Gamache was clearheaded, even ruthless when necessary.
While he hated guns and didn’t wear one in the normal course of his day, Gamache did not hesitate to use the weapon. When necessary. Aiming and firing with an astonishing precision for someone who loathed firearms.
Ghosts followed the Chief Inspector, haunting him even on this bright June morning. And yet, for all that, Armand Gamache remained a hopeful, even happy, man.
He’d chosen to spend his adult life tracking killers, looking into the minds of madmen. Exploring the dark caverns and fissures where acts of murder were born and raised, nurtured, protected, and sent out into the world.
While Gamache had become an explorer of human emotions, Jean-Guy Beauvoir was the hunter. They were a perfect, though unequal, team.
Watching his father-in-law toss a slimy tennis ball to Henri the German shepherd, Jean-Guy was under no illusions who was the leader. He’d follow him anywhere. And had.
And had. Almost. Anywhere. Almost …
Again, he felt the chill.
Henri bounded after the ball, followed by old Fred, who never stopped believing he had a chance of getting there first. And finally tiny Gracie, found on a rubbish heap by Reine-Marie. And brought home.
Gracie might, or might not, be a dog. The smart money was now on guinea pig, with hedgehog a close second.
Armand knelt and picked up the ball Henri had dropped in the muck at his feet. The dog’s tail wagged so furiously it shook his whole body. Then Armand kneaded Henri’s ears, no doubt whispering that he was a good boy.
Though he needn’t have gotten so close. Had Jean-Guy whispered it from the second-story bedroom window, Henri would have heard.
The shepherd’s ears were so enormous they were capable, the villagers suspected, of picking up transmissions from outer space. If there was alien life, Henri would be the first to know.
Then Gamache kissed Fred on the top of his smelly head, patted Gracie, and, standing back up, he tossed the ball again. Then continued his Saturday morning stroll through the sunshine.
A happy and content man. Trailed by ghosts.
It had taken Jean-Guy years to figure out how Gamache managed to hold on to his equilibrium, his humanity, when so many fellow senior officers had seen their marriages fall apart. Who’d taken to drink, to drugs, to despair, to cynicism. To corruption. To turning a blind eye to violence, their own and those of their officers.
Every day Armand Gamache commanded a department that hunted the worst that humankind offered. All day, every day.
And he took the most gruesome task on himself. To break the news to the families.
He absorbed the unfathomable grief as the world collapsed on top of these husbands, wives, fathers, mothers. Children.
With his words, he crushed these people. Killed these people. They were never, ever the same. They now lived in a netherworld where the unthinkable happened. Where the boundaries would now forever be proscribed by “before” and “after.”
This Armand Gamache did.
How he carried the sorrow and responsibility and still remained hopeful had baffled Jean-Guy for years. But now he knew.
He could do it because at the end of each brutal day, Armand Gamache returned here. To the tiny village of Three Pines. That existed on no map. That sat in a hollow surrounded by forests and mountains. As though in the palm of some great hand.
Every evening, he returned here to Reine-Marie.
He sat in the bistro and sipped a scotch and listened to the stories of their days. Clara the painter. Myrna the bookstore owner. Ruth the poet and Rosa, her foul-mouthed duck. Gabri and his partner, Olivier, would join them by the fire, or out on the terrasse on warm summer evenings, their voices mingling with the trill of crickets and the gentle murmur of the Rivière Bella Bella.
Monsieur Béliveau and Billy Williams and Sarah the baker and Robert Mongeau, the new minister, and his wife, Sylvie, and any number of other friends would be there.
All having discovered a village only ever found by people lost.
Every evening Armand Gamache was reminded that goodness existed. And every morning he drove away, to face the horrors. To roll away the stone and step inside the cave. Secure in the certainty that no matter what he found, he could always find his way back home.
There was, though, to Beauvoir’s knowledge, one boulder that Gamache refused to move. One cave he would not enter.
Yes. There was one person, one mind, Armand Gamache feared.
CHAPTER 2
“Don’t you ever—” the Chief Inspector began to say.
The softly spoken words cut through the wind and roar of crashing waves and landed in the younger man’s ears as though whispered directly there.
“—talk like that—”
Agent Beauvoir braced for the Chief Inspector to say “—to me, you stupid, arrogant little shit.”
But instead …
“—at the scene of a murder. That isn’t a body, that isn’t a corpse, that isn’t a puzzle. She’s a human being whose life has been taken. Stolen. I will not tolerate that sort of language, that behavior.”
Spray from waves beating against the rocks stung their faces, but while Beauvoir winced, the Chief Inspector never flinched. Never turned away. His deep brown eyes never wavered, never left Beauvoir’s.
With every word the man uttered, the young agent grew more and more perplexed.
More and more afraid.
Screaming, yelling, threatening he understood, even went out of his way to provoke.
But this? It wasn’t just a foreign language, it was alien. As though the man in front of him had appeared from some strange world unknown to Beauvoir. He understood the individual words, but their meaning eluded him.
And then it got worse.
“We have a duty,” the Chief was saying. His voice steady, never rising above normal level, even as the wind whipped around him and lake water coursed down his face. “Sacred or otherwise, to the murdered person and those who love and care for them. Part of that duty is to make sure their humanity is preserved. Do you understand, Agent Beauvoir?”
Don’t say it, don’t say it. Do. Not. Say. It.
“What I understand, sir, is that you’re a laughingstock, a joke, in the Sûreté.”
Stop. Stop. For God’s sake, stop. He’s not the enemy.
And yet it felt like he was. Gamache was threatening, in his soft, even gentle voice, all Jean-Guy’s defenses, fortifications that had taken a lifetime to erect.
“Your department is made up of all the garbage no one else wanted. They’re the only ones who’ll work for you. You don’t even wear a gun. You’re a coward. Everyone knows that.”
Word after word, like a shotgun blast to the chest, he aimed at this senior officer.
It was, of course, suicide. But necessary. A panicked effort to push away what now seemed inevitable. That this man would breach his walls. Would see inside. And so, Beauvoir lashed out. Wildly. Saying the most insulting things any cop could hear. Any human could hear.
He braced for the counterattack. But none came. The older man just stood there, his face gleaming with lake water, his hair, just touched with gray, tousled in the wind.
Around them the other agents, members of Gamache’s team, had stopped to watch. Some must have moved to intervene because the Chief Inspector made a subtle gesture to stop them.
Jean-Guy raised his voice to be heard above the ruckus of the waves and the wind and the water drumming against their clothing, as though nature was trying to drown him out.
“Only a fool would follow you.”
What happened next shocked and terrified the young agent. And changed his life.