Read Online Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand by Fred Vargas - Free Book Online Page A

one other teenager just as vulnerable and mixed-up as Raphaël, all those found guilty were individuals on the margins of society, homeless tramps or vagrants, habitual drunkards, and all, at the time of arrest, had presented with a spectacularly high alcohol count in their bloodstream. It would hardly have been difficult to extract confessionsfrom people already so disturbed, and who had so quickly given up on themselves.
    Danglard pushed away the large white cat sitting on his feet. The cat was warm and heavy. He hadn’t changed the cat’s name since Camille had left it with him the year before, when she took off for Lisbon. Then the kitten had been a fluffy little ball with blue eyes, and he had called it Snowball. It had grown up sweet-natured, without scratching the furniture or the walls. Danglard could never look at the cat without thinking about Camille, who was similarly not very good at self-defence. He picked up the cat under the stomach, took one of its paws and scratched at the little pad. But the little claws did not come out. Snowball was a one-off. He put it down on the table and finally let it return on top of his feet. If that’s what you want, stay there.
    None of those arrested, Danglard noted, could remember having committed the murder. That amounted to an astonishing run of cases of amnesia. In his career in the police, he could think of only two cases where there had been loss of memory after a murder, both caused by a refusal to consider the dreadfulness of the act, as the perpetrator went into denial. But that kind of psychological amnesia could hardly explain eight cases. Alcohol on the other hand, that might do it. As a young man, when he had been a serious drinker, he could recall waking up with no memory of the night before, so that his friends had had to fill him in on it the next day. He had started to cut back after being told that he had stood up on a table in Avignon, stark naked, and declaimed, to much applause, a passage of Virgil. In Latin. He was already starting to put on weight, and the thought of what he must have looked like appalled him. Very merry, according to his friends (male), quite charming according to his friends (female). Yes, alcohol-induced amnesia was something he knew about, but it was unpredictable. Sometimes, if you drank yourself silly, you could remember everything afterwards, and sometimes you couldn’t.
    Adamsberg knocked twice quietly at the door. Danglard took the cat under his arm and went to open it. The commissaire glanced at the cat.
    ‘OK on that front?’ he asked.
    ‘As well as can be expected,’ said Danglard.
    Subject closed, message understood. The two men sat down at the table and Danglard put the cat back to sit on his feet before explaining the doubts he had about this genuine or false string of murders. Adamsberg listened to him, his left arm held tight across his body, his right hand propping up his cheek.
    ‘I know,’ he interrupted. ‘Do you think I haven’t had all the time in the world to analyse and compare the measurements of the wounds? I know them all by heart. I know how deep they were, the form they took, and all the deviations and differences from case to case. But you have to realise that Judge Fulgence has absolutely nothing in common with an ordinary mortal. He would never be so stupid as to use the same weapon every time. No, Danglard. This man is powerful. But he kills with his trident. It’s the emblem and sceptre of his power.’
    ‘Well, it has to be one thing or the other,’ objected Danglard. ‘Either it’s a single weapon or several. The wounds have differences.’
    ‘It comes to the same thing. What’s so striking about the differences is that they’re tiny , Danglard, absolutely tiny. The space between the perforations, in whatever direction, may vary. But the variation is always small. Look at them again. Whatever the distribution, the maximum length of the line is never more than 16.9 centimetres. That