Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

by Fred Vargas

  Everyone was in fact so discreet that he realised, with astonishment, that Laliberté could not have thought it necessary to tell the French group about the episode in L’Ecluse. The superintendent had stuck to the sober version of events: an accident caused by bumping into a tree branch in the dark. Adamsberg appreciated this considerate omission, since most people enjoy a good story about their superiors hitting the bottle. Danglard would have taken advantage of his drunken fall, and Noël would have made some meaningful jokes. And since one joke led to another, if news of the incident had reached the ears of Brézillon’s circle, he would have felt the consequences of it in relation to the Favre affair. Ginette was the only person who knew the full story, so that she could bring him medical help, and she too had not breathed a word to anyone else. This tact and restraint must mean that the Chat Room in Ottawa was of minute proportions, whereas in Paris, it tended to overflow the walls of the building and spill out over the pavement terrace of the Brasserie des Philosophes.

  Danglard was the only one who did not enquire about his state of health. The imminence of their take-off that evening had once more plunged him into a state of debilitating panic, which he was doing his best to conceal from their Canadian colleagues.

  Adamsberg passed the final day as a conscientious student under the tuition of Alphonse Philippe-Auguste, who was as unassuming as his surname was grandiose. At three in the afternoon, the superintendent called a halt to the session and brought the sixteen participants in the course together for a summing-up conference and a farewell drink.

  The discreet Sanscartier came up to Adamsberg.

  ‘You had a few too many, the other night, I guess?’ he asked.

  ‘Er, you think?’ said Adamsberg prudently.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me a guy like you just walked into a tree. You’ve got a feel for nature and you knew the path like the back of your hand by then.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So in my book, you had an attack of the blues, because of your problem back home, or something. You downed a few drinks, and that’s why you walked into that branch.’

  Sanscartier was a hands-on policeman, who knew his stuff.

  ‘Does it really matter why I bumped into the branch?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘Yeah, it does. Because when you’ve got the blues, that’s exactly when you start bumping into branches. And if you’re still chasing that devil, you need to keep out of their way. You shouldn’t wait for hell to freeze over to get to the other side, if you dig my meaning. Put out more sail, hang on in there, and go for it.’

  Adamsberg smiled at him.

  ‘You won’t forget me, will you?’ said Sanscartier, as they shook hands. ‘You promised you’re going to let me know when you catch your devil. And could you please send me some almond-scented soap?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I knew this French guy, he had some. I liked the smell.’

  ‘Right, Sanscartier. I’ll send you some.’

  Happiness is a bar of almond-scented soap. For a few seconds, Adamsberg envied the sergeant his simple desires. Almond-scented soap suited him down to the ground. It could have been invented for him.

  In the check-in hall of the airport, Ginette inspected the wound on Adamsberg’s forehead one last time, while he looked anxiously around for Noëlla. The moment of their departure was approaching and there was no sign of her so far. He began to breathe more easily.

  ‘If it hurts in the plane because of the pressure, take some of these,’ said Ginette, giving him some pills. She put the ointment tube in his bag, and told him to go on applying it for a week.

  ‘Don’t forget, now,’ she said, distrustingly.

  Adamsberg kissed her goodbye, then went over to the superintendent.

  ‘Thanks for everything, Aurèle, and thanks especially for not letting on to the colleagues.’

  ‘Christ, Jean-Baptiste, everyone has too much to drink once in a while. Not a good idea to shout it from the rooftops though, otherwise you won’t hear the end of it.’

  The sound of the jet engines produced the same disastrous result on Danglard as on the way out. This time, Adamsberg avoided sitting next to him, but he posted Retancourt behind him, with orders to carry out her mission. Which she did twice during the flight, so that when the plane landed next morning at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, everyone was exhausted, except Danglard, who was as fresh as a daisy. Finding himself alive and well and back on Parisian soil opened up new horizons for him, making him feel both indulgent and optimistic. So before getting on the bus, he came over to Adamsberg.

  ‘I’m really sorry about the other night,’ he said. ‘I apologise sincerely. It wasn’t what I meant to say.’

