An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas Read Free Book Online

finding these dead people’s feet in the same place the other day must have upset him a lot. Because they say the Entity – or the Vampire if you like – still reigns in the dark reaches of Highgate.’
    ‘Is that why you talked about an offering?’ asked Estalère. ‘The foot-chopper was making an offering to the Entity?’
    ‘That’s what Radstock thinks. He’s afraid some madman wants to start the whole nightmare up again, and “revive” the powers of the sleeping Master. But I guess it isn’t really likely. The foot-chopper wants to offload his collection, right? He can’t just chuck it all in the bin, any more than we can bear to throw away our childhood toys. He wants to find a suitable place for them.’
    ‘And he chooses a place worthy of his fantasies,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He chooses Higg-Gate, where the feet could go on living.’
    ‘Highgate,’ Danglard corrected. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean the foot-chopper believes in the Vampire. It’s the character of the place that counts. Well, anyway, all that’s well behind us now, and on the other side of the Channel.’
    The train pulled in to the platform and Danglard seized his bag brusquely, as if to mark with a decisive action an end to the numbing effect of his story.
    ‘But when you’ve seen something like that,’ said Adamsberg softly, ‘a bit of it sticks and stays inside you. Any experience that’s too beautiful or too horrific always leaves some fragment of itself in the eyes of people who have witnessed it. We know that. In fact, that’s how you recognise it.’
    ‘Recognise what?’
    ‘Something either overwhelmingly beautiful or overwhelmingly terrible, Estalère. You recognise it by the shock, the little splinter that remains.’
    As they walked back up the platform, Estalère tapped the commissaire on the shoulder, Danglard having parted from them in haste, as if regretting having said too much.
    ‘The little fragments of things we’ve seen, what happens to them?’
    ‘You put them away, you scatter them like stars in the big box we call memory.’
    ‘You can’t get rid of them?’
    ‘No, that’s not possible, the memory doesn’t have a compartment marked trash.’
    ‘So what happens if we don’t like them?’
    ‘Either you have to lie in wait for them and destroy them, like Danglard, or you leave them well alone.’
     
    In the metro, Adamsberg wondered in which compartment of his memory the ghastly feet in London were going to lodge, on which galaxy of stars, and how long it would take for him to think he had forgotten them. And come to that, where would the wardrobe man go, or the bear and the uncle, or the girls who had seen the vampire and were trying to get back to him? What had happened to the one who had gone to the catacomb? And the exorcist?
    Adamsberg rubbed his eyes, looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep. Ten hours, why not? But in the event, he got only six hours.

VI
     
    S EVEN THIRTY NEXT MORNING . T HE COMMISSAIRE , THUNDERSTRUCK , was sitting on a chair, and gazing at the crime scene, under the anxious eyes of his colleagues – so abnormal was it for Adamsberg to be thunderstruck, or indeed to be sitting on a chair. But he remained where he was, his face expressionless, and his eyes darting around, as if he had no wish to see, and was projecting his gaze far away so that nothing should lodge in his memory. He was forcing himself to think back, to 6 a.m., when he had not yet seen this room drenched in blood. When he had been dressing quickly, after the phone call from Lieutenant Justin, putting on the white shirt from the day before and the elegant black jacket lent to him by Danglard, both of them completely inappropriate to the situation. Justin’s choked voice had foretold nothing good; it was the voice of someone who was sick to the stomach.
    ‘We’re using all the platforms,’ he had said. That meant the plastic stands which were put on the ground to prevent any contamination