An Uncertain Place Read online




  About the Book

  Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. Accompanying him are Estalere, a young sergeant, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is a welcome change of scenery, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the attention of their colleague Radstock from New Scotland Yard.

  Just outside the gates of the baroque Highgate Cemetery a pile of shoes is found. Not so strange in itself, but the shoes contain severed feet. As Scotland Yard’s investigation begins, Adamsberg and his colleagues return home and are confronted with a massacre in a suburban home. Adamsberg and Danglard are drawn in to a trail of vampires and vampire-hunters that leads them all the way to Serbia, a place where the old certainties no longer apply.

  In Fred Vargas’s riveting new novel, Commissaire Adamsberg finds himself in the line of fire as never before.

  About the Author

  Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. As well as being a best-selling author in France, she is an historian and archaeologist.

  ALSO BY

  Fred Vargas

  The Chalk Circle Man

  Have Mercy on Us All

  Seeking Whom He May Devour

  The Three Evangelists

  Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

  This Night’s Foul Work

  Fred Vargas

  An Uncertain Place

  TRANSLATED

  FROM THE FRENCH

  BY

  Siân Reynolds

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446468166

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Harvill Secker 2011

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Éditions Viviane Hamy, Paris English translation copyright © Siân Reynolds 2011

  Fred Vargas has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published with the title Un lieu incertain in 2008 by Éditions Viviane Hamy, Paris

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  HARVILL SECKER

  Random House

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846554452

  This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London. www.frenchbooknews.com

  Ouvrage publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre – ministère français chargé de la culture

  This book is published with support from the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du Livre

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Fred Vargas

  Title

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  I

  COMMISSAIRE ADAMSBERG KNEW HOW TO IRON SHIRTS. HIS mother had shown him how you should flatten the shoulder piece and press down the fabric round the buttons. He unplugged the iron and folded his clothes into his suitcase. Freshly shaved and combed, he was off to London, and there was no way of getting out of it.

  He pushed a chair into the patch of sunlight falling on the kitchen floor. Since the room had windows on three sides, he spent his time moving his seat around the circular table, following the light, like a lizard on a rock. He put his bowl of coffee on the east side and sat down with his back to the warmth.

  Going to London was fine by him: he would find out whether the Thames smelt of damp washing the way the Seine did, and what kind of sound the seagulls made. Perhaps they had a different call in English. But he would hardly be allowed time for that. Three days of conference, with ten papers per session, six debates, and a reception at the Home Office. There would be a hundred or so top brass, representing police forces from all over Europe, crammed into a big hall; cops from twenty-three countries, seeking to foster closer police links in an expanded Europe and, more precisely, to ‘harmonise the management of migratory flows’. That was the subject of the conference.

  As chief of the Serious Crimes Squad in Paris, Adamsberg was obliged to turn up, but he wasn’t greatly concerned. He would be participating in a virtual, hands-off way: first because of his ingrained hostility to any ‘management of flows’, and secondly because he had never been able to remember a word of English. He finished his coffee contentedly, reading a text message from Commandant Danglard: ‘Rdv 80 mins GdNord eurostar gate. Fckin tnnl. Have smart jkt + tie 4 U’.

  Adamsberg pressed ‘delete’, wiping away his deputy’s anxiety like dust from furniture. Danglard was not cut out for walking or running, still less for travelling. Crossing the Channel by tunnel was as distressing for him as flying over it in a plane. But he would not for all the world have given up his place on the mission to anyone else. For thirty years, the commandant had been wedded to the elegance of English clothes, on which he banked to make up for his lack of good looks. And from this vital choice he had extended his gratitude to the rest of the United Kingdom, becoming the typical Anglophile Frenchman, addicted to good manners, tact and discreet humour. Except, of course, when he let himself go – revealing the difference between an Anglophile Frenchman and a true Englishman. So th
e prospect of a trip to London had overjoyed Danglard, migratory flows or not. He just had to get past the obstacle of the fckin tnnl: it would be his first experience of it.

