Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

LII

JOSETTE SLEPT BADLY AND WAS WOKEN AT ONE IN THE MORNING BY A nightmare: out of her printer, pages of paper, all of them bright red, were spilling all over the room. Nothing could be read on them, because of their glossy red surface.

She got up quietly and tiptoed into the kitchen, where she helped herself to some cookies and maple syrup. Clémentine came to join her, wrapped up in a huge dressing gown, like a nightwatchwoman.

‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ Josette pleaded.

‘Something going on in that little head, isn’t there,’ declared Clémentine.

‘It’s just that I couldn’t sleep. Nothing really, Clemmie.’

‘Not your machine giving you headaches?’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. In my dream, I couldn’t read anything it printed.’

‘You’ll manage it, Josette, m’dear. I’m sure you can.’

But manage what, Josette wondered.

‘Clemmie, I thought I was dreaming about blood. All the paper was red.’

‘Was the machine leaking red ink?’

‘No, just the sheets of paper.’

‘Well then, it couldn’t be blood.’

‘Has he gone out?’ asked Josette, realising that Adamsberg was not sleeping on the couch.

‘Suppose so. He must be worrying about something. He’s fretting away too. Eat up and drink this too, m’dear, it’ll help you sleep,’ she said, offering Josette a bowl of warm milk.

After putting away the biscuit tin, Josette was still wondering what, if anything, she was going to manage. She put a sweater on over her pyjamas and sat brooding over the computer, without switching it on. Michel’s laptop was alongside, a useless but irritating ruin. She would have to get to the real answer, Josette thought, the one she was trying to chase unsuccessfully in her dream. The unreadable pages were a sign that she had not decoded Michel’s scraps of message properly. A big mistake crossed out in red.

Well, that must be it, she thought, going back to her version of the fractured sentence. It was silly to think people would put in those details if they were really talking about a drugs deal. You wouldn’t put the town, the kind of drug and so on. A dealer surely wouldn’t put out an email message like that. He might as well have put his name and address on the internet. She had set off completely along the wrong track, and her book had been corrected in red.

Josette patiently took up the succession of letters and tried various combinations without success: dam ea ezv ort la ero. Her failure irritated her. Clémentine came and looked over her shoulder, holding a bowl of milk. ‘That’s what’s bothering you?’

‘I must have gone wrong, and I’m trying to understand why.’

‘Do you know what I think?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well it looks like double Dutch to me. In some other language from some other country. Would you like some more hot milk?’

‘No thanks, Clemmie, I need to concentrate.’

Clémentine tiptoed away quietly. One shouldn’t bother Josette when she was working.

Josette looked back at the letters again. Another country. Yes. And what other country was involved in this case? Canada. She suddenly had a thought. What if this referred to the events in Canada? What was the name of the place where Adamsberg had stayed? Gatineau? That gave an ‘ea’. A slight chance of course. Then she suddenly had the feeling that ‘dam’ was simply part of Adamsberg’s name, nothing to do with Amsterdam or Rotterdam. How odd it is, she thought, that you can be up against something and not see it. But she had seen it, in her sleep she had seen red leaves, red sheets of paper. Not blood, Clémentine was right, but the red maple leaves of Canada, falling on the portage trail in autumn. So ‘ort’ could be portage, ‘ero’ could be Corderon, Noëlla’s name. Rendezvous would still be the only possibility for ‘ezv’. Biting her lips, Josette tried to see where an alternative reading could lead her. She had the sudden warm feeling of a hacker breaking through a stubborn obstacle.

A few minutes later, exhausted and now at last ready for sleep, she was looking at another sentence: dam ea ezv ort la ero. ‘Adamsberg – Gatineau – rendezvous – portage trail – Noëlla Corderon.’

She put the sheet of paper on her knee.

Adamsberg must have been followed out to Quebec by Michel Sartonna. It didn’t prove anything about the murder, but what it did show was that the young man was watching Adamsberg’s movements and reporting on his meetings on the portage trail, sending word of them to somebody else. Josette stuck the paper on the keyboard and went back to snuggle under her blankets. So it hadn’t been a hacking mistake, just a matter of straightforward code-breaking.