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.
Gamache paused, quickly putting things together. He’d been wrong. Gone down the wrong path. But now, thanks to Lacoste and Beauvoir, he could see where they needed to be.
He turned slowly back to Abigail Robinson, who’d looked from Beauvoir’s phone, though she couldn’t see the message, back up into Gamache’s eyes. And she saw there that he knew the truth.
“Are you going to tell me, or do you want me to say it?”
Her silence stretched on. He gave her thirty seconds, which seemed an eternity. The room felt like a sensory-deprivation chamber. No movement. No sound. No light outside the windows. Not even the ticking of a clock.
Armand Gamache gave Abigail Robinson another thirty seconds.
But the only thing that happened, the only movement, was the thinning of her lips, as she pressed them together.
“Your mother killed herself.”
That had been Lacoste’s message. What the coroner had written in his notes, but did not include on the death certificate.
Mrs. Robinson committed suicide.
Still, Abigail didn’t speak. So Armand did.
“She’d been suffering from insomnia and postpartum depression since your sister Maria’s birth.”
He stepped carefully, feeling his way forward. Backward. Into the past. He had no proof of what he was saying, but finally the pieces fit.
His voice was deep, gentle. “Your father didn’t work with Cameron. That was wrong. He knew of Cameron’s work, though not the exact nature of it. Your father loved your mother and wanted the best treatment.” As he spoke, he kept thoughtful eyes on Abigail. Watching, gauging, her reaction to his words. “He arranged for her to go to Montréal for treatment.” He paused. “With Ewen Cameron.”
Vincent Gilbert’s mouth went slack. Dropped open.
But Gamache kept his attention on Abigail. Her breathing was rapid, like someone hiding in a closet from an intruder.
“She came back worse,” Armand said, quietly. He and Abigail were alone in the room now. In the world. This dreadful world where such things happened. “Broken, beyond repair. A short time later she took her life.”
“No. Cameron took her life. And him.” She narrowed her eyes to stare at Gilbert.
Vincent Gilbert paled, as though her gaze was drawing the blood from him.
“And then, to add insult,” said Gamache, “Dr. Cameron sent a bill. That’s how you knew Gilbert worked with Cameron. Because he signed the demand for payment. And you found it among your father’s papers.”
From his breast pocket he brought out the paper Reine-Marie had given him, unfolded it, and placed it on the table in front of Abigail Robinson.
“This is what you found. A letter like this.”
She bent down and studied it. Looked at the name. Enid Horton.
“Exactly like that.” She looked at Vincent Gilbert. “A form letter?” Gilbert stared at his hands. “You couldn’t even be bothered to write individual letters? By the time Dad got this, my mother was dead. But he paid anyway.”
“And you came here not to get Vincent Gilbert’s endorsement, but for repayment.”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 36
“Well, we now know why Abigail Robinson came to Québec,” said Lacoste, slicing the baguette. “To kill Vincent Gilbert.”
They were back in the Incident Room. Dominique had brought down dinner. A large pot of her winter spécialité, a hearty pot-au-feu.
Jean-Guy ladled it out, while Armand poured beer for himself and Lacoste, and gave Jean-Guy a ginger ale.
Abigail Robinson had come back to the Inn with them, as had Vincent Gilbert. They were now under the same roof, but on different floors, restricted to their rooms.
“She doesn’t admit that,” said Gamache, tearing a thick piece of baguette and dipping it into the stew. “It would be helpful if we had any evidence, like the letter Gilbert wrote and Abigail found among her father’s things.”
“I think Abigail got that much right,” said Isabelle. “Debbie threatened him with it, he panicked and killed her, then burned the letter along with the murder weapon. He admits he destroyed every other document connecting him to Cameron. And he was in the library before the attack. He could’ve taken a piece of firewood without anyone seeing.”
“So they were going to kill each other?” asked Jean-Guy. “Like gladiators in the ring?”
“Not quite,” said Armand. “But close. I think Abigail’s plan was more subtle, more layered. I think she was going to blackmail Gilbert into publicly supporting her campaign—”
“Then she’d release the evidence anyway, that Gilbert had collaborated with Ewen Cameron,” said Jean-Guy. “Why kill the man outright when you can torture him first? Give him some of his own back. Let him watch everything he’d spent a lifetime building up come crumbling down.”
“He was far beyond his depth, in his sea of glory,” said Gamache.
“A quote?” asked Beauvoir. The rich stew and sleepiness had lowered his resistance, and the question popped out before he could stop it.
His eyes widened in fear, some mock, some real, that the Chief would now regale them with the full poem.
He did not. Gamache only smiled and said, “Why is it when I say something profound you assume I’m quoting someone else?”
“Were you?” Beauvoir asked, and could have kicked himself. Stop it. Stop giving him an opening.
Gamache gave a small grunt of laughter. “How well you know me. Yes. Wolsey’s farewell, from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. I’ve thought of it a few times when I’ve considered Dr. Gilbert in this whole thing. His ego propped open the door to his enemies.”
“I’ve been thinking of eunuchs,” said Isabelle.
“Eunuchs? As in—” Jean-Guy made a gesture over his lap.
“Exactly. Some men in China intentionally castrated themselves in order to rise to a position of power.”
Jean-Guy’s eyes widened. He’d heard of the practice, but had assumed it was a punishment, not a choice. Who would…?
Armand, though, was nodding. “Yes. That might be closer to the truth. What people do for power. How they’re willing to mutilate themselves, physically, intellectually, morally, for power and position.”
“You think that’s what Gilbert did?” asked Jean-Guy, fighting to get the quite vivid image out of his head.
“I think some people would do just about anything, say just about anything, stay quiet about anything, to attain, then hold on to power,” said Armand. “We’ve seen a lot of that in the last few years. Why not Vincent Gilbert? A boy from a poor family, gifted with remarkable intellect, but crippled by a lack of resources and conscience. His brains got him into medical school in McGill, and his faulty moral compass allowed him to stay there.”
“All he had to do was turn a blind eye to torture,” said Isabelle.
“And when, years later, having achieved international recognition as a doctor and humanitarian he was threatened with exposure, his core instincts come out.”
“So you do think Vincent Gilbert killed Debbie Schneider,” said Jean-Guy. “To get those papers off her. To stop the blackmail.”
“I think we finally have a motive for her death. He’d clearly gone to huge lengths to erase any evidence of his work with Cameron, destroying all the paperwork in the files in the Osler Library.”
“But he couldn’t get those demands for payment back,” said Lacoste. “They were in private hands.”
“He must’ve assumed, as time went by and the victims died, that he was safe. That those papers were lost or destroyed,” said Gamache.
“Or that no one would notice, or recognize, the signature of a minor research assistant,” said Lacoste. “But Abigail Robinson did. And she came here to make him pay.”