Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (2 page)

‘They still wear red coats?’

‘Just for the tourists these days. If you’re so impatient to get there, you ought to know what you’re getting into.’

Adamsberg gave a broad smile and Danglard dropped his eyes. He didn’t like Adamsberg smiling when he himself had decided to be in a bad mood. Because, as they said in the Chat Room (the broom cupboard that contained the coffee machine and snack dispenser), Adamsberg’s smile pulverised objections and would melt the ice of the Arctic. And Danglard felt himself melting too, just like a girl, which since he was over fifty, put him out of temper.

‘I do know that the Mounties or whatever you call them have a base on the Ottawa River,’ Adamsberg remarked. ‘And that you get wild geese there.’

Danglard swallowed a mouthful of white wine and smiled grimly.

‘Canada geese, I expect you mean,’ he pointed out. ‘And the Ottawa isn’t really a river. It may be much bigger than the Seine, but it’s just a tributary, a feeder for the St Lawrence.’

‘Well, all right, a feeder. You know too much about it to back out now, Danglard. You’re part of the expedition, and you’ll come with us. But just reassure me it wasn’t you that sabotaged the heating system the other night, or murdered the repairman to stop him getting here.’

Danglard looked up indignantly.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘To petrify our energy and freeze our intentions of going on a Canadian adventure.’

‘Me? Sabotage? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Just a little mini-sabotage. Better a broken-down boiler than a midair explosion. That’s the real reason you don’t want to come, isn’t it?’

Danglard suddenly banged his fist on the table and drops of wine splashed on to the reports. Adamsberg jumped. Danglard could mutter, grumble and sulk in silence, all very controlled ways of expressing his disapproval, if he had to, but he was above all a courteous and polite colleague, whose goodwill was both limitless and discreet. Except on one topic, and Adamsberg stiffened in anticipation.

‘My real reason?’ said Danglard bitterly, his fist still clenched on the table. ‘What the fuck do you care about my real reason? I’m not in charge of this squad, it’s not me that’s taking us all over there to fool about in the snow like idiots, for Christ’s sake.’

Adamsberg nodded. It was the first time in all their years that Danglard had said ‘fuck’ to his face. OK. He wasn’t upset, thanks to his own abnormally mild and unconcerned nature, which some people called indifference and lack of interest, and which could get on the nerves of anyone who tried to penetrate the cloud.

‘Let me remind you, Danglard, that this is an exceptional chance to collaborate with one of the best systems in the world. The Canadians are light years ahead of us on this one. We’d look like idiots if we turned it down now.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. Don’t tell me it’s your professional work ethic that’s making you take us out to the icefields.’

‘Of course it is.’

Danglard downed the rest of the wine in a gulp and glared at Adamsberg with an aggressive tilt of his chin.

‘What other reason would there be?’ Adamsberg asked, softly.

‘Your
reason. Your real reason. Let’s hear about that, instead of accusing me of sabotage. What about
your
sabotage?’

Aha, thought Adamsberg. We’re getting there at last.

Danglard stood up abruptly, opened a drawer, took out the wine bottle and poured another large helping into his plastic cup. Then he began to pace round the room. Adamsberg folded his arms and waited for the storm to break. It would be no use arguing with this combination of anger and wine. The anger was about to explode, one year on.

‘Come on, Danglard, out with it.’

‘OK, you asked for it. Camille. Camille is in Montreal, and you know it. And that’s the only reason you want us to fly the fucking Atlantic.’

‘That’s what all this is about?’

‘Precisely.’

‘It’s none of your business,
capitaine.’

‘Oh no?’ shouted Danglard. ‘A year ago, Camille disappeared. She flew out of your life, thanks to one of those diabolical acts of sabotage that you’re so good at. And who wanted to find her? Who was it? You or me?’

‘Me.’

‘And who tracked her down? Found her? Gave you her address in Lisbon? You or me?’

Adamsberg got up and closed the office door. Danglard had always venerated Camille, whom he protected and cherished as if she were a work of art. There was no way he would stop doing that. And his protective adoration was on a collision course with Adamsberg’s dishevelled way of life.

‘You,’ he replied, calmly.

‘Exactly. So it
is
my business.’

‘Not so loud, Danglard. I can hear you perfectly well, there’s no need to shout.’

