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.
“He wanted you to show the letter to Abigail, to let her know she was safe,” said Armand.
Jean-Paul was holding a book and staring, then he walked over and gave it to Colette. He was now almost completely silent. Though he communicated in other ways.
“Merci,” she said. “I’ve been looking for this.”
He smiled and went back to work.
Colette squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and put the book down on the sofa beside her.
“Vincent says you invited Abigail here so that you both could try to help her. To dissuade her from the path she was on.”
“True.”
“Did Vincent also plan to tell her about his involvement with Ewen Cameron?”
“No. He didn’t realize her mother had been one of Cameron’s victims. Not until she told us.”
“With Abigail’s arrest, will that end the debate over mandatory euthanasia?” Armand asked.
“You’d think,” said Colette. “But I’m afraid the barb has gone in. She’s scared enough people into believing there won’t be enough resources to recover from the pandemic, never mind handle another. Unless the sick and elderly are allowed to die.”
“Made to die,” said Armand. By lethal injection. Capital punishment for men and women whose crime wasn’t killing, but taking too long to die.
Through the door to his study he could see the open files he’d been working on when the Roberges arrived.
They contained the mounting evidence he was quietly and privately collecting against those responsible for abandoning the elderly and frail in care homes during the pandemic.
It was Sunday afternoon. The next morning Armand Gamache had an appointment with the Premier of Québec. To show him the files. And to let him know, quietly, confidentially, that if there was any move to adopt mandatory euthanasia, or anything vaguely smelling of eugenics, those files would go public.
It was, he knew, blackmail. But he and his conscience could live with that.
That was tomorrow. Today he could sit quietly and comfortably in his living room, talking to friends.
“Will you charge Abigail with the murders?” asked Colette.
“We’ll try.”
Her eyes fell on the framed family photographs on the bookshelf behind Armand. “I can’t believe he didn’t shoot.” Her gaze drifted over to Jean-Paul, carefully placing one book on top of another. “It was love, I suppose, that stopped him.”
“Oui.”
Jean-Guy couldn’t be the father he wanted to be for his children if he’d pulled that trigger.
Clara walked right by the mess on the easel and over to a canvas leaning against the wall.
Haniya watched her host and wondered if she should say something about Clara’s whipped cream mustache, but decided not to.
Once a finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize …
Clara lifted the paint-stained sheet, and there was silence.
“It’s wonderful,” muttered Gabri.
“It’s brilliant,” said Olivier.
When Colette and Jean-Paul left, Armand went across to Clara’s.
The others were in the living room, but he found Haniya in the studio. Staring at the painting.
She had her coat on and her Louis Vuitton suitcases were by the door.
Armand and Haniya stood side by side in silence, staring at Clara’s painting.
Then, still looking at it, he asked, “Are you sure you want to leave?”
She turned and, for the first time, she saw not the deep lines down his face, or the scar at his temple, but the kindness in his eyes.
Then she turned back to the painting. “Sudan is my home. I think you understand that, Monsieur Gamache. It’s where I belong.”
“You and your machete?”
“Are you judging me?”
“Non. I’m asking.”
Armand heard Haniya Daoud, the Hero of the Sudan, sigh.
“Sudan’s awful. There’s poverty, unspeakable violence. Women, girls aren’t safe. But there’s unimaginable courage too. And beauty.” She smiled as she stared at the painting in front of her. “My village was rebuilt. I have a small home there. It isn’t far from the White Nile.”
She told him about the scents in summer. About the rain hitting the water. About the sound of the breeze through the savannah. All the little things that add up to home. To belonging.
“When I’m home, I walk there every day. I sit on the shore and pray.”
“What for?”
She turned to him. “Probably the same thing you pray for. The same thing we all do.”
She walked past him, out of the studio.
Reine-Marie was in the mudroom, putting on her boots and coat.
“I’ll drive you to Montréal,” she said.
“That’s all right. I’ve called a taxi.”
“There’re taxis?” asked Myrna.
“Yes. I’m not sure what language the guy was speaking, but I’m pretty sure he said he’d meet me here.”
They looked at Billy Williams, who grinned and put up his hand. Then he dropped it and took Myrna’s.
“I think we can probably cancel the taxi,” said Reine-Marie, and saw Billy nod.
“We’re coming too,” said Clara, and Myrna nodded.
“Why?” asked Haniya.
Clara turned to her, surprised. “Because that’s what friends do.”
Haniya’s last glimpse of Three Pines was of two elderly people standing on the village green, one with a single finger raised, waving goodbye.
Jean-Guy had asked Armand to look after Honoré while he took Idola and Annie into their kitchen.
They sat by the woodstove.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said to Annie. “About how I once felt about Idola. About our decision.”
Armand sat on the bench, with Fred at his feet. They watched Honoré play with some of the other village children as Henri danced around them.
Armand thought about what Clara had painted. It looked like a landscape. At least that’s what a casual observer would see. But if they were not quite so casual? They’d see it was actually a topographical map. One orienteers might use.
And if they paused a little bit longer? If they stopped trying to see it with their eyes, then they’d see what it really was. What really mattered.
They’d see the roads and rivers, hills and vast fields, the stone walls and forests and meadows come together. To form an image. Of a young woman whose face was scored. But not scarred. The deep lines were the route home.
“Papa, Papa,” cried Honoré, though his words were indistinct.
Armand shot to his feet and ran to his grandson.
As he got closer, he saw that all the children, every one of them, had their tongues frozen to the goalpost.
A few minutes later, as he and Gabri knelt and poured warm water over their tender tongues, he wondered why they’d do such a thing. But Annie and Daniel had done it. And so had he, when he was their age. He suspected his father and mother probably had too, when they were children.
Some things were just inexplicable.
“Hold on,” whispered Armand. “It’ll be all right.”
Haniya put her feet up on the footstool of her business class seat and gazed out the window.
As the miles piled up, as she got ever closer to Sudan, to home, she felt herself relax. Her body might not be altogether safe there, but it was where her spirit belonged.
Bringing out the small package Reine-Marie had pressed into her hand at the Montréal airport, Haniya unwrapped it.
Then she looked at the card. It was actually a worn and yellowed piece of paper. It still had Scotch tape on it, where it had been attached to the windowpane.
On one side it was signed by everyone, with cheerful messages. On the other was a rainbow and the words, in bright pink crayon.