Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (21 page)

The janitor stopped him at the door.

‘Feeling better?’ he asked. ‘You were in a helluva state last night. Goddamn gangs. Did you manage to run ’em in?’

‘Yeah, the lot. Sorry to have roused you.’

‘No harm done, I wasn’t asleep. It was nearly two in the morning, but I’m not sleeping well.’

‘Nearly two in the morning?’ asked Adamsberg turning back. ‘Late as that?’

‘Yeah, ten to two, to be precise. I didn’t get to sleep at all last night.’

Feeling rattled, Adamsberg pushed his fists deep into his pockets as he headed down to the river and turned right. He was certainly not going to sit down in the cold, let alone risk meeting the dreaded Noëlla.

Ten to two in the morning. The
commissaire
paced up and down on the little sandy stretch lining the bank. The geese were there, their commander-in-chief still at it, marshalling his troops for the night, whipping in the stragglers and latecomers. He could hear his imperious cackling behind his back. Well, that was one customer who didn’t get depressed and try to drown his sorrows in a bar in the rue Laval, for sure. It made him hate the well-organised bird even more. A Canada gander, who probably checked every morning to see his feathers were in tiptop condition and his shoelaces properly tied. Adamsberg turned up his collar. Never mind the geese, just put your thinking cap on, as Clémentine would say. It isn’t rocket science. Follow the advice she and Sanscartier had given him. For the moment they were his only guardian angels: an eccentric old woman and an innocent unpromoted
sergeant. Well, everyone has his own guardian angels. Just put your thinking cap on.

Ten to two in the morning. Up to when he had crashed into the branch, he could remember everything. He had asked the barman the time. Quarter after ten, way past your bedtime, man. However much he was swaying about, he could hardly have taken more than forty minutes to reach the place on the path where he had hit the branch. Let’s allow three-quarters of an hour maximum, to cover not walking straight. It couldn’t have been more, because his legs were working perfectly well then. So he must have hit the tree at about eleven o’clock. Then allow for waking up on the road, and another twenty minutes to make it to the building. He must have regained consciousness at about one-thirty in the morning. Therefore two and a half hours must have passed between hitting the branch and coming to, feeling sick, at the end of the trail. Two and a half hours, for a journey that usually took him little more than half an hour!

What the hell had he been doing in those two and a half hours? His mind was a complete blank. Had he been unconscious all that time? But the temperature was minus 12 degrees. He would surely have frozen to the spot. He must have been walking, moving about. Perhaps he had dragged himself slowly along the trail, falling then getting up again, making erratic progress, interspersed with fainting fits.

Alcohol and mixed drinks. He knew people who could shout all night without having any memory of it next day. Guys in the cells, who had to be told in the morning what they had been up to: beating the wife, chucking the dog out of the window. Black holes of two or three hours, before falling into a deep sleep. In that time, they’d been responsible for actions, words and gestures, plenty of them, but all lost to conscious memory, since their minds were befuddled with drink. It was as if the alcohol diluted any attempt to record a memory, like the ink from a pen writing on sodden paper.

What had he drunk?

Three whiskies, four glasses of wine and one of cognac. And if the barman, who seemed to know his job, judged the time had come to chuck him out, he no doubt had good reason. Barmen can estimate exactly how
many degrees of alcohol you have in your blood, as certainly as the Mounties’ DNA laboratory. The man had seen his customer go over the line, and refused to serve him another glass, even if it would have meant a few more bucks. They’re like that, barmen. They may look like shopkeepers, but they’re really chemists, vigilant philanthropists, lifesavers. And indeed he remembered the barman had even taken care to pull his cap firmly on to his head.

Well, that was all there was to it, Adamsberg concluded, turning homewards. He had got monumentally drunk, and then he had hit his head. Pissed out of his mind and knocked unconscious. After that, he had spent two and a half hours crawling along the path, tripping and falling every few steps. So drunk that his sodden memory couldn’t register anything. He had gone into the bar in search of forgetfulness, the famous oblivion that lies at the bottom of a glass. Well, he had certainly got more than he’d bargained for.

