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He’s stalling because the guy is crazy about Lizbeth.”
    “Why should I get a move on? The old fraud thinks I’m a rough customer.”
    “Have a heart, Joss. The fellow’s never even been on board. Anyway, aren’t you a just a bit rough really?”
    “Never denied it.”
    “So you see. Decambrais knows a thing or two. Say, Joss, did you understand your number 19 this morning?”
    “No.”
    “I thought it was a special. Like those other specials we’ve had these past few days.”
    “Very special. I don’t like those specials one bit.”
    “So why do you read them out?”
    “They’ve been paid for, top rate too. And though the Le Guerns may be rough customers, they’ve never stolen a penny.”

IV
    “I WONDER,” MUSED
commissaire principal
Adamsberg, “whether spending all this time in the force isn’t going to turn me into a
flic
.”
    “You’ve said that before,” Danglard remarked. He was trying to set up the paperwork system for the still-empty steel cupboard. Danglard wanted to make a fresh start and keep things neat, like he’d said. Adamsberg entertained no such wish and had already laid out the files on the seats of the chairs around the conference table.
    “Do you think there’s a risk?”
    “Well, it wouldn’t be a disaster if twenty-five years in the service did make some kind of a
flic
out of you.”
    Adamsberg stuck his hands into his trouser pockets, leaned back against the recently redecorated wall, and cast a nonchalant eye over the new incident room he’d been allocated just a month ago. New case, new room. The Brigade Criminelle attached to the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. No more cat burglars, handbag-snatchers, alleyway bruisers, idiots with flick knives – on or off the catch – and all those tons of papers after the fact. He’d heard that phrase “after the fact” twice over in recent days. Must come from being a
flic
, he reckoned.
    Not that there wouldn’t be tons of paper after the fact landing on his desk here as well. But here, like everywhere else, he would find men who liked to chew through paperwork. In his early youth, just when he’d left the Pyrenees, he’d discovered that there really were people who lived on paper, and he’d quickly come to regard them with considerable awe, a degree of pity and boundless gratitude. Adamsberg mostly liked to walk, muse and act, and he knew that his tastes inspired little awe and much pity in many of his colleagues. An eloquent pen-pusher had once explained: “Paperwork, that’s to say drafting and then perfecting the charge sheet, is the mother of all Ideas. No Ink means no Idea! Ideas germinate in wordage like bean sprouts in blotting paper. An action not written down is a seed that can’t sprout.”
    In that case, he thought, he must have left many a bean high and dry in his life as a
flic
. All the same, his long walks often left him with the feeling that not entirely uninteresting notions had started to squirm inside his head. Maybe they weren’t quite as straight up as bean sprouts, maybe they were more slippery and tangled, more like seaweed, but germination is germination whatever you say, and once you’ve got your idea it doesn’t matter two hoots whether it grew on a clean piece of blotting paper or on a rubbish tip. That said, Danglard, his number two, was a paper addict. He loved the stuff in forms high and low, from incunabula to kitchen rolls, including books new and old, flysheets, loose sheets and pre-punched bond. He could even think while sitting down, and as long as he had a beer to sip and a pencil to chew, he could be relied upon to germinate a whole tray of sprouts at a time. A worrier like Danglard, with his slack, heavy, slightly weary physique, cultivated fully grown ideas equipped with beginnings, middles and ends, quite unlike those that Adamsberg came up with.
    They’d often come into conflict over this. Danglard had no time for ideas not issuing directly from conscious thought and