Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (40 page)

‘With a trident?’

‘That’s what the police thought, because it looked that way and the fork had disappeared. That fork, it was a bit special. Gérard, he were always messing about with it, sharpening the points in the fire. He looked after his tools, that man. Once when he was digging, he broke a point off. Think he’d throw it away? Oh no, soldered it back on. Knew what he was about in metalwork, of course. And carved stuff on the handle and all. She didn’t like that either, the wife. Thought it was stupid. I don’t say it were art, but it were pretty enough, the handle.’

‘What kind of thing did he carve?’

‘Like in school. Stars, suns, flowers. Nothing too fancy, I s’pose, but Gérard that’s how he was. Liked to make things nice. Same thing with his spade, his pick, his shovel. You couldn’t mistake his tools for anyone else’s. I’ve still got the spade, kept it as a souvenir when he died. Oh, salt of the earth, Gérard was.’

The old man went out and fetched a spade, polished by years of use. Adamsberg examined the glossy handle, with its hundreds of tiny patterns carved into the wood, covered now with the patina of age.

‘Yes, it is pretty,’ he said sincerely, running his fingers over the handle. ‘I can see why you keep it, André.’

‘Makes me sad to think of him. Always a kindly word, or a joke. But not her. No, nobody missed her. I always wonder whether she didn’t do it. And whether Roland knew about it.’

‘Do what, André?’

‘Split the boards in the boat,’ the old man muttered, taking back his spade.

The mayor had driven Adamsberg in his van to Orleans station. As he sat in the freezing cold waiting-room, he chewed mechanically on some
bread to mop up the eau-de-vie which was burning his guts, much as André’s words were burning in his brain. A humiliated father with a mutilated hand, and an ambitious and scornful mother. The future judge growing up caught between them, having a twisted boyhood, making him eager to wipe out his father’s weakness, to transform it into strength. Killing her with the trident, which echoed the father’s deformed hand, now turned into an instrument of total power. Fulgence seemed to have inherited from his mother the urge to dominate others and from his father the unbearable frustrations of a weak man. Every blow dealt with the trident restored the strength and courage of Gérard Guillaumond, who had been defeated and then swallowed up in the mud of the marsh. The last laugh.

So of course the killer would not want to abandon the decorated handle of the weapon. It was the hand of the father. But why then had he not gone on attacking mother-figures? If he hated his mother, one would have expected him to target women in middle age, bossy, maternal figures. But in the list of those killed, there were as many men as women, and they were all ages, from teenagers to old people. Even among the women, there were young girls, quite unlike Marie Guillaumond. Was he trying to extend his power to the whole human race, by striking at random? Adamsberg chewed some more brown bread, shaking his head. This rage to destroy must have some other logic. It wasn’t just wiping out the humiliation, it was amplifying the judge’s power, like his choice of name. It was building a kind of rampart, a defence against any decline. But how could stabbing an old man to death with a fork bring Fulgence that kind of sensation?

Adamsberg suddenly felt the need to call Trabelmann and tell him that after tracking down the ear, he had extracted the judge’s whole body from the dead, and was now moving inside his head. A head he had promised to bring him on the end of a trident, in order to save poor old Vétilleux in his cell. When he remembered the aggressive behaviour of the
commandant
of
gendarmes
, Adamsberg felt an urge to stuff him into one of the windows of Strasbourg Cathedral as well. Just one third of him, up to the waist. Then he’d be face to face with the dragons of fairy stories, the Loch Ness monster, the fish from Pink Lake, the toads, the lamprey, and
all the other creatures which Adamsberg was using to turn the jewel of Gothic architecture into a menagerie.

But that would not wipe out the
commandant’s
words. If it could, everyone would use this handy way of dealing with annoyances and there wouldn’t be a single free church window in the country, even in the tiniest chapel. No, he couldn’t wipe out that memory so easily. No doubt because Trabelmann was not so very far off the truth. A truth which he was skirting round gingerly, thanks to the extra impetus from Retancourt in the cafe on the Place du Châtelet. And when his blonde
lieutenant
gave you a push, it went through your brain like a drill. But Trabelmann had been talking about the wrong ego. Because there’s self and self, he thought as he walked along the platform. Self and brother. Was it perhaps true that the absolute protection he felt he ought to have given Raphaël had kept him in orbit, far from earth, far from other people in any case, in a kind of weightless existence? And the same went for his relations with women too, of course. To allow himself to get carried away would have been to abandon Raphaël to die alone in his cave. And that was impossible. So it might explain why he had always fled from love, and even destroyed it? Had he really gone that far?

