1944, a murder committed with three blows in a straight line. He had come across it in the records, but had ruled it out, because the undisputed killer had been a young man of twenty-five or so, when Fulgence was supposedly forty. He lowered his head to his knees, trying to concentrate. The fine rain formed a mist and seeped into his clothes, as he sat at the wily cardinal’s feet. He waited patiently for the ancient information to come up out of the mist. Or for the fish to swim up out of the depths of Pink Lake. A woman, it had been. Killed with three puncture wounds. And someone had drowned too. When was that? Before the murder? After? Where, in a lake, a pond? In the Landes? No, in the marshes of the Sologne, where people went duck-shooting. The man had drowned, that was it, in a marsh. A father. And after his burial, the woman, his wife, had been killed. He could vaguely picture some photographs in an old press cutting. Probably the father and mother under a headline. A double death, enough to merit a large spread, at a time when news of the war and anticipation of the Allied landings had pushed most small news items off the front pages. Adamsberg clenched his fists and tried to recall what the headline had said.
‘Tragic matricide in the Sologne.’ That was it. True to his habit, Adamsberg sat stock still trying not to breathe. Whenever a fragmentary thought flashed across his mind he tried not to move, afraid of scaring it away, like an angler handling a bite. He wouldn’t pounce on it until it was safely landed in the conscious brain. After the father’s funeral, the couple’s son, aged twenty-five, had killed his mother and fled. There was a witness, a domestic servant, who had been pushed aside by the son in his frantic flight. Had he been caught? Or had he vanished in the turmoil of the Allied Landings and the Liberation? Adamsberg did not know the answer, since he had not pursued the case. It had not seemed to fit the pattern and, in any case, the man was too young to be Fulgence. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ So perhaps it could have been Fulgence after all. A man who’d killed his own mother. With a trident. Mordent’s words came back to him, in a flash: ‘The o-ri-gin-al sin, the first murder. The kind of thing that produces ghosts.’
Adamsberg looked up into the rain and bit his lip. He had blocked all the spectre’s bolt-holes, he had forced the phantom to come back to life, and now he had put his finger on the original crime. He dialled Josette’s number, sheltering the phone and hoping the rain wouldn’t affect its little antennae.
On hearing her voice, he felt as if he was calling up a super-efficient colleague in the most natural way in the world. An elderly little old police inspectress, shuffling along in her earrings and slippers in the secret underworld of the internet. Which earrings would she be wearing tonight, the pearls or the gold clover-leaves?
‘Josette, did I disturb you?’
‘Not at all, I’m having fun in a Swiss bank account.’
‘Josette, the coffin was full of sand. I think I’ve forced our man into the open.’
‘Wait a minute, commissaire, I’ll get a pen.’
Adamsberg heard Clémentine’s loud voice in the corridor:
‘How many times do I have to tell you, Josette, he’s not a commissaire now.’
He heard Josette explaining about the sand.
‘Ah, about time too,’ said Clémentine.
‘Very well, I’m ready,’ said Josette.
‘Can you locate the case of a mother, murdered by her son in 1944. It was some time before the Allied Landings, in March or April. It was in the Sologne region, just after the father’s funeral.’
‘Three puncture wounds, like the others?’
‘Yes. The killer, the son, was young, about twenty-five. I can’t recall what the name of the family was or the exact place.’
‘It’s very old, it will only be in some very remote place if it’s on computer at all. But I’ll give it a try, commissaire.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ the distant voice of Clémentine began.
‘Josette, call me back any time if you find anything.’
Adamsberg put away the mobile and walked slowly back to the hotel. Everyone in this story had contributed something, just the right words at the right time. Sanscartier, Mordent, Danglard, Retancourt, Raphaël, Clémentine, and of course Vivaldi. And then Dr Courtin, Father Grégoire and Josette. Now he had to add Cardinal Richelieu. And perhaps even Trabelmann with his damned cathedral.
Josette called back at two in the morning.
‘Well, now,’ she began as usual. ‘I had to try the National Archives, and the police records. Very well protected, as I said.’
‘Sorry, Josette.’
‘No, it wasn’t too difficult, I enjoyed the chase. Clémentine got me a bowl of coffee with some Armagnac and warm rolls. She looked after me as if I was a submarine captain, getting the torpedoes ready. Anyway. 12 March 1944. A village called Collery in the Loiret. The day of the funeral of Gérard Guillaumond, who had died aged 61.’
‘Drowned?’
‘Yes. It was either an accident or suicide, they never found out which. His boat had sprung a leak and it sank in a marshy lake. And after the funeral, when everyone had gone home, the son, Roland Guillaumond, killed his own mother, Marie Guillaumond.’
‘There was a witness, I seem to remember, Josette?’
‘Yes, the cook. She heard screams from upstairs. She went up and the son of the family pushed past her on the stairs, as he rushed out of his mother’s bedroom. The cook found her mistress lying dead. There wasn’t anyone else there, so there was never any doubt at all who had killed her.’
‘And did they catch him?’ Adamsberg asked anxiously.
‘No, never. The police appeared to think he had gone to earth in the local maquis, and perhaps had been killed in the fighting afterwards.’
‘Were there any photos of him in the press?’
‘No. It was wartime, remember. The cook is dead now, I checked the registration records. So, commissaire, do you really think he’s our judge? I thought he was born in 1904, so he’d have been forty in 1944.’
‘Take off about fifteen years, Josette.’
XLIX
CURTAINS TWITCHED DISCREETLY AS THE STRANGER WENT BY. Adamsberg was walking through the narrow streets of Collery, wondering where to begin. The murder had taken place almost sixty years earlier, and he wanted to find someone who could remember it. The little village smelt of wet leaves and the wind carried the slightly vegetal smell from the green weed-covered pools of the Sologne. It was quite unlike the majestic order of Richelieu’s purpose-built town. Just a little village, with houses higgledy-piggledy and huddled together.
A child pointed out the mayor’s house on the main square. Adamsberg presented himself, with his badge in the name of Denis Lamproie, asking to be directed to the former house of the Guillaumond family. The mayor was too young to have known the family, but of course everybody in the village had heard about the famous Collery murder.
In Sologne, as in other rural areas, it was not easy to extract a quick answer to a question on the doorstep. Parisian abruptness was not the style. Adamsberg found himself with his elbows on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, facing a little glass of eau-de-vie at five in the afternoon. In these parts, wearing a Canadian lumberman’s cap did not appear to surprise anyone: the mayor kept his cloth cap on and his wife her headscarf.
‘Normally,’ the chubby and inquisitive mayor explained, ‘we wouldn’t open the bottle before seven o’clock. But since it isn’t every day a commissaire comes down from Paris, it’s allowed, isn’t it, Ghislaine?’ turning to his wife for approval.