The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg) (10 page)

‘Yes.’

‘The medium speaks out and sometimes the seized person gets to redeem himself. Well, anyway, Lina
is
in some danger, and you can protect her.’

‘I can’t do anything, Léo, the investigation will be in Émeri’s hands.’

‘But Émeri won’t bother himself about Lina. All this stuff about the Furious Army annoys and disgusts him. He thinks times have changed and that people these days are reasonable.’

‘Well, first of all, they’ll want to find out who killed Herbier. And the other two people are still alive. So Lina isn’t in any danger at the moment.’

‘Maybe,’ said Léo, puffing on the remains of her cigar.

*   *   *

Getting to his bedroom meant going outside, since each room communicated only through an external door, which squeaked, reminding Adamsberg of Tuilot, Julien, and the creaking door which would have allowed him to avoid arrest if he had dared to open it. Léo pointed out Adamsberg’s room to him with one of her sticks.

‘You have to give the door a bit of a lift to make less of a noise. Goodnight.’

‘I don’t know your last name, Léo.’

‘Police, they always want to know that. What about yours?’ asked Léo, spitting out a few strands of tobacco stuck to her tongue.

‘Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, I told you before.’

‘Make yourself at home. In your bedroom there’s a whole stack of nineteenth-century pornography. Inherited from a friend, whose family wanted rid of it. Read it if you like, but be careful turning the pages, they’re old and the paper’s fragile.’

VIII

In the morning, Adamsberg pulled on his trousers and went quietly outside, treading barefoot on the wet grass. It was six thirty and the dew was still heavy. He had slept soundly on an old woollen mattress with a hollow in the middle, into which he had curled like a bird in a nest. He walked round the meadow for a few minutes, before finding what he was looking for: a supple twig, so as to turn the end into a makeshift toothbrush. He was peeling the end of his twig when Léo poked her head out of the window.

‘Ello’
– in English as usual – ‘Capitaine Émeri has telephoned to ask for you, and he doesn’t sound too pleased. Come in, the coffee’s hot. You’ll catch cold outside with no shoes on.’

‘How did he know I was here?’ asked Adamsberg when he was back inside.

‘I suppose he didn’t buy the story of the cousin, and he put two and two together with reports of a Parisian getting off the bus yesterday. He said he didn’t like having some cop looking over his shoulder, and that I’d kept it from him. You’d think we’d been plotting, like in wartime. He might make trouble for you, you know.’

‘I’ll tell him the truth. I came to see what a
grimweld
looked like,’ said Adamsberg, helping himself to a large piece of buttered bread.

‘Exactly. And there was no hotel.’

‘You see.’

‘If you’ve been summoned to the gendarmerie, you won’t be able to
catch the 8.50 train from Lisieux. You’ll have to get the next one, the 14.15 from Cérenay. But be careful. It takes at least half an hour by bus. Now, when you go out of here, you turn right, then right again and go straight ahead, about eight hundred metres towards the town centre. The gendarmerie is just behind the main square. Leave your bowl, I’ll clear up here.’

Adamsberg walked through the fields to the gendarmerie, which, oddly enough, had been painted bright yellow as if it were a holiday home.

‘Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg,’ he said to the portly officer on the reception desk. ‘Your capitaine’s expecting me.’

‘Yeah, he is,’ said the officer, looking at him with an apprehensive air, as if he wouldn’t like to be in his boots. ‘Down the corridor, sir, office at the end. The door’s open.’

Adamsberg stopped in the doorway and for a few seconds observed Capitaine Émeri, who was pacing up and down in his office, looking on edge and tense, but very elegant in a close-fitting uniform. A handsome man, the wrong side of forty, with regular features, a full head of hair that was still blond, and cutting a slim figure in his military jacket with epaulettes.

‘What do you want?’ Émeri asked as he turned and saw Adamsberg. ‘Who told you you could come in here?’

‘You yourself, capitaine. You summoned me first thing this morning.’

‘Adamsberg?’ said Émeri, quickly eyeing the commissaire, who not only wore his usual casual clothes, but had not been able to shave or comb his hair.

‘Apologies for being unshaven,’ said Adamsberg, shaking hands. ‘But I wasn’t expecting to stay the night in Ordebec.’

‘Sit down, commissaire,’ said Émeri, still unable to take his eyes off Adamsberg.