  Adamsberg rinsed out his coffee bowl, snatched up his suitcase, and wondered what sort of jkt + tie Danglard had chosen for him. His elderly neighbour, Lucio, was knocking loudly on the glass door, his weighty fist making it rattle. Lucio had lost his left arm in the Spanish Civil War when he was nine years old, and it seemed that his right arm had grown so large to compensate that it had the strength of two. Pressing his face to the pane, he was summoning Adamsberg by his imperious expression.

  ‘Come along,’ he said gruffly and peremptorily. ‘She can’t get them out, I need your help.’

  Adamsberg stepped outside and put his suitcase down in the unkempt little garden he shared with the old Spaniard.

  ‘I’m just off to London,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a hand when I get back, in three days.’

  ‘Not in thrrrreee days! Now!’ said the old man.

  And when Lucio spoke in this tone of voice, rolling his r’s, he produced a great rumbling sound that seemed to Adamsberg as if it was issuing from the very earth. He picked up the suitcase, his mind already on its way to the Eurostar departure lounge at the Gare du Nord.

  ‘What can’t you get out?’ he said distantly, locking his front door.

  ‘The cat in the tool shed. You surely knew she was having kittens?’

  ‘I didn’t even know there was a cat there, and I certainly don’t care.’

  ‘Well, you know now, hombre. And no way will you not care. She’s only managed three so far. One’s dead and two others are still stuck, I can feel their heads. I’ll massage her belly, and you can pull them out. And be careful, gently does it. A kitten, you can break it in half like a biscuit if you’re too clumsy.’

  * * *

  Anxious and impatient, Lucio was scratching his missing arm by moving his fingers in the air. He had often explained that when he had lost his arm, aged nine, there had been a spider bite on it which he hadn’t finished scratching. And on account of that, the bite was still itching sixty-nine years later, because he hadn’t been able to give it a really good scratch and have done with it. This was the neurological explanation provided by his mother, and it had become Lucio’s philosophy of life: he adapted it to every situation and every feeling. You either finish something, or you don’t start. You have to go through to the bitter end, and that applies in matters of the heart too. When something was intensely important to him, Lucio scratched the interrupted bite.

  ‘Lucio,’ said Adamsberg clearly, walking across the little garden, ‘my train goes in an hour and a quarter, my deputy is having kittens himself at the Gare du Nord, and I’m not going to be midwife to your wretched cat when a hundred top cops are waiting for me in London. Do it yourself, you can tell me about it on Sunday.’

  ‘How am I supposed to manage like this?’ cried the old man, waving his stump in the air.

  Lucio held Adamsberg back with his powerful right arm, thrusting forward his prognathous jaw, worthy of a Velázquez painting, according to Danglard. The old man couldn’t see well enough these days to shave properly, and his razor always missed a few bristles. White and tough, they glittered in the sunshine in little clumps, like a silvery decoration made of thorns. Every now and then, Lucio caught a bristle between thumb and fingernail and pulled it out, as he might a tick. He never gave up till he got it out, observing the spider-bite philosophy.

  ‘You’re coming with me.’

  ‘Let me go, Lucio.’

  ‘You’ve got no choice, hombre,’ said Lucio darkly. ‘It’s crossed your path now. You have to come. Otherwise it’ll scratch you all your life. It’ll only take ten minutes.’

  ‘My train’s crossing my path too.’

  ‘Time for that afterwards.’

  Adamsberg dropped the suitcase and groaned impotently as he followed Lucio into the shed. A tiny head, sticky with blood, was emerging between the cat’s hind paws. Under the old Spaniard’s instructions, he caught hold of it gently while Lucio pressed the mother cat’s stomach with a professional gesture. She was miaowing piteously.

  ‘You can do better than that! Pull harder, hombre, get hold of it under its shoulders and pull! Go on, don’t be afraid, but be gentle, don’t squash its skull, and with your other hand, stroke the mother’s head, she’s panicking.’

  ‘Lucio, when I stroke someone’s head, they go to sleep.’

  ‘Joder! Go on, pull!’

  Six minutes later, Adamsberg was putting two red and squeaking little rats alongside the others on an old blanket. Lucio cut the cords and placed them one by one at their mother’s teats. He looked anxiously at the mother cat, which was whimpering.

  ‘What did you mean about your hand? You put people to sleep?’

