Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas

Author:Fred Vargas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446449455
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

XXI

SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON a flat stone, with the dog nestled against her feet, Camille watched night fall on the Mercantour. Wherever she cast her eyes the mountains loomed in their dense, dark, opulent and hopeless solidity.

Sooner or later he would have to come down from the mountains. Sooner or later Massart would have to abandon their sanctuary. In all likelihood. The Loubas garage theory was interesting. But maybe they were all making a mistake about that. Maybe Massart would avoid roads and vehicles altogether. Maybe he would stay holed up in the Mercantour for ever. This no longer seemed impossible, now that Camille could see this huge and primevally empty space for herself. Nothing but stone and almost virgin forest for seventy kilometres from end to end – but with all its slopes and inclines, all its cliffs and rock faces, the surface area must actually be immensely larger. A hundred times, maybe a thousand times bigger. What Massart had here was a vast and vacant territory where he just had to hold out a pitcher for water, and put out his fangs for as much meat and as many victims as he cared for.

But then there was the temperature. Camille huddled inside her jacket for warmth. Now that night had fallen it was 10°C at most, and Watchee had said that by dawn it would go down to 6°. And this was high summer, late June. She put out her hand for the bottle of white Saint-Victor wine and poured herself a thumbnail. Could Massart hold out against the cold? Months and months under snow? With no shelter beside a wolf’s coat? He could light a fire, but then he would be spotted.

So he would be cold. So he would leave the Mercantour sooner or later. But not necessarily tomorrow, via Loubas, as Soliman and Watchee seemed convinced he would. Their certainty surprised Camille. They seemed to reckon they had the right plan and were bound to succeed. Whereas to Camille it sometimes seemed on the one hand a defensible and reasonable project, but on the other hand half-baked and brainless.

Massart might not come down from the Mercantour until the first frosts, in October. Were they going to camp out in the lorry outside Loubas for four months? Nobody spoke about that, nobody even mentioned that their pursuit of Massart had no foregone conclusion. Even had they been tracking a wolf with a transponder they still would not be any surer of finding it. Camille shook her head in the dark, turned her jacket collar up, and took another swig of the wine with the tail. She was not at all confident. She could not see the story proceeding the way the young man and the shepherd thought it would. She saw something darker, more disorderly, something basically more fearful than the clockwork search they were clinging to with the map laid out in front of them.

Fearful and dangerous, too. Camille looked through the binoculars. She could not see a thing on the pitch-black mountainside.

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