In Normandy, the temperature was about six degrees cooler than in Paris, and as soon as he was standing on the forecourt of the almost-deserted bus station, Adamsberg turned his head to catch the fresh breeze, allowing it to run over his neck and ears, in an almost animal gesture, like a horse shaking off flies. He walked round the north side of the small town of Ordebec and half an hour later set off down the Chemin de Bonneval, to which he was directed by an ancient, hand-painted wooden signpost. Contrary to what he had expected, it was a narrow bridlepath: no doubt the idea of hundreds of armed men riding along it had made him imagine a broad and imposing avenue, under a canopy of tall beech trees. This path was much more modest, made of two long rutted tracks with grass growing between them, and on either side were ditches full of brambles, elm saplings and hazel bushes. Many blackberries were already ripe, well ahead of time, because of the abnormal heat, and Adamsberg picked some as he went along the path. He walked slowly, looking carefully at the ditches, and leisurely eating the fruit in his hand. He was surrounded by flies buzzing round his face as if anxious to taste his sweat.
Every few minutes, he stopped to pick a fresh handful of blackberries, tearing his old black shirt on the thorns. Halfway along, he stopped suddenly, remembering he hadn’t left any message for Zerk. He was so used to living alone that letting people know when he would be away took some effort. He called his son on his mobile.
‘Hellebaud has stood up,’ reported the young man. ‘He ate some seeds all by himself. Then he crapped on the table.’
‘That’s what happens if you come back to life. Put a plastic sheet on the table for now. There are some in the attic. I won’t be back till tonight, Zerk, I’m on the Chemin de Bonneval.’
‘Have you seen them?’
‘No, it’s still too light. But I’m looking for the body of the hunter. Nobody’s been here for three weeks, there are brambles everywhere, they’re fruiting early. If Violette phones, don’t tell her where I am, she wouldn’t like it.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Zerk, and Adamsberg told himself his son was perhaps sharper than he looked. Crumb by crumb, he was amassing information about him.
‘I’ve changed the light bulb in the kitchen,’ Zerk added. ‘And the one on the stairs needs changing too, shall I go ahead?’
‘Yes, OK, but don’t put in too strong a bulb. I don’t like it when you can see everything.’
‘If you meet the Ghost Riders, call me!’
‘I don’t think I’ll be able to, Zerk. I dare say if they go past that’ll knock out the signal. The shock of two different eras.’
‘Could be,’ agreed the young man and rang off.
Adamsberg advanced another few hundred metres, probing the sides of the path. Because Herbier was dead, he was quite sure of that. It was the only point on which he agreed with Madame Vendermot, the woman who would fly away if you blew on her. At this point, Adamsberg realised he had already forgotten the name for the little seeds of the dandelion clock.
There was a silhouette on the path and Adamsberg, narrowing his eyes, went forward more cautiously. A very long silhouette, sitting on a tree trunk, and so old and bent that he was afraid he might scare it.
‘Ello,’ said the old woman, in English, as she saw him approach.
‘Hello,’ Adamsberg replied in surprise, pronouncing the H. Following a recent visit to London, ‘hello’ was one of the few words of English he knew, along with ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
‘You took your time getting here from the station,’ she said.
‘I was picking blackberries,’ Adamsberg explained, wondering how such a confident voice could come out of this skeletal figure. Skeletal but intense. ‘You know who I am then?’
‘Not exactly. Lionel saw you get off the Paris train and on to the bus. Then Bernard told me, and what with one thing and another, here you are. Seeing what’s going on at the moment, the chances are you’re a policeman from Paris. There’s a bad atmosphere in these parts. Incidentally, Michel Herbier is no great loss.’
The old woman sniffed loudly and wiped a drop off the end of her very long nose with her hand.
‘And you were waiting for me?’
‘Not at all, young man, I’m waiting for my dog. He’s besotted with the bitch on that farm, just over there. If I don’t bring him over to cover her now and again, he’s impossible. Renoux, the farmer, is furious, he says he doesn’t want his yard full of little mongrels. But what can you do? Nothing. And I’ve had a summer cold, and haven’t been able to bring him out for ten days.’
‘Aren’t you afraid, all alone on this path?’
‘What of?’
‘The Furious Army?’ Adamsberg suggested tentatively.
‘Oh don’t worry,’ said the old woman with a shake of her head. ‘In the first place it isn’t dark, and in any case, I don’t see them. It isn’t given to everyone.’
