Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

LVIII

ADAMSBERG AND BRÉZILLON HAD ARRANGED TO MEET AT A DISCREET cafe in the 7th arrondissement at the quiet time of mid-afternoon. The commissaire was making his way there, head down and muffled in his lumberjack’s cap. The previous evening he had sat up long after Josette had left him, drawing circles in the fire. Since he had casually picked up that newspaper in the office, he seemed to have been travelling for five weeks and five days now, through endless tumult, buffeted by storms, on a raft tossed by the winds of Neptune. Josette, like a perfect hacker, had homed in straight to the target, and he was amazed at himself for not realising the truth earlier. The child had been conceived in Lisbon and was his. This stupefying truth had calmed one storm, only to provoke a wind of anxiety which was now puffing and blowing on the near horizon.

‘You really are a stupid bastard, commissaire.’ Because he had understood nothing. Danglard had been sitting, like a sad heavy weight, on his secret. Meanwhile he and Camille had each retreated into a stiff silence, and he had fled so far away. As far as Raphaël in his exile.

Raphaël might be able to relax now, but Jean-Baptiste would have to keep running. Lock after lock, according to Josette in her celestial running shoes. The lock on the path still seemed impregnable. But the one relating to Fulgence was now within reach. Adamsberg pushed the revolving door of an upmarket cafe on the corner of the avenue Bosquet. A few ladies were taking tea, one was drinking pastis. He spotted the divisionnaire, sitting like a grey monument on a red velvet bench, his glass of beer placed before him on the polished wooden table.

‘Take that hat off,’ Brézillon said at once. ‘Makes you look like a lumberjack.’

‘It’s my camouflage,’ Adamsberg explained, putting it on a chair. ‘Arctic technology, covers eyes, ears, cheeks and chin.’

‘Get on with it, Adamsberg. I’m already doing you a favour by agreeing to meet you.’

‘I asked Danglard to tell you about what’s happened since the exhumation. The judge’s false age, the Guillaumond family, the matricide, the Mah Jong stuff.’

‘Yes, he told me all that.’

‘And your view of it, Monsieur le divisionnaire?’

Brézillon lit one of his coarse cigarettes.

‘Favourable, but two points bother me. Why did the judge make himself out to be fifteen years older? I can see why he’d change his name after killing his mother. And in the maquis, it must have been quite easy. But why his age?’

‘I think it’s because he values power, rather than youth. As a recent law graduate of twenty-five, what could he hope for after the war? Just the slow career path of a small-town lawyer, gradually moving up through the ranks. He wanted better than that. With his acute intelligence and a few fake references, he could quickly aspire to better posts. On condition he was the right age. Maturity was necessary to feed his ambition. Five years after he disappeared, he was already a judge in Nantes.’

‘All right, granted. Second point. Noëlla Corderon doesn’t seem to fit the profile of the fourteenth victim. The name doesn’t mean anything in Mah Jong terms, so I’m still talking to a murderer on the run. All this doesn’t get you off the hook, Adamsberg.’

‘There have been some other supplementary victims, on the way. Michel Sartonna for instance.’

‘We don’t know that for sure.’

‘No, but it’s a reasonable assumption. and it’s an assumption too for Noëlla Corderon. And it’s an assumption we could make for me as well.’

‘Meaning?’

‘If the judge did try to trap me in Quebec, the mechanism hasn’t worked properly. I got away from the RCMP, and the exhumation has smoked him out of his safe hiding-place. If I manage to persuade other people, he’ll lose everything, reputation and honour. He won’t want to take that risk. He’s going to react pretty soon.’

‘By taking you out?’

‘Yes. I should therefore try to make things easy for him. I mean, go back to my own flat quite openly. And he’ll come. That’s what I’ve come to ask you, to let me take a few days and do that.’

‘Adamsberg, you’re crazy. You’re going to do a stakeout for the lion, with yourself as the goat? With a madman who’s already committed thirteen murders?’

Or maybe the old trick of the mosquito in the ear, thought Adamsberg, or the fish in the muddy bottom of a lake, being tempted up by a lamp. Fishing by night with lanterns. Only this time the fish was holding the trident, not the fisherman.

‘There isn’t any other way to get him to break cover.’

‘That’s simply self-sacrifice, Adamsberg, and it won’t get you cleared of the crime in Hull. That’s if the judge doesn’t manage to kill you first.’

‘It’s a risk.’

‘If you’re found in your own flat, dead or alive, the RCMP will accuse me of incompetence or complicity.’

‘You’ll say you lifted the surveillance to trick me into coming back.’

‘Which would oblige me to extradite you right away,’ said Brézillon, putting out his cigarette with his thumb.

‘Well, you’ll have to do that anyway, in four and a half weeks.’

‘I don’t like sending my men over the top.’

‘Just let’s say I’m no longer one of your men, just an independent fugitive.’

‘Agreed then,’ sighed Brézillon.

Drawn in by the lamprey effect, Adamsberg thought. He got up and put his camouflage cap back on. For the first time Brézillon put out his hand to shake. An admission, no doubt, that he was not sure of seeing him alive again.