They’d been each other’s best man at their weddings, and stood up for each other at christenings.
Michel Brébeuf had excelled in the Sûreté, rising quickly through the ranks to the position of Superintendent. Poised to become the next Chief Superintendent.
Armand Gamache had quickly achieved Chief Inspector in homicide, and built that department into one of the finest in the nation.
And then he’d stalled. And seen his best friend’s rise continue.
There had been no hint, though, of envy. They’d remained close friends outside of work, and collaborative colleagues at work.
Their lives had been lived side by side. Until the two roads, the personal and the professional, collided. And went downhill. Fast.
Armand Gamache had gotten whiffs of something wrong within the Sûreté. There were always scandals, of course. Misuses of power. But they’d been swiftly dealt with in the past by the senior officers, including Brébeuf.
But this was different. So huge as to be almost invisible, the scale impossible to comprehend.
At first Gamache gave little credence to the rumors. They’d come through back channels. People who had reason to smear the Sûreté.
But something stuck, and he started to quietly investigate.
It started in the northern territories. Among the Cree and the Inuit. Remote areas that were almost impossible to penetrate. And for good reason, Gamache knew.
Try as he might, he couldn’t get purchase on the rumors.
Until one day he’d met a Cree elder on a bench outside the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. Her community had spent months raising enough money to send her down south, to speak to the leaders. To tell them about the beatings and murders. The missing. So desperate was their need, they’d finally risked trusting the white authorities.
But no one would listen. No one would even let her past the front door.
And so she’d sat down. Exhausted, hungry, out of money and hope.
Until she was joined on the bench by the large man with the kind eyes. Who asked if she needed help.
She told him everything. Everything. Not knowing who he was, but having no choice. He was the last house, the last ear, the final hope.
He’d listened. And he’d believed her.
And so began a battle that lasted years and that landed at the door of the very person Gamache trusted the most.
Michel Brébeuf.
The rot went even deeper than that and ended in catastrophe. But not the great scale of disaster it would have been had Armand Gamache not stopped it.
Brébeuf had been banished and Gamache had resigned, losing his job and almost losing his life.
And it wasn’t over yet, Gélinas knew.
The Sûreté had been cleaned out, but there remained the academy. The training ground for cruelty and corruption.
The corrosion within the Sûreté and subsequent events were well known to the general public. The media had covered it to the point of their own brutality.
What interested Gélinas now was what was unknown. The men’s personal lives.
He’d dug and he’d dug that afternoon. Until he struck dirt.
For all his professional venality, Michel Brébeuf’s personal life appeared conventional. He’d married. Had three children. Joined service clubs.
Brébeuf was a model husband and father and grandfather. But his home life had shattered when the degree of his professional deceit became known. His wife had left him, and there was a rift with his children that had yet to be healed.
But the dirt the RCMP officer sought and found came from a different source.
Not Brébeuf. But Gamache.
Gélinas had found it when he’d dug deep enough into Armand Gamache’s personal life and found a few lines in a long-dormant document. The words had uncurled and re-formed. And walked off the page. Into the present.
Into the waiting hands of the man charged with ensuring a fair investigation.
“A shrewdness of apes,” Myrna read from the reference book, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, before looking up to see Armand and the others arrive.
Reine-Marie got up to greet her husband.
“We’re playing a game,” she explained. “Naming groups of animals.”
“We started off trying to come up with a collective name for a group of Sûreté cadets,” said Myrna, gesturing toward the students.
“I’m thinking it’s a gloom of cadets,” said Ruth.
Paul Gélinas rubbed his forehead and grinned. It was his first time in the bistro and he seemed a little stunned as he took in the beams and stone hearths and wide plank floors. And the old woman with the duck.
Then his eyes fell on the cadets.
Amelia Choquet was unmissable, unmistakable.
And while Gélinas stared at her, she was also staring. Past him. Her mouth open wide enough for him to see the stud through her tongue.
He turned to see who had so enthralled the Goth Girl.
It was Isabelle Lacoste. Amelia Choquet’s polar opposite.
“But then it evolved into animal groups,” Myrna was saying.
“A sleuth of bears,” said Gélinas, returning to the conversation. “That sort of thing?”
“Exactly,” said Clara. “Good for you. You’re on my team.”
“There’re teams?” asked Gabri, leaning away from Ruth.
“Who are you?” Ruth squinted at Gélinas.
Gamache introduced Deputy Commissioner Gélinas, of the RCMP.
“Bonjour,” he said, offering his hand to Ruth.
She gave him the finger, turning it sideways. “And one for the horse you rode in on, Renfrew.”
“Don’t get too close,” Gabri whispered to him. “If she bites you, you’ll go mad.”
Gélinas withdrew his hand.
“The only one I know is a murder of crows,” said Lacoste.
“You made that up,” said Beauvoir. “Why would crows be called that?”
“Funny you should ask,” said Myrna.
She flipped through the reference book and read out loud, “A murder of crows is believed to come from a folk tale, where crows will gather to decide the capital fate of another crow.”
“C’est ridicule,” said Beauvoir.
But his eyes slid across the crowded bistro to the gathering of cadets.
“A crowd of faults,” Ruth said with certainty. “That’s what they are.”
Gamache made a guttural sound, somewhere between amusement and astonishment.
CHAPTER 31
“Bonjour,” said Lacoste, when she arrived at the cadets’ table.
All four stood up. She introduced herself to those who hadn’t yet met her.
“I’m Chief Inspector Lacoste. I’m leading the investigation into the murder of Serge Leduc.”
For Amelia, it was like watching a play. A replay.
There was the head of homicide, petite, contained, in slacks and sweater and silk scarf, with three large men standing respectfully behind her.
“This is Deputy Commissioner Gélinas, of the RCMP,” said Lacoste, and Gélinas nodded to the cadets. “And you know Commander Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir.”
Four senior officers. Four cadets. Like before-and-after shots.
Olivier had dragged another table over, and they sat, the investigators fanned at one end and the cadets at the other. Regarding each other.
“What did you find out about the map?” Commander Gamache asked.
“Nothing,” said Jacques.
“That’s not true,” said Nathaniel. “We found out a lot.”
“Just none of it very useful.” This time no one contradicted him.
They described what they’d found out about the mapmaker, Antony Turcotte. As they spoke, they looked down at a copy of the map he’d made, sitting not far from the wall where it had been hidden for almost a hundred years.