Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Jeez, that was the worst bit. I had to take a sickie to get off work and first of all I asked at the town hall. But no, it was a federal camp. So second of all, I had to go to Montreal to find the name of the lumber outfit. Laliberté was getting fed up with my sick leaves, I can tell you. And your capitaine was on at me the whole time by phone. I got the watchman’s name. He was up the Ottawa River somewhere by then, so I had to take more leave to go there. Thought the super was going to burst a blood vessel.’

  ‘And you found him?’ asked Adamsberg swallowing a glass of water in a single gulp.

  ‘Don’t worry, I nabbed him in his pick-up. But getting him to say anything was another matter. He spun me yarn after yarn. Finally I threatened him with the cells if he didn’t come clean. Withholding information, hiding vital evidence. I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you what he said. Adrien, can you go on?’

  ‘The watchman, Jean-Gilles Boisvenu, saw a man crouching by the path that Sunday night,’ said Danglard. ‘He took out his binoculars and had a good look.’

  ‘A good look?’

  ‘Boisvenu was sure that he was waiting for another homosexual,’ Sanscartier explained. ‘You know the portage trail was supposed to be a gay pick-up place after dark?’

  ‘Yes, he asked me if that was why I was there.’

  ‘He was interested, sort of a voyeur,’ Danglard explained, ‘so he was glued to his windscreen. A very good witness, because he was paying close attention. He was delighted when he heard someone else coming, he could see quite well. But it didn’t work out as he was hoping.’

  ‘How did he know it was the Sunday night, the 26th?’

  ‘Because he was on duty when he should have been off, and furious with the weekend watchman who had called in sick. He saw the first man, who was tall with white hair, hit the other guy on the head with a sawn-off branch. The other one, that’s you, commissaire, fell to the ground. Boisvenu crouched down in the truck. The big guy looked mean and he didn’t want to get involved in a lover’s tiff, if that’s what it was. But he went on looking.’

  ‘Rooted to the spot.’

  ‘Yes, he was thinking, well hoping, in fact, that it might turn into a rape of the victim.’

  ‘Understand now?’ said Sanscartier, his cheeks bright red.

  ‘Well, the big guy started to take the scarf off the other one and undo his jacket. Boisvenu went on looking. And what he saw was that the big guy took your hands and pressed them on something like a strap.’

  ‘The belt,’ said Sanscartier.

  ‘Exactly, the belt. But he didn’t do anything else to your clothing. He injected something into your neck. Boisvenu is absolutely certain about that. He saw him take a syringe out of his pocket and test the pressure.’

  ‘Cotton-wool legs,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘I told you I couldn’t get my head round that,’ said Danglard. ‘Until the branch, even if you were drunk, you were walking normally. But when you woke up, your legs could hardly carry you. And they were still not normal in the morning. On alcohol, I’m an expert, I know what it can do. Amnesia’s not a regular effect, and as for the legs, I just thought that was very odd. I needed to see if something else was involved.’

  ‘That was his hunch,’ Sanscartier explained.

  ‘Some drug,’ Danglard explained, ‘something which would give you memory loss, like all the other people who’d been arrested.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Sanscartier went on, ‘the old guy got up, and left you where you were. At that point, Boisvenu thought he’d better do something, after seeing the syringe. He’s tough, not a nightwatchman for nothing, but he couldn’t get out of his truck right away. Can you tell him why, please, Adrien?’

  ‘Well his legs were caught in his pants,’ Danglard explained. ‘He’d got himself all ready for a peepshow, and he’d pulled his dungarees down to his ankles.’

  ‘Boisvenu was embarrassed to tell me that,’ Sanscartier went on. ‘By the time he was decent, the old man had gone. The watchman found you lying there, out for the count and covered in blood. He dragged you over to his truck and put you inside with a blanket over you. And he waited.’

  ‘Why did he wait. Why didn’t he call the police?’

  ‘He didn’t want people asking him why he hadn’t done anything. He didn’t want to say what he was doing. If he said he was scared, or hadn’t seen the attack because he was asleep, it might have cost him his job. They don’t recruit nightwatchmen to panic or go to sleep. He preferred to keep mum and put you in the truck.’

