This Night's Foul Work Read Online Free

leaned her elbows on the dissecting table where the white corpse lay, pushing the body aside to make more room. Like most pathologists, Ariane showed little respect for the dead. On the otherhand, she investigated the enigma of their bodies with unrivalled talent, thus paying homage in her own way to the immense and singular complexity of each one. Dr Lagarde’s analyses had made the corpses of some quite ordinary mortals famous. If you passed through her hands, you had a good chance of going down in history. After your death, unfortunately.
    â€˜It was an exceptional corpse,’ she remembered. ‘We found him in his bedroom, with a sophisticated farewell letter. A local councillor, compromised and ruined, and he had killed himself with a sword, hara-kiri style.’
    â€˜Having drunk a lot of gin first, to give himself courage.’
    â€˜I remember it clearly,’ said Ariane, in the mild tone of someone recalling a pleasant story. ‘A straightforward case of suicide, on the part of a subject with a history of depression and compulsion. The local council was glad the matter went no further, do you remember, Jean-Baptiste? I had put in my report, which was impeccable. You were just the junior who used to make photocopies, run errands, sort out my paperwork, though you didn’t always stick to instructions. We used to go and have a drink sometimes by the harbour. I was about to be promoted, and you were daydreaming and going nowhere. In those days, I used to put pomegranate juice in beer to make it fizz.’
    â€˜Do you still mix crazy drinks?’
    â€˜Yes, lots,’ said Ariane, sounding disappointed, ‘but I haven’t found the perfect mixture yet. Remember the
violine?
An egg whipped up in crème de menthe and Malaga.’
    â€˜Awful drink, I never went for that one.’
    â€˜I stopped making the
violine
. OK for the nerves but a bit too strong. We experimented with a lot of things in Le Havre.’
    â€˜Except one.’
    â€˜Gracious me.’
    â€˜A bedroom experiment. We never tried that.’
    â€˜No, I was married in those days, and a very devoted wife. On theother hand, we worked well together on the police reports.’
    â€˜Until the day.’
    â€˜Until the day a little idiot of a Jean-Baptiste got it into his head that the local councillor in Le Havre had been murdered. Why? Because you found ten dead rats in a warehouse in the port.’
    â€˜Twelve, Ariane. Twelve rats, all slashed across the belly with a blade.’
    â€˜All right, twelve, if you say so. And you concluded that a murderer had been testing his courage before the attack. And there was something else. You thought the wound was too horizontal. You said the councillor would have had to hold the sword at more of an angle. While he was blind drunk.’
    â€˜And you threw my glass of beer on the floor.’
    â€˜I had a name for that beer-grenadine mixture, for heaven’s sake.’
    â€˜La grenaille
. You had me transferred away from Le Havre, and put in your report without me: suicide.’
    â€˜What did you know about forensics? Nothing.’
    â€˜Nothing at all,’ Adamsberg admitted.
    â€˜Come and have a coffee. And tell me what’s bothering you about these two corpses.’

IV
    L IEUTENANT
V EYRENC HAD BEEN ASSIGNED THIS MISSION FOR THE PAST THREE weeks, stuck in a broom cupboard one metre square, providing protection for a young woman whom he saw go past on the landing a dozen times a day. 1 He found the young woman rather touching, and this feeling disturbed him. He shifted on his chair, trying to find another position.
    He shouldn’t have been troubled by this – it was just a little grain of sand in the machinery, a splinter in the foot, a bird in the engine. The myth according to which a small bird, however exotic, could make an aeroplane engine explode was complete nonsense, one of the many ways people find to scare each other. As