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.
“I do, Professor Robinson. Armand, you look worried.”
In fact, he was hyper-alert. Trying to fathom what was going on.
This extreme politesse was masking a brutal aggression, he could tell that much. Violent emotion was radiating off both Abigail and Gilbert. The place might smell like the forest in high summer, but it felt like a courtroom, nearing the end of a long and dreadful trial.
What had Abigail said? Scientists might appear rational, but they were in fact completely at the mercy of their emotions. Because most never learned to face them.
And it seemed to Gamache that, now faced, their emotions would have no mercy. Not today. Not in this courtroom.
“Why did you come here?” asked Gamache.
“We wanted to talk in private,” said Abigail. “No one was forced. There were things that needed to be said.”
“And done,” said Gilbert. “We hadn’t expected company.”
“What did you expect?” asked Beauvoir.
He slowly, carefully unzipped his pocket. He could feel the weight of the gun and knew that he could get to it long before either Abigail or Gilbert could grab the rifle.
He hoped it would be Abigail Robinson who tried.
“We expected to finally have it out,” said Abigail. She turned to Gilbert. “What’s that line from Ruth Zardo’s poem? I’m sure you know it.”
“Or will it be,” he said, “as always was, too late?”
“No, though that would fit too.”
“And now it is now,” said Beauvoir, “and the dark thing is here.”
Abigail shifted to him and nodded. “That’s the one.”
Gamache and Lacoste were staring at Beauvoir in disbelief.
“Why are you here?” asked Gilbert.
“For the same reason,” said Gamache. “To have it out.”
They’d collected the evidence. The facts. Now they needed the feelings.
The dark thing.
There was a sound outside, and then, incongruously, a polite knock on the door.
Gilbert started for it, but Gamache stepped in front of him and nodded to Lacoste, who opened the door.
“Oh, thank God.” Colette Roberge practically fell inside. Her face was bright red, her eyes and nose running, and her speech slurred by frozen lips and cheeks.
“What the hell are you doing here?” demanded Gilbert.
“I couldn’t stay away.” She stomped her feet to get the circulation back and glared at Vincent for a moment before turning to Gamache. “But you knew that. Did you tell the agent in the car to let us by?”
“Us?” asked Isabelle. She opened the door again and saw Haniya Daoud trudging to the porch. Her head down, her beautiful blue abaya sodden and dragging behind her, like a long teardrop.
Pushing past Lacoste, she muttered through chattering teeth, “Fucking snow.” Once inside she shivered uncontrollably and looked around the cabin. “Fucking Canada.”
Colette had gone straight to the woodstove and stood with her hands outstretched toward the warmth.
“You got your meeting after all, Armand,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Though maybe not where you’d planned.”
She stood almost exactly midway between Abigail and Vincent. Her allegiance as yet undeclared.
“We’re used to adjusting when things don’t go as we planned,” said Gamache.
“I wonder.” Her eyes were shrewd, calculating. “Was this your plan?”
“How could it be? I had no idea Professor Robinson and Dr. Gilbert had left the Auberge.”
“True, but once that was clear, I think you manipulated both Madame Daoud and me. You wanted us here, all together, but you also needed time to manage the situation.”
Gamache raised his brows. “I’m not sure you could call this ‘managed’ and I doubt either of you is that easily manipulated.”
“Everyone can be manipulated. Even you.”
There was a stillness in the air, and Gamache wondered if that was what had happened. What was happening still. Was he being manipulated?
He looked again at the rifle and thought maybe he had been, this whole time. From the first moment that call had come through, asking him to provide security for an obscure little event. All the way along. To this moment.
The case was bookended by this woman, Chancellor Roberge. Who’d requested he head up security at the gym, and now stood warming herself by the woodstove.
“You could’ve had that agent in the car stop us, but you didn’t,” Colette said. “Instead you pivoted. Moved the meeting to here. By your emphasis to me, and your tone to Haniya, you knew we’d come. Very clever. That flexibility, that creativity, is something not encouraged in scientists. We plod along, following facts to a conclusion. Then we stick the landing.”
“Maybe if statistics carried guns, you’d learn to pivot,” said Haniya.
Colette smiled. “Probably true.”
“But statistics are a weapon,” said Gamache. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“I wonder how much you really know about why we’re here,” said Abigail.
“I know,” said Haniya. “I know that Gilbert brought you here to finish what he started.”
“And what was that?” asked the Asshole Saint.
“To kill you,” Haniya said to Abigail.
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Why did I slit men’s throats in the middle of the night? To prevent an even bigger outrage.”
Half the people there gaped at Haniya in surprise.
“You did?” asked Abigail.
“You make it sound noble, Madame Daoud, the Hero of the Sudan,” said Gilbert. “The truth is, you did it to escape. To survive.”
“Of course I did. Who wouldn’t,” said Haniya. “You think it’s easy? It’s sometimes a necessity, but that’s all. You can’t tell me you haven’t sighted another person and pulled the trigger. Was it easy? Or did it add another measure of bile to your cup?”
Isabelle Lacoste began to speak, to defend him, but Gamache raised his hand to request quiet. To let Haniya continue. To see if she’d plunge right over the edge. She might take him with her, but at least then they’d know.
“I warned you, when we first met,” said Haniya. “That it takes courage to stop a monster. Courage you clearly don’t have.”
“But you do.”
“Why do you think they’re going to give me the Peace Prize? It’s for the courage to do what’s necessary. There’s no peace without courage.”
Isabelle couldn’t take it anymore. “What works at night with a machete in Sudan doesn’t work here. There’s no moral high ground in Canada for murder.”
Haniya turned to Isabelle, her stare intense.
“Because you’re so much more civilized, is that it? The true north, strong and free. You just bash each other over the head at parties. And shoot each other in bistros. Must be nice to be so evolved. But just so you know, your high ground is actually a hole.”
“Jesus,” said Abigail. “Do we live in the Dark Ages? Where a scientist is condemned to death for telling the truth? I’m just compiling statistics from the pandemic. The study was commissioned by the federal government, for God’s sake.”
“So was Ewen Cameron’s,” said Gilbert.
“Yes,” said Abigail, turning to him. “Let’s talk about Ewen Cameron. He killed my mother, my sister, my father. And you’re just as guilty of their deaths.”
As she spoke she leaned closer to Gilbert, closer to the rifle. Beauvoir moved his hand to his pocket and rested it there.
Come on. Come on.
“Did you come to Québec to kill Dr. Gilbert?” Gamache asked her.
“No. I came here to look him in the eye. To make him admit what he did.”
“You came here to ruin him,” said Colette.
“He’s already ruined,” said Abigail. She looked around the cabin. Outside, they could hear the blue jays shrieking in the morning sun. “I came here to expose him. I wanted the rest of the world to see what a monster he really is.”