Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (22 page)

‘Not a scrap. The murderer’s someone who melts into thin air and he’s been dodging around in the mist for years now.’

He did not intend to inform Mordent that the murderer was dead, and thus start losing credibility with his staff one after another. ‘Don’t bother trying to convince them,’ Sanscartier had said.

‘So, how are you going to make any progress then?’ asked Mordent.

‘I’ll have to wait for him to strike again and try to pin him down before he disappears.’

‘Not a very cheering prospect,’ commented Mordent.

‘No. But how do you catch a ghost?’

Curiously enough, Mordent seemed to give serious thought to this question. Adamsberg took a seat alongside him, his legs hanging down from the stool. There were eight of these high stools in the Chat Room and Adamsberg had often thought that if you could get eight people to perch on them, they would look like swallows on the telegraph wires. But so far it hadn’t happened.

‘Well, how?’ he asked.

‘By irr-it-ating him,’ was Mordent’s reply.

The
commandant
always spoke in a very deliberate fashion, detaching each syllable distinctly and sometimes dwelling on one, as if with his finger on a piano key. It was a manner of diction which was both jerky and slow, and it annoyed people in a hurry, but Adamsberg rather liked it.

‘And that means?’

‘In stories or films, what happens is that a family moves into a haunted house. Until then, the ghost has been quiet, not annoying a-ny-bo-dy.’

Well, well, Trabelmann wasn’t the only person who liked stories, Mordent did too. Perhaps everybody did, even Brézillon.

‘And then what?’ asked Adamsberg, helping himself to a second regular because of his jet-lag, and perching himself back on the stool.

‘Then the newcomers start to get on the ghost’s nerves. Why? Because
they move in and change everything, cleaning cupboards, opening old trunks, emptying the attic. So they flush him out of his regular haunts. His favourite spots are out of bounds. Or perhaps they discover his most in-tim-ate secret.’

‘What secret?’

‘It’s always the same: his or-ig-inal sin, his first murder. Because if he hadn’t done something really serious, the character wouldn’t have been doomed to haunt the house for three hundred years. Walling up his wife, killing his brother, something like that. The kind of thing that produces ghosts, you know?’

‘Very true, Mordent.’

‘Then when he’s in a corner, with no place to go, the ghost gets cross. That’s when things start happening. He starts to appear to people, he takes his revenge, he becomes kind of human. From then on, the struggle can start.’

‘The way you talk, anyone would think you believe in ghosts, Mordent. Have you ever come across one?’

Mordent smiled and stroked his bald head.

‘You’re the one who brought up ghosts. I was just making up a story. For my own amusement. But it’s interesting too. Because at the bottom of every story, there’s always something monstrous. Thrashing about in the mud.’

Pink Lake immediately flashed into Adamsberg’s mind.

‘What sort of mud do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Well, something so traumatic that people daren’t speak of it except in terms of a story. In all those fairy-tale castles, with ghosts, magic cloaks that change colour, and geese that lay golden eggs.’

Mordent was getting launched as he threw his plastic cup into the bin.

‘The main thing is to solve the riddle correctly, and to guess right whenever you have a choice.’

‘So you have to annoy the ghost, close off his exits, and uncover the original sin.’

‘Ah, well. Easier said than done! Have you read my report on the Quebec course?’

‘Read and signed. Anyone would think you’d been there yourself, it’s brilliant. Do you know who guards the main door over there?’

‘Yes, a squirrel.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Estalère. It made quite an impression on him. Was he a volunteer or recruited?’

‘Who? Estalère?’

‘No, the squirrel.’

‘Oh, a volunteer on principle. But he found a girlfriend and that started to interfere with his work.’

‘Estalère?’

‘No, the squirrel.’

Adamsberg sat back at his desk, thinking about Mordent’s comments. Clear out all the usual hiding places, dislodge, pursue, provoke. Irritate the dead man. Use a laser sword to find out his or-ig-in-al sin. Ride in, sweep across the field, like the hero in a legend. And he hadn’t managed to do it in fourteen years. No horse, no sword, no armour.

