Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

by Fred Vargas

  This time, his arms started to tremble, and his heart beat faster. This was nothing like the previous four attacks, but sheer stupefaction and terror.

  He took a long drink from the kitchen tap and splashed cold water on to his face and hair. Then he opened all the cupboards, looking for some alcohol, the stronger the better, a liqueur, anything. There must be something of the kind, the remains of an evening with Danglard, for instance. In the end, he found an unfamiliar earthenware bottle and uncorked it. Sniffing the neck, he looked at the label. Gin, 44 degrees proof. His hands holding the heavy bottle were trembling. He filled a glass and drank it straight off. Twice. Adamsberg felt his body loosen up and let himself fall into an old armchair, leaving only a reading lamp alight.

  Now that the alcohol had deadened his muscles, he could start thinking, begin again, and try to face the monster that the image of Neptune had finally called up from his own vasty deeps. The stowaway, the dreadful intruder. The invincible and arrogant killer, whom he used to call ‘The Trident’. The murderer who always escaped, and who, thirty years earlier, had thrown his life off course. For fourteen years after that, Adamsberg had been chasing after him, following his tracks, hoping each time to catch him and then losing his moving target. He had run, fallen headlong, and run again.

  And had ended by falling once more. In the course of this pursuit, he had given up hope and, above all, had lost his brother. The Trident had escaped, every time. He was a Titan, a devil, a Poseidon from hell. Raising his three-pronged weapon and killing with a single blow to the belly. Leaving his impaled victims with three bloody wounds in a straight line.

  Adamsberg sat up in the chair. The three red drawing pins in his office, the three bleeding holes. Enid’s long three-pronged fork, echoing the trident’s three points. And Neptune raising his trident-sceptre. These were the images which had given him such pain, dredging up a great sorrow, and then, in a single stream of mud, liberating his resurrected anguish.

  He ought to have guessed, he thought now. He ought to have linked these violent shocks to the long and painful trajectory of his pursuit of the Trident. Because no other living being had caused him more pain and dread, distress and fury than this man. Sixteen years earlier, he had had to close up the gaping wound the killer had made in his life, seal it up, cover it over, and forget about it. And suddenly, without rhyme or reason, it had opened up under his feet.

  * * *

  Adamsberg stood up and paced round the room, with folded arms. On the one hand, he felt relieved and almost peaceful, since he had identified what lay at the eye of the cyclone. The tornadoes would not catch him out again. But this sudden reappearance of the Trident alarmed him. This Monday 6 October, he had risen up like a ghost bursting through the walls. It was a troubling revival, an inexplicable return. He put the bottle of gin back in the cupboard and carefully rinsed out the glass. Unless, that is, he did somehow know, unless he did understand why the old man had risen from the past. Between his calm everyday arrival at the office and the spectre of the Trident, there was some missing connection.

  He sat on the floor, back to the radiator, hugging his knees and thinking of his great-uncle, curled up like that in the rocks. He needed to concentrate, peer into the deepest recesses of his mind without giving up. Return to the first appearance of the Trident, the initial tornado. So, he had been talking about Rembrandt while he explained to Danglard what he saw as the flaw in the D’Hernoncourt case. He tried to relive this scene again. Although he always found it difficult to remember words, images invariably imprinted themselves on his memory like pebbles on soft mud. He saw himself sitting on the corner of Danglard’s desk, and he saw the grumpy face of his deputy, under the sailor’s cap with its remains of a pompom. He saw the plastic cup of white wine, and the light falling from the left. And he was talking about light and shade. How was he sitting? With arms folded? Hands on knees? Hands on the table? Or in his pockets? What had he been doing with his hands?

  He had been holding a newspaper. He had picked it up off the table, and had been leafing through it, without really reading it, during their conversation. Had he really not been reading it? Or had he seen something there? Something so powerful that a tidal wave had surged up out of his memory?

