Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas Read Free Book Online

going to bang on about this all night, he’d had his fun and done very little harm. There wasn’t much wriggle room with guys like Paquelin.
    ‘Did it work, anyway?’
    ‘Pretty well.’
    ‘Paquelin, that’s the good-looking one, fair hair, skinny, and a real bastard?’
    ‘You got it. He knocks prostitutes about, and the guys he arrests he grabs by the balls.’
    ‘Well, I don’t suppose you cut him to bits. What do you want from him?’
    ‘Just that he gets the hell out, that’s all I want.’
    ‘Louis, don’t forget you’re not so well connected these days. Well, it’s your funeral. Vincent took a picture of the man from 102 and followed him.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Can’t tell you anything, can we? I like bringing you bits of news.’
    ‘I’m listening. Tell me some news.’
    ‘Well, that’s it. Told you everything.’
    ‘And about where you’re staying now, you told me everything too?’
    ‘Whose business is that?’
    Marthe turned towards Kehlweiler. This man was like a fly strip. All the bits of news stuck on to him, without his having to lift a finger. That’s how he was, everyone told him everything. A real pain, in the end.
    ‘Take a fly, for instance,’ said Marthe.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Oh, drop it.’
    Marthe put her chin in her hands. A fly thinks she can flit across a room without being spotted, no problem, and she bumps into Ludwig, so she sticks to him, Ludwig gently extracts all her news and lets her go again. He was such a flypaper for information that he’d made it his profession and couldn’t do anything else any more. Fixing a lamp, for instance: no point asking him, he’d be rubbish. No, all he was good at was knowing things. His grand army told him what was going on, from the tiniest details to massive affairs, and once you were in the eye of the storm, it was hard to get out. Well, that was how he’d wanted it.
    Ludwig said you shouldn’t judge a detail by appearances. You never know, it might be hiding another. And his mission was to chase them up, and it paid off. Why all this energy? Who knew? And Marthe had her own idea about that. Until his dying day, Louis would be chasing exterminators, whether they had exterminated one being or a thousand. But as for where she was lodging, who asked you to poke your nose in? We have our pride. She’d told herself she’d find a solution, and now, not only was there no solution in sight, but Louis knew about it. Who’d been telling him that? Who? Never mind, one of his army of wretched whistle-blowers.
    Marthe shrugged. She looked at Louis who was waiting patiently. From a distance, you would think he looked nothing special. But from near to, eighty centimetres say, everything changed. You didn’t really have to ask then why everyone came and told him everything. At one metre fifty, or two metres, say, Louis looked like a forbidding scientist, unapproachable, like those pictures of bearded gents in school history books. At one metre, you weren’t quite so sure. And the nearer you got, the more you doubted. The index finger he laid lightly on your arm to ask a question, it dragged words out of you on its own. That hadn’t worked with Sonia, she must be a fool. She should have stayed with him for life, no, perhaps not for life, because there are times when you absolutely have to eat, earn a living, she knew what she meant. Perhaps Sonia hadn’t taken a good look at him, close up. Marthe could see no other explanation. Ludwig himself thought he was ugly; for twenty years she’d been telling him the opposite, but he did think himself very ugly all the same, and if women were fooled into thinking otherwise, that was his good luck. Too much already, Marthe, who had known hundreds of men and had loved only four of them, knew what she was talking about.
    ‘You’re thinking?’ Louis asked.
    ‘Do you want a bit of cold chicken? Some left in the bag.’
    ‘I had a meal with Inspector Lanquetot.’
    ‘The chicken will go to