Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

XLVIII

‘CAN YOU BEAT THAT?’ BRÉZILLON WAS SAYING, IN THE CAR TAKING THE others back to Paris: he was somewhat excited by this ghoulish excursion. ‘Eighty kilos of sand. He was right then, damnit.’

‘He very often is,’ commented Mordent.

‘It changes everything,’ Brézillon went on. ‘Adamsberg’s accusation is a lot more solid. Anyone who fakes his death is no choirboy. That old man is still around, after committing twelve murders.’

‘Of which the last three were committed when he was ninety-three, ninety-five and ninety-nine years old,’ Danglard pointed out. ‘Does that really seem possible, sir? A man of a hundred years old dragging a girl and her bicycle off the road?’

‘That’s a problem, I grant you. But Adamsberg was right about Fulgence’s death, we can’t deny that. Are you telling me you don’t go along with him, capitaine?’

‘I’m simply pointing out facts and probabilities.’

Danglard shrank into himself in the back of the car and said no more, letting his colleagues, who were quite worked up, talk about the resurrection of the old judge. Yes, Adamsberg had been right. And that made things even more difficult.

Once he was home, he waited until the children were asleep before he called Quebec. It was only six in the evening there.

‘How are things going?’ he asked his Québécois colleague.

He listened with impatience to the explanations he received from the other end.

‘We have to work faster,’ Danglard interrupted the other speaker. ‘Things are moving here. The exhumation was this afternoon. No body, just a bag of sand… Yes… absolutely… And the divisionnaire seems to think it’s on the level. But there’s still no evidence. Hurry up, do the best you can. He might get away with it.’

Adamsberg had dined alone in a little restaurant in Richelieu, in that comfortable, slightly melancholy atmosphere you get in provincial hotels in the off-season. Not like the Liffey Water pub in Paris. By nine o’clock, there was nothing doing in Cardinal Richelieu’s town. Adamsberg had returned to his hotel room and was lying on his back on the pink bedcover, hands clasped behind his head. He tried not to let his thoughts wander, but on the contrary tried to separate them into tiny slices of DNA material ready for analysis. The trickle of sand through which the judge had disappeared from the land of the living. The three-pronged threat hanging over him. The choice of Quebec as the territory for his execution.

But Danglard’s objections were extremely persuasive. How on earth could such an old man have dragged the body of Elisabeth Wind through the fields? She was a healthy eighteen-year-old, and no will o’ the wisp, even if her name suggested the lightness of the wind. Adamsberg blinked. That was what Raphaël had said about his girlfriend, Lise. That she was as light and lively as the wind. And she even had the name of a wind too, the warm south-easterly wind, the Autan. Odd, two names for wind, Wind and Autan. He raised himself on one elbow, trying to recall the names of the other victims, in a whisper, in chronological order: Espir, Lefebure, Ventou, Soubise, Lentretien, Mestre, Lessard, Matère, Brasillier, Fevre.

Ventou and Soubise immediately jumped out at him. Vent = ‘wind’ in French; and the Bise is the French name of a north wind. That made four winds. Adamsberg put on the overhead light, sat at his little table and wrote down a list of all twelve victims, trying to see if there were any connections between their names. But apart from the four names reminiscent of winds, he could find no obvious links.

Wind equals air. One of the four elements with water, fire and earth. Perhaps the judge had some cosmogonic fantasy about making himself master of the four elements. That would make him a god, like Neptune with his trident, or Jupiter with his thunderbolts. Frowning, he looked at the list again. Only Brasillier was a bit like the word ‘brazier’, suggesting fire. None of the others seemed to relate to flames or water or earth. Tired, he pushed the paper away. An elusive old man, hellbent on an incomprehensible career of serial killing. He thought again about the old man in the village, Hubert, who had lived to a hundred, but was scarcely able to move about by the end. He lived at the top of the village and yelled at the boys in the evenings when they were up to their tricks with the toads. Ten or fifteen years earlier, he would have been down there, giving them a thrashing. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’

Now Adamsberg sat up again, putting his hands on the table. Listen to other people, Retancourt had said. And the doctor in Alsace, Courtin, had been quite sure about it. Don’t disregard his opinion, his professionalism, just because it doesn’t fit what you know. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ The judge was ninety-nine years old, because he had been born in 1904. But what was a birth certificate to a devil?

For a while Adamsberg paced round his room, then he picked up his coat and went out into the night. He walked along the rectilinear streets of the small town, and found himself in a park where a statue of Cardinal Richelieu himself loomed up out of the shadows. A cunning politician, the old Cardinal, and not afraid of bending the rules if he had to. Adamsberg sat down near the statue, chin in hand. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ OK, let’s try that. Born not in 1904 but in 1919. He would have been only fifty, not sixty-five when he retired from his circuit. And today he would be eighty-four, not ninety-nine. When he was eighty-four, Hubert had still been able to climb his trees to prune them. Yes, the judge had always looked younger than his age, even when his hair was white. Aged twenty at the start of the Second World War, not thirty-five, he calculated. Twenty-five in 1944, not forty. Why 1944? Adamsberg looked up at Richelieu’s bronze features as if expecting them to offer an answer. You know quite well why, young man, the Cardinal seemed to say. And yes, of course, the young man did know.

