This Poison Will Remain Read online

  Praise for Fred Vargas and the Commissaire Adamsberg Mysteries

  “Fred Vargas’s books are murder mysteries, yes—cunning, corkscrew murder mysteries—but so much else besides: delicate comedies, engrossing tours of French geography and history, fascinating excursions into folklore and myth.”

  —A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “I so enjoyed This Poison Will Remain, real vintage Vargas: playful, thought-provoking, a total delight. And beautifully translated. Adamsberg is one of my favorite detectives.”

  —Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland mysteries

  “A wildly imaginative series.”

  —The New York Times

  “It’s a tangled web [Vargas] weaves, and a hard one to escape.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Vargas’s characters are like something out of a fairy tale—eternal opposites, ever-renewing archetypes despite their fresh adventures each time. That’s why each novel’s opening feels new.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Anyone who enjoys kooky characters and intricate detail will happily follow Vargas along.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Readers should settle in to be unsettled. Delight is found not so much in the details of plot as in the oddities of character. The crime, the suspects, and the commissaire are all pleasantly off-kilter and equally baffling. A definite pick for Francophile mystery buffs who also enjoy Georges Simenon’s Maigret series.”

  —Library Journal

  “Adamsberg, always an intuitive sleuth rather than a rational one, is the perfect hero for a series where reality is always a moving target.”

  —Booklist

  “Vargas remains the gold standard in modern crime fiction.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  THIS POISON WILL REMAIN

  Fred Vargas is a #1 bestselling author in France, Italy, and Germany. She is the winner of four International Dagger Awards from the Crime Writers’ Association and is the first author to achieve such an honor. In 2018, Vargas won the Princess of Asturias Award for letters.

  ALSO BY FRED VARGAS

  in the Commissaire Adamsberg mystery series

  The Chalk Circle Man

  Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

  This Night’s Foul Work

  An Uncertain Place

  The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

  A Climate of Fear

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Originally published in French as Quand sort la recluse by Flammarion, Paris, 2017

  This translation was originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Penguin Random House, UK, 2019

  Published in Penguin Books 2019

  Copyright © 2017 by Fred Vargas and Flammarion, Paris

  English translation copyright © 2019 by Siân Reynolds

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2019941901

  ISBN 9780143133667 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780525505457 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Christopher Lin

  Cover image: Anton Teplyakov / Shutterstock

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Fred Vargas

  About the Author

  Also by Fred Vargas

  Title Page

  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

  Author’s acknowledgement

  I

  Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, sitting on a rock at the quayside, watched the Grimsey fishermen return with their daily catch, as they moored their boats and hauled up their nets. Here, on this tiny island off the coast of Iceland, people called him simply ‘Berg’. An onshore breeze, temperature 11 degrees, hazy sunshine, and the reek of discarded fish entrails. He had forgotten that, not so long ago, he was a commissaire, the police chief in charge of the twenty-seven officers of the Paris Serious Crime Squad, based in the 13th arrondissement. His mobile phone had fallen into some sheep dung, and the ewe had trodden it firmly in with its hoof, no malice intended. That was a novel way to lose your phone, and Adamsberg had appreciated it as such.

  Gunnlaugur, the landlord of the little inn, was just arriving down at the harbour, preparing to choose the best fish for the evening meal. Adamsberg waved to him with a smile. But Gunnlaugur did not look his usual jovial self. He was heading straight for Adamsberg, ignoring the fish market just getting under way. Frowning under his blond eyebrows, he held out a piece of paper.

  ‘Fyrir þig,’ he said – with a gesture. For you.

  ‘Ég?’ Me?

  Adamsberg, who was normally incapable of memorising the most basic rudiments of any foreign language, had inexplicably amassed a stock of about seventy words of Icelandic in just seventeen days. People spoke to him as simply as possible, with a lot of sign language.

  From Paris, the message must be from Paris. And they wanted him back, that must be it. He felt combined sadness and anger and shook his head, refusing to look, turning towards the sea. Gunnlaugur insisted, unfolding the paper and thrusting it into his fingers.

  Woman run over. Husband or lover. Not straightforward. Your presence required. Details fol
low.

  Adamsberg looked down, opened his hand and let the paper blow away in the wind. Paris? How could it be from Paris? Where was Paris, anyway?

  ‘Dauður maður?’ Gunnlaugur asked. Someone’s died?

  ‘Já.’ Yes.