Adamsberg could see a huge blackberry above the old woman’s head but he didn’t dare disturb her to reach it. It was strange, he reflected, how instinctively the urge to pick berries returns to humans the minute they go into a forest. That would have pleased his friend, the prehistoric scholar Mathias. Because when you think about it, it’s the act of gathering that’s bewitching. Blackberries in themselves aren’t all that marvellous a fruit.
‘My name’s Léone,’ said the woman, wiping another drop from her large nose. ‘Usually known as Léo.’
‘Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, commissaire from the Serious Crime Squad in Paris. Glad to have met you,’ he added politely. ‘And now I’ll be on my way.’
‘If it’s Herbier you’re after, you won’t find him along there. He’s lying in a pool of dried blood, up by St Antony’s Chapel.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes, and he’s been dead for some time. Not that anyone will grieve for him, but it’s not a pretty sight. Whoever did it didn’t mess about, you can’t even see his face.’
‘Was it the gendarmes who found him?’
‘No, young man, it was me. I often take flowers to the chapel, I don’t like to leave St Antony all alone. St Antony protects animals. Do you have an animal?’
‘I’ve got a sick pigeon.’
‘There you are then. When you go to the chapel, you need to make a request. He helps people find things that are lost as well. As I get older, I lose lots of things.’
‘You weren’t upset? By finding a corpse up there?’
‘It’s not the same if you’re expecting it. I knew he’d been killed.’
‘Because of the Ghost Riders?’
‘Because of my age, young man. Hereabouts, a bird can’t lay an egg without my knowing about it or feeling it in my bones. So for instance, last night you can be sure a fox took a chicken from Deveneux’s farm. He only has three legs and no tail.’
‘The farmer?’
‘The fox. I’ve seen his droppings. But believe me, he’s quicker than you’d think. Last year this coal tit took a fancy to him. First time I’ve ever seen anything like it. It would perch on his back and he never snapped at it. Just that one, no other bird, mark you. The world’s full of details, have you noticed? And since no detail is ever repeated in exactly the same shape and always sets off other details, there’s no end to it. If Herbier’d still been alive, he’d have finished up killing that fox, and while he was at it, the coal tit as well. That would have led to a lot of trouble during the local elections. But I don’t know whether the coal tit has come back this year. Out of luck.’
‘And have the gendarmes come? You’ve told them?’
‘Now, how could I do that? I had to wait for my dog. So if you’re in a hurry, you can just call them yourself.’
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ said Adamsberg after a moment. ‘The gendarmes don’t like Paris cops coming and sticking their noses in.’
‘So why are you here then?’
‘Because a woman from Ordebec came to see me. So I thought I’d take a look.’
‘Mother Vendermot? She’s frightened for her brood. And she’d certainly have done better to keep her mouth shut. But this business has upset her so much she couldn’t resist going for help.’
A large beige dog with long floppy ears emerged suddenly from the bushes with a yap, and came to lay its head on its mistress’s long thin legs, closing its eyes as if to offer thanks.
‘Ello, Fleg!’ she said, wiping her nose, while the dog wiped its own snout on her grey skirt. ‘See how happy he looks.’
Léo took a sugar lump from her pocket and pushed it into the dog’s mouth. Fleg paced round Adamsberg, full of curiosity.
‘Good boy,’ said Adamsberg, patting his neck.
‘His name’s Fleg, short for “Flegmatic”. Ever since he was a pup he’s just flopped about, lazy as can be. Look at his ears. Other people say that apart from wanting to chase all the bitches in the neighbourhood, he’s a waste of space. I say at least that’s better than going round biting people.’
The old woman stood up, unfolding her long stooped frame, and leaned on two sticks.
‘If you’re going back home to call the gendarmes,’ said Adamsberg, ‘would it be all right if I accompany you?’
‘No need to ask. I love company. But I can’t go very fast, it’ll take about half an hour if we go through the wood. Before, when Ernest was alive, I did bed and breakfast at our farm. There were plenty of people about all the time, young ones too. Lots of folk, coming and going. I had to give up twelve years ago, and it’s a bit lonely now. So when I come across a bit of company I don’t refuse it. Talking to yourself isn’t much fun.’
‘They say Normans don’t like to talk very much,’ said Adamsberg, chancing the remark, as he fell into step behind the old woman, who gave off a slight fragrance of woodsmoke.
‘It’s not so much that they don’t like talking, but they don’t like answering questions. It’s not the same thing.’
‘So how do you go about asking questions?’
‘We find ways. Are you going to follow me all the way back to the house? My dog’s hungry now.’
‘I’ll walk with you. What time does the evening train go?’
‘The evening train, young man, went a good quarter of an hour ago. There’s one from Lisieux, but the last bus goes in ten minutes, and you won’t catch that.’
