The Madness of Crowds
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #17
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781250145284
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Madness of Crowds». Краткое содержание книги:
You're a coward.
Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache.
It starts innocently enough.
While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request.
He's asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting professor of statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.
While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is, until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.
They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson's views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion, are so confused it's near impossible to tell them apart.
Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold.
Abigail Robinson promises that if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.
When a murder is committed, it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion.
And the madness of crowds.
It was the second time in as many days he’d been accused of cowardice. All to do with Abigail Robinson.
As he and Jean-Guy walked home, Armand thought of the scars on Haniya’s young face and wondered what she’d been like as a child. Before. What she would have been like had she been born and raised here.
If her cheeks had been brushed by winter winds and not sliced by machete blades. He wondered what he, what Reine-Marie, what Annie and Daniel would have been like had they been born and raised in her village.
Armand paused at the path to their home and looked up. Into the clear night sky and the stars above. Jean-Guy stopped and also looked up.
While angered by what that woman had said, Jean-Guy mostly felt relief. The weight he’d carried for so long had been at least partially lifted.
It helped that he remembered there were butter tarts in the cookie tin in the kitchen.
Armand spoke, his words directed at the Big Dipper, the huge vessel in the sky.
Jean-Guy lowered his gaze. “Pardon?”
“I said, Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / the hell where youth and laughter go.”
“Nice.” Don’t tell me it’s a poem, thought Jean-Guy.
“It’s a poem,” said Armand.
Please, don’t make it a long one.
Armand met his eyes and smiled. “She called us a ‘smug-faced crowd.’”
“Oui.” Butter tarts. Butter tarts. “So?”
“I wondered if she was referring to a line from that Sassoon poem, from the Great War.”
“Not everything comes from a poem. And how could she know it?”
“She knows far more than I think we realize, mon ami.”
Including the hell where youth and laughter go.
But then, he thought, so do I.
CHAPTER 10
“You’ll never believe it.”
Annie came bounding down the stairs the next morning. They could hear her heavy tread—thump, thump, thumpity thump—and looked toward the door as she practically danced into the kitchen.
Her face flushed, her eyes bright with excitement, she looked at them around the large pine table enjoying their breakfast of pancakes and bacon.
“Haniya Daoud is here.”
“What?” said Roslyn, looking up from trying to dab maple syrup off Florence’s sweater. “Here? In Three Pines? I thought she wasn’t coming until tomorrow.”
“Well, she’s here now. Jean-Guy and Dad met her last night in the bistro,” said Annie. “Didn’t Dad tell you, Mama?”
“No,” said Reine-Marie. “I was asleep by the time he came in and got up before he did. He’s showering now.”
It was just after seven on New Year’s Eve and still dark outside.
When Reine-Marie had dressed and gone downstairs, she found the lights on and Daniel already in the kitchen. He’d started the fire in the woodstove and put the coffee on.
She also found Honoré sprawled by the front door. He’d gotten himself into his snowsuit, and was struggling to put his boots on the wrong feet.
His trusty toboggan lay at his side, and Henri and Fred were circling and nudging him, anxious to go out. Little Gracie, the ratmunk, was still in Stephen’s room, both fast asleep.
Reine-Marie and Honoré had taken the dogs for a walk around the village green. Henri and Fred played in the snow while Honoré dragged his toboggan on a rope behind him and asked his grandmother questions.
What’s a year? Why do we need a new year? Is the old one broken?
How many pancakes can I have?
He showed her the Big Dipper, which was really just a random star still visible in the early-morning sky, and they went inside.
By the time they got to the kitchen, others were already up, coffee was poured, the maple-smoked bacon was sizzling in the huge cast-iron pan.
Reine-Marie cooked up the first batch of blueberry pancakes.
Armand had come down and gone, unnoticed, to his study. Standing at the window, he’d watched Reine-Marie and Honoré on their walk.
It was going to be a brilliant, bitterly cold day. A day where it felt like the air itself was crystalizing.
Then he sat at his laptop and read the messages that had come in overnight.
Sûreté patrols were out on snowmobiles, looking for Édouard Tardif’s brother. Without luck so far. It was a huge area, with many trails and cabins in the forests.
The videos sent in by spectators so far revealed nothing useful. No indication yet who might be an accomplice. Who might have set off the fireworks, if not Tardif himself.
And Tardif was refusing to talk. Gamache would go in and interrogate him later that day.
He heard Reine-Marie and Honoré return and his granddaughters race downstairs on their way to breakfast.
After reviewing all his messages and making notes on the day ahead, he joined the others in the kitchen.
When she’d woken up that morning, Annie had known, instinctively, that she was alone in the bed. Drowsily sneaking her hand over, to confirm, she felt the bedding cool. Not cold. He hadn’t been gone long.
Throwing on a dressing gown, she went to the room next door and found Jean-Guy at Idola’s crib, looking down at her.
“Where’s Honoré?” she asked, sleepily.
Jean-Guy nodded toward the window.
“On the roof?” she asked as she strolled over. “Brilliant.”
There was just enough light for Annie to make out the two figures.
She smiled as she watched little Honoré walking beside his grandmother. The two deep in conversation. And she remembered doing the same thing with her mother. Walking hand in hand through the park near their apartment in Montréal. Telling her mother how the world worked.
It wasn’t until she was in her twenties, and at the Université de Montréal law school, that she’d begun to listen.
“I know it’s your turn to get her up,” said Jean-Guy, “but do you mind if I do it this morning?”
“Are you kidding,” said Annie, turning back to him. “I’d pay you. But”—she looked at him more closely—“are you okay?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering if you’re getting a cold. Is your nose blocked?”
Since the pandemic, even though they’d all had the vaccine, even though there hadn’t been a new case in months, they still worried every time someone coughed.
“Why do you ask? Oh, God, don’t tell me. Is it that bad?” He bent over Idola and inhaled. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Not even bacon?”
“It smells like bacon?”
Now that would be a miracle, he thought before he realized what Annie was saying.
She was smiling at him. “If anyone could have a child whose merde smelled of smoked meat, it would be you, but no. It comes from downstairs. Normally when you smell bacon, it’s all I can do to get you decent before you head down.”
She watched as he finished what he was doing and picked their daughter up, protecting her floppy head as the doctors had shown them. It now came naturally.
Holding Idola secure in his arms, he looked at Annie, who was staring at him with those thoughtful eyes, so like her father’s.
“Everything okay?” she asked again.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
“About Idola?” asked Annie, her voice rising in timber.
“Non. Not really.” He sat on the side of Honoré’s bed.
Annie joined him. “What is it? Is it bad? Did something happen yesterday? You seemed so distracted.”
Jean-Guy brought Idola closer to him. Smelling her hair. Feeling her tiny fingers grasping his collar.
“Last night, in the bistro,” he said, not looking at her. “Your father and I talked.”