Seeking Whom He May Devour (11 page)

“Doesn’t fit,” said Johnstone. “Never been a savaging in those farms. You sure of those locations?”

“Pretty much.”

“Doesn’t fit. Must mean something else.” Johnstone pondered. “Maybe that’s where he sets his traps,” he suggested.

“Why mark them on a map?”

“To log catches. To record good poaching grounds.”

Camille nodded in agreement and folded the map away.

“We’ll have lunch at the village café,” she said. “There’s nothing in the larder.”

Johnstone scowled as he looked in the fridge for confirmation.

“You believe me now?” Camille said.

Johnstone was a loner who did not like mixing in public places; he especially disliked eating in cafés in front of other people, amid the clatter of cutlery and the sounds of mastication. Camille liked the noise and whenever she could she dragged Johnstone to the village café, where she went almost daily whenever he disappeared up into the Mercantour hills.

She went up to him and kissed him on the lips.

“Come on,” she said.

Johnstone gave her a hug. Camille would run away if
he
tried to cut her off from the rest of the world. But that meant making a big sacrifice.

As they were finishing their lunch, Larquet, the roadman’s brother, burst into the café, out of breath and apoplectic. Everyone fell silent. Larquet never set foot in the café as he always took his tiffin in a dixie and ate on the hoof.

“What’s up, old fellow?” said the barkeeper. “You look like you’ve seen the Virgin Mary.”

“I ain’t seen no virgin, you idiot. I saw the vet’s wife coming back up from Saint-André.”

“Not quite the same thing, I grant you,” said the barkeeper.

The vet’s wife was a medical auxiliary and had stuck needles into just about every backside in Saint-Victor and the surrounding area. She was much sought after because she had such a gentle touch that you hardly felt the injection. Others claimed her popularity stemmed from her sleeping with all the not entirely repulsive males whose rumps she perforated. More charitable souls said it was not her fault if she had to give injections in men’s behinds, it could not be much fun to do that for a living and just put yourself in her shoes for a moment.

“And so what?” asked the barkeeper. “Did she tip you in the ditch and have it off with you?”

“You’re a brainless oaf, you are,” Larquet snorted with contempt. “You want to know something, Albert?”

“Tell me, do.”

“She refuses to treat you, and that’s what you can’t
stand
. So you sling mud at her because that’s the only thing you know how to do.”

“You finished your sermon?” the barkeeper retorted with a flash of anger in his eyes.

Albert had very small blue eyes set in a broad, baked-clay face. He was not particularly appealing.

“Yes, I’ve finished, but only because I don’t want to offend your lady wife.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Lucie, putting her hand on Albert’s arm. “What’s going on, Larquet?”

“The vet’s wife was on her way back from Guillos, she was. Where three more sheep have been done for.”

“Guillos? Are you sure? That’s a long way off!”

“Of course I’m sure, I ain’t making this up. It was Guillos. That means that the beast can strike anywhere. If it wants, it can be at Terres-Rouges tomorrow and Voudailles the day after. Whenever it likes, wherever it likes.”

“Whose sheep were they?”

“Gremont’s. He’s all churned up about it.”

“But it’s only sheep!” someone bellowed. “Are you going to cry your eyes out just for sheep?”

Everyone turned to see who it was. It was Buteil, the farm manager at Les Écarts, looking distraught. Bloody hell: Suzanne.

“None of you’s shed a tear for Suzanne, and she ain’t even in her grave! But you’re sniffling over bloody baa-baas! You’re all swine!”

“No, Buteil, we’re not sniffling,” said Larquet, holding his hand out. “We may all be swine, specially Albert, but
nobody
’s forgotten Suzanne. But it’s the same foul beast that done her in, and bloody hell, we’ve got to find it!”

“Right,” someone said.

“Right. And if the lads from Guillos find it first, we’ll look pathetic.”

“We’ll get it first. The Guillos lot have gone soft since they switched to lavender.”

“Don’t kid yourselves, my friends,” said the postman, who was something of a nervous wreck. “We’re past it too, same as the blokes from Guillos or wherever. We’ve lost the knack, we’ve forgotten how to do it. We aren’t going to catch the beast until it drops in here for a drink at the bar. Even then we’ll have to wait until it’s good and sozzled, and we’ll need to be ten strong to keep it down. Meanwhile it’ll have eaten up the whole county.”

