Free The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg) by Fred Vargas Page B

overcome with surprise. ‘One I’m fond of.’
    ‘He gave me two antlers from a stag. They’re sitting in my office.’
    ‘Oh! If he did that, he must have thought well of you. You don’t give antlers to just anybody.’
    ‘Well, I would hope not.’
    ‘We are talking about Robert Binet?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Adamsberg walked another hundred metres or so in the old woman’s wake. A road was now visible through the trees.
    ‘Well, if you’re a friend of Robert’s, that’s different. You could sleep Chez Léo, if that isn’t too different from what you were intending. Chez Léo is my place, it was the name of my guest house.’
    Without having made up his mind, Adamsberg could clearly detect an appeal from the old woman, who was lonely and bored. But as he had told Veyrenc, decisions are taken before you announce them. He had nowhere to stay, and he had rather taken to this outspoken old woman. Even if he felt a bit trapped, as if Léo had organised it all in advance.
    Five minutes later, he could see Chez Léo, an old longhouse of a single storey, which had somehow survived with its ancient wooden beams for at least two centuries. Inside, nothing seemed to have changed for decades.
    ‘Sit down on the bench,’ said Léo, ‘and we’ll call Émeri. He’s not a bad sort, quite the contrary. He gives himself airs and graces from time to time, because some ancestor was one of Napoléon’s marshals. But on the whole people like him. On the other hand, his job’s not good for his character. If you have to suspect everyone, if you’re always punishing people, you can’t improve yourself, can you? I dare say you’re the same.’
    ‘Yes, probably.’
    Léo dragged a stool up to the telephone.
    ‘Well,’ she said with a sigh, as she dialled the number, ‘I suppose the police are a necessary evil. During the war, an evil full stop. I should think quite a few of them went off with the Riders. We’ll have a nice blaze, now it’s cooling down. You know how to lay a fire, I suppose. The log pile’s just outside on the left. Ello , Louis, this is Léo.’
    When Adamsberg came back with an armful of wood, Léo was in full flow. Clearly Émeri was getting the worst of it. Léo passed the old-fashioned earpiece to the commissaire.
    ‘Well, it was because I always take flowers to St Antony, you know that, come on. Tell me, Louis, you’re not going to make trouble for me now, just because I came across a corpse, are you? If you’d bothered to stir your stumps, you’d have found him yourself, and saved me a deal of bother.’
    ‘Don’t get ratty, Léo, I believe you.’
    ‘His moped’s there too, it’s been pushed into some hazel bushes. What I think happened is someone arranged to meet him there, and he hid his bike so nobody could take it.’
    ‘Léo, I’m going up there right now, and then I’m coming round to see you. If I come at eight, you won’t have gone to bed?’
    ‘At eight, I’m still eating my supper, and I don’t like being disturbed when I’m eating.’
    ‘Eight thirty then.’
    ‘No, it’s not convenient, I’ve got a cousin visiting from Haroncourt. Having the gendarmes call the evening you arrive isn’t polite. And I’m tired. Trotting round the forest is tiring at my age.’
    ‘That was why I asked what you were doing, trotting all the way to the chapel.’
    ‘And I already told you. Taking some flowers.’
    ‘You never let on the quarter of what you know.’
    ‘The rest wouldn’t interest you. You’d do better to go over there, before he gets eaten by wild animals. And if you want to see me, make it tomorrow.’
    Adamsberg put down the earpiece and set about lighting the fire.
    ‘Louis Nicolas can’t do anything to me,’ explained Léo, ‘because I saved his life when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The silly boy had falleninto the Jeanlin pond, and I hauled him out by the seat of his pants. He can’t go playing marshals of France with me.’
    ‘He’s local?’
    ‘He