  Adamsberg looked at his watch. Five-twenty in the morning. Getting quickly to his feet, he smoothed down his rumpled jacket and left the house. A short time later, he was neutralising the alarm on the front entrance and walking into the Crime Squad offices. The hall was freezing cold. The engineer who was supposed to have come at seven the previous evening had still not arrived.

  He saluted the duty officer and slipped quietly into his deputy’s office, avoiding telling the night shift he was in the building. He switched on the desk lamp and looked for the paper. Danglard was not the sort of man to leave it lying around and Adamsberg found it in the in-tray. Without bothering to sit down, he turned the pages looking for a Neptune-type incident. It was worse than that. On page 7, under the headline ‘Girl murdered with three stab wounds in Schiltigheim’, there was an indistinct picture of a body on a stretcher. And despite the fuzziness of the photograph, it was possible to make out that the girl was wearing a light-blue sweater, and that there were three wounds in a straight line across her abdomen.

  Adamsberg went round the table to sit in Danglard’s chair. Now he held that last missing piece of the jigsaw, the three puncture-wounds he had fleetingly glimpsed. The bloody signature, seen so many times in the past, and denoting the actions of the murderer, actions lying hidden in his memory and buried for over sixteen years. The photograph, briefly registered, must have awoken the memory with a jump, triggering the terrible feeling of dread and the sense that the Trident had returned.

  He was quite calm now. He tore out the page, folded it and put it in his inside pocket. The elements were all there and the attacks would not be able to trouble him again. Any more than the Trident would, the killer whom he had mentally exhumed because of a mere echo from a briefly-seen press photograph. And after this shortlived misunderstanding, the Trident could be dispatched back into the cave of oblivion where he belonged.

  VI

  THE MEETING OF THE EIGHT DESIGNATED MEMBERS OF THE QUEBEC mission took place in a temperature of 8 degrees, in a gloomy atmosphere rendered even more sluggish by the cold. The whole project might have foundered had it not been for the crucial presence of Lieutenant Violette Retancourt. Without gloves or hat, she gave no sign of discomfort. Unlike her colleagues, whose clenched teeth made their voices tense, she spoke in her usual strong and well-tempered tones, heightened by the interest she considered the Quebec mission to represent. She was backed up by Voisenet, from behind a thick scarf, and young Estalère, who professed an admiration without reserve for the versatile lieutenant, as if devoting himself to some powerful goddess, a mighty Juno combined with Diana the huntress and twelve-armed Shiva. Retancourt spoke eloquently, cajoling, giving examples and concluding. Today she had visibly channelled her energy into persuasion, and Adamsberg, with a smile, let her take the lead. In spite of his disturbed night, he felt relaxed and back on form. He didn’t even have a hangover from the gin.

  Danglard observed the commissaire, who was tilting his chair backwards, apparently quite restored to his usual nonchalance and having forgotten both his irritation of the previous day and even their nocturnal conversation about the god of the sea. Retancourt was still speaking, challenging negative arguments, and Danglard felt he was losing ground: an irresistible force was propelling him in through the doors of a Boeing condemned to be hit by a flock of starlings.

  Retancourt won the day. At ten past midday, the decision to go on the RCMP course in Gatineau was carried by seven to one. Adamsberg closed the session and went to convey their decision to the prefect of police. He caught up with Danglard in the corridor.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold the string. I’m good at it.’

  ‘What string?’

  ‘The one that holds the plane
up,’ Adamsberg explained, pinching his thumb and forefinger together.

  Adamsberg gave a nod to confirm his promise and walked off. Danglard wondered if the commissaire was mocking him. But he had looked serious, as if he really thought he could hold the strings to keep planes in the air and stop them crashing. Danglard touched his pompom, which had now become a calming talisman. Curiously, the idea of the piece of string and Adamsberg holding it, brought him some reassurance.

