Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

but you know it happens sometimes, if people are having a go at each other. But to take a garden fork and stick it in your mother’s guts, begging your pardon, commissaire, I call that barbaric.’

‘His own mother too,’ Ghislaine added. ‘What are you looking into that old story for?’

‘I’m looking for Roland Guillaumond.’

‘You don’t give up in Paris, do you? But surely after all this time, he couldn’t be arrested even if he was alive?’

‘No, of course not. But the Guillaumond father was a relation of one of my colleagues. He’s distressed about it. So there’s a personal side to the investigation if you like.’

‘Oh, if it’s a personal matter, that’s different,’ said the mayor, raising up his calloused hands, rather as Trabelmann had surrendered to the claims of childhood memory. ‘Nobody wants a murderer in the family. But you won’t find Roland now. Everyone says he died in the maquis. There was a lot of fighting round here in ‘44.’

‘What did the father do for a living?’

‘He was a metalworker. Salt of the earth, they used to say. He’d married well, you know, a girl from a good family in La Ferte-Saint-Aubin. And to think it ended in a bloodbath, bad business, eh, Ghislaine?’

‘Would there be anyone still in Collery who knew the family? Who might be willing to talk to me?’

‘Well, you could try Andre,’ said the mayor, after thinking. ‘He must be about eighty-four. He used to work with the father long ago.’

He looked at the clock.

‘You’d better go round before he starts his supper.’

The mayor’s eau-de-vie was still burning his stomach when Adamsberg knocked at the door of Andre Barlut. The old man, wearing a thick corduroy jacket and a cloth cap, looked suspiciously at the badge. Then he took it in his gnarled fingers, and twisted it this way and that, looking at both sides in curiosity. He had a three-day beard and sharp dark eyes.

‘Let’s just say it’s something personal, Monsieur Barlut.’

Two minutes later, sitting in front of another glass of spirits, Adamsberg was asking his questions again.

‘As a rule, I don’t open the bottle before the Angelus,’ the old man said, without answering the questions. ‘But when I have visitors…’

‘I’m told you’re the memory of the village, monsieur.’

Andre winked. ‘Ah, if I told you everything that’s in here,’ he said tapping his head, ‘it’d make a book. A book about what folks get up to, commissaire. How do you like this then? Not too fruity? Helps to think, is what I say.’

‘It’s excellent,’ Adamsberg agreed.

‘Makes it myself,’ said Andre. ‘Drop of this won’t hurt you.’

Sixty degrees of alcohol, Adamsberg estimated silently. It set his teeth on edge.

‘Now old Guillaumond, you want to know about him, oh, he were almost too good to be true. Took me on as his apprentice and we were a good team. You can call me Andre, monsieur.’

‘You were a metalworker too, Andre?’

‘Ah, no. I’m talking now about when he were a gardener. The metalworking, that stopped after his accident. Lost his fingers in the grinder,’ Andre explained, demonstrating with his own hand.

‘How did he do that?’

‘Like I said. Got his hand caught. His thumb and little finger. So his right hand, he just had the three middle fingers left,’ said Andre holding out his hand with three fingers up. ‘After that of course, he couldn’t do metalworking. But his hand didn’t stop him working as a gardener. Garden tools, he could use them all right.’

Adamsberg looked in fascination at the wrinkled old hand. Three fingers. The father’s mutilated hand, like a fork or a trident. Three fingers, three claws.

‘Why did you say he was “almost too good to be true,” Andre?’

‘Well, so he was. Good as gold, always help you out, always had a joke and a kind word. Mind you, I wouldn’t say the same for his wife. And I got my own ideas about that.’

‘About what?’

‘About him drowning. She wore him out, that woman. She ground him down. And in the end, mebbe he couldn’t be bothered patching up the boat, and it got a leak in the winter, or mebbe he just let himself drown. It’s my opinion, she’s the reason he ended up in the water.’

‘You didn’t like her, then?’

‘No, weren’t nobody liked her. Now her, she were the daughter of the big pharmacy in La Ferte-Saint-Aubin. Plenty of money there. But she took it into her head to marry Gerard. In those days, he were a fine figure of a man, see. But it all went bad. She had to be a fine lady, she looked down on him. Living in Collery with a metalworker, that weren’t good enough for her, oh no. She thought she’d married beneath her. And it got worse after his accident. She were ashamed of him, and she didn’t mind who knew it. She were no good at all, that woman.’

* * *

Andre had known the family well. As a small boy, he had played with Roland, an only child like himself, the same age and living opposite. He used to go to the house after school and in the evening. Every night after supper they did the same thing: they had to play Mah Jong. Because that was what they did at the pharmacy in La Ferte, and the mother insisted on keeping it up. But it gave her plenty of chances, which she never missed, to humiliate Gerard. Because in Mah Jong, the rules say you can’t dilute. What does that mean, asked Adamsberg who didn’t know anything about the game. It means mixing different suits to try and win more quickly, like mixing hearts and clubs at cards, for instance. That wasn’t supposed to happen if you were playing properly. Only coarse people did that. Andre and Roland didn’t do it, because they dared not disobey her. They would rather lose than dilute. But Gerard, Roland’s father, couldn’t care less. He picked tiles with his three-fingered hand and made jokes. And Marie Guillaumond would be saying ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Gerard, the day you get a Hand of Honours, hens will have teeth.’ It was just another way of putting him down. The Hand of Honours was a sort of especially good hand, like a fistful of aces. Andre had heard her say this more times than he could remember, always with that sarcastic tone, commissaire. But Gerard just laughed, and he never got one. Nor did she neither, come to that. She always wore white, his wife, so she could see the least little speck of dirt on her clothes. As if it mattered in Collery. The cook and maid called her ‘the white dragon’ behind her back. Yes, that woman had really worn Gerard down.

‘What about Roland?’ Adamsberg asked.

‘She brainwashed him, commissaire, no other word for it. She wanted him to be a gentleman, make a lot of himself, go to the city. It was “Roland, my pet, you won’t be a failure like your father,” “You won’t be a lazy so-and-so.” So then of course, he got to thinking he were too good for the likes of us boys in the village. Got very stuck up. But really, I think it was the white dragon as didn’t want him to play with us. We weren’t good enough, she said. So in the end, Roland, he turned out different from his dad. Proud and stuck-up, you couldn’t say anything to him. Bite your head off, he would.’

‘Did he fight other boys?’

‘Threatened to. Tell you what we used to do, when we were oh, fourteen, fifteen, we used to catch frogs and make ’em blow up with cigarettes. Not a nice thing, you might think, monsieur, but there wasn’t a lot to do in Collery.’

‘Frogs, did you say, or toads?’

‘Frogs, now. Green ones. If you put a cigarette in their mouth they puffs it and they just blows up, like that, ploff! Gotta see it to understand.’

‘I think I can imagine,’ said Adamsberg.

‘So now Roland, he’d turn up with a knife, and splat, just cut the heads off the frogs. Blood all over. I suppose it came to the same for the poor old froggy, he were dead, just the same. But we didn’t like that, us others, no. Then he’d wipe the blood off on the grass, and march off. Just showing us he could do what he wanted.’

Andre helped himself to another glass. Adamsberg did his best to drink as slowly as possible.

‘Still must’ve been more than that to him,’ Andre went on. ’Cause Roland, he really did worship his pa. He didn’t like the way the dragon treated the old man. Didn’t say so, but I’d see how he’d clench his fists like this when she were tearing strips off his old pa.’