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.
“The library? When the fireworks started to go off.”
“You weren’t in the room for the countdown to midnight?” asked Beauvoir.
“So that people could hug me?” He grimaced. “No.”
Though Gamache had the fleeting thought that maybe the Asshole Saint had come in here so that he didn’t have to face no one hugging him.
“You were vague earlier this evening,” said Gamache, “when I asked how you’d read Professor Robinson’s study. Now I’ll ask you again. How did you come to read it?”
“God, it was months ago. I can’t remember. Once I’ve memorized the Cheerios box, I get desperate. The winters are long, and I don’t have many visitors.” He looked at Gamache. “But you’re one, Armand. You bring me books.”
Gamache nodded. Whenever he approached the log cabin, he was reminded of Thoreau, who’d said of his own cabin on Walden Pond, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
Vincent Gilbert had two chairs. He did not like society, and society did not like him.
“Someone sent you Professor Robinson’s research?” asked Beauvoir.
“Must have because I read it.”
“Who?”
“I can’t remember. I get all sorts of junk.”
“Was it Professor Robinson herself?”
“No.”
“Then who? You know we can find out,” said Beauvoir, though at the moment he couldn’t think how.
Not used to having his statements questioned, Vincent Gilbert bridled and dug his heels in, like an obstinate ass, thought Gamache. Then he remembered the poor donkey in the fable. Blameless, but blamed.
And he remembered something else.
“Chancellor Roberge told me she’d checked Professor Robinson’s findings herself, then sent them to someone she trusted, to get their opinion. Like a good scientist, she wanted corroboration. Were you that second opinion?”
Vincent Gilbert held Gamache in a stare that had had generations of interns quaking. But Gamache just stared back.
“Good guess.”
“Was it Colette Roberge?” Gamache pressed. He needed confirmation, not word games.
“Yes.”
“Why would she do that?” Beauvoir asked.
“I have no idea. You’ll have to ask Chancellor Roberge. My guess is she thought I’d be interested.”
“Why would she think that?”
“Because Robinson’s conclusions in her paper are inhumane and I’m a famous humanist.”
Oddly, that was true. Again, not unlike Haniya Daoud, here was a renowned humanist who did not actually like humans.
“How do you and Chancellor Roberge know each other?” Gamache asked.
“We sat on a board together a few years ago.”
“Which board?”
Gilbert crossed and uncrossed his legs and hiked himself further up on the sofa.
“I think it was some charity. I was on a lot of boards at one time. I am unstinting in my work for others.”
“Think again,” said Gamache. “Think harder.”
His hackles up, Dr. Gilbert nevertheless caved to the inevitable.
“LaPorte.”
“There,” said Gamache. “That wasn’t so hard.”
Though he could see that it was. And he knew why. As did Beauvoir.
Dr. Gilbert had all but admitted he had a motive for killing Professor Robinson.
Jean-Guy knew LaPorte well by now. It was a community formed to support and protect men and women, boys and girls, with Down syndrome. The very people Professor Robinson thought should not exist.
What Gamache mostly found interesting was that both Colette Roberge and Vincent Gilbert had tried to hide this fact.
“I know you know this.” Gilbert’s voice was quiet now. He’d turned away from Gamache and spoke only to Jean-Guy. “With screening, fewer and fewer children with Down syndrome are being born. I’m not going to judge that choice. I suspect it’s one I’d have made too, as a young parent. Fortunately, I wasn’t faced with it.”
Beauvoir, hearing the soothing voice, remembered being in this man’s cabin. In this man’s care. When he’d been hurt.
He’d felt, through the pain, this man’s hands on his open wound, and knew he was with not just a doctor, but a healer. Someone who actually cared if he lived or died.
“Ça va bien aller,” Gilbert had whispered, as the pain and fear threatened to overwhelm Jean-Guy. “It’ll be all right.”
And he’d believed him.
“I didn’t just sit on the board, I volunteered at LaPorte,” said Gilbert. “And I came to see that maybe, maybe, instead of them being flawed, we’re the ones with the defects. You know?”
He looked from Jean-Guy, to Armand, then back to Jean-Guy.
“They’re kind. Content. They don’t judge. They don’t hide their feelings. There’s no hidden agenda. Complete acceptance. If that isn’t grace, I don’t know what is. I’m not saying people with Down syndrome are perfect or always easy. That would be to trivialize them, make them sound like pets. What I am saying is that in my experience they make better humans than most.” He smiled again. “Than me. And I think that’s worth fighting for, don’t you?”
There was a long silence before Gamache said, softly, “Worth killing for?”
Now Vincent Gilbert turned to him. “Have you ever arrested a person with Down syndrome for murder?”
“Non.”
“You?” he asked Beauvoir.
“Non.”
“No. And there’s a reason for that. I aspire to be as decent, as optimistic, as forgiving.”
Armand took a deep breath. And kept going. “I believe you. But to aspire to and to achieve are two different things. A person with DS did not murder Debbie Schneider. But someone looking to protect them might have.”
“Me?”
“The Chancellor sent you Professor Robinson’s research in hopes of stopping her campaign,” said Gamache. “It focuses mainly on mandatory euthanasia for the terminally ill and elderly. But there are hints of something else.”
“Of eugenics, yes,” said Gilbert, his voice cold, abrupt. The clinical man was back. “Chancellor Roberge didn’t say why she was sending it to me. She just did.”
“And what did you do, after you’d read it?”
“I was appalled, but honestly, I didn’t think anyone would take it seriously.”
“Are you surprised the Premier has?” asked Gamache.
“Taken her report seriously? I didn’t know.”
And yet Gilbert didn’t look like a man surprised. Though her meeting with the leader of the province was not secret, neither was it public. But there was one person who knew.
Colette Roberge.
And there was one person who could have told Vincent Gilbert.
Colette Roberge.
The Chancellor was proving a puzzle.
She was the one who’d suggested the lecture. She’d invited Abigail into her home. She’d brought her to the New Year’s Eve party. And she was walking outside with the victim—
Gamache stopped himself there.
That didn’t make sense. Colette Roberge was also the one person who could not possibly have mistaken Madame Schneider for Professor Robinson.
“How well do you know the Chancellor?” Gamache asked Dr. Gilbert.
“Not well. We might’ve met twice a year, if that. We were both busy. She was the Chancellor of the University, and I had scarlet runner beans to plant.”
There was no mistaking the self-pity. Forgotten and embittered, Vincent Gilbert was a great man, fallen. The Cardinal Wolsey of the scientific world. Gamache could all but hear him lament, Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!
But Wolsey had gone quietly. Gamache doubted Vincent Gilbert would.
Was he willing to do one last magnificent thing, to remind everyone of all his greatness? But the motive might not be just the Idolas of this world.