  Adamsberg gave a vague nod, then all the members of the Brigade dispersed. It was to be a day of rest and recuperation.

  And of getting used to their old existence once more. Compared to the vast expanses of Canada, Paris seemed pinched to Adamsberg, the trees were spindly, the streets crowded with people, and the squirrels like pigeons. Unless, that is, it was he who had shrunk while he had been away. He needed to think, to separate the samples into segments and bands, as he remembered.

  As soon as he was home, he made himself some real coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and attempted something unusual for him, organising his thoughts. A cardboard file card, a pencil, a set of test tubes, and samples of the clouds in his head. The results weren’t really worthy of the laser sequencer. After an hour of effort, he had managed to make only a few notes.

  The dead judge, the trident. Raphaël. Bears’ claws on trees, Pink Lake, devil in holy water. Fossil fish. Vivaldi’s warning. New father, 2 labradors.

  Danglard: ‘In my book, you’re a stupid bastard.’ Sanscartier the Good: ‘Look for your damn demon and until you collar him, lie low.’

  Drunk. Two and a half hours on the trail.

  Noëlla. Seems to be out of the way.

  And that was it. All mixed up, what was more. Only one positive thing came out of all this: he was rid of that crazy girl, which was a satisfying point to end on.

  While unpacking, he found the ointment left him by Ginette Saint-Preux. Not the best souvenir from a trip abroad, although in the tube there seemed to him to be concentrated all the goodwill of his Québécois colleagues. They were bloody good chums. He must absolutely not forget to send the soap to Sanscartier. That suddenly reminded him that he had brought nothing back for Clémentine, not even a bottle of maple syrup.

  XXIX

  THE MASS OF PAPERWORK AWAITING HIM AT THE OFFICE THAT THURSDAY morning, arranged in five high piles on his desk, almost sent him fleeing along the banks of the Seine, even if the Paris river seemed humble and narrow compared to the Ottawa River. But a walk was still a more tempting prospect than ploughing his way through mountains of dossiers.

  His first move was to pin on his bulletin board a postcard of the Ottawa River Falls, surrounded by red maple leaves. Standing back to judge the effect, he found it so inadequate that he immediately took it down. A picture couldn’t convey the glacial wind, the crashing of the water and the furious cackling of the boss of the Canada geese.

  He spent the entire day working through the files, checking, signing, sorting out and learning about the cases which had come to the Crime Squad during the two weeks he had been away. One thug had beaten up another on the boulevard Ney and then pissed on him as a finishing touch. ‘Not a good idea to piss on the body, man.’ So he’d be caught, no problem, thanks to analysis of the piss. Adamsberg countersigned reports by his lieutenants and broke off to visit the coffee machine, and drink a ‘regular’, Paris-style. Mordent, perched on one of the high stools, like a large grey bird on a chimney-stack, was drinking a cup of chocolate.

  ‘I took the liberty of following that case, the Nouvelles d’Alsace one,’ he said, wiping his lips. ‘Vétilleux’s on remand, and he’ll go for trial in three months.’

  ‘He’s not guilty, Mordent. I tried to convince Trabelmann, but h
e just won’t believe me. Nor will anyone else, come to that.’

  ‘Not enough evidence?’

  ‘Not a scrap. The murderer’s someone who melts into thin air and he’s been dodging around in the mist for years now.’

  He did not intend to inform Mordent that the murderer was dead, and thus start losing credibility with his staff one after another. ‘Don’t bother trying to convince them,’ Sanscartier had said.

  ‘So, how are you going to make any progress then?’ asked Mordent.

  ‘I’ll have to wait for him to strike again and try to pin him down before he disappears.’

  ‘Not a very cheering prospect,’ commented Mordent.

  ‘No. But how do you catch a ghost?’

  Curiously enough, Mordent seemed to give serious thought to this question. Adamsberg took a seat alongside him, his legs hanging down from the stool. There were eight of these high stools in the Chat Room and Adamsberg had often thought that if you could get eight people to perch on them, they would look like swallows on the telegraph wires. But so far it hadn’t happened.

