Adamsberg was scrutinising the corpse from the other side, looking at the old man’s throat. The commissaire‘s mouth was twisted in a grimace of disgust for the hand that had slashed that neck. He was thinking of the stupid drooling dog and nothing else. His colleague from the 14th arrondissement approached with outstretched hand.
‘Commissaire Louviers. We haven’t met before, Adamsberg. Nasty circumstances.’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought it best to alert your sector straight away,’ Louviers insisted.
‘Thank you. Who is this gentleman?’ asked Adamsberg.
‘I think he was probably a retired doctor. At any rate he was carrying a medical bag with him. Seventy-two years old. Gérard Pontieux, born in the Indre département, height 1 metre 79, and that’s all we can say at present, just what’s on his ID card.’
‘We couldn’t have prevented it,’ said Adamsberg, shaking his head. ‘We just couldn’t. A second murder was predictable, but not preventable. All the policemen in Paris wouldn’t have been enough to stop it.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Louviers. ‘It’s your case after that Châtelain murder in your sector, and the killer hasn’t been caught yet. He’s struck again. Hard to take, isn’t it?’
It was true: that was more or less what Adamsberg had been thinking. He had known that this new murder would happen. But not for a moment had he hoped that he could do anything about it. There are stages in an investigation when all you can do is wait for the irreparable to happen if you are to make any progress. Adamsberg could not feel any guilt. But he felt sorry for this harmless well-dressed elderly man stretched out on the pavement, who had had to pay the price for his own powerlessness.
By dawn, the corpse had been taken away in a police van. Conti had come to take some photographs in the morning light, replacing the photographer from the 14th. Adamsberg, Danglard, Louviers and Margellon all met round a table in the Café Ruthène, which had just opened its shutters.
Adamsberg remained silent, disconcerting his bulky colleague from the 14th, who was still taking in the hooded eyes, the lop-sided mouth and the dishevelled hair.
‘No point asking the café owners this time,’ Danglard remarked. ‘This one and the Café des Arts close too early, before ten. The chalk circle man knows where to find a deserted spot. It wasn’t far from here that he put the dead cat in a circle in the rue Froidevaux, by the Montparnasse cemetery.’
‘That’s in our sector,’ Louviers reacted. ‘You didn’t tell us.’
‘There wasn’t a murder then, or even an incident,’ Danglard replied. ‘We just had a look out of curiosity. Actually, you’re not quite right, because it was one of your men who told us about it in the first place.’
‘Ah, that’s all right then,’ said Louviers, relieved not to have been kept out of the loop.
‘Like last time,’ Adamsberg was saying from the end of the table, ‘this victim is entirely inside the circle. You can’t tell whether the circle man was responsible or whether his circle’s just been used. Always this ambiguity. Very clever.’
‘So?’ asked Louviers.
‘So nothing. The doctor thinks it happened at about one a.m. A bit late, to my mind,’ he concluded after another pause.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Louviers, who wasn’t easily discouraged.
‘I mean that’s after the last metro.’
Louviers went on looking puzzled. Then Danglard read from his expression that he had given up trying to intervene in the conversation. Adamsberg asked what time it was.
‘Coming up to eight-thirty,’ said Margellon.
‘Go and phone Castreau. I asked him to do some checking at about four-thirty. He should have some results by now. Try and catch him before he goes to bed. Castreau takes sleeping seriously.’
When Margellon returned, he reported that the brief checks so far hadn’t produced much in the way of information.
‘No, I dare say not,’ said Adamsberg, ‘but let’s have them all the same.’
Margellon read from his notes.
‘Dr Pontieux has no record with us. We’ve already informed his sister, who still lives in the family home in the Indre. She’s apparently his only living relative. And she’s about eighty years old. The parents were ordinary peasant farmers and Dr Pontieux made good, with a career that seems to have absorbed all his energy. Well, that’s what Castreau says,’ Margellon remarked in an aside. ‘He never married, anyway, according to the concierge in his building. Castreau called her. There were no apparent relationships with women or indeed anything remarkable about him, or so Castreau says. He’d lived at that address for the last thirty years, with the surgery on the third floor and his private apartment on the second, and the concierge has known him all that time. She says he was a kind, considerate man, as good as gold, and she was in floods of tears. Verdict: no clouds on the horizon. A sober citizen. An uneventful and boring life. At least-’
‘Yes, that’s what Castreau says,’ Danglard interrupted.
‘Does the concierge know why the doctor was out last night?’
‘He was called out to a child with a high temperature. He wasn’t really practising any more, but some of his former patients still asked for his opinion. He liked going on foot, to get some exercise, obviously.’
‘Nothing very obvious about that,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Anything else?’ asked Danglard.
‘Nothing else.’ Margellon put his notes away.
‘A harmless local GP,’ Louviers concluded, ‘as blameless as your previous victim. Same scenario, it looks like.’
‘But there’s one big difference,’ Adamsberg remarked. ‘A colossal difference.’
The three men looked at him in silence. Adamsberg was scribbling with a burnt match on a corner of the paper tablecloth.
‘Don’t you see what I mean?’ he asked, looking up but without seeking to challenge them.
‘I can’t see what’s so obvious about it,’ said Margellon. ‘What’s the colossal difference?’
‘This time,’ said Adamsberg, ‘it’s a man that’s been killed.’
The pathologist submitted his full report by the end of the afternoon. He estimated the time of death at about one-thirty. Like Madeleine Châtelain, Dr Gérard Pontieux had been knocked unconscious before having his throat cut. The murderer had made a violent assault, slashing the throat at least six times, and cutting through to the vertebrae. Adamsberg winced. The day-long investigation had turned up no more helpful information than they already possessed. They now knew various things about the elderly doctor, but nothing marked him as out of the ordinary. His apartment, his surgery and his private papers had revealed a life without any apparently secret compartments. The doctor had been preparing to rent out his Paris flat and return to his roots in the Indre département where he had recently bought a small house, in perfectly normal circumstances. His will left a tidy but by no means extraordinary sum of money to his sister. Danglard returned at about five. He had been searching the crime scene with three of his men. Adamsberg could see that he was looking pleased, but also that he was in need of a glass of wine.
‘We found these in the gutter,’ Danglard said, holding out a plastic evidence bag. ‘Not far from the body, about twenty metres away. The killer didn’t even bother to hide them. He’s acting as if he’s untouchable, absolutely certain he can move about with impunity. First time I’ve seen anything like that.’
Adamsberg opened the bag. Inside were two pink rubber gloves, sticky with blood. The sight was repulsive.
‘This killer seems to see life quite straightforwardly, doesn’t he?’ said Danglard. ‘He kills his man, wearing these gloves, and then just chucks them into the gutter down the street, as if he was getting rid of waste paper. But there won’t be any prints: that’s the thing with rubber gloves, you can slip them off without touching them and you can pick them up anywhere. So what does this tell us, except that the murderer is pretty cocky? How many people is he going to kill at this rate?’