  ‘Ertu að fara, Berg? Ertu að fara?’ So you’re leaving us, Berg? You’re leaving?

  Adamsberg drew himself up wearily and looked towards the pale sun.

  ‘Nei.’ No.

  ‘Jú, Berg,’ Gunnlaugur sighed. Yes you are, Berg.

  ‘Já,’ Adamsberg admitted.

  Gunnlaugur shook his shoulder, pulling him along.

  ‘Drekka borða,’ he said. You must eat, drink.

  ‘Já.’ OK.

  * * *

  *

  The shock, as his plane’s wheels touched down on the tarmac at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, triggered a sudden migraine such as he had not had for years, and at the same time he felt as if he were being battered all over. Back to base, all that aggression, Paris, city of stone. Unless it was the number of glasses downed the night before, at his farewell party at the inn in Iceland. The glasses had been very small. But numerous. And it was his last night. And it had been brennivín.

  He gave a furtive glance out of the window. Not to get out. Not to have to go anywhere.

  But he was there already. Your presence required.

  II

  By nine o’clock on Tuesday 31 May, sixteen of the squad’s officers had gathered in their council chamber, armed with laptops, folders and cups of coffee, ready to fill the commissaire in on the business they had been dealing with in his absence, under the leadership of Commandants Mordent and Danglard. By the relaxed and suddenly chatty atmosphere, the team was expressing its pleasure at seeing him back, seeing once more his face and mannerisms, without wondering whether his stay in the north of Iceland, on that little island of mists and pounding waves, had altered his approach in any way. And if it had, so what? Lieutenant Veyrenc was saying to himself. He, like Adamsberg, had grown up in the rocky Pyrenees and understood the boss well. He knew that when the commissaire was in charge, the squad was like a tall sailing ship, sometimes with a brisk wind behind it, other times becalmed and its sails drooping, rather than a powerful speedboat churning up torrents of spray.

  Commandant Danglard, on the other hand, was perpetually worried about something. He was forever scanning the horizon, on the lookout for threats of all kinds, flaying his skin on the rough surface of his fears. Following Adamsberg’s departure for Iceland, at the end of a particularly trying case, apprehension had already gained the upper hand. For an ordinary mortal who was simply tired, going off for rest and recuperation to a cold land of mist and fog might seem appropriate. Better than chasing the southern sun, where the relentless light would illuminate the slightest relief, the sharp edges of a gravel chip, no, that was not at all relaxing. But for someone whose mind was already full of mist to go off to a similarly mist-shrouded country seemed to him on the contrary dangerous, potentially heavy with consequences. Danglard feared difficult, possibly irreversible results. He had seriously wondered whether, through some kind of chemical fusion between a country’s fogs and those of a human being, Adamsberg might be swallowed up in Iceland and never come back. News of the commissaire’s return to Paris had somewhat reassured him. But when Adamsberg had come into the room, with his usual slightly rolling gait, smiling round at everyone, shaking hands, Danglard’s anxiety immediately revived. More vague and elusive than ever, with his wandering gaze and absent-minded smile, the commissaire seemed to have lost touch with the precisely carpentered joists which had always, in spite of everything, underpinned his approach, like a series of supporting beams, infrequent but reassuring. He’s looking invertebrate, boneless, Danglard deduced. Amusing, still damp from the north, thought Lieutenant Veyrenc.

  Junior officer Estalère, who specialised in preparing the squad’s ritual coffee, a task he accomplished faultlessly – indeed it was the only area in which he excelled, according to most of his colleagues – immediately served one to his chief, with just the right amount of sugar.

  ‘OK, go ahead,’ said Adamsberg in a gentle, faraway voice, much too relaxed for a police chief dealing with the death of a woman of thirty-seven who had been run over – twice – in the street by a 4x4, which had broken her neck and legs.

  This had happened three days earlier, on the previous Saturday night, in the rue du Château-des-Rentiers. What château, what rentiers? Danglard wondered, since that name sounded very odd in the less-than-well-heeled 13th arrondissement where they were based. He promised himself to check what its origin was, since no detail of knowledge was too trivial for the commandant’s encyclopedic mind.

  ‘Did you read the file we sent for you to pick up at Reykjavik airport?’ asked Mordent.

  ‘Of course,’ said Adamsberg with a shrug.