On his return, he felt well enough to do his packing and clear up the room. A tidy room was what he would have liked to find back home in Paris. He felt overburdened by turbulent clouds, great dark cumulus clouds crashing into each other like swollen toads, not forgetting the thunderbolts as well. What he ought to do was cut up those clouds into little samples, and put them all on collection cards and paper discs. Not mix them all up in a great heavy sack. He would treat obstacles in future as he had learnt to handle them here, methodically taking cloud samples, one by one, in ascending order of length. If he was capable of that. He thought of the next obstacle looming up; the presence of Noëlla tomorrow at the airport, ready for the 20.10 flight to Paris.

XXVIII

HIS HEADACHE HAD LIFTED BY THE MORNING, AND ADAMSBERG ARRIVED
punctually at the RCMP base, parking his car under the same maple tree and greeting the usual squirrel, finding a kind of penitential comfort in reconnecting with his briefly-established Quebec routine. All his colleagues asked how he was, but no one made any ironic references to drink. Warmth and discretion. Ginette said approvingly that the swelling on his forehead had gone down and gave him some more of the sticky ointment.

Everyone was in fact so discreet that he realised, with astonishment, that Laliberté could not have thought it necessary to tell the French group about the episode in
L’Ecluse
. The superintendent had stuck to the sober version of events: an accident caused by bumping into a tree branch in the dark. Adamsberg appreciated this considerate omission, since most people enjoy a good story about their superiors hitting the bottle. Danglard would have taken advantage of his drunken fall, and Noël would have made some meaningful jokes. And since one joke led to another, if news of the incident had reached the ears of Brézillon’s circle, he would have felt the consequences of it in relation to the Favre affair. Ginette was the only person who knew the full story, so that she could bring him medical help, and she too had not breathed a word to anyone else. This tact and restraint must mean that the Chat Room in Ottawa was of minute proportions, whereas in Paris, it tended to overflow the walls of the building and spill out over the pavement terrace of the
Brasserie des Philosophes
.

Danglard was the only one who did not enquire about his state of health. The imminence of their take-off that evening had once more plunged him into a state of debilitating panic, which he was doing his best to conceal from their Canadian colleagues.

Adamsberg passed the final day as a conscientious student under the tuition of Alphonse Philippe-Auguste, who was as unassuming as his surname was grandiose. At three in the afternoon, the superintendent called a halt to the session and brought the sixteen participants in the course together for a summing-up conference and a farewell drink.

The discreet Sanscartier came up to Adamsberg.

‘You had a few too many, the other night, I guess?’ he asked.

‘Er, you think?’ said Adamsberg prudently.

‘You’re not going to tell me a guy like you just walked into a tree. You’ve got a feel for nature and you knew the path like the back of your hand by then.’

‘So?’

‘So in my book, you had an attack of the blues, because of your problem back home, or something. You downed a few drinks, and that’s why you walked into that branch.’

Sanscartier was a hands-on policeman, who knew his stuff.

‘Does it really matter why I bumped into the branch?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘Yeah, it does. Because when you’ve got the blues, that’s exactly when you start bumping into branches. And if you’re still chasing that devil, you need to keep out of their way. You shouldn’t wait for hell to freeze over to get to the other side, if you dig my meaning. Put out more sail, hang on in there, and go for it.’

Adamsberg smiled at him.

‘You won’t forget me, will you?’ said Sanscartier, as they shook hands. ‘You promised you’re going to let me know when you catch your devil. And could you please send me some almond-scented soap?’

‘What was that?’

‘I knew this French guy, he had some. I liked the smell.’

‘Right, Sanscartier. I’ll send you some.’

Happiness is a bar of almond-scented soap. For a few seconds, Adamsberg envied the sergeant his simple desires. Almond-scented soap suited him down to the ground. It could have been invented for him.

In the check-in hall of the airport, Ginette inspected the wound on Adamsberg’s forehead one last time, while he looked anxiously around for Noëlla. The moment of their departure was approaching and there was no sign of her so far. He began to breathe more easily.

‘If it hurts in the plane because of the pressure, take some of these,’ said Ginette, giving him some pills. She put the ointment tube in his bag, and told him to go on applying it for a week.

