The Chalk Circle Man (9 page)

‘But what’s the point of our worrying about the circles if he isn’t the killer?’ said Danglard, getting up and pacing awkwardly round the room. ‘The chalk circle man! Again! But surely we don’t give a damn about the poor sod! It’s whoever’s
using
him that we’re after!’

‘Not me,’ said Adamsberg. ‘So we carry on looking for the circle man.’

Danglard stood up again, wearily. It would take time to get accustomed to Adamsberg.

Charles could sense all the confusion in the room. He perceived Danglard’s vague discomfiture and Adamsberg’s indecision.

‘Which one of us is going into this blind, you or me,
commissaire
?’ asked Charles.

Adamsberg smiled.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘After the anonymous phone call, I suppose you’ll be wanting me to “help you with your inquiries”,’ Charles went on.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Adamsberg. ‘But anyway there’s nothing to stop you going to work as usual. Don’t worry.’

‘It’s not my work that worries me,
commissaire
.’

‘I know. It was just an expression.’

Charles heard the sound of pencil on paper. He imagined that the
commissaire
must be drawing while he was talking.

‘I don’t know how a blind man could manage to kill someone. But I’m a suspect now, aren’t I?’

Adamsberg made an evasive gesture.

‘Let’s say you picked the wrong moment to go and live at Mathilde Forestier’s house. Let’s say that, for whatever reason, we’ve recently become interested in her and what she knows, that is if she’s told us everything, which may not be the case. Danglard can explain all that to you. Danglard’s incredibly intelligent, you’ll see. It’s a great comfort to work with him. Let’s also say that you seem to be a rather awkward customer, which doesn’t help.’

‘What makes you think that?’ asked Charles, with a smile – a nasty smile, Adamsberg thought.

‘Madame Forestier says so.’

For the first time, Charles felt worried.

‘Yes, that’s what she says,’ Adamsberg repeated. ‘“He’s a bad-tempered so-and-so, but that doesn’t bother me” is what she said. And you like her too. Because being in touch with Mathilde, Monsieur Reyer, would do you a power of good, it would bring back shining black eyes, like patent leather. She’d do plenty of people good. Danglard doesn’t like her, though – no, Danglard, you don’t. He’s taken against her, for reasons that he’ll tell you about. He’s even tempted to cast doubts on her good faith. He’s already finding it odd that our Mathilde turned up at the police station to talk to me about the chalk circle man with or without a smell of apples, long before the murder. And he’s quite right. It
is
odd. But then, everything’s odd about this case. Even the rotten apples. Anyway, the only thing we can do now is wait.’

Adamsberg started doodling again.

‘All right,’ said Danglard. ‘We’ll wait.’

He was not in a good mood. He saw Charles to the street.

Returning to the corridor, he was still pressing a finger to his forehead. Yes, it was true: because he had this long body in the shape of a skittle he resented Mathilde, who was the kind of woman who’d never go to bed with someone whose body was that shape. So, yes, he would have liked her to be guilty of something. And this business with the newspaper article certainly landed her in it. That would interest the kids, for sure. But he had sworn, since his mistake about the girl in the jeweller’s shop, never to proceed unless he had evidence and hard facts, not some half-baked hunch that wormed its way into your head. So he would have to tread carefully with Mathilde.

Charles remained on edge all morning. His fingers trembled a little as they ran over the Braille perforations.

Mathilde was on edge too. She had just lost sight of the sunflower man. Stupid, really – he had jumped into a taxi. She had found herself standing on the Place de l’Opéra, disappointed and disoriented. If it had been in the first half of the week, she would have sat down immediately and ordered a glass of beer. But since it was the second half, there was no point getting too upset. Should she pick someone at random to follow? Why not? On the other hand, it was almost midday and she wasn’t far from Charles’s office. She could call and take him out to lunch. She had been a bit brusque with him that morning, with the excuse that during a section two you could say what you liked, and she felt rather bad about that now.

She caught Charles by the shoulder just as he came out of the building in the rue Saint-Marc.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Mathilde.

‘Good thing you found me,’ said Charles. ‘All the cops in the world are thinking about you now. You were the subject of a minor denunciation this morning.’

