Have Mercy On Us All by Fred Vargas

Author:Fred Vargas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446449431
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

XXII

BY 8 A.M. on friday Adamsberg had twelve extra officers helping to man the fifteen additional phone lines he’d had put it to cope with the flood of calls that local stations were transferring night and day. Thousands of Parisians were demanding to know whether or not the police had told the whole truth about the black deaths, whether they should take any special precautions, and if so, how. The commissioner of police had given strict orders to all local stations to log all such calls and to deal with them individually. Unconsoled hysterics could be a major factor in spreading havoc.

The morning papers were not likely to be much help in staunching the rising tide of fear. Adamsberg laid them all out on the table and glanced through. For the most part they just printed what had been said on television, plus their own ha’p’orth of commentary, with more photos. Several of them had also put the backwards 4 on the front page. Some of them hyped it up but others tried to keep a low key in their accounts of the affair. All of them covered themselves by reproducing substantial parts of Chief Superintendent Brézillon’s statement. All of them also printed the last two “specials”. Adamsberg reread them trying to imagine what it would be like to see them for the first time in the present context, that is to say, with three corpses attached:

The scourge is ever ready and at the command of God who brings it down and raises it away, as it pleaseth the Lord.

To my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City, in two parishes together. They said […] that both had been found with tokens that could not be denied or mistaken.

Those two paragraphs were quite enough to sway the gullible, and that made 18 per cent of the population, since 18 per cent had fallen for the Y2K scare. Adamsberg was surprised by the amount of attention to the case in the press, and just as surprised by the speed with which the story had flared up, even though he’d worried that it might happen that way from the moment the first body was found. An obsolete affliction buried beneath the dust of ages was hatching anew and rising up to strike again with almost as much vigour as it ever had had.

Adamsberg glanced at the wall clock since he was due to hold a press conference at nine, by order of the Super. He didn’t like orders and he didn’t like conferences but he was aware that circumstances required him to put up with both for the moment. The line he had to take was to head off panic by showing the marks of strangulation on the photographs of the victims and by demonstrating the vacuousness of the rumours going round. The police doctor who’d done the autopsy came along to back him up, and in the absence of any more killings or a particularly terrifying “special,” he reckoned he could keep things under control.

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