“Looks like stealing to me.” Gamache took off his coat and wrapped it around the items for extra protection against the sleet, now pouring down. “Unless these belong to you.”
The agent was silent.
“I thought not.” He hauled the man to his feet and pushed him forward. “Walk.”
When he saw the two figures appear out of the swirling sleet, Beauvoir leapt out of the car and ran forward, meeting them halfway. “You got him. I thought … I wondered…”
Gamache handed the man over. “Secure him in the back seat.”
“Yessir. With pleasure.”
The man who’d been his supervisor until a few hours ago was letting rip with a string of abuse and threats. That gave Beauvoir even more pleasure, as did the rotting maple leaf plastered to the side of the man’s face. Which Beauvoir left there.
“I heard a shot. You okay?” he asked when he got back into the driver’s seat.
“I am. You heard the shot, but stayed here? You didn’t leave your post?”
“You sound surprised. The truth is, I was getting caught up on emails. I’d have gone eventually.”
Gamache gave a small grunt of amusement. He’d seen Beauvoir’s dark hair, dripping wet. He’d obviously heard the shot, gotten out of the car, and stood there for a while. Tempted.
But he’d followed orders.
“You got them.” Beauvoir nodded toward the items the Chief Inspector was placing in evidence bags. A video camera and an exercise book.
“He got them.”
Gamache was soaked through and shivering. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. Not to sleep, not to rest. Time for that later. He was trying to see the next step.
It wasn’t over yet. But almost. Almost.
Beauvoir, cold and wet himself, turned the heat up full blast, pointing the vents toward Gamache, and drove back to the station in silence. His questions answered. Or most of them.
An hour later all three of the agents Gamache had released, and two of the off-duty officers, had been arrested. Their names found in the careful records in the exercise book. Forensics had taken prints and DNA off the video camera and the tape still inside, as well as the ledger, then handed it back to Gamache and Chernin for closer study.
Clotilde had been, among other things, a businesswoman. She’d kept detailed records. There were names and dates and addresses. And amounts paid. As well as stickers beside certain names. Unicorns for some. Roses. Fairies. Puppies.
“Code?” Chernin asked.
“Seems so.” It was far from clear what those cheerful appliqués meant. Gamache wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
No, he was sure. He didn’t want to know. And wished he didn’t have to think about it. But he did.
Between these records and the videos, there was more than enough evidence to charge everyone involved.
“I want photographs taken of every page and emailed to Serious Crimes,” said Gamache as he closed the book. Squeezing it shut as though it would trap the rot in. “And copies made of the videos.”
If anything happened to them, if somehow this evidence was destroyed, there would be a record of it.
Once he’d issued assignments, Gamache went to the bathroom to splash warm water on his face and disinfect his hands. He changed into the clean and dry clothes he’d packed, knowing they’d probably have to stay at least a few days.
He gripped the side of the sink and closed his eyes. Then, opening them, he stared at himself in the mirror. There was a middle-aged man, with graying hair, gray stubble, and deep lines down his face. How quickly this happened.
He longed to call Reine-Marie. To speak to Daniel and Annie. To hear about their day at school. About Reine-Marie’s day. She worked at Québec’s National Library and Archives, but her hobby was tracking down lost documents from Montréal in the 1600s.
There was one book in particular she was desperate to find.
“It’s called a grimoire,” she’d told him one night, when the kids were asleep and they were relaxing on the back balcony of their apartment in the Outremont quartier of Montréal. “Most of my colleagues think it’s a myth, but I’m not so sure. I found a reference to it in Mother Catherine’s writings.”
“The mystic?” asked Armand, who was an avid, though amateur, student of Québec history.
“Well, mystic or lunatic,” said Reine-Marie. “She was an Augustinian. Helped found one of the first orders in Québec, back in the mid-1600s.”
“What’s a grimoire?”
“It’s a book to summon demons.”
Armand turned in his seat to look at her. “Demons?”
Reine-Marie nodded. “It was an age of demons and witchcraft. Mother Catherine was obsessed with them. A woman in Montréal, accused of being a witch, was said to have a grimoire. But if she did, it was lost.”
“And you think you can find it?” he asked.
“I think we might have it somewhere in the archives.”
“Wouldn’t the clerics have destroyed it?” asked Armand.
“Not necessarily. Mother Catherine was a powerful figure. My theory is, she’d have asked to keep it. To study it.”
“Know your enemy.”
“Yes. We have her papers and books in the archives.”
“Then wouldn’t this grimoire have already been found among them?”
Reine-Marie gave him a pitying look. “And what do the Sûreté archives look like?”
“Archives? You mean the piles of old papers going back a hundred years, dumped into containers in the basement?”
“That’s pretty much what the basement of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationale du Québec looks like.”
He envied her her job. Had he not been a cop, he’d have loved to be a historian or archivist. Going over old papers, finding curiosities buried in obscure libraries.
Now, as he stared at himself in the mirror, Armand wondered if he hadn’t just found a grimoire. Not the same as Reine-Marie described. Not an ancient book to summon demons. This one simply named the ones already here.
It was late, well past midnight, and he could not wake her up to tell her about his own grim discovery. Instead, he dried his face with a rough paper towel and willed himself to go back out.
As he returned to the open office, he half expected to see four horsemen. But instead, he saw his officers hard at work and, among them, Agent Jean-Guy Beauvoir.
The young man in the basement. Who’d refused to be corrupted. Who’d stood his ground.
And Armand knew there was hope.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir looked up from booking one of his former colleagues and watched Chief Inspector Gamache surrounded by his officers. He looked tired and rubbed his forehead as he listened closely to each report. Each person vying for his attention.
Under the look of fatigue, thought Jean-Guy, the attack of migraine and the sigh / There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
CHAPTER 11
The forensics team flew back to Montréal early the next morning with their prisoners.
The hikers had been released, though Gamache had assigned an agent to look more closely into their identities. He also wanted to know more about Clotilde’s history and her family. There must be someone. Parents, siblings, the father of her children.
He and Inspector Chernin stayed behind to fill in some details, leaving Agent Beauvoir to run the detachment.
“You mean I’m in command?” He looked around the empty space as though he’d been given the keys to the kingdom.
Less than a day earlier he’d been in the basement, and now he was in charge.
“Yes,” said Gamache. “It’s all yours. Don’t burn it down.”
As they left, they heard a phone ring. “Sûreté. Agent Beauvoir. How can I help?”