Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

giving her morphine injections for pain. But the death was from a serious overdose. It could have cost her her career.’

‘I should think so!’ said Clementine.

‘And where was that, Josette?’

‘In Tours, that was on the judge’s second circuit.’

‘Acquitted?’

‘Yes. The defence lawyer argued that she had a blameless record. And he pointed out that the patient, who was a retired vet, could have got hold of the morphine and dosed herself.’

‘The lawyer must have been one of Fulgence’s men.’

‘The jury decided it was suicide. Choisel got off without anything on her record.’

‘But in hock to the judge for life. Josette,’ said Adamsberg, putting his hand on the old lady’s arm, ‘your tunnellings are going to bring us up into the air now. Or rather, they’re taking us back under the earth.’

‘About time too,’ said Clementine.

Adamsberg sat for a long time thinking, in the chimney corner, with his dessert plate balanced on his knees. The road ahead was not going to be easy. Danglard, despite having apparently calmed down, would tell him to take a running jump. Retancourt would listen to him more objectively. He took the scarab with red and green legs out of his pocket and dialled her number on its shiny back. He felt a little surge of well-being and relaxation on hearing the serious voice of his maple-tree lieutenant.

‘Don’t worry, Retancourt, I change frequency every five minutes.’

‘Danglard told me you’d been able to buy some time.’

‘Not long, lieutenant, and I have to act quickly. I believe the judge survived his own death.’

‘Meaning?’

‘All I’ve got for the moment is a tip of his ear. But that ear was alive and well two years ago, twenty kilometres from Schiltigheim.’

He had a vision of that lone velvety ear, fluttering like a huge malevolent moth through the attics at the Schloss.

‘Anything attached to the ear?’ asked Retancourt.

‘Yes, a dodgy death certificate. The doctor who signed it was one of Fulgence’s blackmail victims. Retancourt, I think the judge went to Richelieu in the first place because that doctor was in practice there.’

‘He programmed his own death, you mean?’

‘That’s what I think. Can you pass this on to Danglard?’

‘Why don’t you call him yourself?’

‘He’d bite my head off, lieutenant.’

Less than ten minutes later, Danglard called back. His voice was unsympathetic.

‘If I’ve got this right, commissaire, you’ve managed to bring your judge back to life. Simple as that, eh?’

‘I think I have, Danglard. We’re not chasing a dead man now.’

‘But we are chasing an old man of about ninety-nine years old. Commissaire, he’s practically a hundred!’

‘I realise that.’

‘It’s just as improbable. Not a lot of people live to ninety-nine.’

‘There was one in my village.’

‘And was he in good shape?’

‘Well, no, not really,’ Adamsberg admitted.

‘Listen,’ Danglard went on patiently, ‘if you think an old guy of a hundred can attack a young woman, kill her with a trident and then drag her and her bicycle across the fields, you’re raving mad. Only in fairy stories.’

‘Well, stories are like that, I can’t help it. The judge had superhuman strength.’

‘Had is the operative word. But nobody has superhuman strength when they’re that old. A murderer who’s a hundred years old just doesn’t exist, he wouldn’t be able to do it.’

‘The devil doesn’t give a damn how old he is. I want to request an exhumation.’

‘Jesus Christ, are you going that far?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, don’t count on me. You’re going way beyond anywhere I’m prepared to follow.’

‘I understand.’

‘I was ready to believe in a disciple, let me remind you. But not a dead man walking. Or a hundred-year-old murderer.’

‘Well, in that case, I’ll have to try making the request myself. But if it gets through to the squad, will you please attend? You, Retancourt and Mordent?’

‘Uh-oh. Not me, commissaire.’

‘Whatever is in that grave, Danglard, I want you to see it. You’ll come.’

‘I know what’s in a coffin. I don’t need to leave my desk for that.’

‘Danglard, the new name Brezillon gave me was “Lamproie”. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Yes, it’s a primitive type of fish, a lamprey,’ said the capitaine, and Adamsberg could hear him smiling. ‘Well not exactly a fish, a cyclostome. It’s long and thin like an eel.’

‘Ah,’ said Adamsberg, disappointed and slightly disgusted, as he remembered the prehistoric creature in Pink Lake. ‘Does it have any special features?’

‘The lamprey has no hinged jaws. It hangs on by suction, like a leech, if you like.’

Adamsberg wondered as he hung up, why the divisionnaire had given him this odd name. Perhaps it meant he lacked polish? Or maybe it was a reference to the six weeks’ grace he had managed to snatch out of him? Perhaps this creature was a sort of sucker, pulling contrary wills towards it?

Trying to convince Brezillon to order the exhumation of Judge Fulgence looked an unpromising enterprise. Adamsberg concentrated on being a lamprey and tried to pull the divisionnaire’s will towards him, as he telephoned. Brezillon had quickly and volubly refused to give any credence to the ear living in Alsace after the death of the judge. As for the suspect death certificate, it looked a very flimsy bit of evidence to him.

‘What day is it today?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Sunday.’

‘Tuesday 2 p.m. then,’ he announced in one of those sudden about-turns which had given Adamsberg his brief freedom.

‘Retancourt, Mordent and Danglard in attendance, please,’ Adamsberg just had time to ask.

He put his mobile away carefully, so as not to damage its antennae. Possibly Brezillon had felt under some constraint, since he had taken the responsibility of letting ‘his man’ go free, to follow through with the logic and let it take its course. Or perhaps the lamprey had managed to draw him into its orbit. But the force would work the other way, once Adamsberg had to go back, a defeated man, and sit in that chair in Brezillon’s apartment. He remembered Brezillon’s thumb and couldn’t stop himself wondering what would happen if you put a cigarette in the mouth of a lamprey. No, of course, you couldn’t, it lived under water. Another creature to join the strange assortment which was blocking up the door of Strasbourg Cathedral. Add to that the ghastly moth haunting the Schloss, half-ear, half-mushroom.

Well, never mind what had gone through the divisionnaire’s mind, he had authorised the exhumation. Adamsberg felt torn between febrile excitement and genuine fear. Not that it was the first time he had ordered an exhumation. But opening the magistrate’s coffin suddenly seemed a blasphemous undertaking, full of menace. ‘You’re going way beyond anywhere I’m prepared to follow you,’ Danglard had said. But where? Profanation, desecration, horror. A journey underground in the company of the judge who might carry him off into the underworld. He looked at his watches. In precisely forty-six hours.

XLVII