This Night's Foul Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

the other. She was right. And as I told you, they had dirt under their fingernails.’
    â€˜Like a lot of no-hopers round the Flea Market.’
    Ariane said ‘no-hopers’ in the pitying tone of the well-off and indifferent, for whom poverty is a fact of life rather than a problem.
    â€˜It’s not just dirt, Ariane, it’s soil. And these guys didn’t go in for gardening. They lived in squalid rooms, in godawful tower blocks, without heating and lighting, the sort of place no-hopers get from the city council. With their old mothers.’
    Dr Lagarde was staring at the wall. When Ariane was observing a corpse, her eyes narrowed to a fixed position, as if they were high-precisionmicroscope lenses. Adamsberg felt sure that if he examined her pupils at that moment he would have found perfect representations of the two bodies, the white one in the left eye, the black one in the right.
    â€˜Well, I can tell you one thing that might help you, Jean-Baptiste. It was a woman that killed them.’
    Adamsberg put his cup down, hesitating to contradict the doctor for the second time in his life.
    â€˜Ariane, did you see the size of them?’
    â€˜What do you think I look at in the mortuary? Old photographs? I saw your guys. Big lads, who could lift up a wardrobe with one finger, yes. Even so, they were both killed by a woman.’
    â€˜Explain.’
    â€˜Come back tonight. I’ve got a few more things to check.’
    Ariane stood up, and put on over her suit the clinical overall she had left on the peg. The owners of cafés near the morgue did not appreciate doctors in white coats dropping in. It put off the other customers.
    â€˜I can’t tonight. I’m going to a concert.’
    â€˜All right, come round after the concert. I work late – I expect you remember.’
    â€˜No, I can’t, it’s in Normandy.’
    â€˜Gracious me,’ said Ariane, stopping still. ‘What’s on the programme?’
    â€˜No idea.’
    â€˜You’re going all the way to Normandy to listen to it and you don’t even know what they’re playing? Or perhaps you’re trailing after a woman?’
    â€˜I’m not trailing after her, I’m politely accompanying her.’
    â€˜Gracious me. Well, come by tomorrow. Not in the morning, though. I sleep late.’
    â€˜Yes, I remember. Not before eleven, then?’
    â€˜Not before midday. Everything gets accentuated as time goes by.’
    Ariane perched back on her chair, as if in temporary hesitation.
    â€˜There’s something I’d like to tell you. But I don’t know if I really want to.’
    Silence, however long it lasted, had never embarrassed Adamsberg. He waited, letting his thoughts run towards the evening concert. Five minutes went past, or ten, he couldn’t have said.
    â€˜Seven months later,’ said Ariane, having taken a sudden decision, ‘the murderer made a complete confession.’
    â€˜The one in Le Havre, you mean?’ said Adamsberg, looking up.
    â€˜Yes, the man with the twelve rats. He hanged himself in his cell ten days after that. You’d got it right, not me.’
    â€˜And you weren’t too happy about that?’
    â€˜No, and neither were my bosses. I missed my promotion. I had to wait another five years. You’d practically given me the solution on a plate, and I hadn’t wanted to hear what you were saying.’
    â€˜You didn’t tell me about it.’
    â€˜I’d forgotten your name. In fact I’d deliberately wiped you out of my mind. With your glass of beer.’
    â€˜And you’re still angry with me?’
    â€˜No, actually. It was thanks to the rat man that I started my research on dissociation. Have you read my book?’
    â€˜Some of it,’ Adamsberg prevaricated.
    â€˜I invented the term “dissociated killers”.’
    â€˜Yes, I remember – I’ve heard of them,’ Adamsberg