Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (47 page)
Read Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand Online
Authors: Fred Vargas
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General
‘Not maple leaves: oak and olive.’
‘They meant to mean something?’
‘Wisdom and peace.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d say that’s not quite your style, Jean-Baptiste. Inspiration is more like it, and I’m not saying that to make you big-headed. Only there aren’t any leaves that mean that.’
Sanscartier’s kind face contorted into a thoughtful frown as he tried to think of a symbol for Inspiration.
‘What about grass, just ordinary meadow grass?’ suggested Adamsberg.
‘Sunflowers perhaps? But they’d look silly on your shoulders.’
‘My intuitions, or inspirations as you call them, are sometimes a damned nuisance. Get me into big trouble. More like couch-grass.’
‘That so?’
“Yes, and sometimes I put my foot right in it. Sanscartier, listen to this, I have a son who’s five months old, and I only realised it three days ago.’
‘Christ, you missed out on that?’
‘Completely.’
‘Had she given you your marching orders?’
‘No, it was my fault.’
‘You didn’t love her any more?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’
‘But you played the field.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you gave her the runaround and she was unhappy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then one fine day you broke all your promises and walked out, just like that.’
‘You couldn’t put it better.’
‘Was that why you got drunk that night at
L’Ecluse?’
‘Among other things.’
Sanscartier gulped down his champagne.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but if it’s hurting you now, it could mean you made a mistake. You follow me?’
‘Only too well.’
‘I’m not a clairvoyant, but I’d say take your logic in both hands and switch on your lights.’
Adamsberg shook his head.
‘She looks at me from a long way off, as if I’m a huge threat.’
‘Well, if you want to get her to trust you again, you can always try.’
‘How?’
‘Like on the timber site. They pull up old tree trunks and plant maples.’
‘How?’
‘Like I said. They pull up old trunks and plant new maples.’
Sanscartier drew a circle on his temples, indicating that the operation required a little reflection.
‘Should I put that in my pipe and smoke it? Or as Clémentine would say, put my thinking cap on?’ asked Adamsberg with a smile.
‘That’s it, chum.’
Raphaël and his brother went back home on foot at two in the morning walking in step at the same speed.
‘I’m going home to the village, Jean-Baptiste.’
‘I’ll come on down after you. Brézillon’s put me on a week’s leave. It seems I’m in a state of shock.’
‘Do you think the kids are still making toads explode with cigarettes up by the washhouse?’
‘No doubt about it, Raphaël.’
LXV
THE EIGHT FORMER MEMBERS OF THE QUEBEC MISSION HAD GONE TO
see Laliberté and Sanscartier off from the airport on their 16.50 flight for Montreal. In seven weeks, this was the sixth time Adamsberg had been to the airport, and in six different states of mind. As they stood together in front of the departures noticeboard, he was almost surprised not to find Jean-Pierre Emile Roger Feuillet there; a good sort, old Jean-Pierre, whose hand he would have liked to shake.
He walked a little way off from the group with Sanscartier, who wanted him to have his special all-weather padded jacket with twelve pockets.
‘Now look, it’s special, because it’s reversible. The black side’s waterproof, snow and rain just run off it, you won’t feel a thing. The blue side makes it easy to spot you in the snow, but it’s not waterproof. It’ll get wet. So depending on your mood you can wear it one way or the other. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s like life.’
Adamsberg ran his hand through his short hair.
‘I understand,’ he said.
‘C’mon, take it,’ said Sanscartier, pushing it into Adamsberg’s arms. ‘That way, you won’t forget me.’
‘No chance of that,’ murmured Adamsberg.
Sanscartier gave him a warm pat on the shoulder. ‘Switch on your lights, put on your skis and follow your nose, pal. All the best.’
‘Say hullo to the squirrel on sentry duty for me.’
‘Ah, you noticed him? Gerald?’
‘That’s his name?’
‘Yup. At night he sleeps in a little hole in the drainpipe where it’s been covered in anti-freeze. Cunning little fellow. And in the daytime he’s back on duty. You know he had some woman trouble himself?’
‘I didn’t know that. I was in a hole too.’
‘Did you notice he had a girlfirend?’
‘Yes, I did notice that.’