Adamsberg hadn’t foreseen spending the night in Normandy: all he had with him was his ID card, keys and some money. The Ghost Riders were pinning him down in this place. Without seeming perturbed, the old woman walked quite briskly through the trees, using her sticks. She looked rather like a grasshopper jumping over roots.
‘Is there a hotel in Ordebec?’
‘It’s not a hotel, it’s a rabbit hutch,’ pronounced the old women in her booming tones. ‘But anyway, it’s closed for repairs. You have friends you can stay with, I suppose.’
Adamsberg recalled the reticence he had found among Normans about asking direct questions, something that had already caused him difficulties in the village of Haroncourt on a previous case. Like Léone, the men in Haroncourt got round the obstacle by making a statement, whatever it might be, and waiting for an answer.
‘You’ll be counting on finding somewhere to sleep,’ Léo said again. ‘Come on, Fleg. He insists on peeing against every tree.’
‘I’ve got a neighbour like that,’ said Adamsberg, thinking of Lucio. ‘No, I don’t know anybody here.’
‘You could sleep in a haystack of course. The weather’s hotter than normal now, but there’s still dew in the morning. You’ll be from some other part of the country, I suppose.’
‘From the Béarn.’
‘That would be in the east.’
‘No, south-west, near Spain.’
‘And you’ve already been in these parts, I suppose.’
‘I have some friends at the cafe in Haroncourt.’
‘Haroncourt in the Eure département? The cafe near the market hall?’
‘That’s right, I have some friends there, especially one called Robert.’
Léo stopped suddenly and Fleg took advantage to choose a new tree. Then she set off again, muttering to herself for about fifty metres.
‘Well, Robert is a petit cousin, a relative of mine,’ she said finally, still overcome with surprise. ‘One I’m fond of.’
‘He gave me two antlers from a stag. They’re sitting in my office.’
‘Oh! If he did that, he must have thought well of you. You don’t give antlers to just anybody.’
‘Well, I would hope not.’
‘We are talking about Robert Binet?’
‘Yes.’
Adamsberg walked another hundred metres or so in the old woman’s wake. A road was now visible through the trees.
‘Well, if you’re a friend of Robert’s, that’s different. You could sleep Chez Léo, if that isn’t too different from what you were intending. Chez Léo is my place, it was the name of my guest house.’
Without having made up his mind, Adamsberg could clearly detect an appeal from the old woman, who was lonely and bored. But as he had told Veyrenc, decisions are taken before you announce them. He had nowhere to stay, and he had rather taken to this outspoken old woman. Even if he felt a bit trapped, as if Léo had organised it all in advance.
Five minutes later, he could see Chez Léo, an old longhouse of a single storey, which had somehow survived with its ancient wooden beams for at least two centuries. Inside, nothing seemed to have changed for decades.
‘Sit down on the bench,’ said Léo, ‘and we’ll call Émeri. He’s not a bad sort, quite the contrary. He gives himself airs and graces from time to time, because some ancestor was one of Napoléon’s marshals. But on the whole people like him. On the other hand, his job’s not good for his character. If you have to suspect everyone, if you’re always punishing people, you can’t improve yourself, can you? I dare say you’re the same.’
‘Yes, probably.’
Léo dragged a stool up to the telephone.
‘Well,’ she said with a sigh, as she dialled the number, ‘I suppose the police are a necessary evil. During the war, an evil full stop. I should think quite a few of them went off with the Riders. We’ll have a nice blaze, now it’s cooling down. You know how to lay a fire, I suppose. The log pile’s just outside on the left. Ello, Louis, this is Léo.’
When Adamsberg came back with an armful of wood, Léo was in full flow. Clearly Émeri was getting the worst of it. Léo passed the old-fashioned earpiece to the commissaire.
‘Well, it was because I always take flowers to St Antony, you know that, come on. Tell me, Louis, you’re not going to make trouble for me now, just because I came across a corpse, are you? If you’d bothered to stir your stumps, you’d have found him yourself, and saved me a deal of bother.’
‘Don’t get ratty, Léo, I believe you.’
‘His moped’s there too, it’s been pushed into some hazel bushes. What I think happened is someone arranged to meet him there, and he hid his bike so nobody could take it.’
‘Léo, I’m going up there right now, and then I’m coming round to see you. If I come at eight, you won’t have gone to bed?’
‘At eight, I’m still eating my supper, and I don’t like being disturbed when I’m eating.’
‘Eight thirty then.’
‘No, it’s not convenient, I’ve got a cousin visiting from Haroncourt. Having the gendarmes call the evening you arrive isn’t polite. And I’m tired. Trotting round the forest is tiring at my age.’
