Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (13 page)

‘Madame Coutellier, are there any outbuildings in the chateau?’

‘There’s the old stables, a barn, and a summer house. But that was empty and I didn’t have to go there. He kept his car in the stables and the gardener used the barn for his tools.’

‘Can you tell me the colour or the make of his car?’

‘No, I never saw it,
commissaire
, because the gentleman was always out when I was working there, and I didn’t have any keys for any of the outbuildings.’

‘In the house itself, madame,’ said Adamsberg, thinking of his precious trident, ‘did you have access to all the rooms?’

‘Yes, except for the attic which was kept locked. M. Leclerc said it wasn’t worth wasting my time up there in all the dust.’

Bluebeard’s lair, Trabelmann would have said. The locked room, the chamber of horrors.

Adamsberg looked at his watch. Or rather at his watches. The one he had bought himself about two years before, and the second one which Camille had given him in Lisbon, a man’s watch that she had won at a street fair. He had wanted to put it on, to celebrate their finding each other again, and yet a day later, he had left her. Since then, curiously, he had not removed this second watch, a sporty waterproof model, with all sorts of buttons, chronometers and dials that Adamsberg couldn’t work. One of them apparently told you how long it would take after the flash before you were struck by lightning. Very handy, Adamsberg thought. But he hadn’t abandoned his own watch, which had a worn leather strap and joggled against the second one. So for a year now, he had had two watches on his wrist. All his colleagues had pointed this out, and he had informed them that he too had noticed. He had kept his two watches on the go, without really knowing why, which meant a bit of extra fiddling at bedtime and in the morning, taking them off and putting them back on.

One of the watches said one minute to three, the other four minutes past. Camille’s was always faster than the other, and Adamsberg had never bothered to check which was right, or to set them properly. He liked them to be different and calculated what the average was between the two, assuming that to be the right time. It was therefore one and a half minutes past three. He had just time to catch the train back to Strasbourg.

The young man from the estate agent had astonished-looking green eyes, which reminded him of Estalère. He picked Adamsberg up at the station in Haguenau at 18.47 and drove him out to the
Schloss
once inhabited by Maxime Leclerc, a large property surrounded by a pine forest.

‘No nosy neighbours to spy on one here then?’ said Adamsberg, as they visited each of the rooms in the deserted house.

‘Monsieur Leclerc had specified that he valued his peace and quiet above everything else. He was a very solitary gentleman. We come across people like him in this job.’

‘What do you think? Did he dislike other people?’

‘Perhaps he’d had an unhappy life,’ suggested the young man, ‘and preferred to live in an isolated place. Madame Coutellier said he had a lot of books. It takes them that way sometimes.’

With the young man’s help, since his arm was still in a sling, Adamsberg spent some time taking fingerprints, from places which he hoped Madame Coutellier had not dusted too energetically, on the doorhandles and latches and on light switches. The almost empty attic had a floor of rough wooden planks, which made it difficult to detect changes. But the first six metres did not look as if they had remained entirely untouched for four years, and there seemed to be slight irregularities in the thickness of the dust. Under one beam, a vague line was discernible on the dark floor, where it was slightly lighter. It was probably too uncertain to base anything on, but if the man had put a trident down anywhere, it could have been there, where the handle had left a fleeting trace. Adamsberg paid special attention to the huge bathroom. Madame Coutellier had been very thorough in her cleaning that morning, but the size of the room left him some leeway. In the narrow gap between the foot of the handbasin and the wall, he found a little dust, containing several white hairs.

The young man, patient and amazed, opened up the barn for him, and the stables. The earth floor had been brushed, removing any trace of tyres. Maxime Leclerc had vanished with the ethereal evanescence of a ghost.

The windows of the little summer house were covered with grime, but it wasn’t abandoned as Madame Coutellier had thought. Just as Adamsberg hoped, a few signs betrayed that it had been used on occasion. The dust on the floor had been disturbed, there was a clean wicker chair, and on the only shelf there were traces which could have been left by piles of books. It was most likely here that Maxime Leclerc had hidden away for the three hours on Mondays and Thursdays, reading in his
armchair, out of sight of the cleaning lady or the gardener. The armchair and solitary reading reminded Adamsberg of the way his own father would read the paper, smoking a pipe. A whole generation of men had smoked pipes, and he remembered very clearly that the judge had owned one, a meerschaum, as his mother had said admiringly.

