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bidding. And Adamsberg was virtually certain that this one had his hand on boot-girl’s shoulder.
    Adamsberg slumped deeper into his armchair. He was not a strapping young fellow. He was not young. His shoulders weren’t broad. His hair wasn’t fair. He entertained not the faintest expectation of being obeyed. That fellow was a whole heap of things that he was not. Maybe his polar opposite. OK, and then so what? Camille must have been having affairs for years with fair-haired men he had never heard of. He had been having other women of every shade for years, too, and it must be said that not one of them had Camille’s peculiar disadvantage of remaining for ever shod in those bloody leather boots of hers. The other women had all worn women’s shoes.
    All right, nice knowing you, end of story. What worried Adamsberg wasn’t the young man, it was whether Camille had finally settled at Saint-Victor. He thought of Camille as forever on the move, across cities, along highways, with a rucksack full of music and monkey wrenches, a woman never halting, never seated, and therefore fundamentally unconquered. Seeing her in that village disturbed him. It made anything possible. For example, that she owned a house there, with a chair, a coffee mug, yes, why not a coffee mug, and a washbasin, and even so much as a bed, with a man in it, and maybe with this man she had a steady, static relationship, standing four-square like a farmhouse table, a simple, wholesome love scrubbed squeaky-clean every day. A stationary Camille, a consenting Camille, Camille at peace and welded to the fair-haired man. Which would mean two coffee mugs not one. And for that matter why not plates, cutlery, pots, lights and – in the worst case – a carpet. Two wholesome big plain squeaky-clean mugs.
    Adamsberg felt himself nodding off. He got up, switched off the TV and the light, took a shower. Two mugs brimful with plain healthy squeaky-clean coffee. Ah, but if things had come to such a pass, how do you account for the boots? What were those boots doing in the story if all Camille did was to walk from bed to table and from table to piano? And from the piano back to bed. With the squeaky-clean blond?
    Adamsberg turned off the water and got dry. Where there’s boots, there’s hope. He rubbed his hair with a towel and caught his own eye in the bathroom mirror. He did think of that girl from time to time. He liked thinking of her, it was as simple as that. It was the same as going out, or going on a trip, seeing something or learning something new, thinking about something else, or putting up a new set for an evening’s show. The “Rambling Lady” show. And when the curtain went down on it he would go back to his usual daydreams, leaving Camille striding along some road or other. This evening’s show about “The woman who’d settled in Saint-Victor with a man with fair hair” had been much less fun. He wouldn’t drop off to sleep tonight, dreaming of her being in bed with him, as he did from time to time, in gaps between affairs. Camille was his imaginary stand-by lover when reality failed to come up to snuff. But right now that blond fellow got in the way.
    Adamsberg stretched out and closed his eyes. That girl in boots was not Camille, who had no business to be leaning against a plane tree in Saint-Victor. The one on the television was certainly called Melanie. As a consequence of which the conquering hero had no right to interfere with
Commissaire
Adamsberg’s inner life.

VIII
    SMALL GROUPS BEGAN to gather in the village square at first light. Johnstone had hurried back to his hills the previous evening. So as to stay in full control of the wolf-pack and to fight with it if need be, to keep all the approach routes to the wildlife refuge under watch, and to protect the wolves from the slightest incursion on their territory. In theory the hunt would not stray far from the village of Saint-Victor; the huntsmen were not supposed to venture up into the