Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

‘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 Noella 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 Brezillon.

‘Tell me, commissaire, is it usual for the Quebecois 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.

‘Nothing to do with bloody Favre!’ shouted Brezillon. ‘What’s happened is that you’ve got to jump on a plane at 4.50 tomorrow afternoon. So get packing!’

‘Plane, sir? Where to?’ Adamsberg asked politely.

‘Where do you think? Montreal, for God’s sake. I’ve just had Superintendent Legalite on the line.’

‘Laliberte,’ Adamsberg corrected.

‘Whatever his name is. They’ve got some murder case, and they say they need you. Full stop. We’re not being