Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

by Fred Vargas

  ‘All I can tell you for now is that your Alexandre Clar never existed, nor did Lucien Legrand or Auguste Primat. They’re all false names. I haven’t had time to do any more, because of this business with the divisionnaire. And we’ve got a homicide, rue du Château. Some political connection. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back on to the disciple. Sorry, commissaire.’

  Adamsberg hung up, overcome by a wave of despair. Just because the janitor couldn’t sleep. And Laliberté’s conclusions were perfectly logical.

  The thin thread of hope to which he had been clinging had snapped. His confidence had collapsed with it. There was no traitor, no conspiracy. Nobody had told the superintendent about his memory loss. So logically, nobody could have taken it from him. There was no third man, plotting away in the dark against him. He had been alone on the trail, with the trident in easy reach, and Noëlla threatening him with all kinds of things. And he had had that murderous folly in his mind. Like his brother. Or in his brother’s footsteps perhaps.

  Clémentine came to sit by him, without speaking, bringing him a glass of port.

  ‘What is it, m’dear?’

  Adamsberg told her in a dead voice, staring at the floor.

  ‘Now that’s the flics’ way of looking at things,’ she said gently. ‘Your ideas are different.’

  ‘But it means I was the only one there, Clémentine.’

  ‘How do you know that, m’dear, since you can’t remember anything? You’ve got this ghost cornered, you and Josette now, haven’t you?’

  ‘What does that change though, Clémentine? I was on my own.’

  ‘You’re just tormenting yourself, and that’s the long and short of it,’ said Clémentine, putting the glass in his hand, ‘and it’s no good twisting the knife in the wound, m’dear. You’d do better to go back to our Josette and her computer stuff, and drink up this port for me.’

  Josette had been standing by the fire, without saying anything. She seemed about to speak, then hesitated.

  ‘Come on, Josette, out with it,’ said Clémentine, shifting the cigarette in her mouth. ‘You know you shouldn’t keep it to yourself.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure if I should say,’ Josette explained.

  ‘M’dear, we’re long past the point of being shy here, can’t you see?’

  ‘Well, what I thought was that if Monsieur Danglard – that’s his name, isn’t it? – if he can’t look for the murders, we could have a try ourselves. The trouble is, it means, er, going into the records of the gendarmerie.’

  ‘And what would be wrong with that?’

  ‘Monsieur here is a commissaire.’

  ‘Josette, how many times do I have to tell you? He’s no policeman any more. And what’s more, m’dear, the police and the gendarmes, they’re two different systems.’

  Adamsberg, looking distracted, glanced up at the little old woman.

  ‘Could you really do that, Josette?’

  ‘I did get into the FBI archives once, just for fun,’ she admitted shyly.

  ‘No need to look so shy, Josette. It’s no sin to do good for other folks.’

  Adamsberg looked in even greater astonishment at this frail old woman, one-third society lady, one-third shy little creature, and one-third seasoned hacker.

  * * *

  After dinner, which Clémentine had forced Adamsberg to eat, Josette tried the crime files. She had noted on a piece of paper spring 1993, winter 1997 and autumn 1999. From time to time, Adamsberg went over to see how she was getting on. In the evenings, she changed from her tennis shoes into huge velvety grey slippers, which made her feet look like those of a baby elephant.

  ‘Very well protected, I guess,’ he said.

  ‘Firewalls everywhere, but you’d expect that. If they had a dossier on me, I wouldn’t like it to be available to the first old lady who comes along.’

  Clémentine had gone to bed, and Adamsberg stood by the chimney, twisting his hands and staring into the embers. He did not hear Josette come up behind him in her big slippers. With her hacker’s silent footsteps.

  ‘Here you are, commissaire,’ she said, handing him a sheet of paper with the modesty of one who has done a good job of work, and does not realise how talented she is, as if she had simply been stirring a bechamel sauce. In March 1993, thirty-three kilometres from Saint-Fulgent, a 40-year-old woman, Ghislaine Matère, had been killed in her house, stabbed three times. She lived alone, out in the country. In February 1997, twenty-four kilometres from Pionsat, a girl had been killed with three blows to the stomach. Sylviane Brasillier had been waiting at a bus stop late on a Sunday evening. In September 1999, 66-year-old Joseph Fevre had been murdered, thirty kilometres from Solesmes. With three stab wounds.