‘That was why I asked what you were doing, trotting all the way to the chapel.’
‘And I already told you. Taking some flowers.’
‘You never let on the quarter of what you know.’
‘The rest wouldn’t interest you. You’d do better to go over there, before he gets eaten by wild animals. And if you want to see me, make it tomorrow.’
Adamsberg put down the earpiece and set about lighting the fire.
‘Louis Nicolas can’t do anything to me,’ explained Léo, ‘because I saved his life when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The silly boy had fallen into the Jeanlin pond, and I hauled him out by the seat of his pants. He can’t go playing marshals of France with me.’
‘He’s local?’
‘He was born here.’
‘But how did he get posted here then? Policemen aren’t usually appointed to their home ground.’
‘I know that, young man. But he had moved away from Ordebec when he was only eleven, and his parents didn’t have many contacts round here. He was a long time near Toulon, then Lyon, then he got a special dispensation. But he doesn’t really know the people round here. And he’s protected by the count, so no problem.’
‘The count?’
‘Rémy, Comte d’Ordebec. You’ll have some soup, I suppose.’
‘Thank you,’ said Adamsberg, passing his plate.
‘Carrot. After this there’s some veal in bean sauce.’
‘Émeri told me that Lina is completely insane.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ said Léo, thrusting a large spoon into her small mouth. ‘She’s a bright enough girl and reliable. And she wasn’t wrong. Herbier is certainly dead. So Louis Nicolas will be after her now, you can count on that.’
Adamsberg mopped up his soup with bread, as Léo did, and fetched the dish of veal and beans, breathing in the atmosphere of woodsmoke.
‘And since she’s not much liked, not her and not her brothers either,’ Léo went on, serving out the food rather haphazardly, ‘there’ll be hell to pay. Don’t go thinking they’re bad people, but folk are always afraid of what they don’t understand. And what with her gift, and her brothers who aren’t quite normal, they haven’t got a good reputation.’
‘Because of the Ghost Riders?’
‘That and other things. People say they have the devil in that house. It’s like anywhere else, round here, there are plenty of folk with heads so empty they fill them full of rubbish, most of it bad. That’s what everyone prefers, something nasty. Otherwise it’s boring.’
Léo gave a satisfied nod of her chin and swallowed a large mouthful of meat.
‘I suppose you have your own ideas about the Riders,’ said Adamsberg, using Léo’s way of asking a question.
‘Depends how you look at them. In Ordebec, there are some who think Lord Hellequin is a servant of the devil. I don’t really believe that, but if some people can survive because they’re saints, like St Antony, why shouldn’t others survive because they’re wicked? Because this Horde, they’re all wicked, you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s why they get seized. But other people think Lina has visions, that she’s sick in the head. She’s been seen by doctors but they couldn’t find anything wrong. And others again say her brother puts poisonous mushrooms in their omelettes, and that’s what gives her hallucinations. devil’s fungus. You know what that looks like, I suppose, red-footed fungus.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’ said Léone, rather disappointed.
‘All it does is give you a serious bellyache.’
Léone took the plates into her dark little kitchen and washed them up in silence, concentrating on her task. Adamsberg dried the dishes as she went along.
‘You know, it’s all the same to me,’ said Léone, drying her large hands. ‘It’s just that Lina sees the Riders, that’s for sure. Whether the Riders are real or not, I couldn’t say. But now that Herbier’s dead, there’ll be people who’ll have it in for her. And in fact, that’s why you’re here.’
The old woman picked up her sticks and returned to the table. She took a large cigar box out of a drawer, passed a cigar under her nose, licked the end and lit it carefully, then pushed the open box towards Adamsberg.
‘A friend sends me these, he gets them from Cuba. I spent two years in Cuba, four in Scotland, three in Argentina and five in Madagascar. Ernest and me, we opened restaurants pretty well everywhere, so we saw the world. We offered Normandy cuisine à la crème. Would you be good enough to get out the Calvados from the bottom of that cupboard and pour us a little glass each? You will have a drink with me, I imagine.’
Adamsberg did as he was asked. He was beginning to feel quite at home in this dimly lit little room, with the cigar, the glass of Calvados, the fire, lanky old Léone, who looked like a broomstick in clothes, and her dog snoozing on the floor.
‘So why am I here, Léo? If I may call you Léo?’