  ‘He could have just left me there and washed his hands of me.’

  ‘Well yes, theoretically. But he couldn’t square that with God and his conscience, leaving someone to die, and he wanted to retrieve himself. With the temperature that night, you would have frozen to death. He decided to see if you were coming to after the knock on the head and the injection. He didn’t know whether it was just a tranquilliser or a poison. If it looked bad, he’d call the cops and invent something. He watched you for two hours, and since you were sleeping with a regular pulse, he decided you’d be OK. When you seemed to be waking up, he drove off up the cycle track and put you down on the road. He knew you’d come from there, he recognised you.’

  ‘Why did he drive me back?’

  ‘He thought you wouldn’t be in a fit state to get back along the path under your own steam, you might fall in the river.’

  ‘A good egg in the end then,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘There was still a tiny drop of dried blood in the back of his pick-up truck. I took a sample, well, you know our methods. The guy wasn’t lying, it was your DNA, OK. I compared it with …’ Sanscartier hesitated.

  ‘Your semen,’ Danglard completed the sentence. ‘So between eleven and one-thirty in the morning, you weren’t on the path, you were in Boisvenu’s pick-up truck.’

  ‘But before that?’ asked Adamsberg, rubbing his cold lips. ‘Between ten-thirty and eleven?’

  ‘You left L’Ecluse at ten-fifteen. By half-past, you had started down the path. You couldn’t have reached the work site and picked up any trident before eleven, which is when Boisvenu saw you coming. And you didn’t take a fork from the site. Nothing was missing. The judge had his weapon already.’

  ‘Brand new, bought on the spot?’

  ‘Yes, we traced it. Sartonna was sent to buy it.’

  ‘But there was earth in the wounds.’

  ‘You’re not very quick this morning, Jean-Baptiste,’ said Sanscartier with a grin. ‘That’s because you don’t dare believe it. Your devil, you see, he’d knocked the girl unconscious up by the Champlain stone. He’d sent her a message, supposedly from you, to meet her there, and he was waiting for her. He hit her from behind, then dragged her along to the little pool. Before he stabbed her, he’d already had to break the ice on the pool, and the pool was full of mud and leaves. That’s why the prongs had earth on them.’

  ‘And he killed Noëlla,’ whispered Adamsberg.

  ‘It must have been before eleven, and well before, ten-thirty maybe. He knew the time you usually came back along the path. He took the belt, he pushed the girl’s body under the ice. Then he came back to surprise you.’

  ‘Why not wait till I got nearer the body?’

  ‘There was a greater risk of meeting someone. The site was a good place to wait, plenty of big trees in case anyone else came by. He bashed you on the head, drugged you, and then took the belt back and left it by the body. It was the capitaine who thought of looking for some of his hairs. Because of course nothing so far proved it was the judge, you see. Danglard hoped he might have lost a few hairs between the Champlain stone and the pool, when he was dragging the body over. He could have stopped for breath, put his hand to his head, something like that. So we took up the surface about an inch and a half down. It had frozen over again, which meant the hairs might still be there. So that’s why I found myself with six cubic metres of leafmould and twigs to comb. And the contents of that box,’ said Sanscartier, point
ing to it. ‘Apparently you’ve got some of the judge’s hairs over here.’

  ‘From the Schloss! Shit, Danglard, what about Michel? He could have taken them from my flat, they were in the kitchen cupboard with the bottles.’

  ‘I took the sachet the same time I weeded the files of documents about Raphaël. Michel didn’t know anything about the hairs.’

  ‘So how come you looked in the cupboard?’

  ‘I was looking for a little something to help me think about the papers.’

  Adamsberg nodded, thinking how fortunate it was his capitaine knew where to find the gin.

  ‘And anyway, he left his cape in your flat last night,’ said Danglard. ‘So I got two more hairs from the collar while you were asleep.’

  ‘What’s happened to the cape? Have you still got it?’

  ‘Why? Do you want it?’

  ‘Might do, I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d rather have caught the devil than his coat.’

  ‘Danglard, why did he want to pin the murder on me?’

