Free The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas Page A

girl, it was a long time coming, but it’s happened at last, a real fiancé, and such a cultured man too, and now you’re going to see the Pacific.” Well, I didn’t see the Pacific, monsieur, I saw Censier-Daubenton metro station for eight and a half hours! I waited all day, and that’s where Mathilde found me, still at the metro station, in the evening, same place she’d seen me in the morning. She must have said to herself, my sakes, but something’s up with that old woman. Perhaps she’s jinxed.’
    ‘Clémence invents things, you know,’ Mathilde interrupted. ‘She reruns anything she doesn’t like. What really happened the night this famous fiancé stood her up at Censier-Daubenton was that in the end she went off to find a hotel, and going along my street she saw my “to let” sign. So she rang the bell.’
    ‘Well, maybe it could have happened that way,’ Clémence conceded. ‘But now I can’t take the metro at Censier-Daubenton, without thinking of the South Sea Islands. So there we are, I go travelling in the end. By the way, Mathilde, a gentleman telephoned twice for you. Very soft voice, I thought I’d faint listening to him, but I’ve forgotten his name. It was urgent, apparently. Something wrong.’
    Clémence was always on the brink of fainting, but she might be right about the voice on the phone. Mathilde thought that it could have been that policeman, the half-weird, half-enchanting one she had met ten days earlier. But she could think of no reason why Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg should call her urgently. Unless he had remembered her offer to help him catch sight of the chalk circle man. She had proposed that on an impulse, but also because she would be sorry never to have an excuse in future to see this remarkable flic , who had been the real find of that day and who had saved the first section of her week at the last moment. She knew she would not easily forget him, that he was securely lodged somewhere in her memory, spreading his nonchalant luminosity. Mathilde found the number that Clémence had scribbled down in her cramped handwriting.
    Adamsberg had gone home to wait for a call from Mathilde Forestier. The day had started out typical of the aftermath of a murder, a day of silent, sweaty activity by the lab technicians, of stuffy offices with plastic cups all over the tables. The graphologist had arrived and had started delving into the piles of snapshots taken by Conti. And over it all loomed a sort of trembling, of apprehension perhaps, into which this out-of-the-ordinary event had thrown the 5th arrondissement police station. Whether it was the apprehension of failure, or the apprehension of a weird and monstrous killer, Adamsberg had not tried to work out. To escape having to witness it all, he had gone for a walk in the streets all afternoon. Danglard had stopped him at the door. It wasn’t yet midday, but Danglard had already had too much to drink. He said it was irresponsible to walk out like that, on the day they’d had a murder. But Adamsberg couldn’t admit that nothing removed his powers of thought so effectively as watching a dozen other people thinking. He needed the temperature at the station to drop, it was probably an undulant fever anyway, and it was essential that nobody should be expecting anything from him for Adamsberg to be able to harness his own ideas. And for the moment the suppressed excitement in the police station had scattered his ideas all over the place, like panicking soldiers in the thick of the battle. Adamsberg had long ago noted that when there are no combatants left, the fighting stops, so when he had no ideas he stopped working and didn’t try to winkle them out of the cracks to which they had retreated. It had always turned out to be a waste of time.
    Christiane was waiting at his front door.
    Just his bad luck. This was one evening when he would have preferred to be alone. Or else perhaps to spend the night with his neighbour, a young woman