This time, the special timbre of Adamsberg’s voice seemed to do the trick. Like some sort of magic medicine, the
commissaire
’s voice patterns seemed to wrap his interlocutor in softness, releasing the tension, or producing a feeling of serenity or even complete anaesthesia.
Lieutenant
Voisenet, who had trained as a chemist, had often raised the matter in the Chat Room, but nobody had been able to identify what soothing ingredient it was that went into Adamsberg’s voice. Thyme, royal jelly, beeswax, all of them? At any rate, Danglard dropped his voice somewhat.

‘And who,’ he went on, less loudly, ‘went rushing off to Lisbon, and ruined all the good work in about three days?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s right, you did. An act of pure folly.’

‘But not your business.’

Adamsberg got up, and fired the plastic cup into the rubbish bin, bang in the middle. As if he was aiming for it. He walked out evenly, without turning back.

Danglard pursed his lips. He knew he had overstepped the line, trespassed too far on to forbidden territory. But exasperated by months of disapproval, exacerbated by the Quebec business, he had been unable to hold back. He rubbed his cheek with his rough woollen gloves, hesitating, and weighing up those months of heavy silence, of lies, and possibly of betrayal. Good or bad. Between his fingers, he caught sight of the map of Quebec spread out on the table. What was the point of getting worked up? In a week’s time he would be dead, and so would Adamsberg. The starlings would have been sucked into the left-hand engine, which would have burst into flames, and the plane would have exploded over the Atlantic. He picked up the bottle and took a swig of wine. Then he picked up the phone and called the heating engineer.

II

ADAMSBERG CAME ACROSS VIOLETTE RETANCOURT AT THE COFFEE
machine. He stood back, waiting for his heftiest officer to take her cup from the machine’s udder – since in his mind the drinks dispenser was a kind of dairy cow, tethered inside the Crime Squad’s offices, like a silent mother watching over them all, the reason he was so fond of it. But Retancourt slipped away as soon as she saw him. Hey ho, thought Adamsberg, putting his plastic cup under the spout, it really isn’t my day.

His day or not,
Lieutenant
Retancourt was a rare bird. Adamsberg had absolutely no complaints about this statuesque woman of thirty-five, 1.79m tall, and weighing 110 kilos, who was as intelligent as she was strong, and capable, as she had reminded him, of channelling her energy in any direction. And indeed, the range of actions which Retancourt had accomplished in the past year, displaying a striking force of terrifying proportions, had made her one of the pillars of the squad, its all-purpose 4 × 4 war-machine, whether for brainpower, tactics, administration, combat or marksmanship. But Violette Retancourt did not care for Adamsberg. She showed him no hostility; she simply avoided him.

Adamsberg picked up his plastic beaker of coffee, patted the machine gently as a sign of filial gratefulness, and returned to his office, hardly allowing Danglard’s outburst to enter his mind. He did not intend spending hours of his time calming his deputy down, whether it was over Camille or a Boeing 747. He would simply rather not have learnt that Camille was in Montreal, something which he hadn’t known, and which
now cast a slight shadow over the Quebec trip, to which he had been looking forward. He would rather Danglard had not revived those images which he had expelled into the corners of his eyes, into the gentle miasma of oblivion, where the sharp jawline, the childlike lips and the pale skin of Camille, daughter of the north, had become greyed-over and misty. He would rather his deputy had not revived the memory of a love which he was gradually and gently allowing to fall apart in favour of the different landscapes offered by other women. There was no getting away from it, Adamsberg was a compulsive chaser after girls, a collector of young bodies, and, naturally, that was something that upset Camille. He had often seen her put her hands over her ears after one of his escapades, as if her melodious lover had scratched his nails on a blackboard, introducing an unbearable dissonance into the delicate scoring laid out for him. Camille was a musician, which explained it.

Sitting sideways on his office chair, he blew on his coffee, looking at the noticeboard covered with reports, urgent messages and, in the centre, notes about the objectives of the Quebec expedition. Three sheets of paper, neatly lined up and attached with three red drawing pins. Genetic fingerprints, sweat, urine, computers, maple leaves, forests, lakes, caribou. Tomorrow he would sign the mission orders, and in a week’s time he would be taking off for Canada. He smiled and sipped his coffee, feeling settled and even happy.

Then suddenly, he experienced once more that cold sweat on the back of his neck, the same dread coming over him, the cat jumping on to his shoulders. He bowed his head under the shock, and carefully put the coffee cup on the table. The second sudden turn in less than an hour, an alien feeling of trouble, like the unexpected arrival of a stranger setting off an alarm or a panic button. He forced himself to stand up and take a few steps. Apart from the shock and sweat, his body seemed to be behaving normally. He ran his hands over his face, relaxing the skin and massaging his neck. A sort of convulsive defence reflex. The sharp bite of some distress, a warning of a threat, making his body react to it. And
now he was able to move more easily, but was still left with an inexpressible feeling of sorrow, like a dark sediment that the wave leaves behind when it ebbs.

