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.
“Not yet.”
While the tea steeped, Armand went into the study and returned with the documents he’d brought from the Incident Room. Jean-Guy spread them out on the kitchen table. Mugs in front of them, the three Sûreté officers ate pain au chocolat and studied the pages.
It was like Jean-Paul Roberge’s jigsaw puzzle. Though, when correctly assembled, this would not show a basket of puppies.
The problem was, they seemed to have a few puzzles mixed together.
There was Vincent Gilbert’s involvement in Ewen Cameron’s experiments on innocent men and women. Including Abigail’s mother.
There was the question of Maria’s death.
There were the violent reactions to Abigail Robinson, and the people, including Gilbert and maybe the Chancellor, who’d do anything to stop her campaign for euthanasia.
And then there was the outlier. The puzzle that was their visitor. Haniya Daoud. Who talked of moral courage and committed murder under cover of darkness.
Were they separate puzzles, Gamache wondered, or all part of the same picture? One part forest, another sky, some water, some buildings? Appearing unconnected, spurious even, but combined they formed a single image.
Or maybe he had the analogy wrong. Not a puzzle, but what he’d thought earlier. One long thread. That started with Cameron and ended decades later with the body of Debbie Schneider.
The tug he’d given earlier had revealed Colette Roberge. The recipient of Paul Robinson’s oddly vague letter. And his eternal gratitude.
Had she earned it for looking after his daughter when the suicide note arrived, or was it more expected? Was the commitment ongoing?
Picking up his mug, Armand strolled over to the windows at the far end of the kitchen and gazed out. “Why was Paul Robinson so grateful to Colette?”
His words formed steam on the cold window.
Turning around, he looked back at Beauvoir and Lacoste. This was far from the first time they’d found themselves sleepless and poring over a homicide in their pajamas.
“He was grateful to her for looking after Abigail,” suggested Isabelle.
“Possible, but ‘eternal’ gratitude? That seems excessive.” After rekindling the fire in the woodstove, he returned to the table and brought the copy of the suicide note closer to him. “It’ll be interesting to get the handwriting and DNA analysis.”
“You think he didn’t write it?” Jean-Guy asked.
“I’m wondering, not thinking.”
“But if he didn’t, who did?”
“Abigail and Colette were both in Oxford when he died,” said Isabelle. “Who does that leave—” She stopped. “Debbie Schneider? Why would she?”
“Maybe Paul Robinson found evidence that she’d killed Maria,” said Jean-Guy. “The evidence Abigail might have found among his things a few weeks ago.”
“You’re saying he confronted Debbie,” said Isabelle, “and she killed him? How? Then she writes a suicide note and mails it with a book to someone she doesn’t even know exists?”
“Do you see a problem with that?” Armand asked, and smiled. “I suspect if she had done that, she’d have made the supposed confession a lot clearer. I also think if the letter wasn’t in his handwriting, Colette or Abigail would have known. So Paul Robinson wrote that letter to Colette and his daughter, then took his life. But”—he looked down at it again—“it seems an unnecessarily cruel letter, and he doesn’t seem like a cruel man. Just the opposite really. By all accounts, he had a loving relationship with Abigail.”
“And with Maria,” said Isabelle. “We know where that ended.”
As one, the three of them looked at the photograph of Debbie, Abigail, Paul, and Maria, with the vast Pacific stretching out behind them, sparkling in the sunlight.
The last one.
That photograph, Armand knew, must have been precious to Paul Robinson, so what was it doing locked in Debbie Schneider’s desk?
Armand sat slowly back in his chair and stared into the distance. Trying to see something just beyond his grasp.
If he pulled the thread, gently, maybe. Maybe …
Unexpectedly, Reine-Marie’s elderly mother appeared.
He sat forward and turned to them. “You haven’t lost a parent yet, have you?”
They shook their heads, surprised by what seemed a non sequitur.
“Then you haven’t had to clear out their home, go through their things. It’s a terrible job. We did it after Reine-Marie’s mother died a couple of years ago. It’s sad and exhausting and incredibly tedious at times. All the things they didn’t know what to do with, they just put in closets and piled in the basement. Every paper and photograph needs to be gone through, and decisions made. We were lucky, we had Reine-Marie’s seventy-eight siblings to help.”
Isabelle and Jean-Guy smiled. Each time the Chief mentioned Madame Gamache’s enormous family, the number went up. They actually had no idea how many brothers and sisters there were. It was unclear if Reine-Marie even knew.
“But what happens when you’re an only child?” he asked. “Or there are too many things and not enough time?”
“You get help?” suggested Isabelle. “Like what Reine-Marie does for people.”
“Exactly. That’s what I should have seen.”
He was animated, annoyance at himself replaced by excitement at finally seeing clearly.
“You get someone in who isn’t as emotionally attached to help sort things out. So when faced with a deadline, and loads of her father’s things to go through, who would Abigail turn to?”
“Debbie Schneider,” said Jean-Guy. “Merde.”
“Debbie found the photograph. Not Abigail,” said Isabelle, her eyes gleaming. “That’s why it was in her desk. That’s why Abby was surprised. She hadn’t seen it in years.”
“But why lock it away?” asked Jean-Guy. “What’s in it that we can’t see?”
He leaned over and once again saw the devotion on Debbie’s face as she looked at Abigail. And saw the devotion on Abigail’s face as she looked at Maria.
Paul Robinson was looking at Maria. He appeared calm. Content. Happy.
Then Jean-Guy looked at her.
The little girl, her body twisted, had her mouth open, joining in some joke. Her hair gleamed in the sunshine. Her complexion was pink and healthy. Her clothes were clean, and covered with cheery daisies.
But mostly it was her eyes that Jean-Guy noticed. They were bright, amused. Alert and aware.
There was no pain. No despair. No sign Maria was failing. This was not a little girl with no quality of life and this was not a family struggling to keep their heads above water.
“Is that what was hidden in full view?” he said. “A happy family?”
“Non,” said Armand, his voice certain. He too had been staring at the photo, and what he’d seen wasn’t a happy family. “Did the evidence box from Madame Schneider’s home arrive?”
Isabelle checked the tracking on her phone and shook her head in frustration. “Yes and no. They sent it to Sûreté headquarters. Not here. It’s sitting in my office.”
“Get one of the agents on duty to drive it down. Right now.”
“On it.”
As she put in the call, Armand turned to Jean-Guy. “It was there all the time, for us to see. And we did. We even talked about it, but didn’t pursue it.”
“What?” said Jean-Guy.
“That.” Armand pointed at the photograph.
They’d been so focused on the picture of the four people that they’d failed to notice they were actually looking at a screen shot of Debbie Schneider’s desk.
The picture of the happy people, the last one, was sitting on top of the other things that had been locked in the drawer. The ink, the cards, the staples …