'You like him Reyer?'

'He's a bad-tempered so-and-so, but that doesn't bother me. He makes up for Clemence, the old woman you saw, who's mind-numbingly good-natured. She seems to do it on purpose. Charles won't get a rise out of her any more than with me. That'll teach him, it'll blunt his teeth.'

'Her teeth are a bit funny, Clemence's.'

'You noticed, yes, like Crocidura russula more like animal's teeth, aren't they? It must put off the lonely-hearts men she tries to date. We ought to give Charles an eye makeover and Clemence a teeth makeover we ought to give the world a makeover, really. Then of course it would be perfectly boring. If we get a move on, we could be at Saint-Georges metro station by ten, if that's what you want. But I've already told you, Adamsberg, I really don't think it's him you should be chasing. I think someone else used his circle afterwards. Is that impossible?'

'It would have to be someone who was remarkably familiar with his routine.'

'Like me.'

'Yes, and don't say so too loudly or you'll be suspected of following your chalk circle man that night and then dragging your victim, whom you'd previously knocked out, of course, over to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, before cutting her throat, on the spot, right in the middle of the circle, making sure she wasn't outside the line. But that seems pretty far-fetched, doesn't it?'

'No. I think that would be quite possible if you wanted to incriminate somebody else. In fact, it's very tempting, this madman who's been offering himself on a plate to the police and drawing his blue chalk circles two metres wide, just big enough to contain a corpse. It could have given plenty of people the idea of committing murder, if you ask me.'

'But how could any prosecutor prove a motive, if the victim turns out to be entirely unknown to the circle man?'

'The prosecutor would think it was a motiveless crime by a lunatic.'

'He doesn't look like a lunatic at all, from all the cla.s.sic signs. So how could the "real" murderer, according to you, be certain that the circle man would be found guilty in his place?'

'Well, what do you think, Adamsberg?'

'I don't think anything yet, Madame, to tell you the truth. But I've just had a bad feeling about these circles from the beginning. I don't know, just now, whether the man who draws them killed this woman. You could be perfectly right. Perhaps the chalk circle man is just a victim himself. You seem to be much better at working things out and reaching conclusions than I am, you're a scientist. I don't use the same methods, I don't do deductive reasoning. But the feeling I've got at the moment, very strongly, is that this circle man isn't nice at all even if he is your protege.'

'But you haven't got any evidence?'

'No. But I've been trying to find out everything about him for weeks. He was already dangerous, in my view, when he was just drawing rings round cotton buds and hairpins. So he's still dangerous now.'

'But good heavens, Adamsberg, you're working backwards! It's as if you were to say that some food was toxic because you felt sick before eating it!'

'Yes, I know.'

Adamsberg seemed irritated with himself: his eyes were heading for dreams and nightmares where Mathilde couldn't follow him.

'Come on, then,' she said, 'let's go to Saint-Georges. If we get lucky and see him, you'll find out why I'm defending him against you.'

'And why's that?' asked Adamsberg, standing up, with a sad smile on his face. 'Because a man who gives you a little wave of his hand can't be all bad?'

He looked at her, his head on one side, his lips curled into a lopsided grin, and he looked so charming that Mathilde felt once more that with this man life was a little better. Charles needed new eyes, Clemence needed a new set of teeth, but this policeman needed a total face makeover. Because his face was crooked, or too small, or too big, or something. But Mathilde would not have let anyone touch it for the world.

'Adamsberg,' she said, 'you're just too cute. You've no business being a policeman, you should have been a streetwalker.'

'Well, I am a streetwalker as well, Madame Forestier. Like you.'

'That must be why I like you so much. But that won't stop me proving to you that my intuition about the chalk circle man is as good as yours. And watch it, Adamsberg, you're not going to lay a finger on him tonight, not in my company. Give me your word.'

'I promise. I won't lay a finger on anyone at all,' said Adamsberg.

