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.
“And for your information,” she told Gabri when he’d shown up with gardening gloves and a trowel, “I like weed.”
“Weeds, you mean,” he said.
“Maybe,” said the old poet.
He looked more closely at her garden and the healthy growth.
Armand was consulted and assured Gabri it was not marijuana. “Though that doesn’t mean she doesn’t smoke it.”
Now he stood on the same spot and looked at the same little cottage.
In winter it was transformed. Covered in snow, with icicles dangling like crystals from the eaves, it looked like a gingerbread house. Made by happy children.
It went from the least attractive to the most attractive home in the village.
Such, Armand thought as he shoveled his way up the path, was the power of perception.
When he’d finished, and plunged the shovel deep into a drift, the front door opened a crack. “What do you want?”
“I need to speak with you, Ruth, about last night.”
There was a hesitation. Then the door was opened wide, and he stepped quickly inside.
A fire was lit in the living room, fortunately in the fireplace. Almost everywhere he looked were books. It was the literary equivalent of a blizzard. They were stacked up against the walls, as though blown there. In some places they were four, five feet deep.
Books served as side tables next to the worn sofa, and stacks of books held up a plywood plank, creating a coffee table. Though in Ruth’s home it was a scotch table.
Many of the volumes, Armand suspected, had been “borrowed” from Myrna’s bookstore.
Ruth shoved a few off the sofa and pointed.
He was hot from his exertions and took off his parka and boots. Then he sat, slowly, carefully. Executing a controlled deep knee-bend, until he felt the cushion sag beneath him. He’d made the mistake, only once, of letting himself collapse into the sofa as he did at home. But this sofa had almost no springs, so he had hit the wood floor with a bruising bang and felt one lone spring where no spring should be. He’d leaped up. And never made that mistake again.
Rosa was nestled into a small dog bed by the fireplace, muttering in her sleep. It sounded, to Armand, like “Merde, merde, merde”—breath—“merde, merde, merde.”
He wondered how long it would be before little Honoré or even Idola …
“So, speak,” said Ruth.
“I meant you speak, I listen. How well do you know Abigail Robinson?”
The question surprised Ruth, and that wasn’t easy to do.
“I see you’ve decided to start with a stupid question. Perhaps to set the bar low. What in the world makes you think I know her? I’ve never met her. We didn’t talk last night. Or ever. Have you been harvesting my weeds?”
“And Debbie Schneider?” he asked.
“The woman who was killed.” Ruth paused. She never took death, especially violent death, lightly. Perhaps she found it sobering, he thought, being one insult away from it herself.
Her rheumy eyes caught the reflection of the fire, and he saw, as he always did, intelligence burning bright.
“No. I didn’t speak with her either. I spent most of the night talking with Stephen.”
“Did you see anything that, given what happened, makes you wonder?”
Armand knew that while she claimed to be oblivious to others, it was an act. Ruth Zardo was keenly aware of others. Their presence and their feelings.
Whether she cared how people felt was another matter. But little escaped her. And most was rendered into poetry.
Yes, he thought, as he watched her think, it took a special gift to write about the personal, and yet touch a near universal experience. He knew that his own parents, long dead and buried in another town, informed a lot of who he was and what he did.
He thought that was probably true of most people.
“I noticed the tension between that Robinson woman and the Asshole Saint,” said Ruth. “What were they talking about?”
“It was an exchange of insults.”
“Damn. And I missed it. Were they good?”
“Well, she likened him to Ewen Cameron.”
Ruth’s face hardened. “How did Dr. Gilbert take that?”
“He shrugged it off. Said it was a predictable insult. Anyone who wants to try to undermine a McGill medical grad throws Cameron at them. What is it?”
“Nothing. I knew a local woman, a few years older than me, who was apparently one of his subjects. Just rumor.” She paused. “He was a monster, of course.”
“Yes.”
Armand felt inside his pocket and, bringing out what looked like a campaign button, he placed it on Ruth’s scotch table.
“What’s that?” she demanded, staring at it.
“It’s being sold at Professor Robinson’s events, to raise money for her campaign.”
Before the shots had been fired and the gym had descended into near pandemonium, he’d considered buying one of the buttons from the concession, to show to Ruth. But he couldn’t bring himself to give any money, however small, to that cause.
He’d found two of them on the floor among the other articles dropped in the rush to get out. They’d been gone over for prints and DNA. And then he’d taken them.
He watched as she picked it up. Looked at it. Then at him.
“This’s mine,” she said. He knew what she meant. Not her button, but what was written on it.
Or will it be, as always was, too late?
The angry chant of “Too late! Too late!” by Robinson’s supporters momentarily filled the comfortable little sitting room.
It was from a poem, ironically, about forgiveness.
“I don’t understand,” said Ruth, holding up the button. “Why’s my poem on this?”
“Professor Robinson didn’t ask permission to use it?”
“No, of course not. I’d never…” Her voice trailed off.
“What is it?”
She’d turned to stare into the fire, her thin, blue-veined hand at her face. Then she got up and returned a minute later with her computer, opening it on her lap.
“Oh, shit.”
“What?” He went over and bent beside her chair. The email was from a D. Schneider and dated a month earlier.
It asked permission to use that one line in a campaign to help raise money for the university’s research into improving health care.
There was a return arrow.
“You replied?”
“I must have.” She went to her sent file. Sure enough, there was her reply.
No fucking way. Sincerely, Ruth Zardo.
“Well, that seems clear.” Armand straightened up. “But they did anyway.”
That might explain, he thought, why both Robinson and Madame Schneider had, despite what Robinson claimed, avoided Ruth all night. It must’ve been pretty uncomfortable when they saw her at the party.
“Professor Robinson says they came from BC specifically to see you. That they’d arranged to meet you at the party.”
“Bullshit.”
“Are you sure?”
“You think I don’t recognize bullshit?”
“I think you get a lot of requests, and it’s possible in a moment of—”
“—madness?”
“—you agreed.”
“To meet someone I’d already said no to? Why would I do that?”
“You might not have realized who they were.”
She sat back and glared at him. “When was the last time I agreed to meet anyone? Especially to talk about my poetry?”
It was a good point.
Ruth hated discussing her work, preferring that it speak for itself. She was also secretly afraid that she could never really explain what she wrote, and why, and would come across as inarticulate and in need of repair.