And no time, either. He attacked the second pile of dossiers. At least this workload meant he had not yet exchanged a word with Danglard. He wondered how he was going to manage this new silence between them. The
capitaine
had certainly offered his apologies, but the ice was still frozen solid. Adamsberg had listened to an international weather forecast that morning, feeling nostalgic for Canada. In Ottawa, the temperature was still about minus 8 in the daytime and minus 12 at night. No thaw in prospect.

While working on the second pile the next day, the
commissaire
felt a slight niggle buzzing inside his head, as if he had an insect trapped inside his body, flying about between his shoulders and his stomach. It was a fairly familiar sensation. Not like the sudden panic attacks that had overcome him when the judge had started to surface in his unconscious. No,
just a modest little insect, like an annoying fly that needed swatting. Now and then, he took out the index card, to which he had added Mordent’s suggestions for flushing out ghosts. He looked at it, but obviously wasn’t seeing straight, as the barman in
L’Ecluse
had kindly informed him.

A slight headache sent him towards the coffee machine at five o’clock. Aha, Adamsberg thought suddenly, rubbing his forehead, I’ve got that dratted insect. That night of the 26th. What was causing the buzzing wasn’t the drink, but the lost two and a half hours. The question had surfaced again with urgency. What the devil had he been up to for all that time on the portage trail? And why was this tiny misplaced fragment of his life, causing him all this worry? He had already filed it away under the heading ‘memory loss occasioned by too much alcohol’. But obviously his mind was unhappy with this filing system, and the missing stretch of time had jumped off the shelf to start nagging away at him.

Why? Adamsberg wondered, as he stirred his coffee. Was it the idea of losing a chunk out of his life that was so irritating, as if it had been confiscated without permission? Or was it that the alcohol was not enough of an explanation? Or, more seriously, was he worried about what he might have said or done in the missing hours? But why? That sort of worry seemed as pointless as to worry about talking in one’s sleep. What else could he have done, apart from stagger about on the path, fall over, get up again, perhaps even crawling on all fours? Nothing. And yet that insect was still buzzing. Was it just to perplex him or was there some reason?

All he could dredge up about those hours was not an image but a sensation. And, if he tried to formulate it, a sensation of violence. It must have been the branch that hit him. But how could he be angry with a branch that hadn’t had a drop of alcohol to drink? A passive, sober enemy. Could he say the branch had done him violence? Or was it the other way around?

Instead of returning to his office, he went to sit on a corner of Danglard’s desk and threw his plastic cup with perfect accuracy into the bin.

‘Danglard,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a bee buzzing round in my bonnet.’

‘Really?’ said Danglard, cautiously.

‘You know the night of Sunday 26 October,’ Adamsberg went on slowly. ‘The night you told me I was a stupid bastard, you remember.’

The
capitaine
nodded and prepared for a confrontation. Adamsberg was obviously going to let him have it between the eyes, as they would say in the RCMP. But the conversation did not take the turn he was expecting. As usual, the
commissaire
surprised him with something quite different.

‘Well, that night, I hit my head on a branch, on the trail by the river. It was a really bad knock, an awful wallop.’

Danglard nodded again. The bruise was still visible, with its covering of yellow antiseptic ointment.

‘What you don’t know, is that after we spoke, I went straight to that bar,
L’Ecluse
, with the aim of getting well and truly drunk. Which I was doing quite effectively, until the good barman threw me out. I was rabbiting on about my grandmother, and he’d had enough.’

Again Danglard made a discreet sign of understanding, though he had no idea where Adamsberg was heading.

‘And when I reached the trail, I just staggered about from tree to tree and that’s why I didn’t manage to avoid the branch.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘But something else you don’t know is that when I hit my head, it was about eleven o’clock, no later. And I was almost half way home, probably not far from the logging site. Where they’re replanting trees?’

‘Er, right,’ said Danglard, who had never had the slightest wish to walk along the wild and muddy trail.

‘And when I came round, I’d reached the end of the trail. I managed to stagger up to the residence. I told the janitor I’d got into a fight, police versus a gang.’

‘Is that what’s bugging you? The drinking?’

Adamsberg shook his head slowly.

‘What you still don’t know, is that between hitting my head and coming to, there was a gap of two and a half hours. The janitor told me the time.
Two and a half hours for a trip that would usually take me about half an hour.’