  Adamsberg shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know how. If I put my hand on their heads they go to sleep. That’s all.’

  ‘And you do that with your own kid?’

  ‘Yes. And people go to sleep when I’m talking too. I even have suspects drop off when I’m questioning them.’

  ‘Well, do it for this mother cat. Apúrate! Make her sleep.’

  ‘Good grief, Lucio, can’t you get it into your head that I’ve got a train to catch?!’

  ‘We’ve got to calm the mother down.’

  Adamsberg couldn’t have cared less about the cat, but he did care about the black look his old neighbour was giving him. He stroked the – very soft – head of the cat since, it was true, he really had no choice. The animal’s panting gradually subsided as his fingers rolled like marbles from its muzzle to its ears. Lucio nodded his approval.

  ‘Yes, she’s sleeping, hombre.’

  Adamsberg gently removed his hand, wiped it on some wet grass and backed away quietly.

  As he went up the escalator at the Gare du Nord, he could still feel something sticky drying on his fingers and under his nails. He was twenty minutes later than agreed for the rdv. Danglard hurried towards him. Danglard’s legs always looked as if they had been wrongly assembled, and that they would be dislocated from the knee if he tried to run.

  Adamsberg raised a hand to pre-empt his reproaches, and stop him running.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘Something crossed my path and I had to deal with it, or I’d have had to scratch it for the rest of my days.’

  Danglard was so used to Adamsberg’s incomprehensible sentences that he rarely bothered to ask questions. Like others in the squad, he let it pass, knowing how to separate the interesting from the useful. Puffing, he pointed to the departure gate, and set off back in that direction. As he followed without haste, Adamsberg tried to recall what colour the cat had been. White with grey patches? Ginger patches?

  II

  ‘YOU GET SOME WEIRD GOINGS-ON IN FRANCE TOO, DON’T you?’ remarked Detective Chief Inspector Radstock, in English, to his Parisian colleagues.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘He said we get weird things happening back home as well,’ Danglard translated.

  ‘Very true,’ said Adamsberg, without taking much interest in the conversation.

  What concerned him just now was the possibility of taking a stroll. He was in London, it was a fine evening in June, and he wanted to walk about a bit. The two days of conference he had sat through were beginning to get on his nerves. Staying seated for hours on end was one of the rare experiences that disrupted his habitual calm, and made him undergo the strange state other people called ‘impatience’ or ‘feverishness’, usually foreign to his nature. The previous day he had managed to escape three times, and had explored the surrounding district, after a fashion, committing to memory the brick housefronts, the white columns, the black-and-gold lamp posts. He had taken a few steps into a little street called St John’s Mews, though heaven only knew how you were meant to pronounce ‘Mews’. A flock of seagulls had flown up in the air, calling (mewing indeed) in English
. But his absences had been noticed. So today he had had to stay the course, sitting in his place, unresponsive to the speeches of his colleagues and unable to keep up with the rapid translation by a simultaneous interpreter. The hall was crammed full of police officers, all of whom were displaying much ingenuity in devising a grid intended to ‘harmonise the flow of migrants’, and to cover Europe with a net through whose meshes it would be impossible to slip. Since he had always preferred fluids to solids, the flexible to the rigid, Adamsberg naturally identified with the movements of the ‘flow’ and was inventing ways of outflanking the fortifications which were being perfected under his very eyes.

  This colleague from New Scotland Yard, DCI Radstock, seemed to know all about nets, but did not seem to be fanatical about their efficiency. He would be retiring in under a year, and cherished the very British notion of spending his time fishing in some northern loch, according to Danglard, who understood everything and translated everything, including things that Adamsberg had no wish to know. He would have liked to tell his deputy not to bother with these superfluous translations, but Danglard had so few treats and he seemed so happy revelling in the English language, rather like a wild boar wallowing in a favoured spot of mud, that Adamsberg hadn’t the heart to deprive him of the least scrap of enjoyment. At this point, the commandant seemed to have attained a state of bliss, almost to have taken wing, his usually shambling body gaining stature, his drooping shoulders squared, displaying a posture which almost made him impressive. Perhaps he was nursing a plan to retire one day with this new-found friend, and go fishing for something or other in the northern loch.