A Great Reckoning (46 page)

“That's something quite atrocious,” said Clara. “Okay, Armand. Turn it on.”

“Count me out,” said Olivier, getting up. “That nanny gives me the creeps.”

As the establishing shot of 1910 London appeared, Olivier disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, Armand arrived to make more coffee. He found Olivier in one of the armchairs by the fireplace. The small television was on and he wore headphones.

“What're you watching?”

Olivier almost leapt out of his skin.

He shoved the headphones off his ears. “Jeez, Armand. You almost killed me.”

“Sorry. What's on?”

He stood behind Olivier's chair and watched a very young Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in a bar.

“The Deer Hunter.”

“You're kidding,” said Armand. “
Mary Poppins
scares you, but
The Deer Hunter
is okay?”

Olivier smiled. “Talking about Clairton reminded me how great this movie is.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think it's the bond—”

“No, I mean, why Clairton?”

“It's the town the main characters come from. There, that's it.”

He waved at the screen as a shot of a steel town in Pennsylvania came on.

“I'll leave you to it.”

Olivier watched Armand walk back into the living room and the world of Mary Poppins, where the father was singing “The Life I Lead.”

On his screen, Robert De Niro was threatening a barroom brawl with a Green Beret.

*   *   *

Jean-Guy's wipers were taking the sleet off the windshield as fast as they could.

He liked driving. It was a chance to listen to music and think. And at the moment he was thinking about those fingerprints, and the blatant contradiction in what his father-in-law had said.

The prints were his. But he had never touched the gun.

The key to the crime was in the prints.

Did he mean Amelia Choquet?

Despite Annie's protests, and his own gut feeling, Jean-Guy retained a fragment of doubt. Could the Goth Girl be Gamache's daughter? She didn't look at all like either Annie or her brother, Daniel. But maybe she did, and he was simply distracted by all the accoutrements. The tattoos and piercings disguising who and what she really was.

Could Amelia, who perhaps not coincidently shared a name with Gamache's mother, be the result of a momentary lapse twenty years earlier?

But if he knew who she was, why did Gamache admit her to the academy?

Maybe he didn't know Amelia existed until he saw the application, saw the birth mother, saw the birth date. Saw the name. And put it all together.

And then he'd want to see the girl.

And after the crime, he'd want to protect her. The daughter he never knew he had.

Did Gamache think she killed Serge Leduc? And was he shielding her, intentionally muddying the investigation by admitting the prints were his, when they weren't?

Misdirection. Another whale.

All truth with malice in it
.

The wipers swished the slush, clearing the windshield. And despite the mess, Jean-Guy felt he was seeing clearer. Getting closer.

Suppose he took a different tack? Suppose Gamache was telling the truth. The prints were his, even though he'd never touched the gun.

How could that be?

Swish, swish, swish.

Jean-Guy was almost there, he could feel the answer just ahead, in the darkness.

Swish, swish
— He slowed the car and pulled off into a service station. And there he sat in the idling vehicle, the sleet slapping the roof and steamy windows.

If Monsieur Gamache hadn't touched the revolver, but the prints were his, then someone must've placed them there. Someone with such skill and expertise that even the Sûreté's own lab didn't detect the fake.

While the Sûreté Academy was stuffed with professors, top in their field, and soon-to-be agents and visiting experts, few people had the ability to do that.

It demanded not just skill, but someone especially gifted in forensics and manipulation. This was a plan that didn't just happen. It must've been months in the making.

It needed patience, and timing, and nerve. To plant evidence like that needed a great tactician. And the academy had one of those. Someone recruited by Gamache himself.

Hugo Charpentier.

Swish, swish, swish.

*   *   *

Armand placed his hand over Reine-Marie's, which was gripping the shoe box even as she watched the movie.

Just as Mary Poppins slid up the banister, to the astonishment of the Banks children, Armand leaned over and whispered, “I'll do this.”

“I should.”

