A Great Reckoning Read online

  The poor pathology professor. Dr. Nadeau. Armand smiled slightly at the memory of the harried man, bothered yet again by the two cadets and another bone, or a piece of hair, that might be human. Or mouse.

  And each time the verdict. Not human.

  But Michel and Armand developed a pet theory. Their finds were in fact some poor victim, and Dr. Nadeau the killer. Covering up. They didn’t believe it, of course, but it became a running joke. As was their search for more and more ludicrous things to take to the poor man for analysis.

  “Gamache?” said the RCMP officer. “Do you think Brébeuf is still a good man, underneath?”

  “I wouldn’t have brought him here if I didn’t think there was good still in him,” said Gamache, the distant laughter echoing off the glass and concrete.

  “But do you regret the decision? Do you think he killed Leduc?” asked Gélinas.

  “Not long ago you were accusing me, now you’re accusing him,” said Gamache, taking the steps down, his hand on the rail. He stopped on the landing as cadets raced by, late for class. They paused to salute, then ran on, taking the stairs two at a time.

  “I’ve found in homicide it’s natural and even necessary to suspect everyone,” said Gamache, when the stairwell was clear, “but best not to say it out loud. Undermines your credibility.”

  “Thanks for the advice. Fortunately, in the field of homicide, I have no credibility.”

  Gamache grinned at that.

  “I actually thought you might’ve done it together,” said Gélinas, as they continued down the steps.

  “Killed him together? Why in the world would we do that?”

  “To get rid of a problem. You wanted Leduc dead, to protect the cadets. But you couldn’t quite bring yourself to do it. But you knew someone who could. Someone who owed you. That would also explain Brébeuf’s presence at the academy. As an object lesson for the students, perhaps, but mostly as a tool for you. To get rid of someone you couldn’t just fire. So while it was your idea and planning, Brébeuf was the one who actually did it. It was one last spectacular amend for what he did to you.”

  “And now?”

  “I no longer think that.”

  “And yet you just asked if I thought he’d killed Leduc.”

  “I asked if you thought he did it, I didn’t say I thought so.”

  “You mean you wanted to see if I’d throw him under a bus, to save myself?”

  Gélinas was silent. That was exactly what he’d done. He’d handed Gamache an opportunity to condemn Michel Brébeuf. And he hadn’t taken it.

  “Brébeuf is the only person in this whole place who actually needed the dead man alive,” said Gélinas. “While I said I’d learned never to underestimate hatred, I’ve learned something else since the death of my wife.”

  Gamache stopped at the next landing and gave his full attention to Paul Gélinas.

  “Never underestimate loneliness,” said the Mountie. “Brébeuf wouldn’t kill the only person not just willing but happy to keep him company. What did he call Leduc?”

  “His life raft. And now? Are you still lonely?”

  “I was talking about Brébeuf.”

  “Oui.”

  He paused to let Gélinas know he was listening, if he wanted to talk. The RCMP officer said nothing more, but his lips compressed, and Gamache turned away to give the man at least the semblance of privacy.

  He looked out the window, across a snowy field gleaming in the sun, to an outdoor rink where the village children were playing a pickup game of hockey. One of the last of the season. Even from a distance, Gamache could see the puddles where the ice was melting. Before long the rink would be gone, would be grass, and another game would begin.

  It seemed not so much a window as an opening into another place and time. A million miles from where they stood.

  “I remember doing that on the lake at our chalet in the Laurentians,” said Gélinas, so quietly it was almost a whisper. “When I was a kid.”

  When I was a kid, thought Gamache. Now there was a sentence. When I was a kid …

  The two men stood in silence, watching the game.

  “They could be using the indoor rink of the academy,” Gélinas gestured toward the arena. “But maybe they prefer to be outside.”

  “Would you have?” asked Gamache, and Gélinas smiled and shook his head.

  “Non. Give me a warm arena and scalding hot chocolate from the vending machine after the game,” he said. “Heaven.”

  “The mayor has stopped them coming to the academy,” said Gamache.