‘Right,’ said Danglard again, still maintaining as neutral a tone as possible. ‘Well, it was a tricky bit of walking, wasn’t it?’

Adamsberg leaned towards him. ‘Which I can’t remember at all,’ he said deliberately. ‘Not a thing, not a memory of sight or sound. Two and a half hours on the trail and it’s a complete blank. And it was minus 12. I can’t have just been unconscious all that time, or I’d have frozen to death.’

‘Perhaps it was the shock,’ Danglard suggested. ‘From the branch.’

‘I wasn’t concussed, Ginette checked me over.’

‘The drink then?’

‘Well, obviously. That’s why I’m consulting you.’

Danglard sat up, feeling he was on his own ground and relieved to be avoiding a quarrel.

‘Can you remember what you had to drink?’

‘I can remember everything up to the branch. Three whiskies, four glasses of wine and a generous brandy.’

‘Mm, quite a mixture, fair quantity, but I’ve had worse. Still, your body isn’t so used to it, so you have to reckon with that. What symptoms did you have the next day?’

‘Cotton-wool legs. Only after the branch. Splitting headache, vomiting, feeling sick, dizzy, all kinds of vertigo.’

Danglard pulled a wry face.

‘What’s the matter, Danglard?’

‘You have to take the bang on the head into account. I’ve never been sloshed and concussed at the same time. But what with the shock, and then passing out afterwards, I’d say it’s just amnesia caused by alcohol. You could have been walking up and down on the path for two hours.’

‘Two and a half,’ Adamsberg corrected. ‘I suppose I must have walked. But when I woke up I was lying on the ground.’

‘Walked, fell, staggered. Haven’t we seen enough drunks who totter about for a bit and then collapse in our arms?’

‘Yes, I know, Danglard. But it’s still bugging me.’

‘That’s understandable. A memory blackout’s never nice, even for me, and God knows I’ve blacked out often enough. I used to ask the guys I’d been drinking with what I’d said or done. But when I was on my own, like you were that night, with nobody to tell you, I used to worry like hell about the missing hours.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. You think you’ve fallen down a few steps in your life. You feel robbed, it’s sort of like being mugged.’

‘Thanks, Danglard, thanks for that bit of help.’

The piles of paperwork were slowly diminishing. If he spent the entire weekend at his desk, Adamsberg hoped, he would be ready by Monday to get back to the field and the Trident. The incident on the path had triggered in him an illogical sense of necessity, an urgent need to deal with his old enemy, whose shadow seemed to be cast over his most trivial actions, over the bears’ claw marks, over an inoffensive lake, an old fish and an unremarkable drinking session. The Trident was infiltrating his prongs into all the cracks in the hull.

He raised his head suddenly and went back into Danglard’s office.

‘Danglard, what if the reason I went out and got drunk, wasn’t to forget the judge and the new father?’ he asked, carefully omitting to mention Noëlla in his list of torments. ‘What if it started when the Trident rose from his tomb? What if I was doing it to
relive
what my brother went through? Drinking, forest path, memory loss? By a sort of imitation? To find a way back to him?’

Adamsberg was speaking in a hoarse and jerky voice.

‘Uh-huh. Why not?’ replied Danglard evasively. ‘Yes, maybe you wanted to feel the same as him, find his tracks, put your feet in his footprints. But that wouldn’t change anything about the events that night. If I were you, I’d file it under “went on bender, got bad hangover” and forget it.’

‘No, Danglard, it seems to me that it would change everything. Perhaps the river has burst its banks and the boat is taking in water. I need to
follow the current, get back in control before it washes me away. And then I have to bail out the water, and stop up the cracks.’

Adamsberg stayed standing for another long couple of minutes, thinking silently, under Danglard’s anxious gaze. Then he walked pensively off to his office. If he couldn’t get hold of Fulgence in person, at least he knew now where to start.

XXX

BUT ADAMSBERG WAS WOKEN AT ONE IN THE MORNING BY A PHONE CALL
from Brézillon.

‘Tell me,
commissaire
, is it usual for the Québécois to take no notice of the time difference when they telephone us?’

‘What’s happened? Something to do with Favre?’ asked Adamsberg, who woke up as quickly as he dropped off to sleep, as if for him the border between reality and dreams was not very clear.