‘Well, his girlfriend gave him up for a while. Gerald was so upset he stayed in the hole all day. So back home I crushed some hazelnuts, and put them by his drain. After three days, he cracked and came out. The boss wanted to know who the dope was who was bringing Gerald food, so you can bet your boots I kept mum. I was already in his bad books over you.’
‘And now?’
‘He didn’t stay off duty long, he’s back on the job and the girlfriend’s returned.’
‘Same one?’
‘Now that I can’t tell you. With squirrels it’s hard to tell. But, hey, Gerald I’d recognise him anywhere. Would you?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Sanscartier gripped his shoulder again and Adamsberg reluctantly let him go into the departure lounge.
‘Come back and see us,’ beamed Laliberté, with a hearty shake of his hand. ‘I owe you one, and I wanted to tell you. Feel free to come over and see the red leaves in the Fall, and you could even go trail walking again: it’s been exorcised now.’
Laliberté kept hold of Adamsberg’s hand in his iron grip. Over the superintendent’s face where he had never seen more than three expressions, bonhomie, rigour and anger, there now passed a reflective look which altered his face. There’s always something else under the surface, like in Pink Lake, he thought.
‘Know what I think?’ Laliberté went on. ‘We need a few of them in our job, cloud shovellers.’
He let go his hand, and disappeared after the others. Adamsberg watched as his massive back disappeared into the crowd. He could still see Sanscartier. He would have liked to take a sample of his goodness, put it on to a disk and isolate it, so that he could inject a little into his own DNA.
The seven other members of the squad were heading for the exit. He heard Voisenet’s voice calling him and turned round, rejoining them slowly, holding the sergeant’s thick jacket over his shoulder.
Strap on your skis and follow your nose, cloud shoveller.
Put all this in your pipe.
And smoke it.
Notes
‘De
la rigueur, de la rigueur et de la rigueur, je connais pas d’autre moyen de réussir
’ (‘Rigour, rigour and yet more rigour, that’s the only way I know to succeed’) was a slogan in the television advertising for UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), for the years 2001 and 2002.
The Canadian DNA Data Bank is situated in the Ottawa headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police/Gendarmerie royale du Canada, but the ‘annex’ in Gatineau Federal Park is invented, and the episodes concerning DNA profiling in this novel are a mixture of the real and the fictional; they do not represent the RCMP’s actual modes of procedure. The following article (which appears in both French and English) was drawn upon for details of DNA profiling procedures: Joanna Kerr, ‘RCMP’s DNA Data Bank Sets a World Standard’,
The Gazette/La Gazette
, vol. 62, no. 5–6, 2000 (journal of the RCMP/GRC).
Translator’s note:
Canadian French differs more in terms of idiom and vocabulary from the French spoken in France than Canadian English does from British or US English. The French characters here sometimes find the language difficult to follow, but the examples have necessarily been cut or modified in translation.
French police ranks, which were renamed some years ago along the same lines as the
gendarmerie
and the military, have been left in French. The hierarchy ascends as follows:
brigadier, lieutenant, capitaine, commandant, commissaire
. These are roughly equivalent but do not exactly correspond to the British ranks: (detective) sergeant, inspector, chief inspector, superintendent, chief superintendent, with the
divisionnaire
being equivalent to commissioner. As
commissaire principal
, Adamsberg is the equivalent of chief superintendent.
FRED VARGAS is a historian, archaeologist and an internationally best-selling author. Her novel,
The Three Evangelists
, won the prestigious British Crime Writers’ Association Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Award. She lives in Paris.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2008
Copyright © 2004 Éditions Viviane Hamy, Paris
English translation copyright © 2007 Siân Reynolds
Published by arrangement with Harvill Secker, one of the publishers in
The Random House Group Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. Originally published in hardcover in Canada in 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, a division of The Random House Group Ltd., London. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France under the title
Sous les vents de Neptune
by Éditions Viviane Hamy, Paris, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House of Canada Limited.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Vargas, Fred
Wash this blood clean from my hand / Fred Vargas; translated from the
French by Siân Reynolds.
(The Commissaire Adamsberg series)
Translation of: Sous les vents de Neptune.
I. Reynolds, Siân II. Title. III. Series: Vargas, Fred. Commissaire
Adamsberg.
PQ2682.A697S6813 2008 843’.914 C2007-903619-8
eISBN: 978-0-307-36611-5
v3.0
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