The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg) (7 page)

Adamsberg drew up a chair and sat down, stretching his legs, completing the little circle of three men around the hearth.

‘All the same,’ he began – and his sentence stopped there, for want of an exact thought to take it further.

Danglard had never got used to the cloudy vagueness of the commissaire’s mental processes, his lack of logical, overarching reason.

‘All the same -’ Danglard picked up his expression to complete it – ‘it’s just the story of some unfortunate young woman who is disturbed enough to have visions. And of a mother sufficiently frightened to believe in them and ask the police for help.’

‘All the same, it’s also the story of a woman who foretells several deaths. What if Michel Herbier hasn’t just gone off somewhere, and they find his body?’

‘Then your Lina would be in a very awkward spot. Who’s to say she didn’t kill Herbier herself? And then go round telling this story to confuse people?’

‘What do you mean “confuse” them?’ said Adamsberg, smiling. ‘Do you really believe that the horsemen in the Furious Army are credible suspects for the police? Do you think Lina is being Machiavellian, by pointing to a culprit who’s been riding round the area for a thousand years? Who are they going to arrest? Capitaine Hennequin?’

‘Hellequin. He’s a nobleman. Maybe a descendant of Odin.’

Danglard refilled his glass with a steady hand.

‘Just forget it, commissaire. Leave the limbless horsemen be, and this Lina person too.’

Adamsberg nodded his agreement and Danglard drank off the glass. When he had left, Adamsberg paced round the room with a blank expression.

‘Do you remember,’ he said to Zerk, ‘the first time you came here, there wasn’t a bulb in the overhead light?’

‘There still isn’t.’

‘Shall we replace it?’

‘You said it didn’t bother you whether there was a bulb working or not.’

‘That’s right. But there comes a time when you have to take action. A time when you tell yourself to replace the light bulb, and decide to call the captain of the Ordebec gendarmes tomorrow. And then you just have to do it.’

‘But Commandant Danglard’s quite right. That woman’s crazy. What are you going to do about her Furious Army?’

‘It’s not these ghosts riding round the countryside that bother me, Zerk. It’s that I don’t like people coming and warning me about some impending violent deaths, however they do it.’

‘Yes, I see. OK, I’ll look after the light bulb.’

‘Are you going to wait till eleven to feed the bird?’

‘I’ll stay down here tonight to feed it every hour. I’ll just take a nap in the armchair.’

Zerk touched the pigeon with the back of his fingers.

‘He doesn’t feel very warm, in spite of the heat.’

VI

At 6.15 next morning Adamsberg felt someone shaking him.

‘He’s opened his eyes! Come and see. Quick!’

Zerk still didn’t know what to call Adamsberg. Father? Too formal. Papa? He was rather old to do that. Jean-Baptiste? That might seem too familiar and inappropriate. So for the time being, he didn’t call him anything, and this absence caused embarrassing gaps in his sentences. Hollow spaces. But those hollow spaces perfectly summed up his twenty-eight years of absence.

The two men went downstairs and peered into the strawberry basket. Yes, things certainly looked better. Zerk took the dressings off the bird’s feet and applied antiseptic, while Adamsberg filtered the coffee.

‘What are we going to call him?’ asked Zerk as he wound bandages round the bird’s legs. ‘If he survives, we’ll have to give him a name. We can’t keep on saying “the pigeon”. Shall we call him Violette after your beautiful lieutenant?’

‘Not suitable. Nobody would ever be able to catch Retancourt and tie her ankles together.’

‘OK, let’s call him Hellebaud, like the guy in Danglard’s story. Do you think he revised his texts before he came over?’

‘Yes, he must have read them again.’

‘Yeah, but even so, how could he remember them like that, word for word?’

‘Don’t ask, Zerk. If you and I could really see inside Danglard’s head
and take a walk round it, it would be more terrifying than any hullabaloo from the ghostly cavalcade.’

*   *   *

As soon as he arrived at the office, Adamsberg consulted the lists and called Capitaine Louis Nicolas Émeri at the Ordebec gendarmerie. He introduced himself, and sensed a certain hesitancy at the end of the line. Sounds reached him of murmured questions, answers being given, grunts, and chairs being moved round. The intrusion of Adamsberg into a gendarmerie often produced this immediate unease, as people wondered whether they should take his call or find some excuse not to. Louis Nicolas Émeri finally came back on the line.