‘Don’t forget, now,’ she said, distrustingly.

Adamsberg kissed her goodbye, then went over to the superintendent.

‘Thanks for everything, Aurèle, and thanks especially for not letting on to the colleagues.’

‘Christ, Jean-Baptiste, everyone has too much to drink once in a while. Not a good idea to shout it from the rooftops though, otherwise you won’t hear the end of it.’

The sound of the jet engines produced the same disastrous result on Danglard as on the way out. This time, Adamsberg avoided sitting next to him, but he posted Retancourt behind him, with orders to carry out her mission. Which she did twice during the flight, so that when the plane landed next morning at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, everyone was exhausted, except Danglard, who was as fresh as a daisy. Finding himself alive and well and back on Parisian soil opened up new horizons for him, making him feel both indulgent and optimistic. So before getting on the bus, he came over to Adamsberg.

‘I’m really sorry about the other night,’ he said. ‘I apologise sincerely. It wasn’t what I meant to say.’

Adamsberg gave a vague nod, then all the members of the Brigade dispersed. It was to be a day of rest and recuperation.

And of getting used to their old existence once more. Compared to the vast expanses of Canada, Paris seemed pinched to Adamsberg, the trees were spindly, the streets crowded with people, and the squirrels like pigeons. Unless, that is, it was he who had shrunk while he had been away. He needed to think, to separate the samples into segments and bands, as he remembered.

As soon as he was home, he made himself some real coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and attempted something unusual for him, organising his thoughts. A cardboard file card, a pencil, a set of test tubes, and samples of the clouds in his head. The results weren’t really worthy of the laser sequencer. After an hour of effort, he had managed to make only a few notes.

The dead judge, the trident. Raphaël. Bears’ claws on trees, Pink Lake, devil in holy water. Fossil fish. Vivaldi’s warning. New father, 2 labradors
.

Danglard: ‘In my book, you’re a stupid bastard.’ Sanscartier the Good: ‘Look for your damn demon and until you collar him, lie low.’

Drunk. Two and a half hours on the trail
.

Noëlla. Seems to be out of the way
.

And that was it. All mixed up, what was more. Only one positive thing came out of all this: he was rid of that crazy girl, which was a satisfying point to end on.

While unpacking, he found the ointment left him by Ginette Saint-Preux. Not the best souvenir from a trip abroad, although in the tube there seemed to him to be concentrated all the goodwill of his Québécois colleagues. They were bloody good chums. He must absolutely not forget to send the soap to Sanscartier. That suddenly reminded him that he had brought nothing back for Clémentine, not even a bottle of maple syrup.

XXIX

THE MASS OF PAPERWORK AWAITING HIM AT THE OFFICE THAT THURSDAY
morning, arranged in five high piles on his desk, almost sent him fleeing along the banks of the Seine, even if the Paris river seemed humble and narrow compared to the Ottawa River. But a walk was still a more tempting prospect than ploughing his way through mountains of dossiers.

His first move was to pin on his bulletin board a postcard of the Ottawa River Falls, surrounded by red maple leaves. Standing back to judge the effect, he found it so inadequate that he immediately took it down. A picture couldn’t convey the glacial wind, the crashing of the water and the furious cackling of the boss of the Canada geese.

He spent the entire day working through the files, checking, signing, sorting out and learning about the cases which had come to the Crime Squad during the two weeks he had been away. One thug had beaten up another on the boulevard Ney and then pissed on him as a finishing touch. ‘Not a good idea to piss on the body, man.’ So he’d be caught, no problem, thanks to analysis of the piss. Adamsberg countersigned reports by his lieutenants and broke off to visit the coffee machine, and drink a ‘regular’, Paris-style. Mordent, perched on one of the high stools, like a large grey bird on a chimney-stack, was drinking a cup of chocolate.

‘I took the liberty of following that case, the
Nouvelles d’Alsace
one,’ he said, wiping his lips. ‘Vétilleux’s on remand, and he’ll go for trial in three months.’

‘He’s not guilty, Mordent. I tried to convince Trabelmann, but he just won’t believe me. Nor will anyone else, come to that.’

‘Not enough evidence?’