  ‘To make you suffer, but above all to get you to agree to shoot yourself.’

  Adamsberg nodded. It was truly diabolical wickedness at work. He turned to the sergeant.

  ‘Sanscartier, surely you didn’t search that pile of leaves on your own?’

  ‘No, at that stage I had to tell Laliberté. I already had the statement from the watchman and the DNA of your blood. Christ, though, he went up the wall when I told him what I’d been doing on the so-called sick leaves. I won’t tell you what he said. He even accused me of having been your accomplice from the start and helping you escape. He went ballistic. Sure, I’d been way out of line. But in the end I got him to calm down and see reason. Because with our boss, you know, it’s rigour, rigour always that counts for him. So he cooled off and he had to admit there was more to the case than met the eye. After that, he moved heaven and earth and authorised us to do the search. And he lifted the warrant that was out for you.’

  Adamsberg looked at them in turn. Danglard and Sanscartier. Two men who had not abandoned him for a second.

  ‘Don’t try to say anything,’ said Sanscartier. ‘It’s too much to take in right now.’

  The car was moving slowly through the traffic jams on the outskirts of Paris. Adamsberg was in the back, leaning his head against the window, his eyes half shut, watching the familiar landmarks go by and glancing at the two men in front who had rescued him. The end of Raphaël’s exile. And the end of his own purgatory. The novelty and the relief were so great that they created in him an immense fatigue.

  ‘Hey, pretty good work, all that stuff about the Mah Jong,’ said Sanscartier. ‘Laliberté was stunned, he said it was a fantastic bit of detection. He’ll tell you so tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s coming over?’

  ‘I guess you might not want to see him, but he’s coming for your capitaine’s promotion the next day. Have you forgotten? Your big boss Brézillon asked him over, because they’ve got a few bones to pick and need to make it up.’

  Adamsberg found it hard to take it in that now he could just walk into the office if he liked. Without his lumberjack hat, he could just open the door and say hullo, shake people’s hands. Go and buy a loaf of bread. Sit by the banks of the Seine.

  ‘I’m trying to think how to thank you, Sanscartier, but I can’t find the words.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s all sorted. I’m going to a Toronto posting. Laliberté has promoted me to inspector. And all because you got drunk that night.’

  ‘But the judge has got away with it,’ said Danglard gloomily.

  ‘He’ll be found guilty in absentia,’ said Adamsberg. ‘And Vétilleux and those other people will be released. That’s what matters most, after all.’

  ‘No,’ said Danglard, shaking his head. ‘There’s still the fourteenth victim to think about.’

  Adamsberg sat up and leaned forward. Sanscartier smelled of almond soap.

  ‘I’ve worked out who the fourteenth victim is,’ he said, smiling.

  Danglard glanced in the mirror. It was the first time in six weeks that he had seen Adamsberg smile.

  ‘The last tile is the major element. Until you have that one, the game isn’t over and nothing makes sense. It closes the Hand of Honours, and gives its shape to the whole thing.’

  ‘OK, that’s logical,’ said Danglard.

  ‘And that major piece has to be a white dragon. But a dragon that’s white because it’s perfect, honour through excellence. Lightning, white light. It’s himself, Danglard. The Trident will join his father and mother, in a perfect run of white dragons, three tiles, once the whole thing is finished.’

  ‘He’s going to stab himself with a trident?’ frowned Danglard.

  ‘No. His natural death will complete the hand. It’s on what you taped, Danglard. “Even in prison, even in the grave, the last one won’t escape me.”’

  ‘But he always kills everyone with the damn trident,’ Danglard objected.

  ‘Well, not the last one. The judge is the Trident.’

  Adamsberg leaned back in his seat and fell fast asleep. Sanscartier looked round in surprise.

  ‘Does he often go off to sleep like that?’

  ‘When he’s bored, or in shock,’ Danglard explained.

  LXIII

  ADAMSBERG GREETED THE TWO POLICEMEN, UNKNOWN TO HIM, WHO were on duty on Camille’s landing, and showed them his badge – still in the name of Denis Lamproie.

