Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

by Fred Vargas

  An hour later, Retancourt knocked at the door of his hotel room. Adamsberg opened it happily, greeting his lieutenant with a pat on the shoulder. She sat on the bed, making it sag in the middle, like the bed in the Hotel Brébeuf in Gatineau. And as in the Brébeuf, she opened a thermos of coffee and put two cups on the bedside table.

  ‘Sand,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘A long bag of it, weighing 83 kilos.’

  ‘Put in the coffin after the death certificate had been signed, and sealed down before the undertaker arrived. What did they make of it, lieutenant?’

  ‘Danglard was genuinely surprised, and Mordent was greatly relieved. He hates this kind of thing. Brézillon was secretly relieved as well. Maybe rather pleased with himself – it’s hard to tell with him. What about you?’

  ‘Hmm. I’m free of the dead man, but now I’ve got the living one after me.’

  Retancourt undid and redid her pony tail.

  ‘Are you in danger?’ she asked, handing him a cup.

  ‘Now I am, yes.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘Sixteen years ago, I had got quite close and the judge was seriously threatened. I think that’s the reason he decided to fake his death.’ ‘He could have tried to kill you instead.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Too many people in the force knew about it, he could have come under suspicion. All he wanted was a clear road ahead, and he got it. After his so-called death, I gave up looking and Fulgence could get on with his crimes without anyone chasing him. He would have carried on if the Schiltigheim murder hadn’t alerted me by chance. I would have done better not to open the paper that Monday morning. It’s brought me to this, being a murderer on the run, hiding in safe houses.’

  ‘One good thing about the newspaper,’ said Retancourt, ‘was that you found Raphaël.’

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t cleared his name. Nor mine. All I’ve managed to do is alert the judge all over again. He knows I got back on his trail once he had left the Schloss. Vivaldi told me.’

  Adamsberg sipped his coffee while Retancourt looked at him seriously.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said.

  ‘Vivaldi?’

  ‘The coffee. But Vivaldi too. A good pal. But now, Retancourt, the Trident is probably aware that I’ve found out about his fake death. Or he soon will be. I’m in his way again, but I’ve no chance of catching him, or of saving Raphaël, who’s still out there in the field of the stars, orbiting without being able to return to earth. And so am I. Fulgence is still at the helm, in charge, still and for ever.’

  ‘What if he came out after us to Quebec?’

  ‘A man who’s a hundred years old?’

  ‘I said “what if?”. A man a hundred years old is at least better than a dead man. Anyway, he didn’t get you, did he?’

  ‘You think so? I’m still in his trap up to my neck, and I’ve only got five weeks left.’

  ‘It could be enough. You’re not in jail, you’ve got your freedom. He’s in charge, yes, he’s at the helm, but there’s a storm brewing.’

  ‘If I were him, Retancourt, I’d want to get rid of this damned policeman, once and for all.’

  ‘I agree. I’d prefer to know you’re wearing a bullet-proof vest.’

  ‘He kills with a trident though.’

  ‘For you it might be different.’

  Adamsberg thought for a moment.

  ‘You mean he might shoot me without any ceremony. As if I was a sort of extra who didn’t count?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly it, an extra. Do you think this adds up to a series? Not just a succession of psychopathic murders?’

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about it, and I still can’t make up my mind. Psychopathic, compulsive murderers usually operate at shorter intervals than the judge’s. His crimes are separated by years of silence. And with a psychopath, it tends to speed up, the murderous impulses get closer and closer together. The Trident’s different. His murders are regular, programmed, spaced out. It’s as if it were a lifetime’s occupation, without needing to hurry.’

  ‘Or perhaps he’s dragging it out, if his life is governed by the sequence. Schiltigheim might have been the last act. Or the murder in Hull.’

  Adamsberg’s face fell. A shaft of despair pierced him, as it did every time he thought about the crime by the Ottawa River, and his hands with blood all over them, even under his nails. He put down his cup and sat on the bed, cross-legged.

