Have Mercy On Us All

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Authors: Fred Vargas
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so?”
    “Black 4s. On every door. It actually happened over a week ago, so it was before the writing on my own block.”
    Adamsberg stood still for a minute, then closed the door quietly and motioned the young woman to sit down again.
    “Teenage paint-sprayers, don’t you think,
commissaire
, they usually do their stuff in their own streets,” Maryse suggested timidly as she sat down. “I mean, don’t they usually mark their own patch, like just a street or two? They don’t go around putting their graffiti on one block and then on another one at the other end of town, do they? Am I right, do you think?’
    “Unless they live at both ends of town.”
    “Oh, I’d not thought of that. But don’t gangs usually come from the same patch?”
    Adamsberg held his counsel and got out his notepad.
    “How did you know about this?”
    “I’d taken my son to the therapist – he’s dyslexic, you know. While he has his session I always while away the time in the café downstairs. So I was leafing through the local free sheet, you know, the one that has local news and political bits in it. There was a whole story about graffiti, on one block in rue Poulet and another in rue Caulaincourt. Black 4s, on the front doors of all the flats.”
    Maryse paused.
    “I brought you the cutting,” she said, and slipped a piece of old newspaper on to the table. “So you can see I’m not telling you stories. I mean, I’m not trying to make myself interesting or anything.”
    As Adamsberg ran his eye down the article, Maryse got up to go. Adamsberg glanced at his now empty waste-paper basket.
    “One moment,” he said. “Let’s go over this again, from the top. Name, address, the shape of these 4s and so on.”
    “But I told you all that yesterday.”
    “I’d still like to go over it again. As a precaution, if you follow me.”
    “Oh, all right then,” said Maryse, and she sat down again obediently.
    When Maryse had left Adamsberg went for a walk, since he had just spent a whole hour at his desk, and that was as long as he could manage comfortably in a sitting position. Dining out, going to the cinema or to a concert, or spending a long evening on a soggy sofa were experiences that Adamsberg enjoyed at the start but which left him at the end in a state of physical distress. His irrepressible desire to go out and walk, or at least to stand up, would always in the end overwhelm his attention to the conversation, the movie or the music. But this personal handicap had its advantages. It allowed him to understand what other people meant when they spoke of agitation, impatience, even panic – for he never felt those emotions in any of life’s circumstances, except when he had to stay sitting down for too long.
    Once he was up and away on his two feet, Adamsberg’s agitation subsided as quickly as it had risen, and he resumed his natural tempo – slow, steady and calm. He circled round and back towards the Brigade without having thought very much during his walk, but he had the feeling that these graffiti were not some teenagers’ stunt, nor any kind of tit-for-tat. There was something unpleasant about those sets of numbers; something awkward; something vaguely sinister.
    The Brigade building came into view, and Adamsberg knew that he should better not mention any of this to Danglard. Danglard hated seeing his boss’s mind drift on a swell of unsubstantiated feelings, the root cause, in his view, of all the mistakes the police ever made. At best Danglard would call it all a waste of time. Adamsberg had given up trying to explain that wasting time was never a waste of time, because Danglard remained totally resistant to what he saw as an illicit mode of thought – thinking unsupported by rationality. Adamsberg’s problem was that he had never known how to think any other way. He didn’t have a system, in fact, or a philosophy or a persuasion or even a liking for his kind of musing. It was just the way he worked; it was the only

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