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of thought. And Danglard had noticed that at certain times Adamsberg was more absent-minded than at others. When he was doodling, not resting his notepad on his knee but holding a little piece of paper against his stomach, then Danglard would say to himself: ‘If I were to announce to him now that a giant fungus was about to engulf the Earth and squeeze it to the size of a grapefruit, he wouldn’t give a damn. And that would be a pretty serious matter – not room for many people on a grapefruit. As anyone can see.’
    Florence was also watching the commissaire . Since her conversation with Castreau she had thought again, and had announced that the new commissaire made her think of a rather depraved Florentine prince she had seen in a picture in some book, but now she couldn’t remember which. Anyway, she would like to sit on a bench and look at him as if he were a picture in an exhibition when she’d had enough of life, enough of finding ladders in her tights, and enough of hearing Danglard tell her he didn’t know when the universe would come to an end, or indeed why it was the universe anyway.
    She watched them drive off in two cars to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie.
    In the car, Danglard muttered: ‘A cork and a woman with her throat cut. Can’t see the connection – it’s beyond me. I don’t understand what’s going through this character’s mind.’
    ‘If you look at water in a bucket,’ Adamsberg said, ‘you can see the bottom of the bucket. You can put your arm in, you can touch it. Or even a barrel, same thing. But if it’s a well, there’s no hope. Even if you chuck pebbles in to see how deep it is, it’s no use. Problem is, you keep on trying to understand. People always want to “understand”. And that way madness lies. You wouldn’t believe the number of little pebbles there are at the bottom of a well. It’s not to hear the splash that people throw them, really. No, it’s to understand. But a well is a terrible thing. Once the people who built them have died, nobody knows anything about the well. It’s beyond our reach, it’s laughing at us from deep inside its mysterious cylindrical belly, full of water. That’s what a well’s like, for me. But how much water is there? How deep does it go? You have to lean over, to find out, you have to lower ropes down inside it.’
    ‘You can get drowned like that,’ said Castreau.
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    ‘I don’t see what this has to do with the murder,’ said Castreau.
    ‘I didn’t say it had anything to do with it,’ said Adamsberg.
    ‘Then why did you get us started on wells?’
    ‘Why not? The things we talk about don’t always have to be relevant. But Danglard’s right. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between a wine cork and a dead woman. But that’s exactly what’s important.’
    The eyes of the murdered woman were open, with a terrified expression in them, and her mouth was open too, her jaw virtually dislocated. It almost looked as if she had been shouting the rhyme which was written all round the circle surrounding her: ‘ Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for? ‘
    The sound was deafening, enough to make one want to stop one’s ears, and yet the policemen standing in a group around the circle were silent.
    Danglard was looking at the woman’s cheap raincoat, buttoned up tightly, at her throat which had been cut, and at the blood which had trickled as far as the door of a building. He felt sick. He had never been able to view a corpse without feeling sick, something which did not however distress him. It wasn’t unpleasant to feel sick. It made him forget his other sorrows, the sorrows of the soul, he thought bitterly.
    ‘She was killed by a rat, a human rat,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Rats leap at people’s throats like that.’
    Then he added.
    ‘So who is this lady?’
    His petite chérie always said ‘lady’ and ‘gentleman’. ‘That’s a pretty lady.’ ‘That gentleman wants to go to bed