An Uncertain Place Read Online Free PDF

in Highgate. Or because Estalère, who was as slow-witted as he was curious, was the only member of the squad unable to distinguish between the valuable and the pointless among Adamsberg’s remarks. For the young officer, every word his commissaire let drop had meaning and he was now pursuing it. And to Danglard, whose elastic mind leapt over ideas extremely fast, Estalère represented a constant and irritating waste of time.
    ‘If we hadn’t gone for a walk with Radstock two days ago,’ Danglard said, ‘and if we hadn’t bumped into that crazy Clyde-Fox character, we wouldn’t know a thing about those revolting feet and we’d have left them to rot in peace. They belong to the Brits, full stop.’
    ‘There’s no rule against being interested,’ said Adamsberg, ‘when something crosses your path.’
    He felt pretty sure that Danglard had not parted with the woman in London on as reassuring a note as he might have wished. So his anxiety was taking over again, slipping into the recesses of his being. Adamsberg imagined Danglard’s mind as a block of fine limestone, where rain, in other words questions, had hollowed out countless basins in which his worries gathered, unresolved. Every day, three or four of these basins were active simultaneously. Just now, the journey through the tunnel, the woman in London, the feet in Highgate. As Adamsberg had explained to him, the energy Danglard expended on these questions, seeking to empty out the basins, was a waste of time. Because no sooner had he cleared out one space than it made way for something else, for another set of agonising questions. By digging away at them, he was stopping peaceful sedimentation from taking place, and the natural filling up of the excavations, which would happen if he forgot about them.
    ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be in touch,’ Adamsberg told him.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Abstract.’
    ‘Logically,’ Estalère interjected, still following his train of thought, ‘the nephew ought to have left the bear alive, and brought some of its droppings to the aunt. After all, the uncle was inside the bear, but not in its skin.’
    ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Adamsberg, looking satisfied. ‘It all depends on the attitude the nephew had both to the uncle and to the bear.’
    ‘And to his aunt,’ added Danglard, who was feeling calmer on hearing Adamsberg’s certainty about Abstract getting back in touch. ‘We don’t know the aunt’s reactions either, whether she would rather have had the bearskin or the droppings.’
    ‘It all depends on what was going on in the nephew’s mind. Was it that his uncle’s soul had gone into the bear, right to the tips of its fur? And what idea did the thekophagist have of the wardrobe? And what was the foot-chopper thinking about? Whose soul is inside the wooden panels, or on the ends of people’s feet? What did Stock say, Danglard?’
    ‘Forget the feet, commissaire .’
    ‘They remind me of something,’ Adamsberg said in a hesitant voice. ‘A picture somewhere, a story?’
    Danglard stopped the attendant passing with the drinks trolley and bought some champagne for himself and for Adamsberg, and put them both on his side of the table. Adamsberg drank very rarely and Estalère not at all, since alcohol went to his head. It had been explained to him that that was exactly the point, and he had been astonished. When Danglard had a drink, Estalère looked at him with intense puzzlement.
    ‘Perhaps,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘it’s some vague story I seem to recall about a man looking for his shoes in the night. Or who came back from the dead to find his shoes. I wonder if Stock knows it.’
    Danglard quickly knocked back his first glass of champagne, and wrenched his gaze away from the carriage roof to look at Adamsberg, half enviously, half in despair. There were times when Adamsberg converted himself into a compact and dangerous attacker. Not often, but when he did it was easy to counter him. On the other hand, it was less