Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (36 page)

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.

He stopped and rubbed his eyes. Lift leaf after leaf in the dark hidden places, Clémentine had said, to find the mushrooms of truth. For now he had to follow up the malformed ear. It was rather like a mushroom in fact. He would have to remain alert, and not let the dark clouds of his thoughts obscure the narrow trail he had to follow. But the categorical affirmation by the doctor about Maxime Leclerc’s age had unsettled him. Same ear, different age. But still, Dr Courtin judged the age of human beings, not ghosts.

Rigour, rigour
and
yet more rigour. Adamsberg clenched his fists in memory of the Québécois superintendent and climbed into the train. When he reached the Gare de l’Est, he knew exactly whom he had to contact in pursuit of the judge’s ear.

XLVI

THE PARISH PRIEST IN HIS VILLAGE ROSE IN THE MORNING WITH THE
farmyard fowls, as Adamsberg’s mother had always said, hoping to make her children follow his example. Adamsberg waited until half-past eight on his two watches to call the priest, since he calculated that he must now be over eighty. He had always seemed rather like a large dog hunting truffles, and Adamsberg hoped that he hadn’t changed. Father Grégoire had spent a lifetime absorbing masses of useless details, since he was delighted with the diversity that the Good Lord had included in the natural world. Adamsberg introduced himself by his surname.

‘Which Adamsberg is this?’

‘The one who used to look at your old books.

       What god, what harvester of eternal summertime,

       Had, as he strolled away, carelessly thrown down

       That golden sickle …’

‘Abandoned, Jean-Baptiste, abandoned, you mean,’ said the priest, without appearing surprised at being telephoned.

‘Thrown down.’

‘Abandoned.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Father. I need to ask you something. I hope I didn’t wake you up.’

‘Oh, I get up when the chickens do, you know. And the older I get … Wait a minute, I have to check. You’ve sown a doubt in my mind.’

Adamsberg sat with the phone in his hand, anxiously. Didn’t
Grégoire understand these days when something was urgent? He was known in the village for being able to spot the slightest worry on the part of one of his parishioners. Nothing could be concealed from Father Grégoire.

‘Thrown down. You were right, Jean-Baptiste,’ said the priest, disappointed. ‘I must be getting old.’

‘Father, do you remember the judge? The one we called the Lord and Master?’

‘Still fretting about him, are you,’ said Grégoire, with reproach in his voice.

‘He’s come back from the dead. I’ll get the old devil by the horns or lose my soul in the attempt.’

‘Jean-Baptiste, don’t talk like that!’ ordered the priest sharply, as if he were still talking to a child. ‘What if God could hear you?’

‘Father, can you remember what his ears looked like?’

‘Do you mean his left ear?’

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg quickly, picking up a pencil. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but that ear was deformed. Not by God, but by doctors.’

‘God sent him into the world with ears sticking out.’

‘But He had also given him great beauty. God shares things out in this world, Jean-Baptiste.’

Adamsberg thought that God was not currently doing his work very well, and that it was a good thing there were Josettes in the world to help sort out the mess.

‘Tell me about the ear,’ he said, hoping Grégoire would not launch into a sermon about God’s mysterious ways.

‘It was big and deformed, with a long lobe. The entrance to the ear was very narrow, and the rim was scarred. Remember the time we got that mosquito out of Raphaël’s ear? We managed it in the end with a lamp, like when you go fishing at night.’

‘I remember very well. It hissed in the flame with a funny little sound, remember?’

‘Yes, I remember, I made a joke about it.’

‘Yes, indeed. But tell me more about the judge. You’re sure his ear was out of shape?’

‘Oh yes. And let me see, he had a wart on his chin, on the right, which must have given him some trouble shaving,’ said Grégoire, who was now launched into instant recall. ‘The right nostril was larger than the left, and his hair grew low down on his cheeks.’

‘How on earth do you do it?’

‘I can describe you as well, if you like.’

‘No thanks, Father. I’ve got enough problems as it is.’

‘The judge is dead, my son, don’t forget. Don’t get into trouble.’

‘I’m doing my best, Father.’

Adamsberg thought about the old priest, sitting at his greasy old wooden table, then returned to the photos with a magnifying glass. Yes, the wart on the chin was visible, as was the irregularity of the nostrils. The old priest’s memory was as efficient as ever, a real telephoto lens into the past. Apart from the problem of the age difference insisted upon by the doctor, it was as if Fulgence had stepped out of the grave. Or had been pulled out by his ear. It was true, he thought, as he looked at the photographs of Fulgence taken at the time of his retirement, that the judge had never looked his age. He had always had much greater strength than one would anticipate and Courtin couldn’t be expected to know that. Maxime Leclerc was no ordinary patient, and by the same token he was no ordinary ghost.

Adamsberg made some more coffee and waited impatiently for Clémentine and Josette to come back from shopping. Now that he had had to leave the sheltering tree trunk of Retancourt, he felt the need of their support and an urge to tell them of any little progress he made.

‘We’ve got him by the tips of his ears, Clémentine,’ he announced as he helped her empty her shopping basket.

‘Aha, it’s like a ball of wool, once you find the end, you just have to pull it.’

‘Shall we try a new line,
commissaire?’
Josette asked.

‘I keep telling you, Josette. He isn’t a policeman any more. It’s a funny old world.’

‘Let’s try the town of Richelieu, Josette. Can you find the name of the doctor who signed the death certificate, sixteen years ago?’

‘Child’s play,’ she said, dismissively.

It took her only twenty minutes to find the GP, Colette Choisel, the judge’s doctor ever since he had come to live in Richelieu. She had examined the body, diagnosed a heart attack, and signed the certificate for the burial.

‘And her address, Josette?’

‘She closed the practice, four months after the judge died.’

‘Retired?’

‘Hardly. She was only forty-eight.’

‘Perfect. Let’s check her out.’

‘That might not be so easy. She has a common enough name. But if she’s sixty-four, she might still be in practice, and then she’d be on the medical register.’

‘And take a look at court records too, to see if her name crops up.’

‘If she had a record, she wouldn’t be able to practise.’