  He watched as one of the players had a breakaway and another plowed him into the snowbank surrounding the rink. There was a great poof of flakes and then they emerged, covered in snow, red-faced, laughing.

  “They’ll be back,” said Gélinas. “Give it time.”

  The kids skated up and down, up and down the rink, chasing the puck. All of them wore blue and red tuques with bobbing pompoms and Montréal Canadiens hockey sweaters. It was impossible to tell one team from another. But they seemed to know. By instinct.

  They knew who was on their side.

  When did it get so difficult to tell? Gamache wondered.

  CHAPTER 29

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no Mrs. Clairton here,” said the pleasant young woman on the phone.

  “I said, ‘Clairton,’” repeated Isabelle Lacoste.

  “Yes. No. Exactly. Clairton.”

  Lacoste stared at the phone. She hadn’t been looking forward to this call, knowing it would probably end up like this. The woman with the thick British accent trying to understand the woman with the Québécois accent.

  Both speaking apparently unintelligible English.

  It was doubly annoying that Beauvoir, whose rough English had been picked up on the streets of east-end Montréal, had absolutely no trouble making himself understood. And understanding. While she, who’d actually studied English, was constantly misunderstood.

  Lacoste looked down at the email from the woman at the gun manufacturer, McDermot and Ryan, in the UK.

  She’d clearly signed it Elizabeth Coldbrook-Clairton.

  “This is McDermot and Ryan?” asked Lacoste.

  “No, you’ve reached McDermot and Ryan.”

  Lacoste sighed at the completely predicable response.

  “Well, good-bye then,” said the cheerful young woman.

  “Wait,” said Lacoste. “How about Coldbrook? Do you have an Elizabeth Coldbrook?”

  There was a long pause, during which Lacoste wondered if the receptionist had hung up. But finally the voice came down the line.

  “No, but we do have an Elizabeth Coldbrook.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Lacoste, hearing the desperation in her own voice.

  “One moment, please.”

  A few seconds later another voice, this one more efficient but less cheerful, said, “Hello, how may I help you?”

  “Elizabeth Coldbrook-Clairton?”

  There was a very slight hesitation. “Elizabeth Coldbrook, yes. Who’s this?”

  “My name is Isabelle Lacoste. I’m investigating the murder of a professor here in Québec. Canada.”

  “Oh yes, I spoke to your supervisor this morning.”

  “Actually, I’m the supervisor. Chief Inspector Lacoste, of the Sûreté du Québec. You were speaking with Inspector Beauvoir.”

  There was laughter down the line. “Oh, I am sorry. You’d think I’d know better than to assume, especially after all these years in public affairs and being the head of a department myself. Désolé.”

  “You speak French?” asked Lacoste, still in English.

  “I do. Your English is better than my French, but we can switch if you like.”

  Oddly, Lacoste could understand this woman’s English perfectly. Perhaps her clipped tones made it closer to the mid-Atlantic accent she was used to in Canada.

  “English is fine,” said Lacoste. “I’d like to send you a photograph. It’s a revolver.”

  She hit send.

  “I’ve already seen it. Your colleague emailed it to me this morning,” said Elizabeth Coldbrook. “Oh, wait a minute. This isn’t the same picture. What is it?”

  “It’s a detail of a stained-glass window.”

  Lacoste hit send on another picture and she heard the click as Madame Coldbrook opened it as well.

  “I see. A memorial window. Striking image.”

  “Oui. The sidearm the soldier is carrying, can you tell the make?”

  “I can. It’s definitely one of ours. The styling is distinctive. A McDermot .45. They were issued to most of the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War.”

  “This was a Canadian soldier.”

  “I believe many of them were also issued that revolver. At least, the officers were. He looks so young.”

  Both women, both mothers, looked at the boy, with the rifle and the revolver and the frightened, determined, forgiving expression.

  “This is the same make but not the same gun used in your crime,” said Madame Coldbrook. “That revolver was new. Sold to the man just a few years ago.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “You think there’s a connection between a man who died and a soldier of the Great War?”