  ‘And was anyone charged?’ asked Adamsberg, looking at the sheet.

  ‘Here we are. In the first case, a woman, who lived in a forest hut. She was generally regarded as a witch in the neighbourhood, and was certainly a bit touched, and given to drink. In the second case, they arrested an unemployed man who was always round the bars in Saint-Eloy-les-Mines. For the Fevre murder, they found a gamekeeper, out for the count on a bench in a suburb of Cambrai, dead drunk and with the knife in his pocket.’

  ‘Memory loss?’

  ‘All three.’

  ‘New weapons?’

  ‘All three.’

  ‘Brilliant, Josette! We’ve got a trail as clear as daylight now, from Le Castelet-les-Ormes in 1949 to Schiltigheim. Twelve murders. Twelve, Josette! Good God!’

  ‘Thirteen, with the one in Quebec.’

  ‘I was alone there though, Josette.’

  ‘You and your colleague were talking about a disciple. If he did four murders after the judge died, why mightn’t he have been able to kill someone in Quebec?’

  ‘For a very simple reason, Josette. If he bothered to come all the way to Quebec, it would be in order to trap me, like the other scapegoats. And if a disciple had taken over Fulgence’s mission, it would be out of veneration for the judge and a wish to complete his wishes. But whoever it was, even a fanatical follower of his couldn’t have the same thought processes as Fulgence himself. The judge hated me personally. He wanted me out of the way. But a disciple couldn’t have hated me as much, he wouldn’t know me. Finishing some kind of series is one thing, but killing someone to do a favour for a dead man doesn’t make sense. I don’t buy that. That’s why I tell you, I was alone on that path.’

  ‘Clémentine says that’s depression talking.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s got something real behind it. And if there is a disciple, he can’t be very old. Veneration is a youthful emotion. He might be, say, thirty to forty years old. Men of that generation don’t smoke pipes, or hardly ever. The man who lived in the Schloss smoked a pipe, and his hair was white. Josette, I have to tell you, I don’t believe in a disciple. I’ve reached a dead end.’

  Josette twitched her grey slipper up and down on the ancient brick floor.

  ‘Unless,’ she said after a minute or two, ‘you believe in people coming back from the dead.’

  ‘Unless, as you say.’

  They both fell silent for some time. Josette poked the fire.

  ‘Are you tired, Josette, my dear?’ asked Adamsberg, surprised to find himself falling into Clémentine’s way of speaking.

  ‘I’m often up all night.’

  ‘Take this man, Maxime Leclerc, Auguste Primat, whatever he calls himself. Since the judge’s death, he’s been invisible. Either the disciple wants to prolong the image of Fulgence in some way, or our back-from-the-dead person doesn’t want anyone to see his face.’

  ‘Because he’s dead.’

  ‘Yes. In four years, nobody clapped eyes on Maxime Leclerc. Not the estate agents, not the cleaning lady, not the gardener, not the postman. Every contact outside the house was through the cleaning lady. The owner of the house communicated with her by notes, occasionally by phone. So it is possible to avoid being seen, because he managed it successfully. But you see, Jos
ette, I don’t think it’s possible for someone to stay totally invisible. Maybe for two years, but surely not for five, let alone sixteen. It could work, but only if nothing unexpected ever happened, none of the little accidents of everyday life. In sixteen years, something like that has got to have happened. If we go back over the sixteen years, we ought to be able to find something.’

  Josette was listening, in conscientious hacker mode, for more precise instructions, her head and her grey slippers making little movements.

  ‘I’m thinking maybe a doctor, Josette. Let’s suppose our man has some health problem, a fall for instance, or an injury. If something serious happens, you have to make an emergency call. But our man wouldn’t call the local doctor. He’d call one of those telephone services, SOS-Médecins or something, where you get a stranger, a mobile team. You see them once, and then they forget all about you.’