“Heigh-ho, what a jolly fellow you are.”

“That story about a wolf coming in for a drink at the bar is farcical.”

“We should call in a ’copter,” said someone else.

“A ’copter? To look down on the mountains? Are you completely out of your mind?”

“Looks like we’ve lost Massart as well,” someone butted in. “The
gendarme
s are looking for him on Mont Vence.”

“Not what I’d called a great loss,” Albert said.

“Fuckwit!” Larquet said.

“Enough of that!” Lucie said.

“How do you know Massart hasn’t also fallen prey to the beast? What with his habit of going out at night.”

“Yeah, right enough, when we find Massart, we’ll find him in little pieces. You mark my words.”

Johnstone grasped Camille’s wrist. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “They’re driving me crazy.”

When they got into the open air Johnstone took a deep breath, as if he had just emerged from a cloud of poison gas.

“A binful of loonies,” he growled.

“They’re not loonies,” Camille said. “They’re just fearful, and sorrowful, and some of them are tipsy anyway. But I agree that Albert is a nasty piece of work.”

They walked home under the burning sun.

“What do you think about it?” asked Camille.

“About what? About their being sozzled?”

“No. About the place where the wolf attacked, Guillos. It was marked with an
X
on the map.”

Johnstone stopped and looked Camille in the eyes.

“How could Massart have known?” she said under her breath. “How could he have known
in advance
?”

Barking dogs could be heard in the distance. Johnstone stiffened.

“Gendarme
s looking for him,” he said with a grin. “Fat lot of good it’ll do. They won’t find him. Last night at Guillos, tomorrow he’ll be at La Castille. He’s the killer, Camille. He’s doing the killing, with Crassus.”

Camille made as if to say something, but stopped short. She could not find anything to say in Massart’s defence.

“With Crassus,” Johnstone continued. “On the run. They’ll slaughter sheep, women, children.”

“But for heaven’s sake, why?” she whispered.

“Because he has no hair.”

Camille looked at him in disbelief.

“And it’s made him crazy,” Johnstone concluded. “We’re going to the police.”

“Wait,” said Camille, holding him back by the sleeve.

“What? You want him to murder more Suzannes?”

“Let’s wait until tomorrow. To see if they find him. Please.”

Johnstone nodded and walked on up the street in silence.

“Augustus has had nothing to eat since Friday,” he said. “I’m going up again. Back tomorrow noon.”

Next day at noon Massart was still missing. The lunchtime news reported three sheep savaged at La Castille. The wolf was on his way north.

In Paris, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg made a note of the news. He had got hold of a Landranger map of the Mercantour, and he pulled it out of the bottom drawer where he kept files on murky muddles and dicey stratagems. He put a red line underneath the name of La Castille on the map. Yesterday he had underlined Guillos. He gazed at the map for a good while with his elbow on the table and his cheek in his hand. Pondering.

Danglard watched him at it, slightly aghast. He could not understand why Adamsberg had become so interested in the wolf business when he was up to his neck in a complicated manslaughter case in the Latin Quarter (a claim of self-defence which was just a bit too neat to be true) and when a raving madwoman had sworn she would put a bullet in his guts. But that’s the way things were.
Danglard
had never grasped the peculiar logic that lay behind Adamsberg’s decisions. In his view, of course, it was no logic at all, just an unending kaleidoscope of hunches and surmises which inexplicably gave rise to undeniably first-rate results. That said, Danglard’s nerves could not stand the strain of keeping in step with Adamsberg’s thought processes. For not only were the
commissaire
’s thoughts of indeterminate substance, hovering between the solid, liquid and gaseous states, but they were forever agglutinating with other thoughts without the slightest rational link. So while Danglard with his well-honed mind sorted sheep from goats, put things in little boxes, found the missing links, and thereby solved problems with method, Adamsberg put one thing with another, or turned them upside down, or scattered what had been brought together and threw it up in the air to see where it would fall. And despite his amazingly slow pace, he would, in the end, extract truth from that chaos. Danglard therefore supposed that
Commissaire
Adamsberg, like a genius or a mental patient, was endowed with what people call “his own kind of logic”. For years he had been trying to get used to it, but he remained torn between finding Adamsberg’s mind admirable, and finding it exasperating.