‘What can I do for you, commissaire?’ he said distrustfully.

‘Capitaine Émeri, it’s about this missing man, whose freezer was emptied.’

‘Herbier?’

‘Yes. Any news of him?’

‘No, nothing. We visited his home and all the outbuildings. No sign of him.’

A pleasant voice, a little mannered, clear and courteous intonation.

‘Are you taking some interest in this case?’ the capitaine asked. ‘I would be amazed if you had been asked to look into a very ordinary missing-person matter.’

‘No, I haven’t been asked to look into it. I was simply wondering what you were thinking of doing about it.’

‘Applying the law, commissaire. Nobody has been in to ask us to launch a search, so this individual isn’t officially listed as missing. He went off on his moped, and I don’t have any authority to try and trace him. He’s got a perfect right to his freedom,’ Émeri insisted, rather stiffly. ‘We’ve followed regulations and run checks, no reports of a road accident and his moped hasn’t been sighted anywhere.’

‘What do you think about his going off like that, capitaine?’

‘Not all that surprising. They don’t like him round here, and some people absolutely hate him. What the freezer might perhaps indicate is
that some individual successfully threatened him, because of his nasty hunting habits, which you may know about?’

‘Yes, females and young animals.’

‘It’s possible Herbier was intimidated, took fright and left without hanging about for more. Or maybe he had some sort of crisis of remorse, emptied the freezer himself and scarpered.’

‘Yes, why not?’

‘In any case, he has no relatives or friends in the district. That could be a reason to start again somewhere else. The house isn’t his, he rents it, and since he’d retired, he was getting a bit behind with the rent. Unless the landlord complains, my hands are tied. If you ask me, I think he’s done a moonlight flit.’

Émeri was open, cooperative, as Danglard had suggested, though he seemed to consider Adamsberg’s call some kind of distant entertainment.

‘That’s all quite possible, capitaine. Is there a Chemin de Bonneval in your district?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Where does it run?’

‘From a hamlet called Les Illiers about three kilometres from here, through part of the Forest of Alance. After the Croix de Bois, it changes its name.’

‘Do many people go there?’

‘In the daytime, yes. But people don’t go there at night as a rule. There are a lot of old wives’ tales about it, you know the kind of thing.’

‘And you haven’t taken a look there, by any chance?’

‘If that’s a suggestion, Commissaire Adamsberg, I have one for you too. I suggest you have received a visit from someone who lives in Ordebec. Am I right?’

‘Quite right, capitaine.’

‘Who?’

‘I can’t tell you that. Someone who was worried.’

‘And I can well imagine what she told you. About some damned phantom army seen by Lina Vendermot, if you can call it “seeing”. And in among them, she saw this Herbier.’

‘Spot on,’ Adamsberg admitted.

‘You’re surely not going to get involved in this, are you, commissaire? Do you know why Lina saw Herbier with this blasted so-called army?’

‘No, why?’

‘Because she hates him. He’s an old friend of her father’s, probably the only one Vendermot had. Take my advice, commissaire, and forget you ever heard of it. That girl’s been completely crazy since she was a child, as everyone round here knows. And everyone gives her a wide berth, and the whole family, they’ve all got something odd about them. Though it’s not their fault. In fact, they’re more to be pitied than anything.’

‘And everyone knows she saw these Riders?’

‘Of course. Lina told her family and her boss.’

‘Who’s her boss?’

‘She works as a junior in the local solicitors’, Deschamps and Poulain.’

‘And who spread the word around?’

‘Oh, everyone. They’ve been talking about nothing else here for the past three weeks. Sensible people laugh about it, but fainter souls are frightened. Believe me, we can do without Lina having fun terrorising the local population. I bet you anything you like that nobody’s gone near the Chemin de Bonneval since then. Not even those who don’t believe a word of it. Myself included.’

‘Why not, capitaine?’

‘Don’t imagine
I’m
afraid of anything,’ – and here Adamsberg seemed to hear something of the Napoleonic marshal – ‘but I have no wish for people to go thinking Capitaine Émeri believes this stuff about the Furious Army and goes looking. And the same would go for you, so take my advice. This whole affair needs a lid put on it. But if your business ever brings you to Ordebec, I would of course always be very happy to see you.’

