Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

XLVI

THE PARISH PRIEST IN HIS VILLAGE ROSE IN THE MORNING WITH THE farmyard fowls, as Adamsberg’s mother had always said, hoping to make her children follow his example. Adamsberg waited until half-past eight on his two watches to call the priest, since he calculated that he must now be over eighty. He had always seemed rather like a large dog hunting truffles, and Adamsberg hoped that he hadn’t changed. Father Grégoire had spent a lifetime absorbing masses of useless details, since he was delighted with the diversity that the Good Lord had included in the natural world. Adamsberg introduced himself by his surname.

‘Which Adamsberg is this?’

‘The one who used to look at your old books.

What god, what harvester of eternal summertime,

Had, as he strolled away, carelessly thrown down

That golden sickle…’

‘Abandoned, Jean-Baptiste, abandoned, you mean,’ said the priest, without appearing surprised at being telephoned.

‘Thrown down.’

‘Abandoned.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Father. I need to ask you something. I hope I didn’t wake you up.’

‘Oh, I get up when the chickens do, you know. And the older I get… Wait a minute, I have to check. You’ve sown a doubt in my mind.’

Adamsberg sat with the phone in his hand, anxiously. Didn’t Grégoire understand these days when something was urgent? He was known in the village for being able to spot the slightest worry on the part of one of his parishioners. Nothing could be concealed from Father Grégoire.

‘Thrown down. You were right, Jean-Baptiste,’ said the priest, disappointed. ‘I must be getting old.’

‘Father, do you remember the judge? The one we called the Lord and Master?’

‘Still fretting about him, are you,’ said Grégoire, with reproach in his voice.

‘He’s come back from the dead. I’ll get the old devil by the horns or lose my soul in the attempt.’

‘Jean-Baptiste, don’t talk like that!’ ordered the priest sharply, as if he were still talking to a child. ‘What if God could hear you?’

‘Father, can you remember what his ears looked like?’

‘Do you mean his left ear?’

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg quickly, picking up a pencil. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but that ear was deformed. Not by God, but by doctors.’

‘God sent him into the world with ears sticking out.’

‘But He had also given him great beauty. God shares things out in this world, Jean-Baptiste.’

Adamsberg thought that God was not currently doing his work very well, and that it was a good thing there were Josettes in the world to help sort out the mess.

‘Tell me about the ear,’ he said, hoping Grégoire would not launch into a sermon about God’s mysterious ways.

‘It was big and deformed, with a long lobe. The entrance to the ear was very narrow, and the rim was scarred. Remember the time we got that mosquito out of Raphaël’s ear? We managed it in the end with a lamp, like when you go fishing at night.’

‘I remember very well. It hissed in the flame with a funny little sound, remember?’

‘Yes, I remember, I made a joke about it.’

‘Yes, indeed. But tell me more about the judge. You’re sure his ear was out of shape?’

‘Oh yes. And let me see, he had a wart on his chin, on the right, which must have given him some trouble shaving,’ said Grégoire, who was now launched into instant recall. ‘The right nostril was larger than the left, and his hair grew low down on his cheeks.’

‘How on earth do you do it?’

‘I can describe you as well, if you like.’

‘No thanks, Father. I’ve got enough problems as it is.’

‘The judge is dead, my son, don’t forget. Don’t get into trouble.’

‘I’m doing my best, Father.’

Adamsberg thought about the old priest, sitting at his greasy old wooden table, then returned to the photos with a magnifying glass. Yes, the wart on the chin was visible, as was the irregularity of the nostrils. The old priest’s memory was as efficient as ever, a real telephoto lens into the past. Apart from the problem of the age difference insisted upon by the doctor, it was as if Fulgence had stepped out of the grave. Or had been pulled out by his ear. It was true, he thought, as he looked at the photographs of Fulgence taken at the time of his retirement, that the judge had never looked his age. He had always had much greater strength than one would anticipate and Courtin couldn’t be expected to know that. Maxime Leclerc was no ordinary patient, and by the same token he was no ordinary ghost.

Adamsberg made some more coffee and waited impatiently for Clémentine and Josette to come back from shopping. Now that he had had to leave the sheltering tree trunk of Retancourt, he felt the need of their support and an urge to tell them of any little progress he made.

‘We’ve got him by the tips of his ears, Clémentine,’ he announced as he helped her empty her shopping basket.

‘Aha, it’s like a ball of wool, once you find the end, you just have to pull it.’

‘Shall we try a new line, commissaire?’ Josette asked.

‘I keep telling you, Josette. He isn’t a policeman any more. It’s a funny old world.’

‘Let’s try the town of Richelieu, Josette. Can you find the name of the doctor who signed the death certificate, sixteen years ago?’

‘Child’s play,’ she said, dismissively.

It took her only twenty minutes to find the GP, Colette Choisel, the judge’s doctor ever since he had come to live in Richelieu. She had examined the body, diagnosed a heart attack, and signed the certificate for the burial.

‘And her address, Josette?’

‘She closed the practice, four months after the judge died.’

‘Retired?’

‘Hardly. She was only forty-eight.’

‘Perfect. Let’s check her out.’

‘That might not be so easy. She has a common enough name. But if she’s sixty-four, she might still be in practice, and then she’d be on the medical register.’

‘And take a look at court records too, to see if her name crops up.’

‘If she had a record, she wouldn’t be able to practise.’

‘Exactly. We’re looking for an acquittal.’

Adamsberg left Josette to her Aladdin’s lamp and went to give a hand to Clémentine who was peeling vegetables for their lunch.

‘She slips in there like an eel under a rock,’ he said, sitting down.

‘Well, that’s her work, you know,’ replied Clémentine who was unaware of the complexity involved in Josette’s hacking activities.

‘It’s like spuds,’ she went on. ‘Now mind you peel them properly for me, Adamsberg.’

‘I know how to peel potatoes, Clémentine.’

‘No, you don’t. You leave the eyes in. Got to take them out, they’re poisonous.’

Clémentine showed him, with the practised movements of a professional, how to dig the end of the peeler into the eye and dig out the little black cones.

‘They’re only poisonous when they’re raw, Clémentine.’

‘Never mind. I want those eyes out, please.’

‘OK. I’ll be careful.’

The potatoes, checked over by Clémentine, were cooked and on the table by the time Josette returned with her results.

‘Any luck?’ asked Clémentine as she served up.

‘I think so, yes,’ said Josette putting a sheet of paper on the table.

‘I don’t really like people working when they’re eating. Not that it upsets me, you understand, but my old father wouldn’t have let us do that. But seeing as you’ve only got six weeks.’

‘Colette Choisel has been in practice in Rennes for the last sixteen years,’ Josette said. ‘When she was very young, twenty-seven, she was involved in a court case. One of her patients died, an elderly woman. She’d been 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 Clémentine.

‘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 Clémentine.

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 Brézillon 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 Brézillon 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. Brézillon 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 Brézillon 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 Brézillon’s apartment. He remembered Brézillon’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.