Mathilde had settled herself on a banquette at the back of the restaurant, and nothing in her voice indicated to Charles that this item of news disturbed her.

‘All the same,’ Charles insisted, ‘it wouldn’t take much for the police to start thinking you’re the person best placed to help the murderer. You’re probably the only one who could have told him the time and place to find a circle that would suit his plan to kill someone. Worse still, you could even become a murder suspect yourself. With your bad habits, Mathilde, you’re going to be in deep trouble.’

Mathilde laughed. She ordered several dishes. She really was hungry.

‘Well, that’s just fine,’ said Mathilde. ‘Strange things happen to me all the time. It’s my fate. So one more or less isn’t going to make any difference. The night of the
Dodin Bouffant
was surely in a section two of the week, and I must have had too much to drink and talked a lot of nonsense. I don’t remember a lot about that evening, to be honest. You’ll see – Adamsberg will understand, he won’t go chasing the impossible all over the world.’

‘I think you’re underestimating him, Mathilde.’

‘I don’t think I am.’

‘Yes, you are. Plenty of people underestimate him, though probably not Danglard, and certainly not me. I know, Mathilde, Adamsberg has this voice that lulls you to sleep, it charms you and makes you drop your guard, but he never relaxes at all. His voice has distant pictures and vague thoughts in it, but it’s leading inexorably to some conclusion, although he may be the last to suspect that himself.’

‘Have you finished? Is it all right if I eat my lunch?’

‘Of course. But listen to what I’m saying: Adamsberg doesn’t attack, but he transforms you, he weaves his way round you, he comes at you from behind, he leads you on, and in the end he disarms you. He can’t be caught out and tracked down, not even by you, Queen Mathilde. He’ll always get away, because of his gentleness and his sudden indifference. So to you or me or anyone else, he can be a good thing or a bad thing, like the sun in spring. It all depends how you expose yourself to it. And for a murderer he’d be a formidable enemy – you ought to realise that. If I’d killed someone I’d prefer to have a cop chasing me whose reactions I could predict, not one who’s as hard to grasp as water, then suddenly turns to stone. He flows like a stream, he resists like a rock, he’s on his way to his destination, the estuary. And a murderer could easily drown in that.’

‘A destination? An estuary? Don’t be silly, that’s ridiculous,’ said Mathilde.

‘Maybe his destination is the lever that lifts up the whole blasted world. Or the blasted eye of the blasted cyclone – another eye for you, Mathilde. Or some outpost of the universe where knowledge exists, in the mists of eternity. Ever thought of that, Mathilde?’

Mathilde had stopped eating.

‘You really impress me, Charles. You come out with all this stuff like a book, but you just listened to him for an hour this morning.’

‘I’ve developed the sense instincts of a dog,’ said Charles bitterly. ‘A dog that hears what people don’t hear, and smells what they can’t smell. Some wretched hound that will travel a thousand kilometres as the crow flies, just to get back home. So I go about things a different way from Adamsberg, but I’ve got some knowledge too. That’s all we have in common. I believe I’m the most intelligent person on the planet, and my voice is like a metal-cutter. It slices things up, it twists them and my brain operates like a machine, sorting out data. And for me there are no destinations or estuaries any more. I don’t have the strength or purity now even to imagine that cyclones have eyes. I’ve given up all that, I’m too tempted by the nasty little tricks and ways I can find every day to compensate for what I can’t do. But Adamsberg doesn’t need any distractions in order to stay alive, do you understand what I’m saying? He just gets on with his life, letting it all swill about, big ideas and little details, impressions and realities, thoughts and words. He combines the belief of a child with the philosophy of an old man. But he’s real and he’s dangerous.’

‘You
do
impress me,’ repeated Mathilde. ‘I can’t say I’ve dreamed of having a son like you, because he would have driven me up the wall, but you impress me. I’m starting to see why you don’t give a damn about fish.’

‘You’re probably the one who’s right, Mathilde, because you find something to love in slimy creatures with round eyes that aren’t even good to eat. But it wouldn’t bother
me
if all the fish in the sea were dead.’

‘You certainly have the gift of giving me impossible ideas for a section two of the week. You’ve even upset yourself – look, you’re sweating. Don’t get so steamed up about Adamsberg. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Charles. ‘He’s a nice guy all right. He says nice things, does Adamsberg. And I can’t understand why that doesn’t worry you.’