“No, I should.”

Her grip loosened and her hands slid off the old cardboard box.

Armand took it and stepped between the cadets sprawled on the floor, their eyes glued to the screen. Walking into the kitchen, he poured himself another coffee and sat at the harvest table.

At the far end of the room, Olivier had his feet up watching his movie.

Taking a deep breath, Armand looked down at the box filled with telegrams and remembered the number of times he'd been the one to deliver the news.

To see the door open and the expectant, then perplexed, then frightened faces of parents, or spouses, or siblings, or children.

And then to tell them what had happened.

He remembered each and every time over the past thirty years. He closed his eyes and could see all those faces, those eyes, pleading with him. To tell them it wasn't true. And he could feel their hands gripping his arm, as they fell. Mothers, fathers, husbands and wives crumpled to the floor. While he held them, and gently lowered them. To the ground.

And stayed with them until they could get up again. A strange resurrection. Changed forever.

To the accompaniment of Mary Poppins singing about a spoonful of sugar and medicine, he opened the box. And started reading the telegrams. Looking for one name. Turcotte.

He thought he could just hurry through, scanning for the name. But he could not. He found himself reading each and every one. There was a devastating sameness about them. The commanding officers clearly overwhelmed by the number that had to be written. After a while, the telegrams were written in a sort of shorthand, a scrawl, that made sense a hundred years later when the place names were familiar, but that must have, at the moment of delivery, been meaningless. Their child gone, forever. In some unintelligible foreign field.

The worst, perhaps, were the number of missing, presumed dead. The ones lost and never, ever found.

There were plenty of those. Lots of those.

But none of them bore the name Turcotte.

Had he survived?

In his gut Gamache knew the young soldier in the window, with the map, had not come home.

He replaced the lid and sat there, his hand resting on top of the box. He looked over at Olivier and the mute television.

In the background, the Banks children were being warned by Bert, the chimney sweep, that what Uncle Albert suffered from was serious and contagious.

Uncle Albert was giggling, then, unable to contain it any longer, he burst out laughing.

“
I love to laugh
,” Uncle Albert sang, long and loud and clear.

While on Olivier's screen, Robert De Niro, filthy and emaciated, spun the barrel of the revolver, then held the gun to his head. His eyes crazed, his mouth open in what must have been a scream, but all Armand heard was Uncle Albert's laughter, bubbling in from the other room.

De Niro pulled the trigger.

Armand fell back in his chair, his eyes wide, his mouth open, his breathing shallow.

Staring at the gun in Robert De Niro's hand.

A revolver. A revolver.

Gripping the chair for support, Armand slowly rose. And looked from Olivier's movie through the door and into the living room. At Jacques, and Huifen, and Nathaniel. And Amelia. Laughing along with Uncle Albert.

And he knew.

 

CHAPTER 38

When the movies ended, their guests left. Gélinas stayed up for a final drink by the fireplace, then went to bed while Reine-Marie and Armand cleaned up.

“It was pretty bad?” she asked. Thinking his pallor must have come from the shoe box, still sitting on the kitchen table. She was wrong.

“Young lives wasted,” he said.
“The Hell where youth and laughter go.”

“Armand?” she asked, having rarely seen him so upset.

“
Désolé
. I was just thinking about what they were made to do.”

She thought he was talking about the boys in the box. She was wrong.

“Did you find the young Turcottes?” she asked.

He took a deep breath and brought himself out of it. “
Non
. Those telegrams might've been lost. It's surprising so many were kept.”

He looked at her and forced a smile. “Did you enjoy the movie?”

“I must've seen it a hundred times, and I still love it.”

She hummed “Let's Go Fly a Kite” while handing him warm, wet dishes.

“Coming?” she asked, when the kitchen was clean and in order.

“No, I think I'll stay up for a bit.”

She kissed him. “You okay?” When he nodded, she said, “Don't be late.”

