Adamsberg seemed to freeze on the spot and the light went out of his eyes.
‘Dead?’ he repeated in a low voice. ‘How do you know?’
‘Christ Almighty, because you told me! You said you’d lost your brother. That he committed suicide after the trial.’
Adamsberg leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath.
‘Aaah, you really scared me, mon vieux! I thought you’d had news of him… Yes, I did say I lost my brother, thirty years ago. I meant he went away, and I’ve never seen him since. But goddamnit, he’s still alive as far as I know, and I have to see him. No tables to turn, Danglard, just some hard disks to spin. You’re sure to be able to find him on the internet: Mexico, the US, Cuba, somewhere. He went travelling, different cities, different jobs, at least at the beginning.’
The commissaire was moving his finger in vague curves over the table, tracing the wanderings of his brother. Speaking with difficulty, he went on:
‘Twenty-five years ago, he was a pedlar in Chihuahua province, near the US border. He sold coffee, china, linen, mescal, brushes. And he used to do portraits in the street. He was always pretty good at drawing.’
‘Sincerely, commissaire, I beg your pardon,’ said Danglard. ‘I’d completely misunderstood. You spoke of him as if he were no longer here.’
‘Well, he is no longer here.’
‘Do you have any more precise information, anything more recent?’
‘We avoid the subject at home, my mother and I. But when I was in the village about four years ago, I found a postcard he’d sent her from Puerto Rico. Love and kisses. Last known sighting.’
Danglard noted this on a sheet of paper.
‘What’s his full name?’
‘Raphaël Félix Franck Adamsberg.’
‘Date of birth, place, parents’ names, schooling, what does he like doing?’
Adamsberg gave him the necessary information.
‘Will you do it, Danglard? Will you look for him?’
‘Yes, all right,’ muttered Danglard, still feeling guilty at having buried Raphaël before his time. ‘At least I’ll try, but with all this backlog of paperwork, it’s not a priority.’
‘It’s getting urgent. The river’s burst its banks, I told you.’
‘Well there are other urgent things to do as well,’ said Danglard grudgingly. ‘And it’s a Saturday.’
The commissaire found Violette Retancourt dealing in her usual manner with the photocopier, which had jammed again. He told her about their mission and the time of the flight. Brézillon’s order forced an unaccustomed look of surprise on her face. She undid her short ponytail and did it up again, with automatic gestures. Her way of taking time to think. So it was possible, after all, to catch her unawares.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know either, Retancourt, but we’ve got to go back there. They say they need my eyes. I’m really sorry, but the divisionnaire says you’ve got to come too. It’s meant to be protection, according to him.’
Adamsberg was in the departure lounge half an hour before take-off, sitting silently alongside his large blonde lieutenant, when he saw Danglard arrive, flanked by two airport security guards. The capitaine looked tired and was out of breath. He’d evidently been running. Adamsberg would never have believed that possible.
‘These guys nearly drove me mad,’ he puffed, pointing to the guards. ‘They didn’t want to let me through. Here you are,’ he said, handing Adamsberg an envelope. ‘Good luck.’
Adamsberg had no time to thank him properly, because the guards were already escorting his capitaine back to the public zone. He looked down at the brown envelope in his hand.
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ asked Retancourt. ‘It seemed to be urgent.’
‘It is. But I’m hesitating.’
With trembling fingers, he opened the envelope. Danglard had provided an address, in Detroit, USA, and a job: taxidriver. He had also put in a photograph from the internet, taken from a website of illustrators. Adamsberg looked at the face he had not seen for thirty years.
‘Is that you?’ asked Retancourt.
‘My brother,’ said Adamsberg quietly.
Who still looked like him. An address, a job, a photo. Danglard was extremely skilled at finding missing persons, but even so he must have been hard at it to come up with the results and get them to him in a few hours. He closed the envelope with a shiver.
XXXI
DESPITE THE FORMAL CORDIALITY OF THEIR WELCOME AT MONTREAL airport, where Portelance and Philippe-Auguste had come to meet them, Adamsberg had the sensation of being taken in charge. Their destination was the Ottawa mortuary, in spite of the fact that for the French visitors the time was past midnight. During the journey, Adamsberg tried to extract some information from his ex-colleagues, but they remained vague as if they were anonymous drivers. No doubt they had been told not to prejudice the inquiry, so it was not worth insisting. He indicated to Retancourt that he was giving up and took advantage of the time to sleep. When they were woken up at Ottawa, it was past two in the morning, French time.
The superintendent gave them a warmer welcome, shaking hands energetically and thanking Adamsberg for agreeing to make the trip.
‘No choice!’ said Adamsberg. ‘Aurèle, we’re on our knees. Can’t this wait until the morning?’
‘Sorry, we’ll have you driven straight to a hotel afterwards. But the family is pressing us to repatriate the body. The sooner you can take a look, the better.’
Adamsberg saw the superintendent’s eyes shift under the pressure of lying. Was Laliberté intending to exploit his fatigue in some way? It was an old police trick, but he used it himself only with certain suspects and never with colleagues.
‘OK, but can you get me a regular, please, then. Nice and strong.’
Adamsberg and Retancourt, huge polystyrene cups in their hands, followed the superintendent into the cold room, where the duty doctor was nodding off.
‘Don’t keep us waiting, Reynald,’ Laliberté ordered. ‘These people are tired.’
Reynald started to lift the blue sheet covering the victim’s feet.
‘Stop!’ Laliberté ordered, when the fabric had been moved up as far as the shoulders. ‘That’ll do. Come and have a look, Adamsberg.’
Adamsberg leaned over the body which was that of a young woman and winced.
‘Oh, shit!’ he breathed.
‘Something surprising?’ asked Laliberté with a fixed smile.
Adamsberg was suddenly back in the mortuary in the Strasbourg suburbs, looking at the body of Elisabeth Wind. Three wounds in a straight line had perforated the abdomen of the young female victim. Here, ten thousand kilometres from the Trident’s territory.
‘Aurèle, have you got a ruler?’ he asked, holding out his hand, ‘and a tape measure. Centimetres if possible.’
Laliberté looked stunned. He stopped smiling and sent the doctor off to fetch the measuring aids. Adamsberg took his measurements silently, checking three times. Exactly as he had three weeks earlier, for the Schiltigheim victim.
‘17.2 centimetres long, 0.8 centimetres wide,’ he muttered, writing the figures in his notebook.
He checked the pattern of wounds one more time: they were in a perfect straight line, not a millimetre out.
‘17.2 centimetres,’ he repeated to himself, underlining it. Three millimetres longer than the maximum he was used to. Even so.
‘How deep were the wounds, Laliberté?’
‘About six inches.’
‘What’s that in centimetres?’
The superintendent frowned as he tried to convert the figure.
‘About 15.2,’ the doctor said.
‘The same for all three wounds?’