Fred Vargas - Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

He had been holding a newspaper. He had picked it up off the table, and had been leafing through it, without really reading it, during their conversation. Had he really not been reading it? Or had he seen something there? Something so powerful that a tidal wave had surged up out of his memory?

Adamsberg looked at his watch. Five-twenty in the morning. Getting quickly to his feet, he smoothed down his rumpled jacket and left the house. A short time later, he was neutralising the alarm on the front entrance and walking into the Crime Squad offices. The hall was freezing cold. The engineer who was supposed to have come at seven the previous evening had still not arrived.

He saluted the duty officer and slipped quietly into his deputy’s office, avoiding telling the night shift he was in the building. He switched on the desk lamp and looked for the paper. Danglard was not the sort of man to leave it lying around and Adamsberg found it in the in-tray. Without bothering to sit down, he turned the pages looking for a Neptune-type incident. It was worse than that. On page 7, under the headline ‘Girl murdered with three stab wounds in Schiltigheim’, there was an indistinct picture of a body on a stretcher. And despite the fuzziness of the photograph, it was possible to make out that the girl was wearing a light-blue sweater, and that there were three wounds in a straight line across her abdomen.

Adamsberg went round the table to sit in Danglard’s chair. Now he held that last missing piece of the jigsaw, the three puncture-wounds he had fleetingly glimpsed. The bloody signature, seen so many times in the past, and denoting the actions of the murderer, actions lying hidden in his memory and buried for over sixteen years. The photograph, briefly registered, must have awoken the memory with a jump, triggering the terrible feeling of dread and the sense that the Trident had returned.

He was quite calm now. He tore out the page, folded it and put it in his inside pocket. The elements were all there and the attacks would not be able to trouble him again. Any more than the Trident would, the killer whom he had mentally exhumed because of a mere echo from a briefly-seen press photograph. And after this shortlived misunderstanding, the Trident could be dispatched back into the cave of oblivion where he belonged.

THE MEETING OF THE EIGHT DESIGNATED MEMBERS OF THE QUEBEC mission took place in a temperature of 8 degrees, in a gloomy atmosphere rendered even more sluggish by the cold. The whole project might have foundered had it not been for the crucial presence of Lieutenant Violette Retancourt. Without gloves or hat, she gave no sign of discomfort. Unlike her colleagues, whose clenched teeth made their voices tense, she spoke in her usual strong and well-tempered tones, heightened by the interest she considered the Quebec mission to represent. She was backed up by Voisenet, from behind a thick scarf, and young Estalère, who professed an admiration without reserve for the versatile lieutenant , as if devoting himself to some powerful goddess, a mighty Juno combined with Diana the huntress and twelve-armed Shiva. Retancourt spoke eloquently, cajoling, giving examples and concluding. Today she had visibly channelled her energy into persuasion, and Adamsberg, with a smile, let her take the lead. In spite of his disturbed night, he felt relaxed and back on form. He didn’t even have a hangover from the gin.

Danglard observed the commissaire , who was tilting his chair backwards, apparently quite restored to his usual nonchalance and having forgotten both his irritation of the previous day and even their nocturnal conversation about the god of the sea. Retancourt was still speaking, challenging negative arguments, and Danglard felt he was losing ground: an irresistible force was propelling him in through the doors of a Boeing condemned to be hit by a flock of starlings.

Retancourt won the day. At ten past midday, the decision to go on the RCMP course in Gatineau was carried by seven to one. Adamsberg closed the session and went to convey their decision to the prefect of police. He caught up with Danglard in the corridor.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold the string. I’m good at it.’

‘What string?’

‘The one that holds the plane up,’ Adamsberg explained, pinching his thumb and forefinger together.

Adamsberg gave a nod to confirm his promise and walked off. Danglard wondered if the commissaire was mocking him. But he had looked serious, as if he really thought he could hold the strings to keep planes in the air and stop them crashing. Danglard touched his pompom, which had now become a calming talisman. Curiously, the idea of the piece of string and Adamsberg holding it, brought him some reassurance.

On one street corner near the office was a large brasserie where the atmosphere was cheery, but the food was terrible, while on the opposite side was a small cafe where the seating was less comfortable, but the food was good. The fairly crucial choice between the two was faced almost every day by the staff of the Crime Squad, who were torn between eating well in a dark and draughty restaurant, and the comforting warmth of the old brasserie, which had kept its 1930s-style seats but had hired a disastrous new chef. Today the heating question won out over any other considerations, so about twenty officers headed for the Brasserie des Philosophes , a rather incongruous name since about sixty Paris flics , little given to conceptual acrobatics, ate there most days. Noting the direction taken by the majority, Adamsberg took himself to the under-heated cafe known as Le Buisson . He had eaten hardly anything in twenty-four hours, since abandoning his Irish meal when the tornado had struck.

As he finished the day’s special, he pulled out of his inside pocket the crumpled page from the newspaper and spread it on the table, curious about the murder in Alsace which had provoked such a tumult in his head. The victim, Elisabeth Wind, twenty-two years old, had probably been killed at about midnight, when she was returning home on her bike from Schiltigheim to her village, about three kilometres away, a trip she made every Saturday night. Her body had been found in undergrowth about ten metres from the road. The first indications were that she had been knocked unconscious and the cause of death was the three stab wounds in the abdomen. The young woman had not been sexually assaulted, nor had any of her clothing been removed. A suspect was being held, one Bernard Vétilleux, unmarried and of no fixed address, who had quickly been discovered a few hundred metres from the scene of the crime, dead drunk, and fast asleep by the side of the road. The gendarmes reported that they had conclusive proof against Vétilleux, but according to the accused man, he had no memory of the night of the murder.

Adamsberg read through the article twice. He shook his head slowly, looking at the blue sweater, punctured by three holes. It was impossible, absolutely impossible. He, of all people, was well placed to know that. He ran his hand over the article, hesitated, then took out his mobile phone.

‘Danglard?’

His deputy replied from the Brasserie des Philosophes , his mouth full.

‘Can you get me the name of the commandant of gendarmes for Schiltigheim in the Bas-Rhin département?’

Danglard had the names of all the police chiefs of every town in France at his fingertips, but was less good on the gendarmerie .

‘Is this as urgent as the Neptune business?’

‘Not quite, but let’s say it’s not far off.’

‘I’ll call you back in about fifteen minutes.’

‘While you’re at it, don’t forget to call that heating engineer again.’