Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

use the trident on Michel. My guess is that the stupid boy misjudged his contact, asked for too much money or maybe even threatened blackmail. Or perhaps the judge just wanted to get him out of the way.’

‘If it was the judge.’

‘We took a look at Michel’s laptop. The hard disk’s empty, or rather it’s been wiped. Our computer people are coming tomorrow to see if they can resurrect anything.’

‘What about his dog?’ Adamsberg asked, surprising himself by his concern for the large dog that went everywhere with Michel.

‘Shot as well.’

‘Retancourt, since you’re going to send me the bullet-proof vest, can you send over the laptop? I’ve got a Grade A hacker here.’

‘Mm-hm, how’m I going to do that? You’re not a commissaire at the moment.’

‘Yes, I do realise that,’ said Adamsberg, seeming to hear Clementine’s voice reminding him of it. ‘Ask Danglard, convince him, you’re good at that. Since the exhumation, Brezillon’s more favourably inclined to me, and Danglard knows it.’

‘All right, I’ll try, but he’s the boss for now.’

LI

JOSETTE TOOK POSSESSION OF MICHEL SARTONNA’S LAPTOP WITH HUGE delight. Adamsberg felt that he could hardly have made her happier than with this suspect machine, a real gift for a hacker. It had not arrived at Clignancourt until the late afternoon, and Adamsberg suspected that Danglard had had it checked out by his own computer people first. That was perfectly logical and normal, since he was the acting head of the department. The courier who delivered it also brought a note from Retancourt, saying that as far as they could see the hard disk was as clean as a whistle. This had only spurred Josette on to greater efforts.

She spent a long time trying to penetrate the lost memory of the computer, and confirmed that someone else had already had a try.

‘Your men didn’t bother to wipe out their footsteps. That’s fair enough, they weren’t doing anything illegal.’

The last defence came down only with Michel’s dog’s name spelt backwards: ograc. He had often brought the dog into the office, a huge but harmless beast, as unthreatening as a snail, hence its name, Escargot, shortened to Cargo. It liked eating any papers it found lying around, and could transform a report into a wet soggy ball in no time. So it was perhaps a good code name for the mysterious transmutations that took place inside computers.

But once inside, Josette came up against the same blank wall as the police had.

‘Nothing at all, wiped clean, scraped with wire wool,’ she said.

Well, that figured. If the police specialists hadn’t been able to find anything, there was no reason to think Josette would fare any better. But she kept tapping doggedly with her shaky little hands on the keyboard.

‘I’ll keep trying,’ she said obstinately.

‘Don’t bother, Josette, they’ve obviously tried everything in the lab.’

It was time for their ritual glass of port, and Clementine summoned Adamsberg to come and have his aperitif, as if he was a teenager being called to do his homework. She added an egg yolk, beating it up in the sweet wine. Egg-flip with port was supposed to give him strength.

‘Josette’s still at it,’ he explained as he accepted the glass filled with the opaque mixture to which he was becoming accustomed.

‘To look at her, you’d think you could knock her over with a feather, wouldn’t you,’ said Clementine clinking her glass against Adamsberg’s.

‘But you can’t.’

‘No. Not like that,’ Clementine interrupted him to stop him putting the glass to his lips. ‘When you clink glasses, you have to look at the other person. I told you that already. Then drink it off without putting the glass down. Elsewise it won’t work.’

‘What won’t work?’

She shook her head as if that was a supremely silly question.

‘Start again,’ she said sternly. ‘Now what was I saying?’

‘We were saying Josette couldn’t be knocked over with a feather.’

‘Right. Now then. Inside my little Josette there’s a compass, and it’s fixed on the north. She’s taken thousands and thousands from those fat cats. So she won’t just give up on it.’

Adamsberg took a glass of the health-giving mixture into the computer room. Josette clinked glasses properly, with a smile.

‘I found the fragments of one line,’ she said in her quavery voice. ‘It’s the ruins of a message that’s broken up. Your men didn’t find this,’ she said rather proudly. ‘There are always a few corners people don’t manage to go through with a toothcomb.’

‘Like the space between the wall and the washbasin.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I always clean things thoroughly, and my husband thought I was fussy. Come and have a look.’

Adamsberg came over to the screen and read a meaningless series of letters, all that had survived the crash: dam ea ezv ort la ero.

‘Is that all?’ he asked in disappointment.

‘That’s all, but it’s better than nothing,’ said Josette, who was still elated. ‘ezv could only be from “rendezvous,” for instance.’

‘I’m sure Michel was involved with drugs, I often thought so,’ Adamsberg said. ‘So dam is most likely from Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Classic drugs centres.’

‘And the ea could be from “deal” or “dealer”?’

‘Yes, Josette, it looks like a message about dealing to me. From what’s left.’

Josette noted down the letters on a piece of paper and looked at it in silence.

‘I suppose you could make it something like: “Amsterdam – dealer – rendezvous – port – heroin,” for instance,’ she suggested reluctantly.

‘I don’t see how it can have anything to do with the Trident,’ said Adamsberg in a defeated voice. ‘It looks as if Michel simply got involved in something too heavy for him. We should probably pass it over to the drugs squad, Josette.’

Josette sipped her port-flip delicately, but her little face expressed frustration.

Retancourt must be wrong about the mole, Adamsberg thought, as he stirred the fire. The two women had gone to bed and he was alone by the hearth, unable to sleep. He would never succeed in identifying the mole, who had probably never existed. It was after all the janitor who had given Laliberte the key information. And as for believing someone had searched his flat, well that was based on the flimsiest evidence. A key in the wrong place, perhaps, and a box file not quite in the same position, when Danglard thought he had put it away more tidily. Not much to go on. He would never find the unlikely second man on the portage trail. Even if he traced all Fulgence’s crimes, he would be forever alone on that sinister path. Adamsberg felt all the threads snapping one after another, cutting him off from the world, as if he were a ferocious bear on an ice floe, floating away from land. He was isolated here with Clementine’s egg-flips and Josette’s grey slippers.

He put on his coat and his Arctic cap, and slipped out into the night. The shabby streets of Clignancourt were dark and empty, and the street-lamps gave only fitful light. He took Josette’s old moped, which was painted in two shades of blue, and twenty-five minutes later, he braked to a halt outside Camille’s windows. What was driving him was an urge to find a different refuge, and the desire to breathe, if only from outside the building, a little of the clear and healthy air that came to him from Camille, or rather that formed when he and Camille were together. It takes two windows to make a draught, as Clementine would have put it. He had a shock on looking up to the seventh floor. The lights were on. She must have come back from Montreal. Unless she had let the flat. Or maybe the new father was up there, acting as if he owned the place, with his two labradors, one of them drooling under