Read Online Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas - Free Book Online Page B

and get warmed up in a cafe, have a bite to eat, and go back to the shabby lodgings in the rue Chasle. He said goodbye and strode off down the avenue.

IX
     
    MARC VANDOOSLER HAD eaten a sandwich in the street, and was back in his room by early afternoon. Nobody was home in the ramshackle house. Lucien was off giving a lecture on some aspect or another of the Great War, Mathias was classifying artefacts from his autumn dig in the basement of a museum, and the elder Vandoosler must have gone for a walk. Marc’s godfather always had to be outdoors, and wasn’t bothered by the cold.
    Pity. Marc would have liked to ask him a few questions about Louis Kehlweiler, his incomprehensible shadowing of various people, and his interchangeable first names. Just a thought. He couldn’t really care less, but still, just a thought. It could wait, of course.
    Marc was working just now on a bundle of archives from Burgundy, from a place called Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye to be precise. He needed to finish a chapter in his book on the Burgundian economy in the thirteenth century. Marc would continue with his damned Middle Ages until he could make a living out of it, he’d sworn as much to himself. Well, he hadn’t exactly sworn, he’d just told himself. At any rate, this was the only thing in his life that gave him wings, or let’s say feathers, that and the women with whom he had been in love. All gone, even his wife, who had walked out on him. He must be too nervy, it probably put them off. If he’d been calm, like Kehlweiler, things might have worked out better. Though he suspected Kehlweiler wasn’t as calm as he looked. Slow-moving, certainly. But that wasn’t right either. From time to time, he turned his head to look at people with amazing rapidity. And he wasn’t always calm. His face sometimes tensed up, his eyes focused into the distance, it wasn’t as simple as that. Anyway, who’d said it would be simple? No one. This guy who went looking for improbable murderers, because of some dog shit on a pavement, couldn’t function like everyone else. But he gave the impression of being calm, strong even, and Marc would have liked to be able to do the same. It must make things easier with women. Stop thinking about women. He’d been on his own for months now, and it wasn’t worth twisting the knife in the damned wound.
    So, back to the accounts of the lord of Saint-Amand. He had reached the income from his barns, columns of figures from 1245 to 1256, with some gaps. It was already pretty good, this snapshot of a corner of Burgundy to put into the overall picture of the thirteenth century. Come to think of it, Kehlweiler had that strange face, as well as everything else. It makes a difference. Close to, the face was strikingly gentle. A woman might have been better at guessing whether it was the eyes, the lips, the nose, or the combination of all that, but the result was that from close to, he was worth a look. If he’d been a woman, he’d have agreed. Yeah, but he was a man, so that was stupid, and he only fancied women, which was stupid too, because women apparently didn’t fancy him above anyone else, in this world.
    Shit. Marc stood up, went downstairs into the large kitchen, freezing cold as it was in November, and made himself a cup of tea. With tea to drink, he could concentrate on the seigneur of Puisaye’s barns.
    Anyway, there was no sign that women made a beeline for Kehlweiler. Because seen from a distance you didn’t realise he was good-looking, in fact not at all, he seemed off-putting. And it seemed to Marc that Kehlweiler had the look of a man who was pretty lonely, when it came to it. That would be sad. But it would comfort Marc himself. He wouldn’t be the only one not to find anybody, to have disaster after disaster in his love life. Nothing worse than a love affair gone wrong to stop you giving due attention to medieval barns. It really blights your work. All the same, love exists out there, no point