This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas Read Free Book Online Page B

white wine into the six glasses.
    So the big fair one was Robert – built like a wardrobe. And he was thirsty. It was the aperitif hour: heads sunk into shoulders, fists clenched around glasses, chins jutting at aggressive angles. The majestic hour, when the men of the village foregather and the angelus is rung, a time for sage opinions and nods of the head, a time for rural rhetoric, pompous and trivial. Adamsberg knew the score by heart. He had beenborn into this music, had grown up hearing its solemn developments, its rhythms and its themes, its variations and counterpoints, and he knew the players. Robert had sounded the first note on the violin, and all the other instruments would be moving into place at once, in an unvarying order.
    â€˜Tell you what, though,’ said the man on Robert’s left. ‘It’s not just a drink we need after that. Makes you sick to your stomach.’
    â€˜That it does.’
    Adamsberg turned to have a better view of the last speaker, who had the humble but essential task of punctuating every turn in the conversation, as if on a double bass. He was small and thin, the least robust-looking of the group. That figured.
    â€˜Whoever did that,’ said a tall stooped individual at the end of the table, ‘he’s no human being.’
    â€˜No, he’s an animal.’
    â€˜Worse than an animal.’
    â€˜That he is.’
    The first subject had been introduced. Adamsberg got out his notebook, still warped with rain, and started sketching the faces of the actors in the little drama. These were Norman heads, no mistake about it. He realised that they looked like his friend Bertin, a descendant of the god Thor, wielder of thunderbolts, who kept a café on a square in Paris. Square-jawed and high-cheekboned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with an elusive expression in them. It was the first time Adamsberg had set foot among inland Normandy’s damp woods and fields.
    â€˜What I think,’ Robert was saying, ‘is it’s some young fellow. Some nutter.’
    â€˜Nutters aren’t all young.’
    This contrapuntal interjection came from the oldest speaker at the head of the table. Alerted, the other faces turned his way.
    â€˜Because when a young nutter grows up, he turns into an old one.’
    â€˜Dunno about that,’ grunted Robert.
    So Robert had the difficult but also essential task of contradicting the elder of the tribe.
    â€˜I’m telling you they do,’ the older man said. ‘But say what you like, whoever did that, crazy’s the word all right.’
    â€˜A savage.’
    â€˜Stands to reason.’
    Recapitulation and development of the first subject.
    â€˜â€™Cos there’s killing and killing,’ said Robert’s neighbour, a man with hair less fair than the rest.
    â€˜Dunno about that,’ said Robert.
    â€˜Yes, I’m telling you there is,’ said the old man. ‘Whoever did that, they were just out to kill, nothing else. Two shots in the ribs, and that’s it. Didn’t even do anything with the remains. Know what I call that?’
    â€˜Cold-blooded murder.’
    â€˜That it is.’
    Adamsberg had stopped sketching and started listening. The older man half-turned towards him, with a sideways look.
    â€˜Then again,’ Robert was saying, ‘where’s Brétilly? Not our neck of the woods – thirty kilometres away. So why should we care?’
    â€˜â€™Cos it’s shameful, Robert, that’s why.’
    â€˜I don’t even think it was someone from Brétilly. I’ll bet it was a Parisian. Anglebert, what do you think?’
    So the old man who dominated the group from the top of the table was Anglebert.
    â€˜Yes, Parisians now, they can be crazy,’ he said.
    â€˜The life they lead.’
    Silence fell around the table and a few faces turned furtively towards Adamsberg. When men foregather for a drink in the evening, the newcomer is