Danglard was indeed a divided man. Adamsberg, on the other hand, had been cast (rather hurriedly, at a guess) from a single mould and from a single, separate and slippery substance, which meant that the real world could never get a grip on him for very long. Strange to say, he was easy to get on with. Except for people who tried to
get
a grip on him, of course. And there were plenty of those. There always are people who want to get a grip on you.

Commissaire
Adamsberg measured the distance between Guillos and La Castille with index finger and thumb, then pivoted on the latter to see where this nomadic bloodthirsty wolf might strike next in its search for new territory. Danglard watched him working at it for a few minutes. Despite the swirling mists and mirages of his mental landscape, Adamsberg could sometimes be disturbingly precise on technical matters.

“Something wrong with the wolves, then?” Danglard kicked off.

“With the
wolf
, Danglard. He’s all alone, but he’s as dangerous as a pack of ten. An uncatchable man-eater.”

“Is that any of our business? In any way you care to state?”

“No, Danglard, it’s none of our business. How could it be?”

Danglard got up and looked at the map over Adamsberg’s shoulder.

“All the same,” the
commissaire
muttered, “it’s going to have to be somebody’s business, sooner or later –”

“That girl, Sabrina Monge,” Danglard interrupted. “She’s found the underground exit. We’re busted.”

“I know.”

“Must head her off before she tops you.”

“She can’t be stopped. She has to shoot, she has to miss, and then we can pick her up. And get to work properly. Any news of the kid?”

“We’ve got a lead in Poland. But that could take a long time. She’s got us trapped.”

“No, she hasn’t. I’m going to disappear, Danglard. That’ll give us time to find the kid before she tries to put a bullet in me.”

“Disappear where?”

“You’ll soon find out. Tell me where the mastermind of the Gay-Lussac murder hangs out, if that’s what he really is.”

“Avignon.”

“Then that’s where I’ll go. I’m off to Avignon. Nobody needs to know save you, Danglard. I’ve got the green light from the authorities. I need Sabrina off my tail so as to work in peace and quiet.”

“Makes sense,” said Danglard.

“Watch out, Danglard. When she realises I’ve gone off screen, she’ll lay traps. And she’s a very clever girl. So not a word to anyone, not even if my own mother were to whine at you on the phone. Mind you, my mother never whines, nor do any of my five sisters. Danglard, you’ll be the only person to have my number.”

“While you’re gone, sir, should I carry on with the map?” asked Danglard as he pointed to his boss’s desk.

“No, my friend. Bugger the wolf.”

XIV

WHEN JOHNSTONE GOT
to the
gendarmerie
at puygiron he insisted on speaking to the most senior officer present. The conscript on desk duty did not give in straight away.

“What’s your superior officer?” Johnstone asked.

“He’s the sort of bloke who’ll have you out on your ear in no time at all if you give him grief.”

“No, I meant, what rank has he got? What form of address to use, you know, what should I call him?”

“You should call him ‘Head Deputy’.”

“Well then, that’s the man I want to see. I want to see the Head Deputy.”

“And on what account do you wish to see the Head Deputy?”

“On account of a horror story I have to tell him. Such horror as to make you send me in to see your superior officer as soon as you’ve heard it, and to make your super send me up to his boss as soon as he’s heard it. But I’m a busy man. I’m not going to waste my time telling the story four times over, I’m going straight to see the Head Deputy.”

The conscript frowned, unsure of his ground.

“What’s makes this story such a horror, then?”

“Listen, young man,” said Johnstone. “You know what a werewolf is?”

The
gendarme
looked at him. “Of course,” he smirked.

“Well, you can wipe that grin off your face, because the tale I have to tell is about a werewolf.”

The conscript hesitated before throwing in the towel.

“I don’t think I’m qualified to deal with that.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Johnstone.

“I’m not even sure that the Head Deputy is qualified to deal with it.”

“Now look here, young man,” Johnstone replied with false patience. “We’ll find out soon enough what the Head Deputy is and is not qualified to do. The best way to find out is to go see him. Is that clear?”