration, I suppose. The town crier empties out the box three times a day and stands there reading out the messages.”

“How stupid can you get,” someone opined.

“Maybe it’s stupid, but it works,” Adamsberg replied. “Selling words is no more stupid than selling flowers.”

“Or being a
flic
,” said someone on the left.

Adamsberg caught the eye of the last speaker, a short man with a beaming smile who’d already lost most of his grey hair.

“Or being a policeman,” Adamsberg echoed. “The messages CLT put in that box are incomprehensible to the general public, or to mortals in general. They’re short quotations from antiquarian books, some in French and others in Latin, and they turn up in fancy big ivory envelopes. The copy comes from a printer, the computer kind. A fellow who knows his way around old books and who lives on the square found the messages sufficiently disturbing to do some research on them.”