1944, a murder committed with three blows in a straight line. He had come across it in the records, but had ruled it out, because the undisputed killer had been a young man of twenty-five or so, when Fulgence was supposedly forty. He lowered his head to his knees, trying to concentrate. The fine rain formed a mist and seeped into his clothes, as he sat at the wily cardinal’s feet. He waited patiently for the ancient information to come up out of the mist. Or for the fish to swim up out of the depths of Pink Lake. A woman, it had been. Killed with three puncture wounds. And someone had drowned too. When was that? Before the murder? After? Where, in a lake, a pond? In the Landes? No, in the marshes of the Sologne, where people went duck-shooting. The man had drowned, that was it, in a marsh. A father. And after his burial, the woman, his wife, had been killed. He could vaguely picture some photographs in an old press cutting. Probably the father and mother under a headline. A double death, enough to merit a large spread, at a time when news of the war and anticipation of the Allied landings had pushed most small news items off the front pages. Adamsberg clenched his fists and tried to recall what the headline had said.

‘Tragic matricide in the Sologne.’ That was it. True to his habit, Adamsberg sat stock still trying not to breathe. Whenever a fragmentary thought flashed across his mind he tried not to move, afraid of scaring it away, like an angler handling a bite. He wouldn’t pounce on it until it was safely landed in the conscious brain. After the father’s funeral, the couple’s son, aged twenty-five, had killed his mother and fled. There was a witness, a domestic servant, who had been pushed aside by the son in his frantic flight. Had he been caught? Or had he vanished in the turmoil of the Allied Landings and the Liberation? Adamsberg did not know the answer, since he had not pursued the case. It had not seemed to fit the pattern and, in any case, the man was too young to be Fulgence. ‘Take off about fifteen years.’ So perhaps it could have been Fulgence after all. A man who’d killed his own mother. With a trident. Mordent’s words came back to him, in a flash: ‘The o-ri-gin-al sin, the first murder. The kind of thing that produces ghosts.’

Adamsberg looked up into the rain and bit his lip. He had blocked all the spectre’s bolt-holes, he had forced the phantom to come back to life, and now he had put his finger on the original crime. He dialled Josette’s number, sheltering the phone and hoping the rain wouldn’t affect its little antennae.

On hearing her voice, he felt as if he was calling up a super-efficient colleague in the most natural way in the world. An elderly little old police inspectress, shuffling along in her earrings and slippers in the secret underworld of the internet. Which earrings would she be wearing tonight, the pearls or the gold clover-leaves?

‘Josette, did I disturb you?’

‘Not at all, I’m having fun in a Swiss bank account.’

‘Josette, the coffin was full of sand. I think I’ve forced our man into the open.’

‘Wait a minute, commissaire, I’ll get a pen.’

Adamsberg heard Clémentine’s loud voice in the corridor:

‘How many times do I have to tell you, Josette, he’s not a commissaire now.’

He heard Josette explaining about the sand.

‘Ah, about time too,’ said Clémentine.

‘Very well, I’m ready,’ said Josette.

‘Can you locate the case of a mother, murdered by her son in 1944. It was some time before the Allied Landings, in March or April. It was in the Sologne region, just after the father’s funeral.’

‘Three puncture wounds, like the others?’

‘Yes. The killer, the son, was young, about twenty-five. I can’t recall what the name of the family was or the exact place.’

‘It’s very old, it will only be in some very remote place if it’s on computer at all. But I’ll give it a try, commissaire.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ the distant voice of Clémentine began.

‘Josette, call me back any time if you find anything.’

Adamsberg put away the mobile and walked slowly back to the hotel. Everyone in this story had contributed something, just the right words at the right time. Sanscartier, Mordent, Danglard, Retancourt, Raphaël, Clémentine, and of course Vivaldi. And then Dr Courtin, Father Grégoire and Josette. Now he had to add Cardinal Richelieu. And perhaps even Trabelmann with his damned cathedral.

Josette called back at two in the morning.

‘Well, now,’ she began as usual. ‘I had to try the National Archives, and the police records. Very well protected, as I said.’

‘Sorry, Josette.’

‘No, it wasn’t too difficult, I enjoyed the chase. Clémentine got me a bowl of coffee with some Armagnac and warm rolls. She looked after me as if I was a submarine captain, getting the torpedoes ready. Anyway. 12 March 1944. A village called Collery in the Loiret. The day of the funeral of Gérard Guillaumond, who had died aged 61.’

‘Drowned?’

‘Yes. It was either an accident or suicide, they never found out which. His boat had sprung a leak and it sank in a marshy lake. And after the funeral, when everyone had gone home, the son, Roland Guillaumond, killed his own mother, Marie Guillaumond.’

‘There was a witness, I seem to remember, Josette?’

‘Yes, the cook. She heard screams from upstairs. She went up and the son of the family pushed past her on the stairs, as he rushed out of his mother’s bedroom. The cook found her mistress lying dead. There wasn’t anyone else there, so there was never any doubt at all who had killed her.’

‘And did they catch him?’ Adamsberg asked anxiously.

‘No, never. The police appeared to think he had gone to earth in the local maquis, and perhaps had been killed in the fighting afterwards.’

‘Were there any photos of him in the press?’

‘No. It was wartime, remember. The cook is dead now, I checked the registration records. So, commissaire, do you really think he’s our judge? I thought he was born in 1904, so he’d have been forty in 1944.’

‘Take off about fifteen years, Josette.’