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.
When they got inside, Armand gestured to Beauvoir to wait a moment while he walked with Monsieur Roberge to their bedroom. He was surprised to see that suitcases really were on the bed.
“It gives him something to do,” Colette explained, as they watched Jean-Paul take socks out of a chest of drawers and carefully place them in one of the cases. “When he goes to bed, I unpack.”
“I’m sorry,” said Armand.
“Don’t be. He’s not doing any harm and it makes him feel useful.” She watched her husband for a moment. “We’re the lucky ones.”
Armand followed her back down the hall and into the living room, where Beauvoir was waiting.
“We found this.” He handed Armand a book.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” said Armand, a bit perplexed.
“But have you seen this, patron?”
Beauvoir opened it to the title page. “For Colette, with love and eternal gratitude, Paul.”
He looked at Colette. “Paul?”
“My husband, Jean-Paul.”
“My name is Jean-Guy. No one calls me Guy.”
“And I’ve never heard you call your husband Paul,” said Armand. “Even now, it was Jean-Paul.”
“It was a joke between us,” she said. “Long ago. May I?” She reached out and Beauvoir gave her the book.
Armand gestured toward a seating area by the window. There was activity all around them as Sûreté officers went through the home.
“Who’s Paul, Colette?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“We can do a handwriting analysis you know.”
She considered for a moment, looking at the book, closed on her lap. “Paul Robinson. As I think you guessed.”
“So why lie?”
“Because I can see what you’re thinking. He and I were close, but not that close.”
“He signed the book, With love.”
“Don’t you love your friends?”
“Why was he eternally grateful? What had you done?”
“I looked out for Abigail at Oxford. He appreciated that.”
“Eternally?”
When she didn’t reply, Armand nodded toward Jean-Guy, who showed her the picture on his phone.
She smiled. “I haven’t seen that for years. Look at him. So happy. He always wore a bow tie, you know. A noeud papillon.” She stared at the photograph, mesmerized. “That was taken at the conference in Victoria. His last happy day, last happy few hours.”
The last one, thought Armand. “Before?”
“Before going home and giving Maria a sandwich for dinner. She choked to death on it. But you knew that too. You’re not thinking…”
“What?”
She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “Why’re you interested in Paul? In that picture?” She paused. “You’re not thinking that there was more to it? You think Paul did it deliberately?” When both Gamache and Beauvoir continued to watch her, she gave a bark of laughter. “You think I did it?”
“Did you take that picture?” Beauvoir asked.
“I did. Paul and I worked on the poster together. We had a lot of fun doing it.”
“You know what I see when I look at this photograph?” said Armand. “I see a happy, relaxed man looking at a woman he loves. Who loves him. I see an amusing, even silly, poster made for a serious scientific conference. About spurious correlations. A phrase you’ve repeated several times. Why did you do that?”
“I wanted you to know that statistics can be manipulated, misinterpreted. They can be made to say anything.”
“I already knew that,” said Armand. “I think most people do, don’t you? I think you wanted us to find this.” He nodded toward the phone and the photo.
“Why would I do that?”
“To muddy the waters,” said Armand. “To confuse us—”
“You don’t seem to need my help for that.”
“—to make us question, doubt, the connections we were making. Between the death of Maria Robinson and the murder of Debbie Schneider. Between Abby and Maria.”
“The connection,” Beauvoir said, “between you and Paul Robinson.”
“There was a connection,” Colette said. “A very deep one. But there was no affair. He was older, a mentor. Like with Vincent, there was a powerful intellectual attraction, but that’s all. And yes, I loved him. And he loved me. But—”
“Colette?” called Jean-Paul Roberge from somewhere in the house.
She jumped to her feet, the book almost falling to the floor. She put it on the table, then took a step toward the voice, before turning to them. Both men were also on their feet.
“But he”—she looked behind her—“is my soul mate. The only man I’ve ever wanted to be with. And still do.”
They watched her go, but only after Armand asked her to leave the book.
“Keep looking, Jean-Guy.”
“You don’t believe her, patron?”
“I think she’s telling the truth when she says there was no affair, but I think there’s a lot she isn’t saying. Like what she did that made Paul Robinson eternally grateful. Notice the date above the inscription.”
“A day before he died,” said Jean-Guy.
Isabelle Lacoste asked the young man at the reception desk if he’d seen Professor Robinson.
“I think I saw her go into the living room.”
Lacoste looked in there. A few guests, including Vincent Gilbert, were relaxing. Most reading. They looked up at her, then away. Not wanting to catch the cop’s eye.
Only Dr. Gilbert continued to stare. Interested but not worried. But then he wouldn’t be, she thought as she left the room. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
She got a few steps away, stopped, turned, and returned to the living room.
“May I join you?” she asked.
He half rose, in a halfhearted invitation. “Please.”
“Dr. Gilbert, can I confide in you?”
He closed the magazine and set it aside. “Of course.”
“Chief Inspector Gamache has asked me to interview Professor Robinson again because, well, we have our suspicions.”
Gilbert raised his bushy gray brows. “Like?”
“I think you can guess,” she said, lowering her voice and looking at the other guests, too far away to hear.
“You think she killed her friend?” he also whispered.
“I’d rather not say, but before I speak with her yet again, I’m wondering if you know anything that could be helpful?”
“Like?”
“Like anything about her father, for instance.”
Now the brows drew together. “Her father? Don’t you mean her mother? And Cameron?”
“No, we already know about that. I mean her father and her sister.”
“She had a sister?”
Lacoste smiled tightly, “Yes. Badly disabled. She died under strange circumstances.”
“Poor one,” he said, by rote.
“And then the father, it seems, might have taken his own life.”
“Really? A tragic family.”
“Yes. It all seems to go back to the mother being in treatment with Cameron and her own suicide.”
“That seems a bit of a leap.”
“A spurious correlation?”
He studied her. “Yes, I suppose so. Why’re you telling me this?”
“I just wondered if Abigail said anything to you,” said Lacoste. “Accused you of being responsible for the deaths of her sister and father, as well as her mother.”
Now he glared at her. “She did not. Are you?”
“Blaming you, sir? No, of course not. You can’t be held responsible for what someone does decades later and thousands of kilometers away. And all you really did at the Allan Memorial was look after the monkeys, is that right?”