Free The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas

diary, quietly reading out sentences to himself, glancing attentively at Adamsberg, apparently considering every word, and Danglard thought to himself that he might be able to confess to him his problems about corpses.
    ‘If I go on looking at her, I’ll be sick,’ Danglard said to Castreau.
    ‘It gets me in the knees. Especially women, even women like this one, nothing much to look at.’
    ‘What are you reading in the diary?’
    ‘Listen: “Had a perm, but I’m still ugly. Papa was ugly, so was Maman. Why would I be any different? A customer came in for blue mohair but I didn’t have any left. Another bad day.”‘
    Adamsberg watched the four inspectors get back in the car. He was thinking about his petite chérie , Richard III and the lady’s diary. Once the petite chérie had asked him: ‘Is a murder like a packet of spaghetti that’s all stuck together? You just have to put it in boiling water for it to come untangled again? And the boiling water’s the motive?’ and he had replied: ‘No, what gets it untangled is knowledge, you just have to let the knowledge come to you.’ She had said: ‘I’m not sure I understood that’, which was fair enough, since he didn’t really understand it himself.
    He waited for the police doctor, who was still grumbling away, to finish his preliminary check of the body. The photographer and the scene-of-crime people had already left. He stood alone, looking down at the lady on the ground, with the stretcher team waiting nearby. He hoped that a little knowledge would come to him. But until he came face to face with the chalk circle man, he knew it wasn’t worth racking his brains. He just had to keep on picking up information, and for him information had nothing to do with knowledge.

VII
    S INCE C HARLES SEEMED TO BE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THINGS , Mathilde decided that she could count on a peaceful quarter of an hour during which he wouldn’t try to reduce the universe to shreds, and that she would therefore be able to introduce him to Clémence that evening. She had asked the elderly Clémence to stay behind in the flat for the occasion, and had taken some pre-emptive action by warning her emphatically that the new tenant was indeed blind, but that it would not do either to exclaim, ‘Oh my sakes, what a terrible affliction!’ or to pretend complete ignorance.
    Charles heard Mathilde introduce him and listened to Clémence’s greeting. From her voice, he would never have imagined the naive woman whom Queen Mathilde had described to him. He seemed to hear fierce determination, and weird but recognisable intelligence. What she actually said seemed silly, but in the intonations behind the words there was some secret knowledge, caged but breathing audibly, like a lion in a village circus. You hear it growling in the night and tell yourself this circus isn’t what you thought, it isn’t quite as pathetic as the programme might make you think. And Charles, the expert on sounds and noises, could quite distinctly hear this distant growling, a little unsettling since it was possibly concealed.
    Mathilde had offered him a whisky and Clémence was telling him about the incidents in her life. Charles was troubled, because of Clémence, and happy because of Mathilde. A divine creature who was quite indifferent to his nastiness.
    ‘… and this man,’ Clémence was saying, ‘anyone would think he was really nice! He thought I was “interesting,” those were his very words. He never so much as touched me, but I guessed he would sooner or later. Because he wanted to take me on a trip to the South Seas, he wanted us to get married. Oh, my sakes, I was on cloud nine! He got me to sell my house in Neuilly, and my furniture. I put the rest of my things in two suitcases, because he said “You won’t want for any thing, my dear.” So I trotted along to our rendezvous in Paris, feeling so happy that I should have smelled a rat. I kept pinching myself and saying, “Clémence, old