He was having difficulty reconciling Adamsberg’s reputation, good or bad, with such a small man, and such a modest appearance: with his dark complexion and black clothes he appeared out of place, unclassifiable or at any rate nonconformist. Émeri looked for the right expression without really finding it, finally settling on a smile which was as pleasant as it was distant. The aggressive speech he had been thinking of delivering had
somehow got lost in his perplexity, as if coming up not so much against a wall as against an absence of obstacles. And he couldn’t see how to attack or even get to grips with an absence of obstacle. So it was Adamsberg who broke the silence.

‘Léone told me you were displeased, capitaine,’ he said, choosing his words. ‘But I think there’s been a misunderstanding. In Paris yesterday it was thirty-six degrees, and I had just arrested an old man who had killed his wife by choking her with bread.’

‘With bread?’

‘By pushing a couple of handfuls down her throat. And the idea of being able to take a walk in the cool of a
grimweld
appealed to me. Perhaps you can understand.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I was picking blackberries and eating them.’ Adamsberg noticed that his hands still bore the stains. ‘I hadn’t expected to come across Léone. She was waiting for her dog and sitting by the path. And
she
hadn’t expected to find Herbier’s body by the chapel. Out of respect from one professional for another, I didn’t go to the crime scene. And since the last train had gone, she offered me hospitality for the night. I wasn’t expecting to find myself smoking a Havana cigar and drinking some excellent Calvados by her fire, but that’s how the evening ended. She’s a splendid woman, as she might say of someone else, but more than that.’

‘Do you know how this splendid woman comes to be smoking genuine Cuban cigars?’ said Émeri, smiling for the first time. ‘Did she tell you her full name?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. Léo’s full name is Léone Marie de Valleray, Comtesse d’Ordebec. Some coffee, commissaire?’

‘Yes, please.’

*   *   *

Léo, the Comtesse d’Ordebec. Living in a tumbledown old farmhouse, having kept it as an inn, slurping down her soup and spitting out strands of tobacco. Capitaine Émeri came back with two cups, smiling broadly
now, allowing the good-natured and hospitable side of his character described by Léo to appear up front.

‘You’re surprised?’

‘Yes, rather. She doesn’t seem well off. And Léo told me the Comte d’Ordebec was very rich.’

‘She’s the count’s first wife, but it goes back sixty years. They were young, they were carried away. But the marriage caused such a scandal in the count’s family that heavy pressure was exerted and there was a divorce two years later. People say they went on seeing each other for a long time. But then they saw reason and went their separate ways. That’s enough about Léo,’ said Émeri, ceasing to smile. ‘When you arrived on that path yesterday, you didn’t know anything? What I mean is: when you spoke to me on the phone from Paris in the morning, you didn’t know Herbier was lying dead by the chapel?’

‘No.’

‘All right. Do you often do that, leave your squad to go walking in a forest at the first opportunity?’

‘Yes, often.’

Émeri took a mouthful of coffee and looked up. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. And there’d been all that bread in the morning.’

‘What do your officers have to say about that?’

‘Among my officers, I have a hypersomniac who goes to sleep without warning, a zoologist whose speciality is fish, freshwater fish in particular, a woman with bulimia who keeps disappearing in search of food, an old heron who knows a lot of myths and legends, a walking encyclopaedia who drinks white wine non-stop – and the rest to match. They can’t allow themselves to stand on ceremony with me.’

‘And that lot get some work done, do they?’

‘Yes, plenty.’

‘What did Léo say when you met her?’

‘She just said “Ello”, that way she does. And she already knew I was a cop and just off the train from Paris.’

‘Not surprising – she’s more gifted at sniffing out information than her dog. She’d be shocked, though, at my calling it a gift. She has her own
theory about the combined effect of details on each other. She’s always quoting this story about the movement of a butterfly’s wing in New York leading to an explosion in Bangkok. I don’t know where that comes from.’

Adamsberg shook his head, being equally ignorant.

‘Léo goes on about the butterfly’s wing,’ Émeri continued. ‘She says the important thing is to spot the moment it moves. Not when everything explodes later. And I have to say, she’s pretty good at it. Lina sees these Riders go past. That’s the butterfly’s wing. Lina’s boss tells other people, Léo hears about it, Lina’s mother takes fright, some priest gives her your name – I’m right, aren’t I? – she gets the train to Paris, her story intrigues you, the temperature in Paris is thirty-six degrees, the woman gets killed with a mouthful of bread, the cool walk in the
grimweld
tempts you, Léo is waiting on the path, and here you are sitting in front of me.’

