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.
But if he was very, very careful, the other end could be tied to a killer.
CHAPTER 39
Reine-Marie and Haniya shared a box while Susan and James Horton each had their own.
They sat in the living room of the Horton home, surrounded by packing crates and newspaper and tape.
“I should have brought this back sooner,” Reine-Marie confessed, placing her hand on the file box filled with their mother’s things. “But to be honest, I was curious.”
“About the monkeys,” said Susan. “We opened the boxes you left, and James looked at the side of Mommy’s bed.”
Her brother was quiet. And quietly seething.
Did he know? Reine-Marie wondered. Was he old enough to remember his mother before, and his mother after?
Did he know what was in the box in front of them? The family secret that had somehow, as secrets often did, morphed into a shame.
“Why did she do that?” asked Susan. “Why draw monkeys? Even when she was dying? I don’t understand.”
Haniya Daoud shifted, trying to get more comfortable. But to do that, she was nudging Reine-Marie closer to the edge.
She’d introduced Haniya, but hadn’t explained who she was. It seemed, by his expression, that James vaguely recognized her, but couldn’t quite place her.
Susan, though, just stared at her. Unable, it seemed, to see beyond the disfigurement.
Now brother and sister waited for Reine-Marie to say something constructive.
Armand had allowed his feet to choose the path, this freed his mind to also choose its own way forward.
He was in the woods now, his boots sinking into the soft snow of the trail. It was quiet in there. Peaceful.
Abby Maria. Ave Maria. Hail Maria, full of grace.
Be well, Maria.
He allowed his thoughts to roam free, untethered by logic.
Ça va bien aller. All shall be well. Maria.
Gamache stopped, looked up, and saw where his feet, where the thread, had taken him. Up ahead was the hermit’s cabin. The home of the Asshole Saint.
A thick layer of snow lay on its roof. There was no smoke from the chimney. No light at the windows.
No sign of life. And yet it didn’t feel abandoned, or empty. It felt as though it was waiting for Vincent Gilbert to return. Home.
Gamache had visited Gilbert there a few times.
They’d sat on the porch in the summer sipping lemonade. They’d harvested vegetables in autumn, from the garden out back by the stream. He’d skied to the log cabin in winter. They’d drunk tea and eaten bread and honey Armand had brought from the village, while Vincent fed wood into the stove.
They’d talked about all sorts of things. Family. Paris. Emerson. Auden and Keller.
They’d talked about choice and chance and fate.
One of Gilbert’s favorite quotes was from Henry David Thoreau. The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
And Armand had told Vincent one of his favorite Thoreau stories.
When Thoreau was arrested for protesting an injustice, Ralph Waldo Emerson had visited him in prison and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau had replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”
Vincent had laughed. As had Armand. But both appreciated what Thoreau was saying.
Came a time when people of conscience had to take a stand.
Had that time come for Vincent Gilbert? Had a crisis of conscience moved him from looking to seeing to acting?
Would he have to arrest the Asshole Saint for that act? And when he did, would Vincent Gilbert ask him what he was doing “out there”?
But Armand knew the answer to that. He was bringing a murderer to justice.
He heard footsteps behind him. Had heard them almost from the moment he’d veered off the road, onto the path through the woods.
Now they were close. Almost upon him.
“You don’t really believe what you said, do you?” said Armand. “About Paul Robinson. That he killed his daughter.”
The footsteps stopped. And there was silence for a moment. “Yes. I do.”
Armand turned and faced Jean-Guy. He smiled. He’d known from that first footfall who it was. He recognized the gait. And, more than that, he knew that Jean-Guy would, if he could, always be there. Close by.
Isabelle Lacoste barely noticed the gloom in the Incident Room anymore. She was preoccupied with her thoughts. With her questions.
She picked up the phone.
“Barry? It’s Isabelle. You know that photograph that was in Debbie Schneider’s desk? Can you see if anything’s written on the back? A date or something?”
“It’s packed away in the boxes, ready to be shipped to you.”
“Can you find it?”
He heaved a sigh. “Yes. It’ll take a little while.”
“Please, as soon as you can.”
He must have finally heard the urgency in her voice. “I’ll go down now.”
“And can you send a list of the other items in the drawer with it?”
“I have it here on my computer. There were some staples. Two printer cartridges. A ruler, an agenda, some birthday cards, a box of paper clips, and that picture. I’ll forward you the list.”
“Merci. When you find the box, can you also scan those cards?”
She hung up and stared ahead.
“You don’t believe Paul Robinson killed his daughter,” said Armand.
“I do.”
“The truth, Jean-Guy.”
“I think Paul Robinson killed his daughter. He regretted it, and he tried to justify it, but yes, I think he did it.”
“Think. You think that. But what do you feel? What do you believe, in here.”
Gamache tapped Beauvoir’s chest. The gesture, the insistence, infuriated Jean-Guy. He hated it, hated it, when Gamache pushed him like that. Not physically, but pushed him to consider feelings. Beliefs. Emotions. When Gamache insisted that they could possibly be as important as thoughts. As facts.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir had strong feelings about feelings, and Gamache knew it. But insisted anyway.
“All right. You want to know what I feel? This’s what I came to show you.”
He pulled out his phone, tapped, and shoved it into Gamache’s face, almost hitting him.
It was the image of Paul Robinson that Jean-Guy had found when he’d googled the man. Robinson was at a conference, standing in front of a poster showing a bunch of graphs. He was smiling, in an exaggerated, silly sort of way.
“Look at the banner behind him,” demanded Jean-Guy. “This’s the week before, maybe days before, Maria died. That’s not the face of a father in such despair he’s considering killing his youngest daughter.”
Gamache took the phone and examined the picture. Then handed it back.
“This proves nothing, Jean-Guy. Like you said, if Paul Robinson smothered Maria, it was in a moment of madness. A psychotic break.”
“You’re right,” said Beauvoir. “That’s what I think too. But you asked me what I feel. And I feel that man did not go home and put a pillow over his daughter’s face.”
Armand stared at his second-in-command. His son-in-law.
“Then who did?”
Isabelle Lacoste was at her desk going over the latest forensic reports when a text came in from Beauvoir asking her to meet them in the bistro.
She found the Chief and Beauvoir in a private corner. Heads together, deep in discussion. Perhaps about the case. More likely, she thought, about what to order.
“Are you here to see me, ma belle?” Olivier asked, kissing her on both cheeks.
Try as he might, every time Olivier saw Isabelle, he first saw her lying on the floor of their bistro. Bleeding. Dying. As shots exploded all around them.