‘Can you smell it?’ he asked the young man. ‘The smell of sweet pipe tobacco?’

Here, the table, the chair, the doorhandles had all been very carefully wiped, with a thoroughness which was eloquent. Unless, that is, as Danglard would have said, nothing at all had been wiped, because dead men leave no prints, do they? Although apparently they read books, like other people.

It was after nine o’clock when Adamsberg sent his guide home, the young man having seen it as his duty to drive him to Strasbourg station, since trains did not stop at Haguenau so late in the evening. As it happened, he had a train leaving in six minutes, so had no time to go and see whether a dragon had managed to block the main door of the cathedral. People would have noticed, Adamsberg said to himself.

On the return journey, he took notes, putting down in any order the details he had noticed in the
Schloss
. The four years Maxime Leclerc had spent there appeared to have been marked by the utmost discretion: it was as if the house’s owner had evaporated, significantly, into thin air.

The plump man whom Madame Coutellier had met could not have been Maxime Leclerc himself, but one of his henchmen instead, entrusted with this brief task. The judge exerted power over a considerable cohort of people, a fragmented network which he had built up over his long years on the bench. A suspended sentence here, a light sentence there, a fact pushed under the carpet, so that the accused would emerge either with an acquittal or a much reduced prison term. But by the same token, he would join that collection of men in his debt, whom Fulgence would later use for some purpose. This network extended into the criminal
world as well as into the bourgeoisie, business circles, the magistrature and even the police. Procuring false identity papers in the name of Maxime Leclerc would present no problems for the Trident, and he could dispatch his accomplices all over France if need be. Or he could assemble a group to help him organise a midnight flit. None of his hostages could escape from the judge’s thrall without revealing the original deception and risking a fresh trial. It must be one of these ex-accused who had come along to impersonate the house’s owner for the cleaning lady. Then Judge Fulgence had taken possession of the
Schloss
under the name of Leclerc.

Adamsberg could understand why the judge would make plans to move out. But the abruptness of the operation surprised him. Such extreme haste in abandoning the house and putting it on the market seemed to fit uneasily with Fulgence’s normal powers of prediction. Unless, that is, something unexpected had cropped up to surprise him. It certainly wasn’t any inquiry from Trabelmann, who had no idea who he was.

Adamsberg frowned. What was it that Danglard had said about the judge’s name, his identity? Something in Latin, like the village priest. Adamsberg felt unable to telephone his deputy who, whether because of Camille, the living dead, or the Boeing, was becoming more and more hostile to him every day. He decided to follow Clémentine’s advice, and put his thinking cap on. It must have been in his flat, after the bottle incident. Danglard was knocking back the gin and had said the name Fulgence suited the judge ‘down to the ground’. And Adamsberg had agreed.

Fulgence,
fulgur
, lightning, that was it,
l’éclair
. Le Clair, Leclerc, sounded the same. And if Adamsberg was not mistaken, Maxime must mean ‘the biggest’, like maximum. The biggest flash of lightning. Judge Fulgence wouldn’t be satisfied with a humble pseudonym.

The train was braking to enter the Gare de l’Est in Paris. Pride comes before a fall, thought Adamsberg. That’s how he would get him. If his own cathedral was 142 metres high, something which had yet to be ascertained, Fulgence’s must reach to the sky. Laying down the law up there, throwing down his golden sickles in the fields full of stars. Throwing
Adamsberg’s brother, like so many others, before the courts and then into prison. He suddenly felt very small. ‘Keep a low profile,’ Brézillon had ordered. Well, he would do just that, but he did have in his bag a few white hairs from a dead man’s head.