‘You do impress me, Charles,’ Mathilde repeated.

IX

S
TRAIGHT AFTER LUNCH
, A
DAMSBERG DECIDED TO TRY SOMETHING
.

Inspired by the little diary they had found on the dead woman, he bought a small notebook that he could slip into his back pocket. So that if he was struck by some interesting thought he could write it down. Not that he was hoping for any miracles. But he told himself that when the notebook was full, the overall effect might be relevant and perhaps provide him with some insight into himself.

He felt that he had never been living so much from day to day as at this moment. He had already noted on many occasions that the more pressing anxieties he had, harassing him with their urgency and seriousness, the more his brain seemed to want to play dead. In response, he did his best to live by concentrating on little things, as if he were some stranger who cared about nothing, wiping out any thoughts and qualities, keeping his spirit a blank, his heart empty and his mind fixed entirely on short wavelengths. This state, a stretch of indifference which discouraged all those around him, was well-known to him now, but he found it hard to control. Because when he was in this uncaring mode, having rid himself of all the worries of the planet, he felt calm and on the whole happy. But as the days went by, such indifference insidiously caused internal damage so that everything became colourless. People began to become transparent to him, all identical, since they were so distant from him. And this lasted until, coming to some end point in his informal disgust with the world, he felt that he himself had no density, no importance at all, letting himself be ferried along by other people’s daily lives, being all the readier to carry out a host of little kindnesses since he had become completely detached from them. His body’s mechanisms and his automatic responses enabled him to get through the day, but he wasn’t there for anyone. At this stage, almost out of his own existence, Adamsberg felt no anxiety, had no thoughts. This disinterest for the world did not even have the panic-inducing fear of nothingness. His spiritual apathy did not bring with it the dread of ennui.

But God in heaven, it had happened very quickly this time.

He could perfectly well remember the extreme distress which only yesterday had struck him when he had imagined that Camille was dead. And now even the word ‘distress’ seemed meaningless to him. What could distress mean? That Camille was dead? But what did that matter now? Madeleine Châtelain had had her throat cut, the chalk circle man was still on the loose, Christiane was pusuing him, Danglard was depressed, and he had to deal with the whole bloody mess, but what was the point?

So he sat down in a café, took out his notepad and waited. He surveyed his thoughts as they proceeded through his head. They seemed to have a middle, but no beginning and no end. So how could he write them down? Disgusted but still calm, after an hour he wrote:

‘Can’t think of anything to think’.

Then from the café he telephoned Mathilde. Clémence Valmont answered the phone. The old woman’s grating voice brought him a sense of reality, the idea of doing something before he completely lost touch with things and passed out. Mathilde had returned home. He wanted to see her, but not at her house. He gave her an appointment for five o’clock at his office.

Unexpectedly, Mathilde arrived on time. She had surprised even herself.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It must be the effect of “helping the police with their inquiries”.’

Then she looked at Adamsberg, who was not drawing but was sitting with his legs outstretched, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other holding a cigarette in his fingertips and seeming so disorganised and nonchalant that it was hard to know how to approach him. But Mathilde sensed that he was quite capable of doing his job, even looking like that, or perhaps especially when looking like that.

‘I get the feeling this isn’t going to be as much fun as last time,’ said Mathilde.

‘You could be right,’ said Adamsberg.

‘It’s ridiculous going to all this performance of getting me called to the station. You would have done better to come to the Flying Gurnard, and we could have had a drink and a bite to eat. Clémence has made a repulsive sort of dish, her local speciality, she says.’

‘Where’s she from?’

‘Neuilly.’

‘The Paris suburbs aren’t exactly exotic. But I’m not staging any kind of performance. I just needed to talk to you and I didn’t want to sit cosily in the Flying Gurnard or anywhere else you might have in mind.’

‘Because a policeman doesn’t eat dinner with his suspects?’

‘On the contrary, that’s just what he does do,’ said Adamsberg wearily. ‘Being on matey terms with the suspects is precisely what the books recommend. But over in your house, it’s like a railway station. Blind men, batty old women, students, philosophers, upstairs neighbours, downstairs neighours – you have to be one of the Queen’s courtiers or you’re nothing at all, isn’t that right? And I don’t like the choice of courtier or nothing. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to say all this, it’s not important.’