At the same time, he was thinking that he would try to keep his word on this in relation to Christiane, who was lying waiting for him, naked, in bed, back at his flat. And yet who would turn down an offer from a naked girl? As Clemence would say, perhaps the evening was jinxed. Clemence seemed to be a bit jinxed herself, in fact. As for Charles Reyer, it was worse than a jinx: he was teetering on the edge of an internal explosion, a major cataclysm.

When Adamsberg followed Mathilde back into the big room with the aquarium, Charles was still talking to Clemence, who was listening attentively and amiably, puffing at a cigarette as if she was new to smoking. Charles was saying: 'My grandmother died one night, because she had eaten too many spice cakes. But the real sensation was next day, when they found my father at the table eating the rest of the cakes.'

'Very interesting,' said Clemence, 'but now I'd like you to help me write my letter to my M., 66.'

'Night-night, children,' said Mathilde on the way out.

She was already in action, striding towards the stairs, in a hurry to be off to the Saint-Georges station. But Adamsberg had never been able to hurry.

'Saint George,' Mathilde called to him, as they scanned the street for a taxi. 'Isn't he the one who killed the dragon?'

'I wouldn't know,' said Adamsberg.

The taxi dropped them at the Saint-Georges metro station at five past ten.

'It's OK,' said Mathilde. 'We're still in time.'

By half past eleven, the chalk circle man had still not shown up. There was a pile of cigarette ends around their feet.

'Bad sign,' said Mathilde. 'He won't come now.'

'Perhaps his suspicions have been aroused,' said Adamsberg.

'Suspicions? What about? That he'd be accused of murder? Rubbish! We don't know if he even listens to the radio. He might not even know about the murder. You already know he doesn't go out every night, it's as simple as that.'

'It's true, he might not have heard the news yet. Or else perhaps he did hear it, and it made him wary. Since he knows someone's watching him, he may be changing his haunts. In fact, I'm sure he will. It's going to be the devil's own job to find him.'

'Because he's the murderer is that what you mean, Adamsberg?'

'I don't know.'

'How many times a day do you say "I don't know," or "Maybe"?'

'I don't know.'

'I know about all your famous cases so far, and how successful you are. But all the same, when you're here in the flesh, one wonders. Are you sure you're suited to the police?'

'Certain. And anyway, I do other things in life.'

'Such as?'

'Such as drawing.'

'Drawing what?'

'The leaves on the trees and more leaves on the trees.'

'Is that interesting? Sounds pretty boring to me.'

'You're interested in fish, aren't you?'

'What do you all have against fish? And anyway, why don't you draw people's faces? Wouldn't it be more fun?'

'Later. Later or maybe never. You have to start with leaves. Any Chinese sage will tell you.'

'Later? But you're already forty-five, aren't you?'

'Yes, but I can't believe that.'

'Ah, that's like me.'

And since Mathilde had a hip flask of cognac in her pocket, and since it was getting seriously cold, and since she said, 'We're into a section two of the week now, we're allowed to have a drink,' they did.

When the metal gates of the metro station closed, the chalk circle man had still not appeared. But Adamsberg had had time to tell Mathilde about the pet.i.te cherie and how she must have died somewhere out in the world, and how he hadn't been able to do anything about it. Mathilde appeared to find this story fascinating. She said that it was a shame to let the pet.i.te cherie die like that, and that she knew the world like the back of her hand, so she'd be able to find out whether the pet.i.te cherie had been buried, with her monkey, or not. Adamsberg felt completely drunk because he didn't usually touch spirits. He couldn't even p.r.o.nounce 'Wahiguya' properly.

At about the same time, Danglard was in an almost identical condition. The four twins had wanted him to drink a large gla.s.s of water 'to dilute the alcohol,' the children said. As well as the four twins, he had a little boy of five, just now fast asleep in his lap, a child whom he had never dared mention to Adamsberg. This last one was the unmistakable offspring of his wife and her blue-eyed lover. She had left this child with Danglard one fine day, saying that all in all it was better that the kids should stay together. Two sets of twins, plus a singleton who was always curled up in his lap, made five, and Danglard was afraid that confessing to all this would make him look a fool.