XVI

ON TUESDAY 14 OCTOBER, THE EIGHT MEMBERS OF THE QUEBEC
mission were waiting to board their Boeing 747, take-off scheduled for 16.40, estimated arrival time midnight, or 18.00, local time. Adamsberg knew just how much that term ‘estimated’, repeated by the reassuring voices over the loudspeakers, was piercing Danglard with sick apprehension. He had been watching him attentively for the couple of hours that they had been waiting at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport.

The rest of the team was regressing into teenage behaviour, disoriented by the unusual context, as if they were off on a school trip. He glanced at
Lieutenant
Froissy, a sharp-witted woman, but still subject to an attack of depression, occasioned by an unhappy love affair, according to what he had heard in the Chat Room. Although she was not joining in the rather infantile rowdiness of her colleagues, the break from routine seemed to distract her and he had seen her smile a few times. But the same could not be said for Danglard. Nothing seemed to rouse the
capitaine
from his sombre prognostications. His long and already lethargic body seemed to have become almost invertebrate as the time of departure approached. His legs no longer appeared able to carry him, and he had shrunk back into the curved metal seat, as if it were moulded to him. Adamsberg had seen him three times fish in his pocket and produce a pill which he then thrust between his bloodless lips.

Danglard’s colleagues, since they were aware of his fear of flying, were being deliberately discreet. The scrupulous Justin, who always hesitated
to give an opinion, in case he offended someone or altered their ideas, was by turns re-telling standard jokes and pretending frantically to revise the ranks and insignia of the Québécois police. He was the opposite of Noël, who always rushed in where angels fear to tread. Any kind of movement was a good thing as far as Noël was concerned, so he was looking forward to the trip, as was Voisenet. The ex-chemist and naturalist was hoping to pick up plenty of scientific information on the visit, but also to explore the geology and fauna of Canada. In Retancourt’s case, there was no problem of course, since she was adaptability personified, always adjusting to the demands of any situation. As for the young and timid Estalère, his large green eyes with their perpetual look of amazement were always on the alert for some new surprising curiosity. In short, Adamsberg thought, they all found some form of release or advantage in the expedition, which contributed to the noisy collective excitement.

All except Danglard, that is. His five children had been left in the care of his generous neighbour on the sixth floor, along with the cat, and on that front everything was under control, except the prospect of leaving them orphans. Adamsberg tried to think of some way of rescuing his deputy from his increasing panic, but the growing coolness between them left him little room for manoeuvre in trying to comfort him. Or perhaps, Adamsberg thought, he ought to try a different tack: provoke him and force him to react. What better way than to tell him about the visit to the phantom of the
Schloss?
That would certainly make Danglard angry, and anger is much more stimulating and distracting than fear. He had been thinking about this for a moment or two, smiling to himself, when their flight for Montreal-Dorval was called, bringing them all to their feet.

They were seated in a compact group in the middle of the plane, and Adamsberg saw to it that Danglard was seated to his right, as far as possible from a window. The safety instructions which were mimed by a smiling flight attendant, explaining what to do if there was a loss of pressure, or a landing on water, and how to evacuate the aircraft via the escape chutes, did not help at all. Danglard fumbled under his seat for his lifejacket.

‘Don’t bother,’ said Adamsberg. ‘If there really was any trouble, you’d be sucked out through the window without even being conscious, and disappear like the toad. Puff, puff, bang.’

This kind remark failed to bring a smile to the
capitaine’s
face.

When the plane stopped to rev up to full power, Adamsberg really thought he was going to lose his deputy, just like the damned toad. Danglard survived take-off by clinging to the armrests. Adamsberg waited till the plane had finished its ascent before trying to distract him.

‘Look,’ he explained, ‘you have your own TV screen. They put on some good films. There’s a cultural channel too. See here,’ he added, consulting the programme. ‘There’s a documentary about the precursors of the Italian Renaissance. That’s for you, isn’t it? The Italian Renaissance?’

‘Already know all that stuff,’ muttered Danglard, his expression fixed, his fingers still gripping the armrests.

‘Even the precursors?’

‘Know all that too.’

‘If you switch on your radio, there’s a debate about Hegel’s aesthetics, it says here. What about that?’