Fred Vargas - Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

‘Come back and see us,’ beamed Laliberté, with a hearty shake of his hand. ‘I owe you one, and I wanted to tell you. Feel free to come over and see the red leaves in the Fall, and you could even go trail walking again: it’s been exorcised now.’

Laliberté kept hold of Adamsberg’s hand in his iron grip. Over the superintendent’s face where he had never seen more than three expressions, bonhomie, rigour and anger, there now passed a reflective look which altered his face. There’s always something else under the surface, like in Pink Lake, he thought.

‘Know what I think?’ Laliberté went on. ‘We need a few of them in our job, cloud shovellers.’

He let go his hand, and disappeared after the others. Adamsberg watched as his massive back disappeared into the crowd. He could still see Sanscartier. He would have liked to take a sample of his goodness, put it on to a disk and isolate it, so that he could inject a little into his own DNA.

The seven other members of the squad were heading for the exit. He heard Voisenet’s voice calling him and turned round, rejoining them slowly, holding the sergeant’s thick jacket over his shoulder.

Strap on your skis and follow your nose, cloud shoveller.

Put all this in your pipe.

And smoke it.

‘De la rigueur, de la rigueur et de la rigueur, je connais pas d’autre moyen de réussir ’ (‘Rigour, rigour and yet more rigour, that’s the only way I know to succeed’) was a slogan in the television advertising for UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), for the years 2001 and 2002.

The Canadian DNA Data Bank is situated in the Ottawa headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police/Gendarmerie royale du Canada, but the ‘annex’ in Gatineau Federal Park is invented, and the episodes concerning DNA profiling in this novel are a mixture of the real and the fictional; they do not represent the RCMP’s actual modes of procedure. The following article (which appears in both French and English) was drawn upon for details of DNA profiling procedures: Joanna Kerr, ‘RCMP’s DNA Data Bank Sets a World Standard’, The Gazette/La Gazette , vol. 62, no. 5-6, 2000 (journal of the RCMP/GRC).

Translator’s note:

Canadian French differs more in terms of idiom and vocabulary from the French spoken in France than Canadian English does from British or US English. The French characters here sometimes find the language difficult to follow, but the examples have necessarily been cut or modified in translation.

French police ranks, which were renamed some years ago along the same lines as the gendarmerie and the military, have been left in French. The hierarchy ascends as follows: brigadier, lieutenant, capitaine, commandant, commissaire . These are roughly equivalent but do not exactly correspond to the British ranks: (detective) sergeant, inspector, chief inspector, superintendent, chief superintendent, with the divisionnaire being equivalent to commissioner. As commissaire principal , Adamsberg is the equivalent of chief superintendent.

FRED VARGAS is a historian, archaeologist and an internationally best-selling author. Her novel, The Three Evangelists , won the prestigious British Crime Writers’ Association Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Award. She lives in Paris.