Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

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 Clementine’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’eclair. 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,’ Brezillon 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 Quebecois police. He was the opposite of Noel, who always rushed in where angels fear to tread. Any kind of movement was a good thing as far as Noel 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 Estalere, 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