  ‘Well, how?’ he asked.

  ‘By irr-it-ating him,’ was Mordent’s reply.

  The commandant always spoke in a very deliberate fashion, detaching each syllable distinctly and sometimes dwelling on one, as if with his finger on a piano key. It was a manner of diction which was both jerky and slow, and it annoyed people in a hurry, but Adamsberg rather liked it.

  ‘And that means?’

  ‘In stories or films, what happens is that a family moves into a haunted house. Until then, the ghost has been quiet, not annoying a-ny-bo-dy.’

  Well, well, Trabelmann wasn’t the only person who liked stories, Mordent did too. Perhaps everybody did, even Brézillon.

  ‘And then what?’ asked Adamsberg, helping himself to a second regular because of his jet-lag, and perching himself back on the stool.

  ‘Then the newcomers start to get on the ghost’s nerves. Why? Because they move in and change everything, cleaning cupboards, opening old trunks, emptying the attic. So they flush him out of his regular haunts. His favourite spots are out of bounds. Or perhaps they discover his most in-tim-ate secret.’

  ‘What secret?’

  ‘It’s always the same: his or-ig-inal sin, his first murder. Because if he hadn’t done something really serious, the character wouldn’t have been doomed to haunt the house for three hundred years. Walling up his wife, killing his brother, something like that. The kind of thing that produces ghosts, you know?’

  ‘Very true, Mordent.’

  ‘Then when he’s in a corner, with no place to go, the ghost gets cross. That’s when things start happening. He starts to appear to people, he takes his revenge, he becomes kind of human. From then on, the struggle can start.’

  ‘The way you talk, anyone would think you believe in ghosts, Mordent. Have you ever come across one?’

  Mordent smiled and stroked his bald head.

  ‘You’re the one who brought up ghosts. I was just making up a story. For my own amusement. But it’s interesting too. Because at the bottom of every story, there’s always something monstrous. Thrashing about in the mud.’

  Pink Lake immediately flashed into Adamsberg’s mind.

  ‘What sort of mud do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, something so traumatic that people daren’t speak of it except in terms of a story. In all those fairy-tale castles, with ghosts, magic cloaks that change colour, and geese that lay golden eggs.’

  Mordent was getting launched as he threw his plastic cup into the bin.

  ‘The main thing is to solve the riddle correctly, and to guess right whenever you have a choice.’

  ‘So you have to annoy the ghost, close off his exits, and uncover the original sin.’

  ‘Ah, well. Easier said than done! Have you read my report on the Quebec course?’

  ‘Read and signed. Anyone would think you’d been there yourself, it’s brilliant. Do you know who guards the main door over there?’

  ‘Yes, a squirrel.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Estalère. It made quite an impression on him. Was he a volunteer or recruited?’

  ‘Who? Estalère?’

  ‘No, the squirrel.’

  ‘Oh, a volunteer on principle. But he found a girlfriend and that started to interfere with his work.’

  ‘Estalère?’

  ‘No, the squirrel.’

  Adamsberg sat back at his desk, thinking about Mordent’s comments. Clear out all the usual hiding places, dislodge, pursue, provoke. Irritate the dead man. Use a laser sword to find out his or-ig-in-al sin. Ride in, sweep across the field, like the hero in a legend. And he hadn’t managed to do it in fourteen years. No horse, no sword, no armour.

  And no time, either. He attacked the second pile of dossiers. At least this workload meant he had not yet exchanged a word with Danglard. He wondered how he was going to manage this new silence between them. The capitaine had certainly offered his apologies, but the ice was still frozen solid. Adamsberg had listened to an international weather forecast that morning, feeling nostalgic for Canada. In Ottawa, the temperature was still about minus 8 in the daytime and minus 12 at night. No thaw in prospect.

  While working on the second pile the next day, the commissaire felt a slight niggle buzzing inside his head, as if he had an insect trapped inside his body, flying about between his shoulders and his stomach. It was a fairly familiar sensation. Not like the sudden panic attacks that had overcome him when the judge had started to surface in his unconscious. No, just a modest little insect, like an annoying fly that needed swatting. Now and then, he took out the index card, to which he had added Mordent’s suggestions for flushing out ghosts. He looked at it, but obviously wasn’t seeing straight, as the barman in L’Ecluse had kindly informed him.