  “We’re really just tying up details.”

  “I see. Well, if there’s nothing more I can do…”

  “Merci. Oh, there is one other little thing. Just curious, but do you go by the name Elizabeth Coldbrook, or Clairton, or Coldbrook-Clairton? For our report.”

  “Elizabeth Coldbrook is fine.”

  “But you signed your email Coldbrook-Clairton. And I notice the Clairton is in a slightly different font. Is there a reason for that?”

  “It’s a mistake.”

  Chief Inspector Lacoste let that statement sit there. How, she wondered, did someone mistake their own name? Misspell, perhaps. Her best friend had, out of nerves, signed her first driver’s license Lousie instead of Louise. That had haunted her well beyond the expiry date, as her friends resurrected the error every time they had a few drinks.

  But perhaps Madame Coldbrook had been married and was recently divorced. And reverted to her maiden name. That would explain the disappearing hyphen and the mistake, on all sorts of levels. And her guarded tone when asked about it.

  “Thank you for your time,” said Lacoste.

  “I hope you find out what happened,” said Madame Coldbrook, before hanging up.

  Isabelle put the receiver down but remained unsettled by the conversation. Madame Coldbrook has been polite and helpful, readily volunteering information. But something didn’t fit.

  It wasn’t until she and Beauvoir were driving down to Three Pines later in the afternoon that it struck her.

  If Madame Coldbrook had once used her husband’s name, hyphenated, then surely the receptionist would have recognized it.

  “Unless the receptionist was new,” said Jean-Guy, when she brought up the issue. “The one I spoke to sounded young.”

  “True.”

  It was just past six in the evening, but the sun was already touching the horizon. After turning off the autoroute onto the secondary road, Beauvoir spoke again.

  “You’re still not sure?”

  “If her separation or divorce was so new that she still mistakenly signed her name that way, then the receptionist must have only just started. She sounded young, but experienced.”

  “How do you know? Did you understand a word she said?”

  “I understood the tone,” said Lacoste in a mock-defensive voice.

  “I don’t see how it matters,” said Beauvoir. “What name she uses, or even the gun and the map and the stained-glass window.”

  “I’m not sure either,” admitted Lacoste. “And it wouldn’t, except for one thing.”

  “Serge Leduc had a copy of the map in his drawer.”

  “And the soldier boy had the map in his knapsack.”

  “And both died violent deaths,” said Beauvoir. “But not because of the map.”

  “At least not the boy,” agreed Lacoste. “But why in the world would Leduc have the map and keep it so close to him? Not in his desk, not in his office, but in his bedside table. What do you keep there?”

  “Now that’s a little personal.”

  “Let me guess.” Lacoste thought for a moment. “A package of mints. Some very old condoms, because you can’t be bothered to throw them out. No, wait. You keep them because they remind you of your wild yout.”

  “What’s a yout?” he asked, and she laughed at their running joke, quoting the famous line from My Cousin Vinny.

  “Okay, so what else would be in your bedside table? Some AA reading and a photograph of you and Annie. Noooo. The sonogram showing the baby. So that when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, you can look at it.”

  Jean-Guy stared straight ahead. It seemed Isabelle had made it well past his drawers and right into his private parts.

  “My turn,” he said. “You haaavvvve…”

  He thought for a kilometer. The road was getting rougher and rougher as it changed from asphalt to dirt, and the heaves and holes of the spring thaw grew more obvious and devious.

  “Used Kleenexes from wiping your kids’ noses when they came to you crying in the night. You have scraps of paper with scribbles on them you can’t make out but are afraid to throw away in case they turn out to be important. Probably a mix of thoughts on a case and random fears about the kids. Oh, and you have the note Robert left you the first time he signed, ‘Love, Robert.’ Oh, and a cigar.”

  “A cigar?”

  “That was a guess. You seem the sort.”

  “Asshole.”

  “But I see what you mean,” said Jean-Guy as he turned onto the almost invisible side road. “There’s some junk, but mostly we keep things that are precious in our bedside tables.”