  ‘I see. But they probably don’t keep much in the way of records, certainly not more than a few years.’

  ‘Well, that means concentrating on Maxime Leclerc. So if we tried a search for the emergency services of the Bas-Rhin département, we might unearth a doctor’s visit to the Schloss.’

  Josette put the poker down, adjusted her earrings and pushed up the sleeves of her cashmere sweater. It was one in the morning when she switched the computer back on. Adamsberg stayed by the fire, piling on a couple more logs, as tense as an expectant father. His new superstition was to keep away from Josette while she operated her magic lamp. If he stood over her, he was afraid of witnessing the expressions of disappointment on her face. He sat motionless, still plunged into the hell of the portage trail. His only hope was the tiny glimmer resulting from these painstaking explorations by the old lady. Which he was carefully gathering, and putting into the process wells of his mind. Hoping that the protective devices would all crumble, as his little hacker went about her work with her magic lantern. He had noted the various terms she used to describe the levels of resistance in ascending order of difficulty: password protected, locked, key-chained, firewalled, barbed wire, concrete. And she had tunnelled under the defences of the FBI. He raised his head as he heard the shuffle of slippers in the narrow corridor.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Josette. ‘It was locked, but not impregnable.’

  ‘Tell me quickly, what did you get?’ said Adamsberg, his heart pounding.

  ‘Maxime Leclerc called the emergency services two years ago, on 17 August at 14.40. He had seven wasp stings, which had made his neck and jaw swell up. Seven, that’s a lot. The doctor arrived very fast. He came back again at eight o’clock, and gave him another anti-histamine injection. I’ve got the name of the doctor, Vincent Courtin. I took the liberty of finding out his address and telephone number.’

  Adamsberg put his hands on Josette’s shoulders. He could feel her slender bones.

  ‘These last few days, my life has been in the hands of magical women. They’ve been tossing me from one to another, and every time they save me from falling into the abyss.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’ asked Josette, seriously.

  He woke his deputy up at two in the morning.

  ‘Stay where you are, Danglard. I just want to give you a message.’

  ‘I’m still sleeping. Fire away.’

  ‘When the judge died, there must have been some press photos. Can you get me four, two in profile, one full-face, and one three-quarters, if they exist, and get the lab to age the face for me.’

  ‘There are plenty of drawings of skull types in any good dictionary.’

  ‘Danglard, this is serious, and it’s urgent. Can you get a fifth picture, full face, and have them augment it with swellings, as if the man had been stung by wasps.’

  ‘If it amuses you,’ said Danglard, resignedly.

  ‘Can you get them to me as quickly as possible? Don’t bother about the missing murders. I’ve got them, all three, and I’ll send you the names of the new victims. For now, go back to sleep, capitaine.’

  ‘I already have.’

  XLV

  FOR HIS FALSE POLICE BADGE, BRÉZILLON HAD GIVEN HIM A NAME HE found hard to remember. Adamsberg repeated it to himself under his breath, before he called the doctor. He took out his mobile carefully. Since his hacker had ‘improved’ his phone, it had six bits of red and green wire sticking out of it like an insect’s legs, and two little switches, to change frequency, which looked like eyes on each side. Adamsberg handled it as if it was a mysterious scarab beetle. When he called, on Saturday at ten in the morning, he found Dr Courtin at home.

  ‘Commissaire Denis Lamproie,’ Adamsberg announced, ‘Paris Serious Crime Squad.’

  Doctors, from long experience of being called on in connection with autopsies and burials, generally react calmly to a call from the police.

  ‘How can I help you?’ Dr Courtin said, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Two years ago, on 17 August, you treated an emergency patient about twenty kilometres from Schiltigheim, in a property called Das Schloss.’

  ‘I’ll stop you right there, commissaire. I can’t recall the names of my emergency patients. I sometimes do up to twenty calls a day and I hardly ever see those people again.’

  ‘I realise that, but this man had seven wasp stings. He had an allergic reaction and needed two injections, one in the afternoon and again in the evening.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I do remember that one, because you don’t usually get a lot of wasp stings all at once. Tell you the truth, I was quite anxious about the old guy. He lived alone. He was as stubborn as hell, and didn’t want me to see him again after the first injection. But I called back at the end of the day, and he had to let me in, because he was still having difficulty breathing.’