'Oh, stop going on about diluting the alcohol,' said Danglard. 'And as for you,' he said, addressing the first-born of the older set of twins, 'I don't like this way you've got of pouring white wine into plastic cups, and then pretending that you're being sympathetic, or that it looks nice, or that you don't object to white wine so long as it's in a plastic cup. What's the house going to look like with plastic cups everywhere? Did you think of that, edouard?'

'That's not the reason,' the boy replied. 'It's because of the taste. And then, you know, the flakiness afterwards.'

'I don't want to know,' said Danglard. 'And if we're talking about flakiness, you can take a view on that when the vicomte de Chateaubriand, the greatest writer in French literature, and about ninety-nine beautiful girls, have all rejected you, and when you've turned into a Paris cop who may be a sharp dresser but is all mixed up inside. I don't think you'll ever manage that. What about a case conference tonight?'

When Danglard and his kids had a case conference, it meant they got to talk about his police work. It could last hours, and the kids adored it.

'Well, for a start,' said Danglard, 'and can you beat this? St John the Baptist walked out and left us to deal with this shambles for the rest of the day. That got me so worked up that by three o'clock I was well away. And yes, it's clear that the man who wrote that stuff on the other circles is the same one who wrote the stuff round the circle with the murdered woman in it.'

'Victor, woe's in store, what are you out here for?' chanted edouard. 'Or you might as well say "Marcel, go to h.e.l.l, on your bike and ring the bell" or "Maurice, call the police, give us all a bit of peace" or-'

'OK, OK, said Danglard, 'but yes, "Victor, woe's in store" does suggest something vicious: death, bad luck, a threat of some kind. Needless to say, Adamsberg was the first to get a sniff of that. But is that enough for us to charge this man? The handwriting expert's quite positive about it: the man's not mad, he's not even disturbed, this is an educated person, careful about his appearance and his career, but discontented and aggressive as well as deceptive those were his words. He also said, "This man's getting on in years, he's going through some crisis, but he's in control; he's a pessimist, obsessed about the end of his life, therefore about his afterlife. Either he's a failure on the brink of success, or a successful man on the brink of failure." That's the way he is, kids, our graphologist. He turns words inside out like the fingers of a glove, he sends them one way, then the other. For instance, he can't talk about the desire for hope without mentioning the hope for desire, and so on. It sounds intelligent the first time you hear it, but after that you realise there's nothing there really. Except that it is the same man who's been doing all the circles so far, a man who's clever and perfectly lucid, and that he's either about to succeed in life or to fail. But as for whether the dead woman was put into a circle that had already been drawn or not, the lab people say it's impossible to tell. Maybe yes, maybe no. Does that sound like forensic science to you? And the corpse hasn't been much help, either: this is the corpse of a woman who led a totally uneventful existence, nothing odd at all, no complicated love life, no skeletons in the family cupboard, no problems with money, no secret vices. Nothing. Just b.a.l.l.s of wool and more b.a.l.l.s of wool, holidays in the Loire Valley, calf-length skirts, sensible shoes, a little diary that she wrote notes in, half a dozen packets of currant biscuits in her kitchen cupboard. In fact she wrote about that in her diary: "Can't eat biscuits in the shop, if you drop crumbs the boss notices." And so on and so forth. So you might say, well, what on earth was she doing out late at night? And the answer is she was coming back home after seeing her cousin, who works in the ticket office at the Luxembourg metro station. The victim often used to go over there and sit alongside her in the booth, eating crisps, and knitting Inca-style gloves to sell in the wool shop. And then she would go back home, on foot, probably along the rue Pierre-et-Marie Curie.'

'Is the cousin her only family?'

'Yes, and she'll inherit the estate. But since it consists of the currant biscuits plus a tea caddy with a few banknotes in, I can't see the cousin or her husband cutting Madeleine Chtelain's throat for that.'

'But if someone wanted to use a chalk circle, how would they have known where there was going to be one that night?'

'That is indeed the question, my little ones. But we ought to be able to work it out.'