  ‘What’s against me,’ he said, looking at his hands, ‘is this hundred-year-old man’s presumed journey all the way to Quebec. After Schiltigheim, he had plenty of time to work out a way of catching me. He didn’t have to rush it in a few days, did he? There was no need to dash across the Atlantic.’

  ‘On the contrary, it could be the ideal opportunity,’ Retancourt objected. ‘The judge’s technique doesn’t work so well in town. Killing a victim, placing them somewhere, then fetching or luring some poor befuddled scapegoat to the spot, none of that would really work in Paris. He always strikes in the countryside. Canada offered him an unusual chance.’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Adamsberg still looking at his hands.

  ‘There’s something else as well. Getting you on to new territory.’

  Adamsberg looked at his lieutenant.

  ‘Well, let’s say removing you from your home ground. All the landmarks, routines, reflexes and structures are changed. In Paris, it would be virtually impossible to get people to believe that a commissaire of police would walk out of his office one fine day and have an attack of homicidal mania in the street.’

  ‘New place, unknown territory, different acts,’ Adamsberg agreed, sadly.

  ‘In Paris, nobody could possibly believe you capable of murder. But over there, well …The judge took his chance and it worked. You saw what they said about you in that RCMP dossier: “Unblocking of repressed drives”. It would be the ideal set-up, if he could manage to get you alone in the forest.’

  ‘He must have been aware of my habits, since he’d known me for several years, from when I was a boy until I was eighteen. He knew that I like to go walking alone at night. Well, it’s all possible, I suppose, but there’s nothing to prove it. He would have had to know all about our trip. But I’ve stopped believing that there was a mole in the department.’

  Retancourt examined her nails as if she was consulting a notebook.

  ‘It’s true, I can’t work it out either,’ she admitted, with a frown. ‘I’ve talked to everyone. I’ve made myself invisible and listened in all the rooms. But nobody there seems to believe you could possibly have killed Noëlla. The atmosphere is very tense and everyone’s talking in whispers, as if they’re in a state of suspended animation. Luckily Danglard is in charge and he’s keeping people calm. I take it you don’t suspect him any more?’

  ‘No, on the contrary.’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you now, commissaire,’ said Retancourt, putting the top back on the thermos. ‘The car leaves at six. I’ll get that vest for you.’

  ‘I don’t need it.’

  ‘I’ll get it to you all the same.’

  XLVIII

  ‘CAN YOU BEAT THAT?’ BRÉZILLON WAS SAYING, IN THE CAR TAKING THE others back to Paris: he was somewhat excited by this ghoulish excursion. ‘Eighty kilos of sand. He was right then, damnit.’

  ‘He very often is,’ commented Mordent.

  ‘It changes everything,’ Brézillon went on. ‘Adamsberg’s accusation is a lot more solid. Anyone who fakes his death is no choirboy. That old man is still around, after committing twelve murders.’

  ‘Of which the last three were committed when he was ninety-three, ninety-five and ninety-nine years old,’ Danglard pointed out. ‘Does that really seem possible, sir? A man of a hundred years old dragging a girl and her bicycle off the road?’

  ‘That’s a problem, I grant you. But Adamsberg was right about Fulgence’s death, we can’t deny that. Are you telling me you don’t go along with him, capitaine?’


  ‘I’m simply pointing out facts and probabilities.’

  Danglard shrank into himself in the back of the car and said no more, letting his colleagues, who were quite worked up, talk about the resurrection of the old judge. Yes, Adamsberg had been right. And that made things even more difficult.

  Once he was home, he waited until the children were asleep before he called Quebec. It was only six in the evening there.

  ‘How are things going?’ he asked his Québécois colleague.

  He listened with impatience to the explanations he received from the other end.

  ‘We have to work faster,’ Danglard interrupted the other speaker. ‘Things are moving here. The exhumation was this afternoon. No body, just a bag of sand … Yes … absolutely … And the divisionnaire seems to think it’s on the level. But there’s still no evidence. Hurry up, do the best you can. He might get away with it.’