  ‘Could you describe him, doctor?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I see hundreds of faces. He was elderly, tall, white hair, rather offhand in manner I seem to recall. I couldn’t say more, because of course his face was all swollen with the stings.’

  ‘I have some photos.’

  ‘Frankly, commissaire, you’d be wasting your time. I can’t remember much about him, it’s just that the wasp stings did stick in my mind.’

  By early afternoon, Adamsberg was on his way to the Gare de l’Est, with his photographs of the judge, artificially aged. Off to Strasbourg again. In order to keep his face and his bald patch hidden, he had put on a Canadian lumberman’s cap with earflaps which Basile had bought him in Montreal. It was too warm for the milder temperatures which had returned to France. The doctor would probably think it odd if he kept it on. Courtin did not appreciate having this forced consultation, and Adamsberg had the impression he was spoiling his weekend.

  The two men sat down at a table covered with papers. Courtin was quite young, though already putting on weight, and his normal expression seemed to be grumpy. The old man and the wasps did not inspire him with any curiosity, and he did not ask the reason for the enquiries. Adamsberg spread out the photographs of the judge. ‘The ageing and the swelling are artificial,’ he explained. ‘Does he look familiar?’

  ‘Commissaire,’ the doctor asked, ‘don’t you want to take off your hat?’

  ‘Yes, I do, actually,’ said Adamsberg who was dripping with sweat under the Arctic headgear. ‘To tell you the truth, I caught fleas from a prisoner in a cell, and half of my hair has been shaved off.’

  ‘Funny way of dealing with it,’ said the doctor, after Adamsberg had taken off the cap. ‘Why didn’t they shave the whole head?’

  ‘A friend did it for me, an ex-monk.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the doctor with a shrug. He shook himself and turned back to the photographs.

  ‘This one,’ he said, pointing to a photograph of the judge in left profile. ‘That’s the fellow with the wasps.’

  ‘I thought you only had a vague memory of him.’

  ‘Him yes, but his ear I remember very well. Doctors tend to remember abnormalities. And I certainly remember his left ear.’

  ‘What’s the matter with
it?’ asked Adamsberg.

  ‘Look at the way it’s lying. He must have had protruding ears in his youth. In those days, the operation was a bit dodgy. The scar has turned into a lump and the outer surface of the ear is deformed.’

  The press photographs dated from the time when the judge was still in post. He had had short hair in those days, and his ears were clearly visible. Adamsberg had known him only when he had retired, and his hair was longer.

  ‘He had long hair, but I had to lift it up to see how far the swelling went,’ the doctor explained, ’so I noticed the malformation. As for the rest of the face, well it could be him, I suppose, same type.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure, doctor?’

  ‘I’m sure that that ear has been operated on, and that the scar didn’t heal properly. And I’m also sure that the right ear wasn’t the same way, as you can see in the photos. I remember looking at the left one with some curiosity. But he wouldn’t be the only man in France with a misshapen left ear. See what I mean? Still, it’s not all that common. Normally, both ears would have been left looking the same shape after the operation. You don’t often get a bad reaction on one side and not the other. So all I can say is that this corresponds to my memory of your Maxime Leclerc.’

  ‘Two years ago, he would have been about ninety-seven. Very old indeed. Does that correspond too?’

  At this, the doctor shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Good Lord, no! He couldn’t have been over, oh say, eighty-five.’ The doctor looked incredulous. ‘Never in his nineties.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Adamsberg in surprise.

  ‘Absolutely. If he’d been ninety-seven, I’d never have left him on his own with seven wasp stings. I’d have hospitalised him right away.’

  ‘But Maxime Leclerc was born in 1904,’ Adamsberg insisted. ‘He’d been retired about thirty years.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the doctor. ‘No doubt whatsoever in my mind. Take off about fifteen years.’

  Adamsberg avoided the cathedral, for fear of seeing Nessie in the doorway, along with the dragon or the fish from Pink Lake swimming out of a window.