Danglard got up carefully, to put Number Five, Rene, to bed.

'For instance,' he resumed, 'take the commissaire's new friend, Mathilde Forestier: it seems that she's actually seen the chalk circle man. Adamsberg told me. Look, I'm managing to say his name again. Obviously the conference is doing me good.'

'At the moment, I'd say it was a one-man conference,' edouard observed.

'And this woman, who knows the chalk circle man, she worries me,' Danglard added.

'You said the other day,' said the first-born girl of the second set of twins, 'that she was beautiful and tragic and spoilt and hoa.r.s.e-voiced, like some exotic Egyptian queen, but she didn't worry you then.'

'You didn't think before you spoke, little girl. The other day, n.o.body had been killed. But now, I can just see her coming into the police station, on some damfool pretext, making a big fuss, getting to see Adamsberg. And then talking to him about this, that and the other, before getting round to telling him she knows this chalk circle man pretty well. Ten days before the murder bit of a coincidence isn't it?'

'You mean she'd planned to kill Madeleine, and she came to see Adamsberg so that she'd be in the clear?' asked Lisa. 'Like that woman who killed her grandfather but came to see you a month before, to tell you she had a "presentiment"? Remember?'

'You remember that dreadful woman? Not an Egyptian princess at all, and as slimy as a reptile. She nearly got away with it. It's the cla.s.sic trick of the murderer who telephones to say they've found a body, only more elaborate. So, well, yes. Mathilde Forestier turning up like that does make you think. I can just imagine what she'd say: "But commissaire, I'd hardly have come and told you I knew all about the chalk circle man if I was intending to use him to cover up a murder!" It's a dangerous game, but it's bold, and it could be just her style. Because she is a bold woman, you've probably gathered that.'

'So did she have a motive for killing poor fat Madeleine?'

'No,' said Arlette. 'This lady, Madeleine, must just have been unlucky, picked by chance to start a series, so they'd pin it on the circle maniac. The real murder'll happen later. That's what papa is thinking.'

'Yes, maybe that is what he's thinking,' Danglard conceded.

VIII.

NEXT MORNING, MATHILDE CAME ACROSS CHARLES REYER AT THE foot of the stairs, fumbling with his door. In fact she wondered whether he hadn't been waiting for her, and pretending not to find the keyhole. But he said nothing as she went past.

'Charles,' said Mathilde, 'you're putting your eye to keyholes now, are you?'

Charles straightened up, and his face looked sinister in the dark stairwell.

'That's you, is it, Queen Mathilde, making cruel jokes?'

'Yes, it's me, Charles. I'm getting my retaliation in first. You know what they say: "If you want peace, prepare for war."'

Charles sighed.

'Very well, Mathilde. In that case, please help a poor blind man put the key in the lock. I'm not used to this yet.'

'Here you are,' said Mathilde, guiding his hand. 'Now it's locked. Charles, what did you think of that cop who came round last night?'

'Nothing. I couldn't hear what you were saying, and anyway I was distracting Clemence. What I like about Clemence is that she's got a screw loose. Just to know there are people like that in the world does me good.'

'Today my plan's to follow someone else like that, a man who's interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, goodness knows why. It could take me all day and the evening as well. So if it's not too much trouble, I'd like you to go and see the policeman for me. It's on your way.'

'What are you up to, Mathilde? You've already got what you were after, whatever that was, by getting me to come and live here. You want me to get my eyes sorted out, you get me to babysit Clemence for a whole evening, and now you're flinging me into the arms of this policeman. Why did you come looking for me? What are you trying to do with me?'

Mathilde shrugged.

'You're making too much of it, Charles. We met in a cafe, that's all. Unless it's to do with underwater biology, my impulses generally don't have any particular reason. And listening to you, I'm sorry I don't have more of a reason for them. Then I wouldn't be standing here, stuck on the stairs, having my morning spoiled by a blind man with a bad temper.'

'I'm sorry, Mathilde. What do you want me to say to Adamsberg?'