  Adamsberg had dined alone in a little restaurant in Richelieu, in that comfortable, slightly melancholy atmosphere you get in provincial hotels in the off-season. Not like the Liffey Water pub in Paris. By nine o’clock, there was nothing doing in Cardinal Richelieu’s town. Adamsberg had returned to his hotel room and was lying on his back on the pink bedcover, hands clasped behind his head. He tried not to let his thoughts wander, but on the contrary tried to separate them into tiny slices of DNA material ready for analysis. The trickle of sand through which the judge had disappeared from the land of the living. The three-pronged threat hanging over him. The choice of Quebec as the territory for his execution.

  But Danglard’s objections were extremely persuasive. How on earth could such an old man have dragged the body of Elisabeth Wind through the fields? She was a healthy eighteen-year-old, and no will o’ the wisp, even if her name suggested the lightness of the wind. Adamsberg blinked. That was what Raphaël had said about his girlfriend, Lise. That she was as light and lively as the wind. And she even had the name of a wind too, the warm south-easterly wind, the Autan. Odd, two names for wind, Wind and Autan. He raised himself on one elbow, trying to recall the names of the other victims, in a whisper, in chronological order: Espir, Lefebure, Ventou, Soubise, Lentretien, Mestre, Lessard, Matère, Brasillier, Fevre.

  Ventou and Soubise immediately jumped out at him. Vent = ‘wind’ in French; and the Bise is the French name of a north wind. That made four winds. Adamsberg put on the overhead light, sat at his little table and wrote down a list of all twelve victims, trying to see if there were any connections between their names. But apart from the four names reminiscent of winds, he could find no obvious links.

  Wind equals air. One of the four elements with water, fire and earth. Perhaps the judge had some cosmogonic fantasy about making himself master of the four elements. That would make him a god, like Neptune with his trident, or Jupiter with his thunderbolts. Frowning, he looked at the list again. Only Brasillier was a bit like the word ‘brazier’, suggesting fire. None of the others seemed to relate to flames or water or earth. Tired, he pushed the paper away. An elusive old man, hellbent on an incomprehensible career of serial killing. He thought again about the old man in the village, Hubert, who had lived to a hundred, but was scarcely able to move about by the end. He lived at the top of the village and yelled at the boys in the evenings when they were up to their tricks with the toads. Ten or fifteen years earlier, he would have been down there, giving them a thrashing. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’

  Now Adamsberg sat up again, putting his hands on the table. Listen to other people, Retancourt had said. And the doctor in Alsace, Courtin, had been quite sure about it. Don’t disregard his opinion, his professionalism, just because it doesn’t fit what you know. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ The judge was ninety-nine years old, because he had been born in 1904. But what was a birth certificate to a devil?

  For a while Adamsberg paced round his room, then he picked up his coat and went out into the night. He walked along the rectilinear streets of the small town, and found himself in a park where a statue of Cardinal Richelieu himself loomed up out of the shadows. A cunning politician, the old Cardinal, and not afraid of bending the rules if he had to. Adamsberg sat down near the statue, chin in hand. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ OK, let’s try that. Born not in 1904 but in 1919. He would have been only fifty, not sixty-five when he retired from his circuit. And today he would be eighty-four, not ninety-nine. When he was eighty-four, Hubert had still been able to climb his trees to prune them. Yes, the judge had always looked younger than his age, even when his hair was white. Aged twenty at the start of the Second World War, not thirty-five, he calculated. Twenty-five in 1944, not forty. Why 1944? Adamsberg looked up at Richelieu’s bronze features as if expecting them to offer an answer. You know quite well why, young man, the Cardinal seemed to say. And yes, of course, the young man did know.