  He rang the bell. He had spent the previous day coming back to life in solitude and in a daze, finding great difficulty in getting back in touch with himself again. After these seven weeks buffeted by winds from all four quarters, he found himself thrown up on the sandy shore, soaked and calmed, with the wounds inflicted by the Trident all healed. And at the same time, stunned and surprised. He knew at least that it was imperative that he tell Camille that he had not killed anyone. At least he must do that. And if he could manage it, he would tell her that he had expelled the image of the new father with the dogs from his mind. He felt ill at ease, with his uniform cap under his arm, his sharply-creased trousers, his jacket with its gold epaulettes and his medal in the button hole. The cap would at least have covered the remains of his tonsure.

  Camille opened the door and signalled to the two officers that she knew her visitor.

  ‘There are two policemen on the landing the whole time,’ she said, ‘and I don’t seem to be able to reach Adrien.’

  ‘Danglard’s at the Prefecture. He’s putting the finishing touches to a massive file. The uniforms will be guarding you for two months.’

  * * *

  Pacing up and down the studio, Adamsberg managed to tell his story, more or less. Trying not to say too much about Noëlla. and mixing up various elements. He interrupted himself half-way through.

  ‘And you know,’ he said, ‘I’ve sorted out that business about the man with the dogs.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Camille slowly. ‘So what do you think of him now?’

  ‘He’s much the same as his predecessor.’

  ‘Glad you like him.’

  ‘It’s easier this way. We can shake hands.’

  ‘For instance.’

  ‘Exchange a few words, like human beings.’

  ‘Yes …’

  Adamsberg nodded, and went on with the story: Raphaël, exile, dragons. He gave her back the rules of Mah Jong, and left, closing the door quietly behind him. The quiet click shocked him. Each of them on one side of the wooden barrier, living on separate levels. Separated by his own actions. At least the two watches were not separate, but locked together in a a discreet coupling on his left wrist.

  LXIV

  EVERYONE WAS IN DRESS UNIFORM AT THE SQUAD HEADQUARTERS. Danglard looked around contentedly at the hundred or so people in the Council Chamber. At one end, a dais had been prepared for the official speech by the divisionnaire, who would recount Danglard’s merits in the service, compliment him and pin on his new stripes. Then he would have to ma
ke an acceptance speech, crack a few jokes and convey some emotion. After that, his colleagues would congratulate him, everyone would relax, and there would be booze, canapés and chatter. He was watching the door to see whether Adamsberg turned up. It was possible the commissaire might not want to return to the squad on such a formal occasion. Clémentine was there however, in her best flowered dress, accompanied by Josette who wore a smart suit and tennis shoes. Clémentine was quite at ease, a cigarette in her mouth, and happily reunited with Brigadier Gardon, who had once, long ago, lent her a pack of cards, as she had not forgotten. The fragile hacker, the indispensable lawbreaker, afloat in a sea of police, stuck close to Clémentine’s side, holding her glass in both hands. Danglard had seen to it that the best quality champagne had been ordered, and had laid in plenty of it, as if wishing to make this evening as dense as possible, to impregnate it with fine bubbles which would run through it like molecules. For him the ceremony was less about his promotion than about the end of Adamsberg’s long agony.

  * * *

  The commissaire appeared discreetly at the door and for a moment, Danglard was vexed to see that he had not even put on his uniform. Then he realised who he was, as the man advanced hesitantly through the crowd. This man, with a handsome dark face with high cheekbones was not Jean-Baptiste but Raphaël Adamsberg. The capitaine understood how Retancourt’s plan had been able to work, if he was glimpsed across a car park in Gatineau. He pointed him out to Sanscartier.

  ‘That’s him, the brother,’ he said. ‘The one talking to Violette Retancourt.’

  ‘I can see how he fooled my colleagues,’ said Sanscartier with a grin.

  The commissaire had followed his brother in soon afterwards, his uniform cap covering his tonsure. Clémentine looked at him, openly appraising him.

  ‘That’s three kilos he’s put on with us, Josette,’ she said proudly surveying her work. ‘It suits him well, his blue uniform.’

  ‘Now he has no more locked doors, we won’t be hunting in the underground any more,’ said Josette with regret.