  “Or at least intimate things,” said Isabelle. “The map wasn’t like your condoms, shoved there and forgotten. The Duke didn’t just keep it, he kept it close. But not visible. Why?”

  Beauvoir tried to imagine Serge Leduc, sleepless, turning on the lamp and opening the bedside drawer and pulling out the old map. As he did the sonogram. Jean-Guy had to admit he was still trying to make out the limbs, the head, the light heart of their baby.

  Did Leduc stare at the map, trying to figure it out? Did it give him comfort on long winter nights?

  Beauvoir could not imagine Leduc needing comfort, never mind finding it in the odd little map.

  “Maybe it wasn’t important to him in a personal way,” he suggested. “People also keep things there they don’t want others to see.”

  “But the map wasn’t secret or something to be ashamed of,” said Lacoste. “Monsieur Gamache has the original framed on his wall at the academy. He gave copies to the cadets.”

  “Yes, but Serge Leduc didn’t want anyone to know he’d gotten his hands on a copy.”

  “But again”—she raised her hands and let them drop into her lap in exasperation—“why did he have a copy?”

  She could see his face harden.

  “What’s wrong? What’ve you just thought?”

  “Leduc probably got the map from Amelia Choquet.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, let’s say she gave it to him. And he put it in his bedside drawer. What’s the natural conclusion? What did you really think, Isabelle, when you heard that?”

  “I wondered if Professor Leduc hadn’t just gotten his hands on the map, he’d also gotten his hands on the cadet. Had it been found in his office, I probably wouldn’t have thought that, but a bedside table’s different.”

  “Yes,” said Beauvoir. “I thought the same thing. I think that’s what everyone would suspect. That Leduc and Cadet Choquet had a relationship. An intimate, sexual one. And the map was a kind of prize, a talisman. Proof of his conquest.”

  “A notch in the bedpost,” said Lacoste with distaste.

  ��And it might be true,” said Beauvoir. “Or it might not.”

  “Cadet Choquet is the unusual one, right?”

  “That’s one way of putting it. Spiky black hair. Unnaturally pale skin. Nose, eyebrows, ears, lips and tongue pierced.”

  “Tattoos,” nodded Lacoste. “I’ve seen her. This isn’t your parents’ academy. What do you think of her? Could she have done it?”

  It was the most serious of questions, and needed reflection.

  “Absolutely,” he said immediately. “She’s smart and angry.”

  “But is she clever?”

  Now Jean-Guy reflected. That really was the ingredient necessary to get away with murder. To commit murder, all you needed was rage and a weapon. Any fool could kill. It took cleverness to baffle the best minds in homicide in the nation.

  Was she clever? It went beyond smart. Beyond cunning. Clever was a combination of all those things, with an added twist of guile.

  “I don’t know if she’s clever. There’s a sort of innocence about her.”

  He surprised himself with that, but he knew it was true.

  “Probably explains the anger,” said Lacoste. “The innocent are often upset when the world doesn’t live up to their expectations. Doesn’t mean she’s innocent of the crime.”

  Jean-Guy nodded. “I spoke to her professors this afternoon. She shows up to class, sits at the back, rarely contributes, but when called upon is almost always unconventional but insightful. She frankly intimidates most of her profs, who don’t much like her.”

  “She intimidates with her looks, her demeanor, or because she’s so obviously smarter than they are?”

  “Probably all three. She certainly doesn’t conform.”

  “And her uniform?”

  It was a good question. Many of the freshmen, unused to uniforms, adjusted them to make them more personal and stylish. In the past, Leduc had meted out punishments for that, but Commander Gamache had chosen a different route. Much to the surprise of the seasoned professors, the new commander allowed the adjustments.

  “But it’s disrespectful,” Professor Godbut had protested at a staff meeting.

  “How so?” asked Gamache.

  That had flummoxed the professor, until Leduc had said, in a drawl, “Because it’s not just a uniform. It’s a symbol of the institution. Would you have allowed your Sûreté agents to dye their uniforms, or wear smiley-face buttons, or do up their slacks with their ties?”

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