Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand Read Online Free PDF Page A

floor, back to the radiator, hugging his knees and thinking of his great-uncle, curled up like that in the rocks. He needed to concentrate, peer into the deepest recesses of his mind without giving up. Return to the first appearance of the Trident, the initial tornado. So, he had been talking about Rembrandt while he explained to Danglard what he saw as the flaw in the D’Hernoncourt case. He tried to relive this scene again. Although he always found it difficult to remember words, images invariably imprinted themselves on his memory like pebbles on soft mud. He saw himself sitting on the corner of Danglard’s desk, and he saw the grumpy face of his deputy, under the sailor’s cap with its remains of a pompom. He saw the plastic cup of white wine, and the light falling from the left. And he was talking about light and shade. How was he sitting? With arms folded? Hands on knees? Hands on the table? Or in his pockets? What had he been doing with his hands?
    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 frontentrance 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.

VI
    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