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he looked on informal, intuitive reckoning with deep suspicion. Adamsberg didn’t try to distinguish the one from the other, and in any case held no strong views. But when he was transferred to the Brigade Criminelle, Adamsberg stamped his foot until they allowed Danglard to come along, with a promotion to boot. He could not manage without that dogged mind and its carborundum edge.
    Well, in the new digs they’d got, neither Danglard’s trained and powerful nor Adamsberg’s woolly wanderer would be switching from smashed windows to bag-snatchings. Their job had one name and one name only: murder. Murder
ad infinitum
, without a broken pane to let a healthy gust of teenage delinquency take your mind off the subject; murder
ad aeternam
, unrelieved by having to lend a handkerchief to the nice young lady who’d just lost her keys, her address book and a love letter. It would be total immersion in the nightmare of humanity, the killer species.
    No, sir, no relief. Violent crimes only. Murder squad.
    This unambiguous definition of their duties felt as sharp as a knife. Well, all right then, he’d got what he asked for, what with having solved a score and more mysteries through his walking, dreaming, straggly-thinking method. As a result they had put him right up on the front line. Tracking killers was something he’d been unexpectedly good at. Diabolical, in fact. That was Danglard’s term, to account for the surprising results of Adamsberg’s impenetrable mental meanderings.
    So they there were, at the sharp end, with a squad of twenty-six men and women under their command.
    “I was wondering,” Adamsberg said as he ran the flat of his hand over the damp plaster, “whether what happens to cliffs doesn’t also happen to us.”
    “What happens to cliffs?” Danglard snapped.
    Adamsberg had always been a slow talker, hovering around his main point and sometimes forgetting entirely where it was; Danglard found it increasingly hard to put up with.
    “Well, the rock isn’t, so to speak, all of a piece, on a cliff by the sea. I don’t know, but let’s say it’s made up of hardstone and softstone.”
    “Softstone isn’t a geological term, sir.”
    “That’s as may be. At any rate, there are harder bits and softer bits in a cliff, like there are in all living things, like there are in you and me. So you’ve got a cliff, all right? And as the sea laps at it, and washes it, and splashes over it, the soft bits begin to melt.”
    “‘Melting’ is not the right word, sir.”
    “That’s as may be. At any rate, bits drop off and the harder bits start to stick out. And as the sea and the storms go on bashing away at the cliff, the weaker parts vanish into thin air. When it gets to be an old man, the cliff is all craggy and hollow, like a ruined castle or keep. Like a gaping jaw with a stony bite. What you’ve got where the soft bits were are gaps, holes and voids.”
    “Yes, sir?”
    “Well, I was wondering whether
flics
– and heaps of other people exposed to life’s stormy seas – don’t suffer erosion as well. Lose their soft bits, keep their tough bits, grow hard and craggy and hollow. Basically, fall to pieces.”
    “So you think you’re turning into a stone jaw?”
    “I guess so. I could be turning into a
flic
.”
    Danglard pondered the point.
    “As far as your personal geological make-up is concerned, sir, I reckon you are not eroding normally. I’d put it this way, sir: your soft bits are quite hard and your hard bits are fairly soggy. So the result is rather unique.”
    “Does that make any difference?”
    “All the difference in the world, sir. Soft rocks that resist erosion turn things upside down.”
    Danglard tried to imagine himself in the same light as he put another clip of papers into a hanging file. “So what would happen, sir, if you had a cliff made entirely of soft rock – and let’s say the cliff is a
flic
in this case.”
    “He’d erode into a tiny pebble and then vanish for