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.
Otto Pascal sat behind his large desk while Colette Roberge, the Chancellor, was in a high-back chair that looked uncomfortable. The President had not invited Gamache to sit.
“Oui. How could this happen?” the Chancellor asked.
Gamache turned to stare at her.
“Let me explain,” said Éric Viau, the building superintendent, as he stood in the old gym with Inspectors Beauvoir and Lacoste. “All the doors are kept locked and are attached to alarms that sound in my home”—he waved toward the road and the small house by the entrance to the University—“and at campus security. They also give off a god-awful siren.”
“The alarms didn’t go off in the last week?” asked Isabelle Lacoste.
“No. Nothing.”
“And there were no other events here over Christmas?” Beauvoir asked, looking around at the hats and mitts, the bags and boots that lay where they’d fallen.
They were standing where the firecrackers had gone off. The floor there was charred.
“Nothing. It’s not exactly anyone’s first choice for a venue. We only use this place if all the other venues are booked. But not recently, non. Not over the holidays.”
“So why was it booked for the event yesterday?” asked Lacoste. “And at short notice? Was every other place already taken?”
Monsieur Viau looked at her in surprise. “You’re asking me? I just try to keep the old place standing. I have no idea why someone would choose it.”
“Wait a minute, Armand,” said the Chancellor, getting up from her chair by the President’s desk. “Are you saying this all might’ve been planned and carried out by Professor Robinson herself? For publicity?”
“What I’m saying is that it’s a possibility, one of many we’re looking into.” He’d gone through the various theories they were pursuing. It interested him that the Chancellor had landed on that one.
President Pascal had also gotten to his feet. He came around his desk and stood beside and slightly in front of the Chancellor as they confronted the Chief Inspector.
Otto Pascal was looking more and more agitated. This was far beyond his understanding, which stopped sometime around 600 BC and the Sack of Thebes.
The twenty-first century was a cipher to the Egyptologist. He studied the Sûreté officer’s face, as though hoping he’d found the Rosetta Stone.
“You’ve arrested the man who took the shots. So why keep digging?”
“Why do you?” asked Gamache. “In case there’s something you missed. In case there’s something else to be found. Like you, we need to be thorough.”
Dr. Pascal was pale and looked like he wanted to sit back down. He also looked like he’d spent most of his life sitting down. Which he had.
As an authority on hieroglyphic literature, when he hadn’t been sitting for the last forty years, he’d been bending over. Some would say backward. Trying to first see, then convince the rest of the world, that such a thing as hieroglyphic literature existed.
Which is to say Dr. Pascal, now President Pascal, believed that some of what had been presumed to be nonfiction accounts of ancient Egyptian lives and events, etched carefully into stone, were actually the ancient equivalent of novels. Mostly thrillers.
Which is to say he’d spent his career, pinned his career, on the ability to turn truth into fiction. Which he seemed desperate to do in this meeting.
“Well, I,” stammered Roslyn. “Yes, I suppose that’s … I also design children’s—”
“Clothes for children?” asked Haniya. “Presumably children of the privileged. And what do they cost?”
Roslyn mumbled.
“Sorry, what?” said Haniya.
“Well…” Roslyn looked to Clara for help, but her friend and host had been through the wringer herself, several times that morning, and was already deflated.
She’d gotten out of bed partly reluctantly, partly excitedly.
Haniya Daoud, the toast of the Free World, was asleep in the next room.
Except she was not. Clara found her in her studio, going through the oil paintings propped against the wall.
“They’re from an earlier show,” Clara said from the doorway. “I haven’t gotten around to hanging them.”
Haniya, now in a splendid deep green silk caftan, turned to Clara and said, “I can see why not.”
It was then, as her scalp went cold but her cheeks burned, that Clara had composed the text to Myrna, Reine-Marie, Annie, and Roslyn. The SOS. To save her soul from the Asshole Saint.
Now she dropped her eyes to the phone in her lap and sent off a quick message to Myrna.
Where are you?
Sorry. Can’t come.
Can’t or won’t?
Yes.
Bitch, Clara typed and got a smiley face back.
“That’s a beautiful sari you’re wearing,” Annie said.
Roslyn turned a grateful face to her sister-in-law, who’d just distracted the ogre. But Clara suspected there was more to it than that.
It was a subtle rapier thrust, pointing out to Haniya the hypocrisy of criticizing Roslyn while enjoying the fruits of similar labor.
That sari must’ve cost a pretty penny, was probably a gift from a wealthy benefactor, and might even have been made by child laborers in some hellhole sweatshop in India.
“It’s called an abaya,” said Haniya. “It comes from a network of women’s co-ops I formed in Nigeria. It’s funded by a banking system I set up which is also run by…”
Clara thought she might throw up, and Annie looked light-headed.
Roslyn, on the other hand, was leaning forward, taking in every word.
“Did you see anyone hanging around the building in the last week or so?” asked Isabelle.
“I thought you caught the gunman,” said Monsieur Viau.
“We have,” said Jean-Guy. “We just need to make sure no one else was involved.”
As he said that he watched Monsieur Viau for any reaction. A slight change in skin tone, in breathing. A sprint for the door.
But the caretaker was just listening.
“Did anyone set up an appointment to see the place in the last couple of weeks?” Beauvoir asked. “Were there any workers? Repairs?”
“Not a worker, but some fellow came by. Wanted to hold a fundraising dance and had heard this place was cheap.”
“Did you ever leave him alone?” Lacoste asked.
“No.”
“Did you take him anywhere else in the building?”
“No. Just here.”
“Could he have hidden anything without you seeing?” asked Beauvoir.
Monsieur Viau considered, then shook his head. “No. I was with him the whole time. I’d have noticed that.”
“Is this the man?”
Isabelle showed him their photo of Édouard Tardif.
As Monsieur Viau studied it, the blood drained from his face. “Oui.” He looked up at them. “I let the gunman in?”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Isabelle. “Did he rent the place?”
“You’ll have to ask someone in Administration about that.”
“The Chief’s over there now,” said Beauvoir, taking out his phone. “Meeting with the President and Chancellor.”
“Lucky man,” said Viau.
“I’ll see if he can get the information.” As he sent off the text, Lacoste turned back to the caretaker.
“Just to be clear, this man you met here was alone?”
“Oui.”
“You’re sure?”
Now Viau hesitated. “Well, I didn’t see anyone else, but I suppose someone could have been with him. Waiting outside.”
“You unlocked the door when this man arrived,” said Isabelle. “Could someone else have come in after him, without you seeing?”