Mathilde laughed.

‘I get it,’ she said. ‘In future we should meet in a café or on a bridge over the Seine, some neutral territory where we’d be on equal terms. Like two republican French citizens. Mind if I smoke?’

‘Go ahead. That article in the 5th
arrondissement
newsletter, Madame Forestier, did you know about it?’

‘Never heard of the damn thing till Charles recited it from memory for me at lunch time today. And as for whatever I was shouting about at the
Dodin Bouffant
, it’s no good trying to get me to remember it. All I can tell you is that when I’ve had a few drinks, my stories multiply reality by about thirty. It’s not impossible that I boasted that the chalk circle man came to dinner with me, and shared my bath, or my bed, or that we planned his nocturnal tricks together. Once I start showing off, nothing is too outrageous. So, you can imagine. Sometimes I act like a natural disaster, as my philosopher friend takes care to tell me.’

Adamsberg pulled a face.

‘I find it hard to forget you’re a scientist,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’re as unpredictable as you make out.’

‘So, Adamsberg, you think I cut Madeleine Châtelain’s throat? It’s true I don’t have a respectable alibi for that evening – nobody checks when I come and go. There’s no man sharing my bed at the moment, and there’s no concierge for our block: I’m as free as the wind, as free as the mice. So what is this poor woman supposed to have done to me to prompt this?’

‘Everyone has their secrets. Danglard would say that since you spend your time following thousands of people, Madeleine Châtelain could figure somewhere in your notes.’

‘It’s not impossible.’

‘He would add that in your underwater career you are known to have slit the bellies of two blue sharks. You’re capable of determination, courage and strength.’

‘Oh, come on, you’re not going to shelter behind someone else’s arguments, are you? Danglard this, Danglard that. What about you?’

‘Danglard’s a thinker. I listen to what he says. In my view, only one thing matters: the chalk circle man and his wretched outings. Nothing else. Take Charles Reyer, now – what do you know about him? It’s impossible to tell which of you first sought the other out. It looks as if it was you, but perhaps he forced your hand.’

There was a silence, then Mathilde said:

‘Do you really think I’d allow myself to be manipulated like that?’

At this difference in her tone, Adamsberg interrupted the doodling he had started. Sitting opposite, she was staring at him, smiling, grand and generous, very sure of herself, regal, as if she could demolish his office and the rest of the world with a simple mocking remark. So he spoke slowly, chancing some new ideas suggested by her expression. Resting his cheek on his hand, he said:

‘When you came to the police station the first time it wasn’t because you were looking for Charles Reyer, was it?’

Mathilde laughed.

‘Yes, I was looking for him! But I could have found him without your help, you know.’

‘Of course. It was stupid of me. But you’re a splendid liar. So what game are we playing here? Who were you really looking for? Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

‘Simple curiosity, because my appointment had been announced in the papers? You wanted to add me to your collection? No, it wasn’t that.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Mathilde.

‘ To talk about the chalk circle man, as Danglard thinks?’

‘No, not even that. If it hadn’t been for the press cuttings you had under the desk lamp, I wouldn’t have thought of that. You’re free not to believe me, of course, now that you know I’m thoroughly unreliable.’

Adamsberg shook his head. He felt he was on the wrong track.

‘It was because I got a letter,’ Mathilde continued. ‘It said: “I have just heard that Jean-Baptiste has been appointed to a job in Paris. Please go and take a look.” So I came to take a look, as was natural. There are no coincidences in this life, as you well know.’

Mathilde inhaled smoke, with a smile. She was really enjoying all this, was Mathilde. Yes, she was having a ball, in her damned section of the damned week.

‘Tell me the rest, Madame Forestier. Who was the letter from? Who are we talking about?’

‘Our beautiful traveller. Sweeter than me, more shy, less disreputable, less bohemian. My daughter Camille, my daughter. But you were right in one respect, Adamsberg. Richard III is dead.’

