Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

‘Was Roland good-looking as a lad?’

‘Oh, like a film star. All the girls were after him, the rest of us wasn’t anywhere. But Roland didn’t go with girls, tell you the truth, monsieur, I think he wasn’t quite normal, that way. Anyway, off he went one fine day to the city to do studying, and be a gentleman. Ambitious, see.’

‘Law school?’

‘That’s right. And then what happened, well it was bound to happen. Couldn’t anything good come out of a house like that, with all the bad feelings. At poor old Gerard’s funeral, the mother, she didn’t shed a tear. Not a one. I always thought what happened was when they got back home, she must have said summat.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well the kind of thing she would say. “Good riddance to bad rubbish” or summat of that. She’d a sharp tongue on her, that woman. And then, Roland, he’d have seen red, because the funeral would have shaken him up a lot. I’m not defending him, mind, but that’s what I think. So he just up and at her. Grabbed his dad’s fork and chased her up the stairs. And that’s how it fell out, if you ask me. Killed the old white dragon.’

‘With a trident?’

‘That’s what the police thought, because it looked that way and the fork had disappeared. That fork, it was a bit special. Gerard, he were always messing about with it, sharpening the points in the fire. He looked after his tools, that man. Once when he was digging, he broke a point off. Think he’d throw it away? Oh no, soldered it back on. Knew what he was about in metalwork, of course. And carved stuff on the handle and all. She didn’t like that either, the wife. Thought it was stupid. I don’t say it were art, but it were pretty enough, the handle.’

‘What kind of thing did he carve?’

‘Like in school. Stars, suns, flowers. Nothing too fancy, I s’pose, but Gerard that’s how he was. Liked to make things nice. Same thing with his spade, his pick, his shovel. You couldn’t mistake his tools for anyone else’s. I’ve still got the spade, kept it as a souvenir when he died. Oh, salt of the earth, Gerard was.’

The old man went out and fetched a spade, polished by years of use. Adamsberg examined the glossy handle, with its hundreds of tiny patterns carved into the wood, covered now with the patina of age.

‘Yes, it is pretty,’ he said sincerely, running his fingers over the handle. ‘I can see why you keep it, Andre.’

‘Makes me sad to think of him. Always a kindly word, or a joke. But not her. No, nobody missed her. I always wonder whether she didn’t do it. And whether Roland knew about it.’

‘Do what, Andre?’

‘Split the boards in the boat,’ the old man muttered, taking back his spade.

The mayor had driven Adamsberg in his van to Orleans station. As he sat in the freezing cold waiting-room, he chewed mechanically on some bread to mop up the eau-de-vie which was burning his guts, much as Andre’s words were burning in his brain. A humiliated father with a mutilated hand, and an ambitious and scornful mother. The future judge growing up caught between them, having a twisted boyhood, making him eager to wipe out his father’s weakness, to transform it into strength. Killing her with the trident, which echoed the father’s deformed hand, now turned into an instrument of total power. Fulgence seemed to have inherited from his mother the urge to dominate others and from his father the unbearable frustrations of a weak man. Every blow dealt with the trident restored the strength and courage of Gerard Guillaumond, who had been defeated and then swallowed up in the mud of the marsh. The last laugh.

So of course the killer would not want to abandon the decorated handle of the weapon. It was the hand of the father. But why then had he not gone on attacking mother-figures? If he hated his mother, one would have expected him to target women in middle age, bossy, maternal figures. But in the list of those killed, there were as many men as women, and they were all ages, from teenagers to old people. Even among the women, there were young girls, quite unlike Marie Guillaumond. Was he trying to extend his power to the whole human race, by striking at random? Adamsberg chewed some more brown bread, shaking his head. This rage to destroy must have some other logic. It wasn’t just wiping out the humiliation, it was amplifying the judge’s power, like his choice of name. It was building a kind of rampart, a defence against any decline. But how could stabbing an old man to death with a fork bring Fulgence that kind of sensation?

Adamsberg suddenly felt the need to call Trabelmann and tell him that after tracking down the ear, he had extracted the judge’s whole body from the dead, and was now moving inside his head. A head he had promised to bring him on the end of a trident, in order to save poor old Vetilleux in his cell. When he remembered the aggressive behaviour of the commandant of gendarmes, Adamsberg felt an urge to stuff him into one of the windows of Strasbourg Cathedral as well. Just one third of him, up to the waist. Then he’d be face to face with the dragons of fairy stories, the Loch Ness monster, the fish from Pink Lake, the toads, the lamprey, and all the other creatures which Adamsberg was using to turn the jewel of Gothic architecture into a menagerie.

But that would not wipe out the commandant’s words. If it could, everyone would use this handy way of dealing with annoyances and there wouldn’t be a single free church window in the country, even in the tiniest chapel. No, he couldn’t wipe out that memory so easily. No doubt because Trabelmann was not so very far off the truth. A truth which he was skirting round gingerly, thanks to the extra impetus from Retancourt in the cafe on the Place du Chatelet. And when his blonde lieutenant gave you a push, it went through your brain like a drill. But Trabelmann had been talking about the wrong ego. Because there’s self and self, he thought as he walked along the platform. Self and brother. Was it perhaps true that the absolute protection he felt he ought to have given Raphael had kept him in orbit, far from earth, far from other people in any case, in a kind of weightless existence? And the same went for his relations with women too, of course. To allow himself to get carried away would have been to abandon Raphael to die alone in his cave. And that was impossible. So it might explain why he had always fled from love, and even destroyed it? Had he really gone that far?

He watched as the train came into the station. That was a deep and dark question that took him straight back to the horrors of the portage trail. Where there was no evidence that the Trident had ever set foot.

As he turned into Clementine’s little sidestreet, he snapped his fingers. He must tell Danglard about the frogs in Collery. He would certainly be glad to hear it worked with frogs as well. Ploff, bang! A slightly different sound.

L

BUT IT WASN’T THE MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT FROGS. ALMOST AS SOON as he got in, a call from Retancourt informed him that Michel Sartonna, the young man in charge of cleaning the departmental office, had been found murdered. He normally came in to work between five and nine in the evening. When he had not been seen for two days, someone was sent round to his flat. He had been shot dead, with two bullets in the chest from a handgun with a silencer, some time between Monday night and Tuesday morning.

‘Could it have been a gangland killing, lieutenant? I had the feeling Michel was into drug dealing.’

‘If so, he wasn’t rich. Except for a large sum of money deposited in his bank on 13 October, four days after the news item appeared in the Nouvelles d’Alsace. And there was a brand new laptop in his flat. I should also say that he’d put in for two weeks’ leave, without warning, which exactly tallies with the dates we were in Quebec.’

‘You’re thinking he was the mole, Retancourt? But I thought we’d established there wasn’t one.’

‘Well, we might have to think again. Michel could have been contacted after Schiltigheim, and been paid to do some spying, and perhaps follow us out to Quebec. And it might have been him who got into your flat.’

‘And then killed Noella on the path?’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t believe that, Retancourt. Even if we suppose there was someone else there, the judge would hardly have left it to someone like Michel to carry out such a refined kind of vengeance. And certainly not with the trident.’

‘Danglard doesn’t think so either, actually.’

‘As for murder with a gun, that doesn’t sound like the judge.’

‘I’ve told you what I think about that. A gun is OK for outsiders, murders that don’t fit the scheme. No need to