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.
They didn’t hide in dark alcoves. The distinguished monsters sat among them. Secure in the knowledge that no one would condemn them, even if they knew.
“The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman,” said Mary Hague-Yearl, following his thoughts and his eyes to the photograph.
Jean-Guy spent the next hour reading about the victims of Ewen Cameron. Their stories. How they showed up in his office complaining they couldn’t sleep and returned home months later unable to speak.
Unable to recognize their husbands and wives and children.
Unable to hold a job, or hold their bladders, or hold their babies.
He read about how Cameron would strap them down and send electricity through them so strong they could smell their flesh burning.
How he kept them awake for days at a time, or put them into comas for months and filled them with drugs.
Until their brains were so washed they’d lost their minds.
And then he sent them home, addled. Clutching bills for the treatments. Then Dr. Ewen Cameron went on to the next, and the next.
“And Vincent Gilbert knew about it?” said Beauvoir. “Helped him?”
“We don’t know that,” said Myrna. “All we know is that the receipt for the animals, sent care of Dr. Vincent Gilbert, is authorized by Cameron. It’s from the mid-sixties. Gilbert must’ve been young, just starting out.”
“Come on,” said Beauvoir. “He must have known.”
Reine-Marie saw Vincent Gilbert sitting at the old pine table in their kitchen after dinner, as they’d had coffee and cognac and swapped stories.
Had the same hands that had held her grandchildren held men and women down while Cameron tortured them?
Jean-Guy Beauvoir asked for copies of some of the more damning documents, including the receipt for the animals. They thanked Mary Hague-Yearl, then left for home.
The car was quiet, everyone lost in their own thoughts. The wipers lazily, rhythmically, sweeping the freshly fallen snow from the windshield.
As the city disappeared into the rearview mirror and the peaceful countryside slipped by, Reine-Marie opened the file on her lap and looked again at the damning receipt for the rats and monkeys and actual guinea pigs.
There would be people still alive who’d suffered Cameron’s torture. And the silence of his colleagues.
She leaned her head against the cold window and stared out at the acres and acres of snow. At the lights just beginning to show in homes. At the forests and fields and mountains. At the wilderness. And Reine-Marie Gamache longed to get home to Three Pines.
Isabelle Lacoste found Haniya Daoud in the stables.
She had a currycomb in one hand and a brush in the other.
Lacoste stood in the wide aisle and watched as Haniya, a borrowed parka over her long abaya, made slow circular motions with the curry-comb, then brushed the horse’s flank down.
Then did it again, and again. In long, flowing, rhythmic movements.
And as she did it, Haniya muttered something Isabelle couldn’t make out, though she knew if she could, she probably wouldn’t understand the words. But she would understand the meaning.
It was a prayer. A meditation. An invocation.
It was, Isabelle felt, very calming. Between the whispered words, the fluid motions, the occasional toss of the horse’s mane and tail, the musky scent of horse and hay, the warmth of the barn, Lacoste could feel herself relax.
“Do you know horses, Inspector?” asked Haniya, without stopping.
“A bit. I rode as a child, but I could never figure out the bridle.”
“It is complicated.” Haniya moved to the other side of the horse and could now see Lacoste. “The leather and metal bit and straps. The means of control.”
The horse was leaning against Haniya Daoud. Not in a threatening way. It seemed to like the contact. As did she.
“Billy Williams tells me the owners of the Auberge saved these animals from the abattoir,” said Haniya. “This one’s a former racehorse who was no longer useful. So it was going to be killed and ground up. Turned into dog food and sweet treats for children.”
She looked over to another stall, where Billy was just putting a large harness on an immense animal.
“I’m not totally sure that’s a horse,” she confided in Lacoste.
“No,” said Isabelle, glancing over. “That’s Gloria. We think she might be a moose.”
Haniya snorted in some amusement and looked around. “What a strange place.”
“It grows on you,” said Lacoste.
“So does a mole.”
Putting down the brushes, Haniya traced the lattice of whip marks on the horse’s flank.
“We haven’t actually met. My name’s Isabelle Lacoste, I’m with the Sûreté. But you already knew that.”
“Yes, you work with Monsieur Gamache. I’ve seen you around.”
“Can we talk?”
Haniya looked behind her. “Monsieur Williams is just hitching up the sleigh to take the children out, but he’s offered to take me on a short ride first. I suppose you might as well come along.”
Not the most gracious invitation Lacoste had had, but far from the worst.
A few minutes later, a heavy blanket tucked around them, they were ensconced in the back seat of the big red sleigh looking at Gloria’s immense rump. Billy sat high in the driver’s seat, his back to them, muttering to Gloria, who seemed to understand his incantations. His invocations. And maybe his prayers.
She meandered across the road and into the woods. Away from the Auberge. Away from the crime scene.
Haniya tipped her head back, letting the huge flakes land on her face. She was almost smiling.
This close to the woman who would probably be named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Isabelle could see two things. How young Haniya Daoud actually was, and the scars all over her face. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle, imperfectly assembled.
“I can’t get used to snow,” Haniya said, her eyes closed, her face tilted and moist.
The small bells on Gloria’s bridle jingled merrily. The rails of the sleigh slid along the snow making a soft sound. Shhhh.
“Tell me what happened to you in Sudan.”
“You don’t want to know,” she said to the sky.
“I do.”
“Why?” Haniya asked the snowflakes. Then lowered her face and opened her eyes and looked at the homicide investigator. “Oh. You want to know how damaged I am. And if I’ve killed before. Let me give you the shorthand. I am damaged, beyond repair, as your lunatic poet would say. And yes, I’ve killed.” She studied Isabelle. “I think you know how both feel.”
“I do.”
“So, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
Isabelle sat quietly for a moment, looking into the naked woods. Only in the winter was it possible to see both the forest and the trees. Homicide, she thought, was a perpetual winter.
“Agreed.”
So with the swish of Gloria’s tail for accompaniment, and the shhhhh of the sleigh, Haniya told her.
About being kidnapped at the age of eight, when her village was attacked and destroyed. Her crime? Being a member of an ethnic minority. She was beaten and whipped and slashed with machetes. Staked naked in the dirt. And left there. Given just enough food and water to be kept alive. For the men to rape. Day after night after day.
To the tune of the sleigh bells, Haniya told her about giving birth at twelve. The baby taken from her.
Then again at thirteen, and fourteen. And every year until she’d escaped. Expelling babies from her body. Some dead. Some screaming. Never to be seen again.
“They told me that the meat I was eating was the flesh of my dead children,” she told the pine trees as they passed.
Isabelle felt herself grow faint, and thought she might pitch forward, out of the sleigh.