His wife looked from him to the screen, then back.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “It’s not true.” She stared at him, searching his face. Then her eyes returned to the pile of bodies on the path, the bright green fields behind them and the little lambs in front. Her hand slid out of his.
No one moved, no one spoke. There was complete and utter silence, as though they too had been paused. And then it was shattered by a single word, screamed.
“Nooooooo.”
It came out of her like a blast furnace and she began pounding his chest, no longer making words but just sounds. Howling.
Lacoste started to get up but sat back down.
Lepage did nothing to defend himself, except close his eyes. It seemed he even leaned in to the fists, welcoming the beating. The Sûreté officers watched as Evelyn Lepage’s life well and truly collapsed. Armand narrowed his eyes, not wishing to watch something so private, so intimate, so painful. But needing to see it.
He watched and wondered if little Frederick Lawson had raced through the woods, as Laurent had. A stick for a gun. Playing soldier. Fighting the enemy. Sacrificing himself in deeds magnificent and heroic.
One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?
Evelyn only stopped pounding on her husband’s chest when she was too exhausted to go on.
“You did that?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
He tried to take her hand again, but she batted him away, flailing her arms.
“Go away, get back,” she demanded.
“I was a different man back then,” he pleaded. “It was war, I was young. The platoon leader said they were Viet Cong.”
“The babies?” she said, her voice barely audible.
“I had no choice. It was strategic. They were the enemy.”
His voice petered out and with it the litany, the liturgy, the story he’d told himself every day, until he believed it. Until the miracle occurred, the transubstantiation. Until Frederick Lawson became Al Lepage. Troubadour. Raconteur. Organic gardener and aging hippie. Draft dodger.
Until a lie became the truth.
But the ghosts had pursued him over the border and across the years.
There had been no escape for Frederick Lawson after all. No second chance. No rebirth. His past had shown up one day, and knocked on his door, and asked him to do an etching. Looking into those dead eyes, Frederick Lawson knew this pretty village had offered him sanctuary but not pardon.
“There was one young girl—”
Al Lepage stopped, and Gamache thought he could go no further. Hoped he could go no further. But Lepage gathered himself, and his burden, and moved on.
“She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She knelt on the ground in front of me, her arms out. She said nothing. Not a word, not a sound. No begging, no crying. There was no fear. None. All I could see in her eyes was pity.”
Pity, thought Gamache. That was the expression Lepage had put on the face of the Whore of Babylon. The emotion he couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t contempt, it wasn’t arrogance, or amusement. It was pity. For the hell to come.
That was the root of that etching. The rot.
But Al Lepage wasn’t finished yet.
“I was alone,” he said, his voice detached, filled with wonder. “I could’ve let her go.”
Jean-Guy stood up suddenly. His face was contorted with rage and he looked about to pour it all over Lepage, but instead he walked swiftly, unsteadily away, knocking over a wastepaper basket and banging into a desk before making it to the bathroom.
Lepage lifted his eyes from the screen and looked at Gamache.
“But I didn’t.”
CHAPTER 35
After an all but silent dinner, Armand retired to his study, closing the door.
Jean-Guy and Reine-Marie sat in the living room in front of a fire that popped and danced and threw gentle heat.
They exchanged pleasantries, but Reine-Marie had been around homicide long enough to know there was a time to talk and a time to be silent.
From the study they could hear talking.
“He’s on the phone,” said Jean-Guy, putting down the newspaper.
“I hope so,” said Reine-Marie and saw her companion smile. “Is everything all right? You both looked a little pale when you came in.”
“Sometimes you hear and see things you never really want to know,” he said. “And can never forget.”
She nodded. Jean-Guy had called Annie as soon as he’d arrived back, and Armand had hugged her and then taken a shower. Something had happened. She knew Armand would tell her about it, if not today then one day. Or maybe not. Maybe it would go into that locked and bolted room.
“Pardon,” said Jean-Guy a few minutes later, when they could hear no more from the study.
He knocked, and without waiting for a reply he went in.
“Chief?” he said, closing the door behind him.
Gamache sat in his large, comfortable chair by the desk, a file box open on the floor and a dossier on his lap. The bookcase behind him contained not just books but photographs of the family in all stages. One, though, had been taken down and was now in Gamache’s hand.
It was a tiny sterling silver frame with a photograph of the grandchildren, Florence and Zora.
Gamache was staring at it, one hand holding the picture, the other up to his face, gripping his face. Trying to hold the wretched, wrenching feelings in. But they escaped through his eyes. Leaving them red and glistening.
And now he closed them, at first gently, and then he squeezed his eyes tight shut.
Jean-Guy sat heavily in the armchair across from him and put his own hands up to his own face, to cover his own grief.
The two men sat there for a long time, without a word or sound, except for the occasional ragged gasp for breath.
Finally Beauvoir heard the familiar sound of a tissue tugged from the box.
“Oh God,” sighed Armand.
Jean-Guy lowered his hands and instinctively drew his arm across his wet face before reaching for a tissue.
Both men wiped and blew and finally stared at each other.
Armand was the first to smile.
“Well, that feels better. We must do this again sometime.”
“Is that why you came in here, patron?” asked Jean-Guy, reaching for another tissue and wondering how many tears these books had seen while the rest of the world saw a calm, determined visage.
“No,” said Armand with a small laugh. “That was a surprise. I came in because there’s something I’ve known I should do for a while but haven’t wanted to. But after talking to Ruth, there was no way out of it.”
“What’s that?”
“I have an appointment at the SHU tomorrow morning. I need to speak to John Fleming.”
Gamache tried to make it sound like any other rendezvous, but couldn’t quite pull it off. The hand holding the tissue trembled slightly, until he closed it into a fist, crushing the moist tissue.
“I see,” said Beauvoir. And he did. He knew slightly more than the public about the Fleming case. He’d followed the trial and he’d heard the rumors swirling around Sûreté headquarters. And he knew, though he was never told outright, that there’d been a secret trial. A trial within a trial, and the Chief Inspector had been part of it, though in what capacity Beauvoir didn’t know.
“What’cha reading?” he asked, in an intentionally hyper-cheerful voice, and nodded toward the file on Gamache’s knees. “Is it about a serial killer?”