He’d been reading about Lord of the Flies, yes. But that had been earlier. The search he’d hidden from Gamache was for the words the chief had written on the napkin that had fluttered to the floor.
Burn our ships.
Beauvoir now knew what that referred to. But not why the words, the phrase, had so struck Chief Superintendent Gamache that he’d had to write them down. And keep them.
It must’ve been just this past lunch hour. Who did the chief have lunch with?
Toussaint. Madeleine Toussaint. The new head of Serious Crimes.
Burn our ships.
Armand Gamache walked through the late afternoon darkness. The lights from the cottages were made soft by the mist that still hung over the village. Three Pines felt slightly out of focus. Not quite of this world.
He could hear tapping, as water rolled off leaves and hit branches further down. It sounded like rain, but wasn’t. It was a faux rain. Not quite real. Like so much else in this village. Like so much else in this murder. One foot in the here and now, and the other in some other world. Of a Conscience that walked. And killed.
The air smelled earthy and the cold and damp seeped through his canvas coat.
Lights were on in the church and he could see the stained-glass window, illuminated, and the village boys, the doughboys, captured there. Forever moving forward into some battle long ago won. Or lost. Moving so far forward they could never come back.
As Gamache moved forward.
Once in St. Thomas’s, he took the stairs to the basement.
A conference table had been set up at one end of the room, with desks filling in the middle. Technicians were working to install phone lines and computers and other equipment.
Chief Inspector Lacoste and an agent were at the conference table conducting an interview. Gamache caught her eye and she nodded imperceptibly.
“Who’s there?” asked Ruth, turning stiffly in her seat.
The old poet seemed to miss the obvious but catch the imperceptible.
“Oh, it’s only you.”
The agent taking notes stood, and the Sûreté technicians stopped what they were doing to stare, wide-eyed, at the new Chief Superintendent.
“Patron,” a few of the older ones said, nodding to the man.
The younger ones, including the agent who’d escorted Ruth up to the Incident Room, just stared.
The veteran agents knew Gamache from when he’d been head of homicide. From when he’d cleaned out the corruption, at enormous personal cost.
And now he was back, running the whole thing.
There’d been a huge sense of relief when he’d stepped up to take the job.
He could be seen walking down the corridors in Sûreté headquarters, often with people around him, briefing him on the fly between meetings.
There was a sense of urgency, of purpose, that had been missing in those corridors for many years.
But sometimes Chief Superintendent Gamache could be seen in the hallways, or an elevator, or the cafeteria, alone. Deep in some dossier. Like a college professor reading an obscure and fascinating text.
It was an oddly comforting sight, for men and women who’d been immersed in brutality. Who’d worn their guns more proudly than their badges.
Here was a man with a book, not a weapon, and no need to prove his bravery. Or descend into savagery.
It became okay to stop the swaggering, to cease the bullying that was excused as an appropriate way to treat the populace.
They could be human again.
This chief didn’t hide away, plotting and dividing. Chief Superintendent Gamache was in full view, though no one expected to view him in the church basement in this obscure village.
Their GPS had warned them they were literally in the middle of nowhere and the woman’s voice had advised them, in tones their mothers once used, to recalculate.
Gamache nodded to the agents and subtly gestured to them to continue what they were doing. He’d had no intention to disrupt, but he was learning that whenever the boss appeared, disruption was inevitable.
“S’il vous plaît.” Isabelle Lacoste gestured to an empty chair, a hint of desperation in her voice. “Join us. You’re just in time.”
“Hello, Clouseau,” said Ruth, loudly enough for all the agents in the room to hear. “I was telling her that I didn’t kill that woman.” Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward the Sûreté officers. She spoke out of one side of her mouth like a gangster. “But I can’t vouch for the duck.”
She leaned back in her chair and gave them a meaningful look. Rosa glanced from one to the other with her beady little eyes.
They knew that, if need be, Rosa would take the fall for Ruth. Though surely Ruth didn’t have that much further to fall.
“You were here this morning, I understand,” said Lacoste. Ruth nodded. “Did you come down here?”
“No.”
“Did you notice anything different about the church?” asked Lacoste.
Ruth thought. Then slowly shook her head. “No. Everything seemed normal. The church was unlocked, like it always is. I turned on the lights, then I sat in the pew by the boys.”
They all knew which bright, brittle boys she meant.
“No strange noises?” asked Lacoste, and braced for the caustic, sarcastic reply.
Like a murder happening downstairs?
But none came. The elderly woman just thought some more, and shook her head again.
“It was quiet. As always.”
She brought her elbows to the table and her hands to her face, and held Isabelle Lacoste’s steady eyes.
“She was down here then, wasn’t she? Already dead.”
Lacoste nodded. “We think so. Did you know about the root cellar?”
“Of course. I’m one of the church wardens. It was once used by rum runners, you know. During Prohibition. To get booze across the border.”
Gamache didn’t know that about the church, but it did explain why Ruth considered it an exceptionally sacred place.
Ruth looked over at the small room with the dirt floor and the crime scene tape. “It’s a terrible thing, to take another life. And somehow, it seems even worse to do it in a church. I wonder why that is?”
Her wizened face was open, genuinely seeking an answer.
“Because we feel safe here,” said Lacoste. “We feel God, or decency, will protect us.”
“I think you’re right,” said Ruth. “And maybe He did.”
“He didn’t protect Katie Evans,” said Lacoste.
“No, but maybe He protected us from her.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Look, I didn’t know her, but that conscience thing was here for a reason.”
“You mean the cobrador?” asked Lacoste. “You think the reason was Madame Evans?”
“I do. And so do you.”
Her gaze shifted to Gamache. The Chief Superintendent simply held those sharp eyes, without nodding. Imperceptibly or otherwise.
“You think the fellow in the costume killed her because of something she did?” asked Lacoste.
“It’d be ridiculous not to think that. He’s gone and she’s dead. Which would mean she did something so horrific she had to pay for it with her life. And he was here to collect. Now, whether she really had done something that bad or he was just crazy is another matter. I have to think someone who puts on a costume like that might not be all there.”
With great effort, Lacoste stopped herself from pointing out that Ruth might not be the best judge of “there.”
“If Madame Evans was the target all along, why not just kill her?” Lacoste asked. “Why the costume?”
“Have you never watched a horror film?” asked Ruth. “Halloween, for instance?”