  And indeed he had read it during the flight from Reykjavik to Paris. But in reality, he had found it hard to concentrate. He knew that this woman, Laure Carvin – a pretty woman, he had noted – had been killed by the 4x4 between 22.10 and 22.15. The precision about time of death resulted from the victim’s extremely regular routine. She sold children’s outfits in a luxury boutique in the 15th arrondissement between 14.00 and 19.30. Then she did the accounts and pulled down the shutters at 21.40. She crossed the rue du Château-des-Rentiers every evening at the same time, at the same traffic lights, very near her home. She was married to a rich ‘self-made man’, but Adamsberg could not now remember what line he was in, or what his bank account looked like. It had been the husband’s 4x4, the rich guy’s – what was his first name? – that had run the woman down, there was no doubt about that. There was still blood in the treads of the tyres and on the bodywork. The same night, Mordent and Justin had retraced the tracks left by those killer wheels, taking with them a sniffer dog from the canine squad. Which had led them directly, via a set of side streets, to the small car park of a video games centre, a mere three hundred metres from the scene of the crime. The rather high-maintenance police dog had demanded many pats for his performance.

  The proprietor of the centre was well acquainted with the owner of the bloodstained vehicle: a regular who frequented the games room every Saturday evening from about 9 p.m. until midnight. If he was out of luck, he might well stay until closing time, 2 a.m. He had pointed the man out: in a tailored suit and with loosened tie, he was easy to spot among the other players who wore hoodies and held beer cans. The man was furiously battling with huge cadaverous figures speeding towards him on screen, and he had to mow them down with a machine gun, in order to force a passage to the labyrinthine Mountain of the Black King. When the officers had interrupted him by touching his shoulder, he had shaken his head frantically, without lifting his hands from the controls, and shouted that there was no way he was going to stop now, at 47,652 points, almost the level needed for the Bronze Route, no way! Raising his voice above the noise of the machines and the loud voices of the customers, Mordent had managed to communicate to him that his wife had been killed, knocked down on the road, a mere three hundred metres away. The man had collapsed on to the console, cancelling the game. The screen carried the message ‘Too bad, you’ve lost!’ with appropriate music.

  ‘So according to the husband, he hadn’t left the games room?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘If you’ve read the report –’ Mordent began.

  ‘I’d prefer to hear it from you,’ Adamsberg said, cutting him off.

  ‘That’s right, he’d been there all evening.’

  ‘So how does he explain that the tyres of his own 4x4 are covered in blood?’

  ‘Because there’s a lover in the picture. The lover must have known the husband’s habits, come and borrowed the car, driven it at his mistress, then parked it back in its place.’

  ‘So as to make it look as if it was him?’

  ‘Yes, becau
se the police always accuse the husband.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How did he react, the husband?’

  ‘Taken aback. He seemed more shocked than distressed. He recovered somewhat when they took him to the station. The couple were apparently considering divorce.’

  ‘Because of the lover?’

  ‘No,’ said Lieutenant Noël with a sneer. ‘Because a man like him, a jumped-up fancy lawyer, thought his lower-class wife was a drag on him. If you read between the lines of what he says.’

  ‘And his wife,’ chimed in fair-haired Justin, ‘was humiliated to be left out of all the cocktail parties and grand dinners he gave in his suite of rooms in the 7th arrondissement, for his clients and contacts. She wanted to come along, but he refused. They had a number of scenes about it. She’d have been “out of place”, according to him, she “wouldn’t have fitted in”. He’s that kind of man.’

  ‘Unbelievable – eh?’ said Noël.

  ‘He gradually regained control,’ said Voisenet, ‘and then he started protesting as if he’d been forced on to a Go to Jail route in his video game. He started speaking in more and more complicated and incomprehensible sentences.’

  ‘It’s a simple strategy,’ said Mordent, jerking his long thin neck from his collar, having in no way over the past fortnight altered his appearance of an old heron, disillusioned with the trials of existence. ‘He’s banking on the contrast between himself, a lawyer handling big business, and the lover.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘An Arab, as he insisted on telling us at once, a guy who repairs drinks machines. And he lives in the adjoining building. Nassim Bouzid, Algerian but born in France, married, two children.’

  Adamsberg hesitated, then did not speak. He couldn’t decently ask his officers how the interrogation of Nassim Bouzid had gone, because it must have been in the report. But he couldn’t remember anything about this man.

  ‘What impression did you get of the lover?’ he asked casually, while signalling to Estalère to fetch him another coffee.