  A slight headache sent him towards the coffee machine at five o’clock. Aha, Adamsberg thought suddenly, rubbing his forehead, I’ve got that dratted insect. That night of the 26th. What was causing the buzzing wasn’t the drink, but the lost two and a half hours. The question had surfaced again with urgency. What the devil had he been up to for all that time on the portage trail? And why was this tiny misplaced fragment of his life, causing him all this worry? He had already filed it away under the heading ‘memory loss occasioned by too much alcohol’. But obviously his mind was unhappy with this filing system, and the missing stretch of time had jumped off the shelf to start nagging away at him.

  Why? Adamsberg wondered, as he stirred his coffee. Was it the idea of losing a chunk out of his life that was so irritating, as if it had been confiscated without permission? Or was it that the alcohol was not enough of an explanation? Or, more seriously, was he worried about what he might have said or done in the missing hours? But why? That sort of worry seemed as pointless as to worry about talking in one’s sleep. What else could he have done, apart from stagger about on the path, fall over, get up again, perhaps even crawling on all fours? Nothing. And yet that insect was still buzzing. Was it just to perplex him or was there some reason?

  All he could dredge up about those hours was not an image but a sensation. And, if he tried to formulate it, a sensation of violence. It must have been the branch that hit him. But how could he be angry with a branch that hadn’t had a drop of alcohol to drink? A passive, sober enemy. Could he say the branch had done him violence? Or was it the other way around?

  Instead of returning to his office, he went to sit on a corner of Danglard’s desk and threw his plastic cup with perfect accuracy into the bin.

  ‘Danglard,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a bee buzzing round in my bonnet.’

  ‘Really?’ said Danglard, cautiously.

  ‘You know the night of Sunday 26 October,’ Adamsberg went on slowly. ‘The night you told me I was a stupid bastard, you remember.’

  The capitaine nodded and prepared for a confrontation. Adamsberg was obviously going to let him have it between the eyes, as they would s
ay in the RCMP. But the conversation did not take the turn he was expecting. As usual, the commissaire surprised him with something quite different.

  ‘Well, that night, I hit my head on a branch, on the trail by the river. It was a really bad knock, an awful wallop.’

  Danglard nodded again. The bruise was still visible, with its covering of yellow antiseptic ointment.

  ‘What you don’t know, is that after we spoke, I went straight to that bar, L’Ecluse, with the aim of getting well and truly drunk. Which I was doing quite effectively, until the good barman threw me out. I was rabbiting on about my grandmother, and he’d had enough.’

  Again Danglard made a discreet sign of understanding, though he had no idea where Adamsberg was heading.

  ‘And when I reached the trail, I just staggered about from tree to tree and that’s why I didn’t manage to avoid the branch.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘But something else you don’t know is that when I hit my head, it was about eleven o’clock, no later. And I was almost half way home, probably not far from the logging site. Where they’re replanting trees?’

  ‘Er, right,’ said Danglard, who had never had the slightest wish to walk along the wild and muddy trail.

  ‘And when I came round, I’d reached the end of the trail. I managed to stagger up to the residence. I told the janitor I’d got into a fight, police versus a gang.’

  ‘Is that what’s bugging you? The drinking?’

  Adamsberg shook his head slowly.

  ‘What you still don’t know, is that between hitting my head and coming to, there was a gap of two and a half hours. The janitor told me the time. Two and a half hours for a trip that would usually take me about half an hour.’

  ‘Right,’ said Danglard again, still maintaining as neutral a tone as possible. ‘Well, it was a tricky bit of walking, wasn’t it?’

  Adamsberg leaned towards him. ‘Which I can’t remember at all,’ he said deliberately. ‘Not a thing, not a memory of sight or sound. Two and a half hours on the trail and it’s a complete blank. And it was minus 12. I can’t have just been unconscious all that time, or I’d have frozen to death.’