  On one street corner near the office was a large brasserie where the atmosphere was cheery, but the food was terrible, while on the opposite side was a small cafe where the seating was less comfortable, but the food was good. The fairly crucial choice between the two was faced almost every day by the staff of the Crime Squad, who were torn between eating well in a dark and draughty restaurant, and the comforting warmth of the old brasserie, which had kept its 1930s-style seats but had hired a disastrous new chef. Today the heating question won out over any other considerations, so about twenty officers headed for the Brasserie des Philosophes, a rather incongruous name since about sixty Paris flics, little given to conceptual acrobatics, ate there most days. Noting the direction taken by the majority, Adamsberg took himself to the under-heated cafe known as Le Buisson. He had eaten hardly anything in twenty-four hours, since abandoning his Irish meal when the tornado had struck.

  As he finished the day’s special, he pulled out of his inside pocket the crumpled page from the newspaper and spread it on the table, curious about the murder in Alsace which had provoked such a tumult in his head. The victim, Elisabeth Wind, twenty-two years old, had probably been killed at about midnight, when she was returning home on her bike from Schiltigheim to her village, about three kilometres away, a trip she made every Saturday night. Her body had been found in undergrowth about ten metres from the road. The first indications were that she had been knocked unconscious and the cause of death was the three stab wounds in the abdomen. The young woman had not been sexually assaulted, nor had any of her clothing been removed. A suspect was being held, one Bernard Vétilleux, unmarried and of no fixed address, who had quickly been discovered a few hundred metres from the scene of the crime, dead drunk, and fast asleep by the side of the road. The gendarmes reported that they had conclusive proof against Vétilleux, but according to the accused man, he had no memory of the night of the murder.

  Adamsberg read through the article twice. He shook his head slowly, looking at the blue sweater, punctured by three holes. It was impossible, absolutely impossible. He, of all people, was well placed to know that. He ran his hand over the article, hesitated, then took out his mobile phone.

  ‘Danglard?’

  His deputy replied from the Brasserie des Philosophes, his mouth full.

  ‘Can you get me the name of the commandant of gendarmes for Schiltigheim in the Bas-Rhin département?’

  Danglard had the names of all the police chiefs of every town in France at his fingertips, but was less good on the gendarmerie.

  ‘Is this as urgent as the Neptune business?’

  ‘Not quite, but let’s say it’s not far off.’

  ‘I’ll call you back in about fifteen minutes.’

  ‘While you’re at it, don’t forget to call that heating engineer again.’

  Adamsberg was finishing a double espresso, much less impressive than the kind from the office dairy cow, when his deputy called him back.

  ‘Commandant Thierry Trabelmann is the name. Have you got a pen?’

  Adamsberg wrote the telephone number on the paper tablecloth. He waited until after two o’clock had struck on the old clock in Le Buisson before calling the Schiltigheim gendarmerie. Commandant Trabelmann sounded somewhat distant. He had heard of Commissaire Adamsberg, some good, some not so good, and was hesitating over how to handle him.

  ‘I have no intention of trying to take this case over, Commandant Trabelmann,’ Adamsberg assured him at once.

  ‘That’s what they always say, and we all know what happens. The gendarmes do all the dirty work and as soon as it gets interesting, the flics come in and take over.’

  ‘All I want is to check something.’

  ‘I don’t know what bee you’ve got in your bonnet, commissaire, but we’ve got our man, and he’s firmly under lock and key.’

  ‘Bernard Vétilleux?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s rock solid. We found the murder weapon a few metres away from the victim, just chucked into the grass. It corresponded exactly to the wounds, and it had Vétilleux’s fingerprints on the handle, clear as daylight.’

  Clear as daylight. As simple as that. Adamsberg asked himself quickly whether he was going to follow this up or beat a retreat.

  ‘But Vétilleux denies it?’

  ‘He was pissed out of his mind when my men brought him in. Could hardly stand up straight. He can deny it all he likes, it won’t make a blind bit of difference. He can’t remember a thing about the night, except that he’d drunk himself silly.’

  ‘Does he have a record? Any violence in the past?’

  ‘No. But everything has to start somewhere.’