He watched as the train came into the station. That was a deep and dark question that took him straight back to the horrors of the portage trail. Where there was no evidence that the Trident had ever set foot.

As he turned into Clémentine’s little sidestreet, he snapped his fingers. He must tell Danglard about the frogs in Collery. He would certainly be glad to hear it worked with frogs as well. Ploff, bang! A slightly different sound.

L

BUT IT WASN’T THE MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT FROGS. ALMOST AS SOON
as he got in, a call from Retancourt informed him that Michel Sartonna, the young man in charge of cleaning the departmental office, had been found murdered. He normally came in to work between five and nine in the evening. When he had not been seen for two days, someone was sent round to his flat. He had been shot dead, with two bullets in the chest from a handgun with a silencer, some time between Monday night and Tuesday morning.

‘Could it have been a gangland killing,
lieutenant?
I had the feeling Michel was into drug dealing.’

‘If so, he wasn’t rich. Except for a large sum of money deposited in his bank on 13 October, four days after the news item appeared in the
Nouvelles d’Alsace
. And there was a brand new laptop in his flat. I should also say that he’d put in for two weeks’ leave, without warning, which exactly tallies with the dates we were in Quebec.’

‘You’re thinking he was the mole, Retancourt? But I thought we’d established there wasn’t one.’

‘Well, we might have to think again. Michel could have been contacted after Schiltigheim, and been paid to do some spying, and perhaps follow us out to Quebec. And it might have been him who got into your flat.’

‘And then killed Noëlla on the path?’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t believe that, Retancourt. Even if we suppose there was someone else there, the judge would hardly have left it to someone like Michel to carry out such a refined kind of vengeance. And certainly not with the trident.’

‘Danglard doesn’t think so either, actually.’

‘As for murder with a gun, that doesn’t sound like the judge.’

‘I’ve told you what I think about that. A gun is OK for outsiders, murders that don’t fit the scheme. No need to use the trident on Michel. My guess is that the stupid boy misjudged his contact, asked for too much money or maybe even threatened blackmail. Or perhaps the judge just wanted to get him out of the way.’

‘If it was the judge.’

‘We took a look at Michel’s laptop. The hard disk’s empty, or rather it’s been wiped. Our computer people are coming tomorrow to see if they can resurrect anything.’

‘What about his dog?’ Adamsberg asked, surprising himself by his concern for the large dog that went everywhere with Michel.

‘Shot as well.’

‘Retancourt, since you’re going to send me the bullet-proof vest, can you send over the laptop? I’ve got a Grade A hacker here.’

‘Mm-hm, how’m I going to do that? You’re not a
commissaire
at the moment.’

‘Yes, I do realise that,’ said Adamsberg, seeming to hear Clémentine’s voice reminding him of it. ‘Ask Danglard, convince him, you’re good at that. Since the exhumation, Brézillon’s more favourably inclined to me, and Danglard knows it.’

‘All right, I’ll try, but he’s the boss for now.’

LI

JOSETTE TOOK POSSESSION OF MICHEL SARTONNA’S LAPTOP WITH HUGE
delight. Adamsberg felt that he could hardly have made her happier than with this suspect machine, a real gift for a hacker. It had not arrived at Clignancourt until the late afternoon, and Adamsberg suspected that Danglard had had it checked out by his own computer people first. That was perfectly logical and normal, since he was the acting head of the department. The courier who delivered it also brought a note from Retancourt, saying that as far as they could see the hard disk was as clean as a whistle. This had only spurred Josette on to greater efforts.

She spent a long time trying to penetrate the lost memory of the computer, and confirmed that someone else had already had a try.

‘Your men didn’t bother to wipe out their footsteps. That’s fair enough, they weren’t doing anything illegal.’