An ambiguous and slightly uneasy exchange, Adamsberg thought as he put down the phone. Émeri had been politely mocking him. He had let him get started, when he already knew all about the visit by a local resident. His unwillingness to be drawn was understandable. Having someone who saw visions on your patch was not a gift from heaven.

Gradually the office was filling up. Adamsberg usually got there early. The large figure of Retancourt briefly blocked the light from the door, and Adamsberg watched as she moved heavily towards her desk.

‘The pigeon opened its eyes this morning,’ he said. ‘Zerk fed it through the night.’

‘That’s good,’ said Retancourt calmly. She wasn’t given to showing emotion.

‘If he lives, he’s going to be called Hellebaud.’

‘Elbow? Funny name.’

‘No, Hellebaud, with an h. It’s some old name. An uncle or a nephew, of someone or other.’

‘Fine,’ the lieutenant said, switching on her computer. ‘Justin and Noël want to see you. Apparently Momo, our local pyromaniac, is at it again, but this time it’s serious. The car was completely burnt out as usual, but someone was asleep inside. According to the scene-of-crime people, an elderly man. Involuntary manslaughter at least – he won’t get away with six months this time. They’ve launched the investigation, but they would appreciate – what shall I say? – some
guidance
from you.’

Retancourt stressed the word ‘guidance’ with apparent irony. Because for one thing, she didn’t consider Adamsberg capable of giving any, and for another she generally disapproved of the way the commissaire allowed himself to float with the flow of inquiries. This contradiction in their approach had been latent since the beginning and neither she nor Adamsberg had tried to resolve it. Which didn’t prevent Adamsberg having the instinctive affection for Retancourt that a pagan would have for the tallest tree in the forest. The only one that offers real refuge.

The commissaire went over to the desk where Justin and Noël were noting down the latest information about the burnt-out vehicle with the man inside. Momo the firebug had just torched his eleventh car.

‘We’ve left Mercadet and Lamarre stationed by the flats where Momo’s pad is, Cité des Buttes,’ Noël explained. ‘Car was in the fifth arrondissement, rue Henri-Barbusse. Top-of-the-range Mercedes, as per usual.’

‘This man who died, do they know who he was?’

‘Not yet. Nothing left of his ID, or the number plates. The lads are
working on the motor. Attack on a toff, it’s got Momo written all over it. He never tries anything outside the fifth.’

‘No,’ said Adamsberg, shaking his head. ‘This one’s not Momo. We’d be wasting our time.’

In itself, wasting time didn’t bother Adamsberg. He was impervious to impatience and didn’t rush to follow the usually hasty rhythms of his colleagues, just as his colleagues couldn’t follow his slower meanderings. Adamsberg didn’t have a method, still less a theory, but it seemed to him that as far as time was concerned it was in the almost imperceptible interstices of an inquiry that the choicest pearls were sometimes to be found. Like the little shells that slip into cracks in the rock, far from the crashing breakers of the open sea. At any rate, it was there that he tended to come across them.

‘Go on, it’s classic Momo,’ Noël was insisting. ‘The old geezer must have been waiting for someone in the car. It was dark, and he must have dropped off. Best-case scenario, Momo didn’t notice him. Worst-case, he set fire to the car, passenger and all.’

‘No, it can’t be Momo.’

Adamsberg visualised quite clearly the face of the young man in question, obstinate and intelligent, rather delicate under his shock of dark curly hair. He didn’t know why he hadn’t forgotten Momo, or why he liked him. While listening to his colleagues, he was simultaneously phoning about train times to Ordebec, since his car was in the garage for repairs. The little woman hadn’t appeared again and the commissaire presumed that since she had failed in her mission, she had gone back to Normandy. The commissaire’s ignorance about the Furious Army must have overwhelmed the last shreds of her courage. Because it must have taken courage to come and tell a cop about a horde of thousand-year-old demons.

‘Commissaire, he’s already torched ten cars, he’s famous for it. They all admire him on his estate. He’s moving up, he wants to go big time. For him there’s not much difference between a Merc and the guy inside it, they’re both class enemies.’

‘There’s all the world of difference, Noël, and he won’t make the jump.
I know this lad, he’s been in youth custody twice before. But Momo would never torch a car without checking if there was someone in it.’

*   *   *