  1944, a murder committed with three blows in a straight line. He had come across it in the records, but had ruled it out, because the undisputed killer had been a young man of twenty-five or so, when Fulgence was supposedly forty. He lowered his head to his knees, trying to concentrate. The fine rain formed a mist and seeped into his clothes, as he sat at the wily cardinal’s feet. He waited patiently for the ancient information to come up out of the mist. Or for the fish to swim up out of the depths of Pink Lake. A woman, it had been. Killed with three puncture wounds. And someone had drowned too. When was that? Before the murder? After? Where, in a lake, a pond? In the Landes? No, in the marshes of the Sologne, where people went duck-shooting. The man had drowned, that was it, in a marsh. A father. And after his burial, the woman, his wife, had been killed. He could vaguely picture some photographs in an old press cutting. Probably the father and mother under a headline. A double death, enough to merit a large spread, at a time when news of the war and anticipation of the Allied landings had pushed most small news items off the front pages. Adamsberg clenched his fists and tried to recall what the headline had said.

  ‘Tragic matricide in the Sologne.’ That was it. True to his habit, Adamsberg sat stock still trying not to breathe. Whenever a fragmentary thought flashed across his mind he tried not to move, afraid of scaring it away, like an angler handling a bite. He wouldn’t pounce on it until it was safely landed in the conscious brain. After the father’s funeral, the couple’s son, aged twenty-five, had killed his mother and fled. There was a witness, a domestic servant, who had been pushed aside by the son in his frantic flight. Had he been caught? Or had he vanished in the turmoil of the Allied Landings and the Liberation? Adamsberg did not know the answer, since he had not pursued the case. It had not seemed to fit the pattern and, in any case, the man was too young to be Fulgence. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ So perhaps it could have been Fulgence after all. A man who’d killed his own mother. With a trident. Mordent’s words came back to him, in a flash: ‘The o-ri-gin-al sin, the first murder. The kind of thing that produces ghosts.’

  Adamsberg looked up into the rain and bit his lip. He had blocked all the spectre’s bolt-holes, he had forced the phantom to come back to life, and now he had put his finger on the original crime. He dialled Josette’s number, sheltering the phone and hoping the rain wouldn’t affect its little antennae.

  On hearing her voice, he felt as if he was calling up a super-efficient colleague in the most natural way in the world. An elderly little old police inspectress, shuffling along in her earrings and slippers in the secret underworld of the internet. Which earrings would she be wearing tonight, the pearls or the gold clover-leaves?

  ‘Josette, did I disturb you?’

  ‘Not at all, I’m having fun in a Swiss bank account.’

  ‘Josette, the coffin was full of sand. I think I’ve forced our man into the open.’

  ‘Wait a minute, commissaire, I’ll get a pen.’

  Adamsberg heard Clémentine’s loud voice in the corridor:

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you, Josette, he’s not a commissaire now.’

  He heard Josette
explaining about the sand.

  ‘Ah, about time too,’ said Clémentine.

  ‘Very well, I’m ready,’ said Josette.

  ‘Can you locate the case of a mother, murdered by her son in 1944. It was some time before the Allied Landings, in March or April. It was in the Sologne region, just after the father’s funeral.’

  ‘Three puncture wounds, like the others?’

  ‘Yes. The killer, the son, was young, about twenty-five. I can’t recall what the name of the family was or the exact place.’

  ‘It’s very old, it will only be in some very remote place if it’s on computer at all. But I’ll give it a try, commissaire.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ the distant voice of Clémentine began.

  ‘Josette, call me back any time if you find anything.’

  Adamsberg put away the mobile and walked slowly back to the hotel. Everyone in this story had contributed something, just the right words at the right time. Sanscartier, Mordent, Danglard, Retancourt, Raphaël, Clémentine, and of course Vivaldi. And then Dr Courtin, Father Grégoire and Josette. Now he had to add Cardinal Richelieu. And perhaps even Trabelmann with his damned cathedral.

  Josette called back at two in the morning.

  ‘Well, now,’ she began as usual. ‘I had to try the National Archives, and the police records. Very well protected, as I said.’