Afterwards, Adamsberg could not have said whether Mathilde left immediately or a little while later. Disconnected as he was at this moment, one thing had echoed round inside in his head. She was alive, Camille was alive. His
petite chérie
, never mind where, never mind who she was with, she was breathing, her obstinate forehead, her tender lips, her wisdom, her futility, her silhouette, they were all alive and well.

Only later, as he was walking home – having posted men for the night at the Saint-Georges and Pigalle metro stations, despite a feeling that it was pointless – did he realise what he had learned. Camille was Mathilde Forestier’s daughter. Well, of course. Even though Mathilde was a great mystifier, there was no point bothering to check it out. Profiles like that weren’t mass-produced.

There is no such thing as coincidence. His
petite chérie
, somewhere in the world, had read a French newspaper and learned about his posting, then had written to her mother. Perhaps she wrote to her often. Perhaps they even saw each other often. It was possible indeed that Mathilde managed to make the destinations of her scientific expeditions correspond to wherever her daughter was at the time. In fact, Adamsberg was certain of it. He would only have to find out which coasts Mathilde had been working from for the last few years to know where Camille had been. So he had been right. She had been travelling, lost and out of reach. Out of reach. He realised that. He never would manage to catch hold of her. But she
had
wanted to know what was happening to him. He hadn’t melted from her mind like wax. But then he had never had any doubt about that. Not that he thought himself unforgettable. All the same, he felt that a little piece of him had lodged like a tiny stone, somewhere in Camille, and that she too must be carrying him round inside her like a weight, infinitesimal though it might be. It was inevitable. It had to be. However vain human love appeared to him, and however dark his feeling today, he could not admit that some magnetised fragment of that love was not still lodged somewhere in Camille’s body. Just as he knew, although he rarely thought about it, that he had never allowed Camille’s existence to dissolve from inside himself, though he couldn’t have said why, because he had not consciously thought about it.

What bothered him, and even distracted him from the far country where his mood of indifference had taken him, was that now he would only have to ask Mathilde to find out. Just to find out. To find out, for instance, whether Camille loved someone else. But it was better not to know, and to keep on imagining the bellhop in the Cairo hotel where he had left off last time. The bellhop was good-looking, dark, with long eyelashes, and it was just for a couple of nights, since he had got rid of the cockroaches in the bathroom. And in any case, Mathilde wouldn’t tell him. They wouldn’t speak about it any more. Not a word about the girl who was taking both of them on journeys from Egypt to the Paris suburbs, and that was that. But what if she really was in the Paris suburbs? She was alive, that was all that Mathilde had wanted to tell him. So she had kept the promise she had made the other night at the Saint-Georges metro station. She had removed that death from his head.

Perhaps too, since Mathilde felt herself under threat from the police and their harassing questions, she had been setting out to make herself untouchable. To let him know that if he went on harassing the mother he would distress the daughter. No, that wasn’t Mathilde’s style. There was no future in talking about it any more; it was a closed subject, full stop. He had to leave Camille wherever she was, and carry on the inquiries surrounding Madame Forestier without deviating from his course. That was what the investigating magistrate had said earlier that afternoon. ‘No deviating from the course of the inquiry, Adamsberg.’ But what course? A course assumed a plan, some future laid out ahead, and in this case Adamsberg had less of a plan than ever before. He was waiting for the chalk circle man. This man didn’t seem to trouble many people. But for him, the man behind the circles was a creature who laughed at night and pulled cruel faces during the day. A man who was difficult to catch, disguised, putrid and feathery like moths of the night, and the thought of him was repulsive, giving Adamsberg the shivers. How could Mathilde possibly think the man was ‘harmless’ and take a ridiculous pleasure in following him around as he drew his deadly circles? That was an example, whatever he might say, of Mathilde’s fantastic recklessness. And how could Danglard, the learned and deep Danglard, also be certain this man was innocent, expelling him from his thoughts, whereas in Adamsberg’s mind he was crouching like a malevolent spider? But perhaps he, Adamsberg, was going desperately wrong? Too bad, if so. He had only ever been able to follow his own train of thought, wherever it took him. And whatever happened, he would keep on chasing this deadly man. And he
would
see him, he had to. Perhaps when he saw him he would change his mind. Perhaps. He would wait. He was sure that the chalk circle man would come to him. The day after tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, perhaps, there would be a new circle.