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 Jean-Guy Beauvoir was far from the average cop.
They’d taken Abigail Robinson into the Sûreté station, where she was booked for possession of a dangerous weapon and assault on a police officer.
They hadn’t yet charged her with the murder of Debbie Schneider, or Maria. They didn’t know if they had enough evidence to convict. That might take some time. If ever. Though they still hoped for a confession.
By the time the booking was done, the statements taken, the paperwork completed, it was late afternoon.
Colette Roberge had been driven back home to Jean-Paul, and Vincent Gilbert and Haniya Daoud had returned to the Auberge.
Once there, Vincent had asked Haniya to walk down to the bistro with him, for a drink.
“I need some fresh air.”
“We’re going to walk?”
“It’s just down the hill,” he said. “You can see it from here.”
“You can see the horizon too. Doesn’t mean I want to walk there.”
The two Asshole Saints bickered all the way down the hill and into the bistro, where Gabri got them a table away from polite company and pumped them for information.
He left with an order for a double scotch and a hot chocolate, but no information.
Isabelle drove the Chief and Beauvoir back to Three Pines.
Jean-Guy sat in the back seat and passed a shaky hand over his face. He wondered if they realized how close he’d come. He thought they probably did.
What he didn’t know is why he hadn’t fired. And whether he’d live to regret it.
“So you didn’t take Abigail to your cabin to kill her?” Haniya asked.
“Me? Murder someone? I got a belly full of cruelty with Ewen Cameron. No. I asked Professor Robinson to join me, away from distractions, so I could apologize for what I allowed to happen to her mother. But I never got the chance.”
He looked down at his veined hands, clasped together on the table. His scotch was untouched in front of him.
Haniya picked up her bowl of hot chocolate topped with peaks of whipped cream. She’d felt the need for something soothing. Never having had hot chocolate, but watching the pleasure it gave others, she felt it might be just the thing.
She wondered why she was so upset. After all, she’d been through worse. Done worse. But she’d never actually witnessed the fallout. She’d thought of the men she’d killed as inhuman. And she knew that she’d had no choice but to do what she did.
But now she was beginning to realize a greater truth. That those men and boys had families. Had motives, however flawed. Had wounds of their own. They almost certainly had not been born with the desire to rape, to torture, to torment and murder.
Now, sitting in the quiet bistro in the quiet village, Haniya Daoud accepted that while the men she’d killed were horrific, were monsters, they were also human.
And maybe, maybe, in realizing the truth, she could finally find some measure of peace. Maybe that was the real prize.
“Would you like to?” Haniya asked. “Apologize, I mean. Maybe you can try it on me.”
Gilbert was about to dismiss the idea, but looking at her, he changed his mind.
“I’m deeply sorry for what happened to your mother. For my shameful part in it. I’m deeply sorry I didn’t do anything to stop it. I should have, and I didn’t. I’m sorry that it led to her death, and for what subsequently happened to your family, and all the families. I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused.”
The elderly Asshole Saint searched the face of the young Asshole Saint and noticed that the scars had disappeared. Or rather, they were no longer the first thing he saw when he looked at her.
“I forgive you,” she said quietly. “And I’m sorry too. That you were so hurt, driven mad with brown brown, that you did those terrible things. I’m sorry your life had to end as it did.”
While Vincent Gilbert tried to figure out what she was talking about, and what brown brown was, Haniya lifted the bowl with trembling hands and took her first sip of hot chocolate. And immediately understood its powers to soothe, if not heal. She also understood why Canadians might love winter, if this warm drink came with the snow and ice.
She lowered the mug and smiled at Vincent.
He wondered if he should tell her about the whipped cream mustache but decided not to. Seeing it somehow lifted his spirits.
Once an Asshole Saint …
“Before you go, there’s something I’d like to show you,” Clara said the next morning.
She’d asked Haniya over to her home to say goodbye. When she arrived, she found Myrna already there in the now familiar kitchen. Going into the familiar living room, Haniya stopped at the threshold and stared.
Gabri and Olivier stood up and turned to her. As did Reine-Marie. Ruth, holding Rosa, stood next to Stephen. Jean-Guy and Isabelle were there. As were Annie and Honoré and Idola. They’d driven down to Three Pines, to see her off.
They were standing in a semicircle, facing her.
Haniya stepped back. Paused. Then took one step forward. Then another. And completed the circle.
Vincent Gilbert had declined the invitation to Clara’s home, having had more than his fill of humanity to last him the balance of his life.
As he approached his cabin, he heard the blue jays shrieking. In the past he’d chased them off, or at least tried to. But now he stopped at his front porch and opened the sack he’d bought at Monsieur Béliveau’s general store.
Scattering the black sunflower seeds on the white snow, he watched the birds swoop down and pick them up. He went inside then, lit the fire, made a pot of tea, and opened the book Colette had lent him.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
He settled in, and read about the South Sea bubble, and the tulip crisis, and the Drummer of Tedworth.
The birds still shrieked, of course. But now it sounded more like company.
“Oh, God,” sighed Ruth. “Not that fucking painting again. Brace yourself,” she said to Stephen.
At Haniya’s request, Clara had made up a batch of hot chocolate with whipped cream. Stephen had poured brandy into his and Ruth’s.
At least the two of them would be quite well braced.
Gabri was practicing saying, “It’s wonderful. It’s brilliant.”
Even Reine-Marie was bracing herself. Like the rest of them, she’d been privy to Clara’s latest effort. Their friend had taken to slapping layers of paint, apparently at random, onto the canvas. Occasionally breaking up the splatters with something hyper-recognizable.
The last one was a banana. Reine-Marie wondered if it was a reference to all those monkeys, but suspected it had no meaning at all. Behind her, Myrna was trying to coax Billy Williams forward, but like the donkeys he raised, he’d put his head down and was refusing to budge.
Smart man, thought Myrna, as she reluctantly followed the others into Clara’s studio.
“How much did you know, Colette?” asked Armand.
The Chancellor and her husband were sitting in the Gamaches’ living room. Since Jean-Paul was calmer away from crowds, they’d stayed behind while the rest of them had headed over to Clara’s, to say goodbye to Haniya Daoud.
Jean-Paul was taking books off the shelves and stacking them neatly on the floor in front of the fireplace, while Armand and Colette talked.
“Paul never told me outright, but he knew that I knew. He’d never have given Maria a peanut butter sandwich by mistake. And if it was on purpose, it was murder. And I knew he wasn’t capable of that. But I have to say, I’d always hoped it was Debbie Schneider who’d done it. Not Abigail. For Paul’s sake. But when the letter came, I could tell that he thought it was Abby who’d done it. He knew his daughter. Knew what she was capable of.”