  ‘The newspaper said there were three stab wounds. With a knife?’

  ‘A carpenter’s awl.’

  Adamsberg was silent for a moment.

  ‘Bit unusual?’

  ‘Well, not all that. These homeless characters carry all kinds of tools around with them, an awl can be handy for opening tins or forcing locks. Don’t get worked up, commissaire, we’ve got our man, I’ll guarantee you that.’

  ‘One last thing, commandant,’ said Adamsberg rather quickly, sensing Trabelmann’s impatience. ‘Was the tool brand new?’

  There was a silence from the other end.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Trabelmann suspiciously.

  ‘It was new, then?’

  ‘Affirmative. But what difference does that make?’

  ‘Trabelmann, can you do me a big favour? Send me the photographs of the body, close-ups of the stab wounds.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because I’m asking you nicely.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘I’m not trying to take over from you,’ said Adambserg. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘So what’s eating you?’

  ‘A childhood memory.’

  ‘Oh, in that case,’ said Trabelmann, suddenly respectful, and dropping his guard, as if childhood memories were a sacred reason and an unquestionable open sesame.

  VII

  THE ELUSIVE HEATING REPAIRMAN HAD ARRIVED, AND SO TOO HAD FOUR photographs from Trabelmann. One of them showed the wounds of the victim very clearly, taken from directly above. Adamsberg had worked out how to use his computer, but he couldn’t enlarge the images without Danglard’s help.

  ‘What’s all this?’ muttered Danglard, sitting down at Adamsberg’s screen.

  ‘Neptune,’ said Adamsberg with a half-smile. ‘Leaving his mark on the blue of the sea.’

  ‘But what is it?’ asked Danglard again.

  ‘You always ask me questions, but you don’t like my answers.’

  ‘I prefer to know what I’m dealing with.’

  ‘These are the three wounds of Schiltigheim, the three marks left by the trident.’

  ‘Neptune again? Is this some kind of obsession?’

  ‘No, it’s a case of murder. A girl has been killed with three stab wounds from a carpenter’s awl.’

  ‘Trabelmann sent these to us? Has he been taken off the case?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I won’t know anything until I can get this picture enlarged.’

  Danglard frowned as he set about working on the images. He did not at all like that ‘Well, I don’t know’, one of Adamsberg’s most used expressions, which had many times led him off on to meandering paths, sometimes into complete quagmires. For Danglard, it presaged the quicksands of thought, and he had often feared that one day Adamsberg would be swallowed up
into them without trace.

  ‘The papers say that they’ve got the killer,’ Danglard pointed out.

  ‘Yes. With the murder weapon and his prints all over it.’

  ‘So what’s bothering you?’

  ‘Call it a childhood memory.’

  This reply did not have the same calming effect on Danglard as it had had on Trabelmann. On the contrary, the capitaine felt his apprehension growing. He made the maximum enlargement of the image and sent it to print. Adamsberg was watching as the page emerged in stops and starts from the machine. He picked it up by a corner, waved it quickly in the air to dry, then switched on the desk lamp to examine it closely. Danglard watched, puzzled, as he reached for a long ruler, took measurements one way then the other, drew a line, marked the centre of each wound with a dot then drew another parallel line and took more measurements. Finally, Adamsberg put down the ruler and paced round the room, still holding the photograph. When he turned round, Danglard saw on his face an expression of pain and astonishment. And while Danglard had seen this expression many times in his life, it was the first time he had encountered it on the normally phlegmatic face of his superior officer.

  The commissaire took a new file out of the cupboard, put his newspaper cutting and photograph in it, and wrote on the outside ‘Trident no. 9’, followed by a question mark. He would have to go to Strasbourg to see the body. This would hinder the urgent steps to be taken for the Quebec trip. He decided to entrust these to Retancourt, since she was well ahead of everyone else on the project.

  ‘Come back to my place, Danglard. If you don’t see what I’m going to show you, you won’t understand.’