Have Mercy On Us All by Fred Vargas Read Free Book Online

as he took back his notepad.
    “That’s because it is backwards. It’s a backwards 4, with a fat foot and two little notches at the end of the crossbar. Do you know what it is? Is it a make of burglars? Are they called CLT? Or what?”
    “Burglars usually leave as few signs on front doors as they can manage. What are you frightened of?”
    “I think it’s
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
that put the wind up me. The story about the murderer who marked all the doors with a big X.”
    “In the story, Ali Baba only marked one door. If I’m not mistaken, it was his wife who marked all the others so as to confuse him.”
    “That’s true,” said Maryse, who seemed genuinely comforted.
    “It’s just graffiti, really,” Adamsberg said as he showed Maryse out. “Teenagers from down the street, I should guess.”
    “The point is I’ve never seen a 4 like that down our street.” Maryse had lowered her voice to a whisper. “Nor have I ever seen graffiti on front doors up the staircase. Because graffiti are supposed to be on the street, aren’t they? For everyone to see.”
    “There’s all kinds, you know. Scrub your front door and forget all about it.”
    Maryse left and Adamsberg tore the sheets out of his pad, screwed them up into a ball which he then aimed at the bin. Then he went back to his leaning wall so as to think while standing about how to pump the mental filth out of people like Favre. Not easy to do. There was something twisted deep down inside the man; and he would hardly be aware of it. All Adamsberg could hope was that the rest of the squad didn’t have the same problem. Especially as there were four women in it.
    As he always did when he let himself have a good think, Adamsberg quickly lost touch and fell into a kind of void close to sleep. Ten minutes later he came back to the surface with a start, then got the list of his team out of his desk drawer and began a memory session: reciting over and over the names of each one of the twenty-seven members he had to get into his head, with the exception of Danglard’s. In the margin he entered next to the name of Noël:
Ears, Toughguy
, and next to Favre’s:
Hooter, Brows, Birds
.
    Then he went out to have the coffee that his encounter with Maryse had put off. The coffee-maker and snack dispenser still hadn’t been delivered to the office; there were constant squabbles over chairs and writing paper; the electricians were still putting in the computer cables, and workmen had only just started barring up the ground-floor windows. What would crimes be without iron bars? Murderers would just have to control themselves until the Brigade had got itself into shape. So he might as well carry on musing in the fresh air and rescuing damsels in distress. He could have a think about Camille, too; he’d not seen her for more than two months. Unless he was mistaken, she was due back tomorrow, or maybe the day after, as he wasn’t sure what day it was anyway.

V
    ON TUESDAY MORNING Joss handled the ground coffee with heightened care and attention. He’d not slept well. The fault surely lay with the “room to let” sign dangling before his eyes but quite out of reach.
    He looked up from his bowl of coffee, his baguette and garlic sausage, and cast an angry glance around his gloomy cabin. The plaster was all cracked, there was no proper bed, and to get to the toilet you had to go out on to the landing. He could have afforded a better place on the money he was making, but half of it went back to his mother at Le Guilvenec. The long and the short of it, he told himself, is that you can’t keep warm if you know your mother’s in the cold. Joss knew that the bookworm couldn’t charge very much, because his rooms weren’t self-contained and the rental income wasn’t declared. To be fair to the man, Decambrais wasn’t one of those scavengers who take an arm and a leg for a pint-sized piece of property in Paris. In fact, Lizbeth paid no rent at all, in return for