He finished his coffee and put his chin in his hands. He had many times failed to understand his actions, but now for the first time he felt he had lost touch with himself. It was the first time that he had reeled for a few seconds, as if some stowaway had slipped into his head and taken charge. For of that he was certain. There was a clandestine passenger aboard. Any sane person would have explained that this was absurd, and suggested he was coming down with flu. But Adamsberg diagnosed something very different, the brief intrusion of a dangerous unknown being, who wished him no good.

He opened the cupboard and took out an old pair of trainers. This time a short walk and a few moments daydreaming would not help. He would have to run, for hours if necessary, straight down towards the Seine, then along the embankment. And as he ran, he would try to shake off his pursuer, throwing him into the waters of the river, or perhaps transferring him to someone else, why not?

III

CLEANSED, EXHAUSTED AND SHOWERED, ADAMSBERG DECIDED TO EAT A
meal at the
Liffey Water
, a dark bar whose noisy atmosphere and acrid smell had often punctuated his excursions round Paris. He understood not a word uttered by the other customers, who were almost exclusively Irish, so the pub offered the unique advantage of a warm human ambiance along with complete solitude. He found his usual table, sticky with beer and smelling of Guinness, and recognised the barmaid, Enid, whom he asked to bring him some roast pork and potatoes. Enid served the dishes up using an ancient metal fork, which Adamsberg liked, with its polished wooden handle and three irregular prongs. He was watching her put his meat on the plate, when the stowaway in his mind suddenly returned, but now with the force of a rapist. This time, he seemed to detect the attack a fraction of a second before it struck. Fists clenched on the table, he tried to resist the intrusion. He tensed his whole body, calling up different thoughts, imagining red maple leaves. Nothing worked, and the sense of dread swept through him like a tornado destroying a field, sudden, unstoppable and violent. And then carelessly, it abandoned its prey, going on to wreak havoc elsewhere.

When he was capable of unclenching his hands, he picked up his knife and fork, but could no longer touch the food. The deposit of distress that the tornado had left behind had taken away his appetite. He apologised to Enid and went out into the street, walking at random and without any sense of purpose. The memory flashed into his head of a great-uncle,
who when he was ill, would go and curl up in a ball in some hollow rock in the Pyrenees until it was over. Then the old man would uncurl and come back to life, the fever having passed from him and been swallowed by the rock. Adamsberg smiled. In this huge city he could find no den to curl up in like a bear, no hollow in the rock that would drain the fever and eat his stowaway alive. Perhaps in any case the stranger had jumped on to the shoulders of one of his Irish neighbours in the pub.

His friend Ferez, the psychiatrist, would no doubt have tried to identify the mechanism that was provoking the intrusion. He would try to probe the hidden chagrin, the unavowed pain walled up inside Adamsberg and shaking its chains like a prisoner, causing these sudden sweats, clenched muscles and a singing in his ears that made him flinch. That’s what Ferez would have said, with the sympathetic pleasure he took in unusual cases. He would say, now what were you talking about when the first cat jumped on to your shoulders? Perhaps about Camille? Or about Quebec?

Adamsberg stopped on the pavement, searching his memory, trying to think what he had been saying to Danglard when the first cold sweat had broken out on his neck. Rembrandt, yes, that was it. He had been thinking about Rembrandt, and the absence of shades of dark and light in the D’Hernoncourt case. It was just then. So, it was well before any talk of Camille or Canada. Above all, he would have had to explain to Ferez that never before had any worry of that kind made a vicious cat spring on his back. This was something new, never experienced, quite unprecedented. And the shocks had recurred at different times and in different circumstances, without any apparent link between them. What connection could there be between his kindly Enid and Danglard, between the table at the
Liffey Water
pub and his own bulletin board? Between the noisy crowd in the bar and his quiet office? None at all. Even someone as quick on the uptake as Ferez would be quite lost. And he would refuse to believe that an alien had climbed on board. Adamsberg ran his hands through his hair, then rubbed his arms and legs energetically, trying to revive his body. He set off once more, making an effort
to use his normal inner resources: walking round quietly, observing passers-by with detachment, letting his mind float like a log on the surface of the river.