Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

XX

VOISENET HAD PLANNED TO SPEND THE WEEKEND OFF IN THE FORESTS and lakes, with his binoculars and camera. Because of the need to share cars, he was taking Justin and Retancourt with him. The other four had chosen the big city, and were leaving for Ottawa and Montreal. Adamsberg had decided to head off alone for the north. Before leaving in the morning, he went to check whether the noisy goose of the day before had handed over to another leader. He was certain it was a gander in fact.

No, the despotic gander had not yielded an inch. The other geese were following him like sheep, swerving whenever the leader changed direction, and waiting in complete stillness when he went into action, flapping along the surface of the water towards the ducks, wings outspread and feathers ruffled to make him look even bigger. Adamsberg shouted an insult at him and shook his fist before going back to the car. Before moving off, he knelt down to check that no squirrels were underneath.

He headed due north, lunched at Kazabazua, and then drove along an endless succession of dirt roads. Ten kilometres or so out of town, the Québécois didn’t bother to asphalt the roads, since the frost broke up the surface every year. If he went on driving in a straight line, he thought, with immense pleasure, he would end up looking across to Greenland. That’s something you can’t say in Paris when you go out after work. Or in Bordeaux. He allowed himself to wander along, taking side-roads when they tempted him, finally turning south again before parking at the edge of a forest by Pink Lake. The woods were deserted, the ground strewn with red maple leaves and occasional patches of snow. Here and there, a notice told travellers to watch out for bears and to recognise their claw marks on the trunks of beech trees. ‘Warning: black bears climb trees in order to eat beech nuts.’ ‘Good,’ thought Adamsberg, looking up and feeling with his finger the scars left by the claws of bears, peering to see if any beast was overhead. Up till now, he had only seen some beaver dams and some tracks left by deer. Just footprints and traces, but no animals were visible. A bit like Maxime Leclerc in his Haguenau Schloss.

Stop thinking about the Schloss and go and take a look at this pink lake instead.

Pink Lake was marked on the map as being a small example of the half-million or so lakes in Quebec province, but Adamsberg found it large and beautiful. Because he had taken to reading notices in the days since visiting Strasbourg, he read the information board about Pink Lake. He discovered therefore that he had chanced upon a unique lake.

He recoiled a little. This recent propensity to come across exceptions was unsettling. Waving these thoughts away, with his habitual gesture, he read on. Pink Lake was twenty metres deep and its bed was covered with three metres of mud. So far, so normal perhaps. But because of the great depth, the surface waters did not mix with the lower ones. From fifteen metres down, they did not move, were never disturbed or oxygenated, any more than the mud on the lake bed which enclosed its 10,600 years of history. The lake might look normal, Adamsberg concluded, and indeed it seemed to be reflecting blue and pink colours, but its smooth surface covered a second lake, one that was perpetually stagnant, airless and dead, a fossil. Worst of all, a saltwater fish still lived down there, from the era when the sea had covered it. Adamsberg examined the drawing of the fish, which seemed to be a sort of cross between a carp and a trout, but smaller and with spines. He looked in vain for its name on the notice; it didn’t seem to have one.

A living lake lying over a dead one. Harbouring a nameless creature, of which only a sketch or image was available. Adamsberg leaned over the wooden fence to try to glimpse the dead lower waters under the shimmering pink surface. Why did all his thoughts keep leading him back to the Trident? Like the marks of the bears’ claws on tree trunks? Like this dead lake, muddy and grey, surviving silently underneath an apparently living surface, and home to a strange creature left over from a bygone era.

Adamsberg hesitated, then got his sketchpad out of his anorak. Warming his hands, he copied as precisely as possible the artist’s impression of the damned fish which seemed to swim between heaven and hell. He had intended to spend a long time in the forest, but Pink Lake made him go back. Everywhere he found himself facing the long-dead judge, everywhere he found himself touching the threatening waters of Neptune and the traces of his accursed trident. What would Laliberté have done in the face of this torment that dogged him so continuously? Would he have laughed it off with a wave of his huge hand, opting instead for rigour, rigour and more rigour? Or would he have pounced on his prey and never let it go? Walking away from the lake, Adamsberg had the sensation that the pursuit was the other way round, that the hunter was becoming the hunted, and that the prey was itself sinking its teeth into him. Its spines, claws, and prongs. In that case, Danglard would be right to suspect that he was now becoming obsessive.

He walked slowly back to the car. By his two watches, which he had altered to read local time, while still respecting their five minutes difference, it was twelve and a half minutes past four in the afternoon. He drove along the empty roads, searching for indifference in the uniform immensity of the forests, then decided to turn back towards civilisation. He slowed down as he approached the parking lot of his residence, then gradually speeded up, leaving Hull behind him and heading for Montreal. This was precisely what he had not wanted to do, as he kept telling himself the whole two hundred kilometres of the way. But the car was just taking him there, as if it were radio-controlled, at a speed of ninety kilometres an hour, following the tail-lights of the pick-up trunk in front.

Just as the car knew it was going to Montreal, Adamsberg remembered perfectly the directions from the green brochure, the time and the place. Or perhaps, he thought as he approached the city, he ought to opt for a film or a play, why not? If he could, he ought perhaps to get rid of this damned car and find one that didn’t drive him to Pink Lake or to concerts by the Montreal quintet. But at 10.36 that evening, he was slipping into the church, just after the interval. He went to sit on one of the forward pews, behind a white pillar.