Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas Read Free Book Online Page A

doubts, her low spirits and lack of musical inspiration, all of which were no more than secondary indications of impotence.
    Camille took her metal-tipped walking stick and her copy of
The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft
. It was the sort of thing she most liked to leaf through at special moments – at breakfast, in her coffee break, or whenever she felt her heart sinking. Apart from that Camille had more or less ordinary tastes in reading.
    Johnstone did not take kindly to Camille’s liking for materials and crafts, and he’d thrown the
A to Z
out with the rubbish alongside other advertising bumf. It was quite enough for Camille to be a plumber, she did not have to drool over toolkits for every trade under the sun. Camille rescued the somewhat stained catalogue without making a fuss. Johnstone’s overweening hopefulness about women paradoxically made him rather conservative. He saw women as belonging to a higher level of creation, he granted them mastery over instinctual reality, and believed that their task was to raise men above mere matter. He wanted them to be sublime and not vulgar, he aspired to their being almost immaterial, and not at all pragmatic. Such idealisation could hardly be squared with
The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft
. Camille did not dispute Johnstone’s right to have his daydreams, but she considered herself equally entitled to like tools – same as any other fuckwit, as Suzanne would have said.
    She shoved the
A to Z
, a loaf and some water into her backpack and left the village by the flight of steps that climbed steeply to the west. It took her nearly three hours of walking to get to the stone. You can’t, after all, earn fertility just by snapping your fingers. Stones of that kind are never in your neighbour’s back yard, that would be no better than cheating. They’re always stuck in impossible places. When she got to the top of the rise where the worn old stone sat, Camille found herself staring at a fresh-painted sign politely warning ramblers to be wary of the guard dogs now used by local shepherds. The last paragraph ended optimistically: DO NOT SCREAM AND DO NOT THROW STONES AT THE DOGS. AFTER OBSERVING STRANGERS FOR A CERTAIN TIME, THEY WILL NORMALLY LEAVE OF THEIR OWN ACCORD. And abnormally, Camille added for symmetry, they’ll jump at my throat. Instinctively, she altered her grip on her metal-tipped stick and looked around. What with wolves and dogs on the loose, the mountainside had become a wilderness once more.
    She climbed onto the stone whence you could see down over the whole valley. She could make out the white streak of the line of cars belonging to the men of the hunting party. Distant halloos wafted up to her. So, basically, it wasn’t much quieter up here, on her own. Basically, she was a bit scared.
    She got out her bread and water and the tool catalogue. It was an exhaustive listing with sections on
compressed air, soldering, scaffolding, lifting gear
, and scores of similarly promising headings. Camille read every entry from start to finish, including detailed specifications like
jumbo weed hog, 1.1HP petrol engine, anti-recoil bar, low-vibration solid transmission with reverse thrust, electronic ignition, weight 5.6 kilograms
. Such descriptions – and catalogues were full of them – gave her profound intellectual satisfaction (understanding the object, how it fitted together, how it worked) as well as intense lyrical pleasure. On top of the underlying fantasy of solving all the world’s problems with a
combined-cycle milling machine
or a
universal chuck tool
, the catalogue represented the hope of using a combination of power and ingenuity to overcome all of life’s shitty obstacles. A false hope , to be sure, but a hope nonetheless. Thus did Camille draw her vital energy from two sources: musical composition and
The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft
. Ten years younger and she had also drawn on love, but she had really lost interest in that