Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

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. ‘Vetilleux’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?’

‘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 Brezillon.

‘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?’

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

‘Who? Estalere?’

‘No, the squirrel.’

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

‘Estalere?’

‘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.