The last defence came down only with Michel’s dog’s name spelt backwards:
ograc
. He had often brought the dog into the office, a huge but harmless beast, as unthreatening as a snail, hence its name, Escargot, shortened to Cargo. It liked eating any papers it found lying around, and could transform a report into a wet soggy ball in no time. So it was perhaps a good code name for the mysterious transmutations that took place inside computers.

But once inside, Josette came up against the same blank wall as the police had.

‘Nothing at all, wiped clean, scraped with wire wool,’ she said.

Well, that figured. If the police specialists hadn’t been able to find anything, there was no reason to think Josette would fare any better. But she kept tapping doggedly with her shaky little hands on the keyboard.

‘I’ll keep trying,’ she said obstinately.

‘Don’t bother, Josette, they’ve obviously tried everything in the lab.’

It was time for their ritual glass of port, and Clémentine summoned Adamsberg to come and have his aperitif, as if he was a teenager being called to do his homework. She added an egg yolk, beating it up in the sweet wine. Egg-flip with port was supposed to give him strength.

‘Josette’s still at it,’ he explained as he accepted the glass filled with the opaque mixture to which he was becoming accustomed.

‘To look at her, you’d think you could knock her over with a feather, wouldn’t you,’ said Clémentine clinking her glass against Adamsberg’s.

‘But you can’t.’

‘No. Not like that,’ Clémentine interrupted him to stop him putting the glass to his lips. ‘When you clink glasses, you have to look at the other person. I told you that already. Then drink it off without putting the glass down. Elsewise it won’t work.’

‘What won’t work?’

She shook her head as if that was a supremely silly question.

‘Start again,’ she said sternly. ‘Now what was I saying?’

‘We were saying Josette couldn’t be knocked over with a feather.’

‘Right. Now then. Inside my little Josette there’s a compass, and it’s fixed on the north. She’s taken thousands and thousands from those fat cats. So she won’t just give up on it.’

Adamsberg took a glass of the health-giving mixture into the computer room. Josette clinked glasses properly, with a smile.

‘I found the fragments of one line,’ she said in her quavery voice. ‘It’s the ruins of a message that’s broken up. Your men didn’t find this,’ she said rather proudly. ‘There are always a few corners people don’t manage to go through with a toothcomb.’

‘Like the space between the wall and the washbasin.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I always clean things thoroughly, and my husband thought I was fussy. Come and have a look.’

Adamsberg came over to the screen and read a meaningless series of letters, all that had survived the crash:
dam ea ezv ort la ero
.

‘Is that all?’ he asked in disappointment.

‘That’s all, but it’s better than nothing,’ said Josette, who was still elated.
‘ezv
could only be from “rendezvous,” for instance.’

‘I’m sure Michel was involved with drugs, I often thought so,’ Adamsberg said. ‘So
dam
is most likely from Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Classic drugs centres.’

‘And the
ea
could be from “deal” or “dealer”?’

‘Yes, Josette, it looks like a message about dealing to me. From what’s left.’

Josette noted down the letters on a piece of paper and looked at it in silence.

‘I suppose you could make it something like: “Amsterdam – dealer – rendezvous – port – heroin,” for instance,’ she suggested reluctantly.

‘I don’t see how it can have anything to do with the Trident,’ said Adamsberg in a defeated voice. ‘It looks as if Michel simply got involved in something too heavy for him. We should probably pass it over to the drugs squad, Josette.’

Josette sipped her port-flip delicately, but her little face expressed frustration.

Retancourt must be wrong about the mole, Adamsberg thought, as he stirred the fire. The two women had gone to bed and he was alone by the hearth, unable to sleep. He would never succeed in identifying the mole, who had probably never existed. It was after all the janitor who had given Laliberté the key information. And as for believing someone had searched his flat, well that was based on the flimsiest evidence. A key in the wrong place, perhaps, and a box file not quite in the same position, when Danglard thought he had put it away more tidily. Not much to go on. He would never find the unlikely second man on the portage trail. Even if he traced all Fulgence’s crimes, he would be forever alone on that sinister path. Adamsberg felt all the threads snapping one after
another, cutting him off from the world, as if he were a ferocious bear on an ice floe, floating away from land. He was isolated here with Clémentine’s egg-flips and Josette’s grey slippers.