‘To protect Lina and her brothers. I don’t have any children, and she’s after being a sort of daughter to me. And if there are any more deaths, I mean if the other men she saw with the Riders should die too, then things are going to turn nasty. The same sort of thing happened in Ordebec in the eighteenth century, before the Revolution. There was this man, François-Benjamin, who saw four local villains being seized by the Horde. But he could only identify three of them. Just like Lina. And two of the named men died eleven days later. People were so terrified – because of the fourth unnamed person – that they thought they could put an end to these deaths by killing the man who saw them. The villagers went for François-Benjamin with pitchforks and then burnt him at the stake in the marketplace.’
‘And the third man didn’t die?’
‘Yes, he did. And so did a fourth, in exactly the order he had said. So they didn’t get anywhere by killing poor old François-Benjamin with their pitchforks.’
Léone took a mouthful of Calvados, swilled it round her mouth, swallowed it noisily and with satisfaction, and took a long draw on the cigar.
‘And I don’t want anything like that to happen to Lina. People say times have changed. That just means they’ve got more discreet. Not pitchforks and fire, but some other method. Anyone round here now with some shameful act on their conscience will be scared to death, depend on it. They’re terrified of being seized, and terrified of anyone finding out.’
‘Do you mean some serious crime, like a murder?’
‘Not necessarily. It could be spreading malicious rumours or doing someone out of an inheritance, or some other injustice. They’d like to put an end to Lina and her loose talk. Because that would cut the connection to the Riders, you see. That’s what they say. Calm things down, just like in the old days. Times haven’t really changed, commissaire.’
‘Is Lina the first person to have seen the Riders since François-Benjamin?’
‘No, of course not, commissaire,’ Léo said in her hoarse voice, through a cloud of smoke as if she were scolding some disappointing pupil. ‘This is Ordebec. There’s at least one medium every generation. The medium is the one who sees the sight, who forms the connection between the living and the army of the dead. Before Lina was born, it was Gilbert. Apparently he laid hands on her head when she was a baby, over the font in the church, and that way he passed on his destiny to her. And when you’ve been marked by destiny, it’s no use running away, because the Riders will always take you back to the grinveld, or grimweld as they say in eastern Normandy.’
‘But nobody killed this Gilbert?’
‘No,’ agreed Léone, blowing out a large smoke ring. ‘But the difference is that this time, Lina did the same as François-Benjamin, she saw four, but she could only name three: Herbier, Glayeux and Mortembot. And she hasn’t named the fourth. So of course if Glayeux and Mortembot were to die too, the whole town will be scared to death. If you don’t know who’s next, nobody will feel safe. And the fact that she named Glayeux and Mortembot has already caused a deal of trouble.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s been talk about both of them for a long time. They’re both nasty pieces of work.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Glayeux makes stained-glass windows for all the churches in the region. He’s very talented with his hands, but not at all a nice man. He thinks himself above all the yokels round here and doesn’t hesitate to tell them so. Yet his own father was only a blacksmith in Le Charmeuil-Othon! And if the yokels didn’t go to Mass, he wouldn’t have any call for his stained-glass windows. Mortembot has a garden centre on the road to Livarot, and he keeps himself to himself. Of course, since these rumours started, their businesses have fallen off. Customers aren’t going to the garden centre any more, people are avoiding both of them. And when the news gets out that Herbier’s dead, it’ll be worse. That’s why I think Lina would have done better to keep quiet. But that’s the problem with the mediums. They feel obliged to speak out, to give a chance to the people who were seized. You know what I mean by “seized”, I suppose.’
‘The medium speaks out and sometimes the seized person gets to redeem himself. Well, anyway, Lina is in some danger, and you can protect her.’
‘I can’t do anything, Léo, the investigation will be in Émeri’s hands.’
‘But Émeri won’t bother himself about Lina. All this stuff about the Furious Army annoys and disgusts him. He thinks times have changed and that people these days are reasonable.’
‘Well, first of all, they’ll want to find out who killed Herbier. And the other two people are still alive. So Lina isn’t in any danger at the moment.’
‘Maybe,’ said Léo, puffing on the remains of her cigar.
* * *
Getting to his bedroom meant going outside, since each room communicated only through an external door, which squeaked, reminding Adamsberg of Tuilot, Julien, and the creaking door which would have allowed him to avoid arrest if he had dared to open it. Léo pointed out Adamsberg’s room to him with one of her sticks.
‘You have to give the door a bit of a lift to make less of a noise. Goodnight.’
‘I don’t know your last name, Léo.’
‘Police, they always want to know that. What about yours?’ asked Léo, spitting out a few strands of tobacco stuck to her tongue.
‘Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, I told you before.’
‘Make yourself at home. In your bedroom there’s a whole stack of nineteenth-century pornography. Inherited from a friend, whose family wanted rid of it. Read it if you like, but be careful turning the pages, they’re old and the paper’s fragile.’