Reine-Marie climbed the stairs to bed while he sat by the fireplace in the living room, Henri's head on his lap.

Their home creaked and then was quiet again, except for the sleet scratching the windows. He just needed a few quiet minutes to himself. To think.

Then Armand got up and began turning off lights. As he approached the front door to lock up, the handle began to turn. It was midnight. Everyone had gone home. Everyone else was in bed.

Gamache gestured Henri to his side, then the two moved swiftly to stand behind the slowly opening door. Henri's ears were pointed forward, his hackles up, a snarl coming from him.

But he stood slightly behind Gamache. In case.

Armand motioned with his hand, and Henri's growling stopped. But he remained alert. Ready to run away at any moment.

Gamache watched the door push open. And his racing mind remembered the car at the top of the hill, looking down into the village. And then withdrawing. Backing up. Waiting, perhaps, for a better time.

And this, he thought, was it.

The intruder was almost certainly armed, and Gamache was not. But he had the great advantage of surprise. And surprised he was, when he saw who appeared.

“What're you doing here?”

“Holy shit, Armand, you scared me to death.”

Henri gave a little yelp of pleasure, and relief. His tail wagging furiously, he looked from Jean-Guy Beauvoir to the bowl of treats by the door, then back again. A dog with an agenda. A big one, with only one entry.

As Jean-Guy gave Henri a biscuit, Armand hung up his coat and reflected that it was the first time, ever, that Jean-Guy had called him Armand. He'd asked his son-in-law many times, since the marriage, to do that in private, but the younger man had never quite managed it. Settling on
patron
as a compromise.

But the shock had jarred loose an “Armand.
”

“Why are you here? Annie's all right, isn't she?”

“If she wasn't, I'd call,” Jean-Guy pointed out. “Not drive all this way through a fucking awful night. Pardon my English.”

He took off his boots and put on the slippers he kept by the door.

“Then what is it? Not that I'm unhappy to see you.”

“Annie told me to come.”

“Why?”

“Because I told her about Gélinas's suspicions and she's worried.”

Armand was on the verge of asking why Beauvoir would do such a thing when he remembered that he told Reine-Marie everything. Or nearly everything.

And now Jean-Guy had found a confidante in his own wife. Gamache could hardly protest, though he wanted to.

Looking at the familiar face, at a man he trusted with his life, Armand felt a surge of relief, and was grateful to Annie for sending him down.

“Where's Gélinas now?” asked Beauvoir.

“In bed, asleep. Come with me,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” said Jean-Guy.

In the kitchen, Beauvoir went over to the cage in the corner. “How's Gracie settling in?”

He bent down, then straightened up and stepped back on seeing what was sleeping in there.

“Are dragons a real thing?” he asked.

“Puppy,” said Gamache with conviction, putting a heaping helping of shepherd's pie in the microwave.

“Monkey?” asked Jean-Guy.

Armand refused to reply. The microwave beeped, the dinner was put out, a Coke was poured, and the two men sat at the pine table.

Jean-Guy took a long sip of his drink and a huge forkful of shepherd's pie, and looked at his father-in-law.

“Something's happened,
patron
. What is it?”

“I think I've found the motive for the murder, Jean-Guy.”

Beauvoir lowered his fork.

“What is it?”

“First I need you to call the woman at McDermot and Ryan, and ask her about her name.”

“Coldbrook?”

“Clairton. Find out why she really used that name in her correspondence with you. Why it was in a slightly different font. Push her, Jean-Guy. And if she won't tell you, say,
Deer Hunter.
”

“Come on. You have to give me more.”

“I can't. She has to come up with it on her own. I don't want you to lead her more than that. And even that you need to keep in your pocket unless it's absolutely necessary.”

“
D'accord
.” Beauvoir looked at his watch. “Five in the morning in the UK. Too early to call.”

He looked at his father-in-law. At the drawn expression.

“But I'll call and leave a message asking her to get back to me as soon as she gets in.”