Myrna, feeling called to the principal’s office, followed him into the living room.
“Yes, he found the video,” she admitted before Armand could say anything. But still he was quiet, and she nodded. “I might have suggested he google you.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he so clearly believed what that Leduc man was saying about you. He needed to know the truth if he was ever going to learn. There’s a murderer. The boy has to start paying attention.”
“No one needs to see that video.”
“Look, Armand, I know you hate that it’s out there, but the fact is, it is. It might as well have a purpose. If it teaches that young man the reality of the situation, then maybe some little good will come of it.”
“Does he look like he’s changed his mind?” asked Armand, and Myrna glanced in the direction of the dining room. And shook her head.
“I think there’s something else at work here,” she said. “I saw his face as he watched the video of that raid. He was shocked. But not in the usual way. He seemed to have walked right into the screen. To experience it, as it was happening. It’s a rare ability, to empathize that intensely. It’s almost as though he was there.”
On seeing Gamache’s face, she repeated, “Almost.”
Gamache looked toward the dining room, then back at Myrna.
“He saw all of them,” said Armand. “Réal and Etienne and Sarah.”
He recited the names of the dead, as Ruth had done the day before.
Myrna nodded. “And Jean-Guy. And you. I think for the first time he realized what being a Sûreté agent would mean. The Duke, that’s what they called him?”
Gamache nodded.
“The Duke probably filled them with stories of power and glory, and any violence was heroic and cartoonish, like the old war movies or westerns. Death was clean, and mostly us doing it to them. And they loved him for it. But the video shows how horrific it really is. I think it’s terrified him. And he hates you for it.”
Gamache realized he’d been wrong. He’d been afraid Cadet Laurin wasn’t taking this seriously enough, when in fact he was near paralyzed with fear.
Jacques was asking himself the question they all did, eventually. When faced with it, would he move forward or would he run away?
“It’s time he learned what might be expected of him,” said Gamache. “It’s time they all learned.”
Then he smiled. Quickly, briefly. Sincerely.
“That’s a nice thought, Myrna. That good might come out of what happened. Their deaths might save lives. Might save his life, especially if it convinces him to quit.”
“Do you think he will?”
“I think perhaps he should.”
“But will he die at the appointed hour anyway?” she asked. “In his bed, in his car, or in a gun battle?”
“Fate? Don’t start on that again,” said Gamache. It was a conversation they often had, but not that day.
The two men left, as did Myrna and Clara, but the cadets stayed behind.
Huifen, after all, had dishes to do. Amelia grudgingly got up to help her. Then Nathaniel joined in. And finally Jacques came into the kitchen. Grabbing the dish towel from Nathaniel, he snapped it at him before picking up a wet dish.
Nathaniel laughed, knowing it was done in jest. And yet, there had been something vicious about that snap, and the sting it left behind.
CHAPTER 26
“He could have done it,” said Isabelle Lacoste.
They’d gathered in the conference room at the Sûreté Academy. Gamache, Professor Charpentier, Beauvoir, and Gélinas listened as Lacoste reported on their early morning meeting with the mayor.
Light poured in through the picture window, and outside the snow was melting in the brilliant sunshine.
“He had the motive and the opportunity. Even, perhaps, the expertise to override the security system here.”
“Though we don’t know if it was done intentionally, or the system just failed on its own,” said Beauvoir.
“What did you make of Mayor Florent?” Gamache asked.
“I liked him. An interesting man. He put up a sort of mist of bonhomie. Of good cheer. But he readily, almost cheerfully, admitted he could’ve left his home, driven over here, killed Leduc and got back home without anyone knowing he was gone.”
“But when you asked if he killed Leduc, he said no,” Gélinas pointed out. “So I guess he didn’t do it.”
“You tried that again?” asked Gamache.
“Still hasn’t worked, eh?” said Beauvoir.
She shook her head and smiled. “One day it will and we can all go home early.”
“But the mayor did admit he despised the man,” said Gélinas, watching with interest and some envy the easy familiarity of these people. He had to remind himself that his job was to judge them, not join them. “That was the word he used. ‘Despised.’ And that he prayed him dead.”
“If everyone we prayed dead died, the streets would be littered with corpses,” said Beauvoir.
“Non,” said Gélinas. “We might wish someone dead, but for a religious man to sit in a church, before God, and pray that someone dies? Not a loved one who’s sick and in pain, whose suffering we want to see ended, but a vigorous man who could live, should live, another forty years? To pray that man dead is something else entirely. It’s a hatred that overwhelms his morals and ethics and beliefs. It’s a hatred that’s hooked in the soul.”
Gamache listened to Gélinas and wondered if he was himself a religious man.
“So you think Mayor Florent is a religious fanatic and God was his accomplice?” asked Beauvoir.
“Now you just make it sound silly,” said Gélinas with a rueful smile, then he shook his head. “He might be a religious man, but I think if he killed Leduc, it was driven by hatred of the man and not love of God. I’ve learned never to underestimate hatred. There’s a madness that goes with it.”
“We have the forensics report,” said Beauvoir, tapping the screen of his tablet.
It was a relief to be investigating a murder in a place with high-speed Internet. The report flashed up on all their screens.
It was also a relief to now be dealing with facts rather than speculation.
“The bullet we dug out of the wall was the one that killed him. And it came from the gun we found. The McDermot .45. No surprise there.”
“There is one surprise,” said Gélinas. “I’m not a homicide investigator, but I’d have thought most murderers take the weapon with them. To dispose of it. Less for the investigators to work with, if there’s no weapon.”
“Amateurs,” said Charpentier. He’d been bone-dry and silent so far, but as he spoke, sweat began pouring from his pores.
“Professionals know that as soon as murder is committed, the weapon stops being a gun or a knife or a club and becomes a noose,” he said. “It attaches itself to the killer. He might think he’s being clever, taking the weapon, but murder weapons are harder to get rid of than people think. The longer he holds on to it, the tighter the rope gets, the bigger the drop.”
Charpentier mimicked a length of rope, and then jerked it with such sudden violence, and such relish, it gave those watching pause. A kind of ecstasy had come over the quiet man as he glistened in the morning sun and talked of execution.
Gamache leaned forward slightly, toward Charpentier, his thoughtful eyes sharpening. And he knew then what his former pupil reminded him of. His thin, tense body was that rope, and his outsized head the noose.
If Gamache was an explorer and Beauvoir a hunter, Charpentier seemed a born executioner.
And Gélinas? Gamache shifted his gaze to the senior RCMP officer. What was he?
“Amateurs panic and take it with them,” confirmed Beauvoir. “Leduc was killed by someone who knew what he was doing, or at the very least had thought it through.”