He watched as the train came into the station. That was a deep and dark question that took him straight back to the horrors of the portage trail. Where there was no evidence that the Trident had ever set foot.
As he turned into Clémentine’s little sidestreet, he snapped his fingers. He must tell Danglard about the frogs in Collery. He would certainly be glad to hear it worked with frogs as well. Ploff, bang! A slightly different sound.
L
BUT IT WASN’T THE MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT FROGS. ALMOST AS SOON as he got in, a call from Retancourt informed him that Michel Sartonna, the young man in charge of cleaning the departmental office, had been found murdered. He normally came in to work between five and nine in the evening. When he had not been seen for two days, someone was sent round to his flat. He had been shot dead, with two bullets in the chest from a handgun with a silencer, some time between Monday night and Tuesday morning.
‘Could it have been a gangland killing, lieutenant? I had the feeling Michel was into drug dealing.’
‘If so, he wasn’t rich. Except for a large sum of money deposited in his bank on 13 October, four days after the news item appeared in the Nouvelles d’Alsace. And there was a brand new laptop in his flat. I should also say that he’d put in for two weeks’ leave, without warning, which exactly tallies with the dates we were in Quebec.’
‘You’re thinking he was the mole, Retancourt? But I thought we’d established there wasn’t one.’
‘Well, we might have to think again. Michel could have been contacted after Schiltigheim, and been paid to do some spying, and perhaps follow us out to Quebec. And it might have been him who got into your flat.’
‘And then killed Noëlla on the path?’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t believe that, Retancourt. Even if we suppose there was someone else there, the judge would hardly have left it to someone like Michel to carry out such a refined kind of vengeance. And certainly not with the trident.’
‘Danglard doesn’t think so either, actually.’
‘As for murder with a gun, that doesn’t sound like the judge.’
‘I’ve told you what I think about that. A gun is OK for outsiders, murders that don’t fit the scheme. No need to use the trident on Michel. My guess is that the stupid boy misjudged his contact, asked for too much money or maybe even threatened blackmail. Or perhaps the judge just wanted to get him out of the way.’
‘If it was the judge.’
‘We took a look at Michel’s laptop. The hard disk’s empty, or rather it’s been wiped. Our computer people are coming tomorrow to see if they can resurrect anything.’
‘What about his dog?’ Adamsberg asked, surprising himself by his concern for the large dog that went everywhere with Michel.
‘Shot as well.’
‘Retancourt, since you’re going to send me the bullet-proof vest, can you send over the laptop? I’ve got a Grade A hacker here.’
‘Mm-hm, how’m I going to do that? You’re not a commissaire at the moment.’
‘Yes, I do realise that,’ said Adamsberg, seeming to hear Clémentine’s voice reminding him of it. ‘Ask Danglard, convince him, you’re good at that. Since the exhumation, Brézillon’s more favourably inclined to me, and Danglard knows it.’
‘All right, I’ll try, but he’s the boss for now.’
LI
JOSETTE TOOK POSSESSION OF MICHEL SARTONNA’S LAPTOP WITH HUGE delight. Adamsberg felt that he could hardly have made her happier than with this suspect machine, a real gift for a hacker. It had not arrived at Clignancourt until the late afternoon, and Adamsberg suspected that Danglard had had it checked out by his own computer people first. That was perfectly logical and normal, since he was the acting head of the department. The courier who delivered it also brought a note from Retancourt, saying that as far as they could see the hard disk was as clean as a whistle. This had only spurred Josette on to greater efforts.
She spent a long time trying to penetrate the lost memory of the computer, and confirmed that someone else had already had a try.
‘Your men didn’t bother to wipe out their footsteps. That’s fair enough, they weren’t doing anything illegal.’
The last defence came down only with Michel’s dog’s name spelt backwards: ograc. He had often brought the dog into the office, a huge but harmless beast, as unthreatening as a snail, hence its name, Escargot, shortened to Cargo. It liked eating any papers it found lying around, and could transform a report into a wet soggy ball in no time. So it was perhaps a good code name for the mysterious transmutations that took place inside computers.
But once inside, Josette came up against the same blank wall as the police had.
‘Nothing at all, wiped clean, scraped with wire wool,’ she said.
Well, that figured. If the police specialists hadn’t been able to find anything, there was no reason to think Josette would fare any better. But she kept tapping doggedly with her shaky little hands on the keyboard.
‘I’ll keep trying,’ she said obstinately.
‘Don’t bother, Josette, they’ve obviously tried everything in the lab.’
It was time for their ritual glass of port, and Clémentine summoned Adamsberg to come and have his aperitif, as if he was a teenager being called to do his homework. She added an egg yolk, beating it up in the sweet wine. Egg-flip with port was supposed to give him strength.
‘Josette’s still at it,’ he explained as he accepted the glass filled with the opaque mixture to which he was becoming accustomed.
‘To look at her, you’d think you could knock her over with a feather, wouldn’t you,’ said Clémentine clinking her glass against Adamsberg’s.
‘But you can’t.’
‘No. Not like that,’ Clémentine interrupted him to stop him putting the glass to his lips. ‘When you clink glasses, you have to look at the other person. I told you that already. Then drink it off without putting the glass down. Elsewise it won’t work.’
‘What won’t work?’
She shook her head as if that was a supremely silly question.
‘Start again,’ she said sternly. ‘Now what was I saying?’
‘We were saying Josette couldn’t be knocked over with a feather.’
‘Right. Now then. Inside my little Josette there’s a compass, and it’s fixed on the north. She’s taken thousands and thousands from those fat cats. So she won’t just give up on it.’
Adamsberg took a glass of the health-giving mixture into the computer room. Josette clinked glasses properly, with a smile.
‘I found the fragments of one line,’ she said in her quavery voice. ‘It’s the ruins of a message that’s broken up. Your men didn’t find this,’ she said rather proudly. ‘There are always a few corners people don’t manage to go through with a toothcomb.’
‘Like the space between the wall and the washbasin.’
‘Yes, that’s right. I always clean things thoroughly, and my husband thought I was fussy. Come and have a look.’
Adamsberg came over to the screen and read a meaningless series of letters, all that had survived the crash: dam ea ezv ort la ero.
‘Is that all?’ he asked in disappointment.
‘That’s all, but it’s better than nothing,’ said Josette, who was still elated. ‘ezv could only be from “rendezvous,” for instance.’
‘I’m sure Michel was involved with drugs, I often thought so,’ Adamsberg said. ‘So dam is most likely from Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Classic drugs centres.’