‘That isn’t exactly an explosion.’

‘But Herbier’s death is. That’s when Lina’s dream explodes into reality. As if the dream made a wolf come out of the woods.’

‘Lord Hellequin designates the victims, and someone thinks he’s had the go-ahead to kill them? Is that what you think? That Lina’s vision has pushed a murderer to act?’

‘It isn’t just a vision, it’s a legend that’s been current in Ordebec for a thousand years. You can bet that more than three-quarters of the people here are terrified of this parade of dead horsemen. They’d all be panic-stricken if their name was announced by Hellequin. But they wouldn’t say so. I can assure you that people tend to keep well away from the
grimweld
at night, except for a few lads who dare each other to go there. Spending a night on the Chemin de Bonneval is a sort of initiation rite, to prove you’re a man. A kind of medieval ritual. But there’s a big difference between all that and someone believing in it enough to assassinate someone at Hellequin’s bidding. No. But I do admit one thing. It’s fear of the Riders that’s behind Herbier’s death. Note that I said
death
, not murder.’

‘Léo said this man had been shot.’

Émeri nodded. Now that his plans for confrontation had melted away his bearing and face had lost their pomposity. The change was striking and Adamsberg thought again about the dandelion. When it’s closed at
night, it’s nondescript, with just a hint of yellow, but in the daytime it’s a rich, attractive, bright flower. Still, unlike Madame Vendermot, Capitaine Émeri was anything but a fragile flower. Adamsberg was still trying to remember the name for the little parachutes, so he missed the beginning of Émeri’s reply.

‘…it was his gun, yes, a sawn-off shotgun, a Darne. Herbier was a brutal hunter, he liked to scatter the pellets and kill a female and her young with one shot. From the impact, which was at very close quarters, it’s quite possible he held it in front of him with the barrel pointing at his forehead and pulled the trigger.’

‘But why would he do that?’

‘For the reasons people have said. Because of the appearance of the Ghost Riders. You can guess the chain of events. Herbier hears about the prediction. He’s a bad character and he knows it. He takes fright and something clicks in his head. He empties out his freezers himself, as if to deny all his hunting atrocities, and he kills himself. Because they say that someone who enacts justice on himself won’t go to hell with Hellequin’s army.’

‘Why did you say he had the barrel pointing at his forehead, but not touching it?’

‘The shot was fired from at least ten centimetres.’

‘It would have been more logical to put the muzzle directly against his forehead.’

‘Not necessarily. It depends what he wanted to see. The muzzle pointing at him. So far we’ve found only his own prints on the gun.’

‘But you could equally well suppose that someone else thought they would take advantage of Lina’s prediction to get rid of Herbier, disguising it as suicide.’

‘But you can’t seriously imagine someone would go to the lengths of emptying his freezers? Round here there are more hunters than animal rights campaigners. And wild boar are a damned pest, they cause terrible damage. No, Adamsberg, a gesture like that must be some sort of penance for his crimes, an expiation.’

‘What about the moped? Why would he hide it in the hazel bushes?’

‘It wasn’t hidden, just pushed in under the bushes out of the way, a sort of reflex, I suppose.’

‘And why would he have gone to the chapel to kill himself?’

‘That bit makes perfect sense. In the legend, the people who are seized are often found near some abandoned religious site. You know what “seized” means?’

‘Yes,’ Adamsberg repeated.

‘So, they go to some site which is cursed, in Hellequin’s domain. Herbier kills himself there, he’s anticipating his destiny, and he’ll escape punishment because of his contrition.’

Adamsberg had been sitting too long on his chair and his legs were itching with impatience.

‘Is it all right if I walk around a bit in here? I can’t sit still too long.’

An expression of total sympathy appeared on the capitaine’s face. ‘Nor can I!’ he exclaimed, with the intense happiness of someone who finds another person shares their own torment. ‘It makes my stomach clench, I get nervous electricity in little bubbles bouncing round inside me. Apparently my ancestor, Napoleon’s marshal, Davout, was a man of great nervous energy too. I have to walk at least a couple of hours a day to get rid of it. Let’s go for a walk through the streets. Ordebec’s a pretty place, you’ll see.’