Beauvoir had paused. He knew he’d go to Three Pines, would do as the Chief asked. He always would. If the Chief asked him to conduct the interviews naked, he would. But of course he would never ask that, which was why he trusted the Chief. With his life.
For a moment, unbidden, he felt again the shove, the pressure, and then the horror as his legs had collapsed and he knew what had happened. He’d crumpled to the filthy floor of the abandoned factory. And he’d heard, from far off, the familiar voice, shouting.
“Jean-Guy!” So rarely raised, but raised then.
The Chief was speaking to him again, but now his voice was calm, thoughtful, trying to work out the best strategy. “You’ll be there as a private citizen, not a homicide investigator. Not trying to prove him guilty. Maybe the thing to do is look at it from the other direction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Go to Three Pines and try to prove Olivier didn’t murder the Hermit Jakob.”
So there Jean-Guy Beauvoir sat, trying to pretend he liked these people.
But he didn’t.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir didn’t like many people and these ones in Three Pines had given him little reason to change. They were cunning, deceitful, arrogant, and nearly incomprehensible, especially the Anglos. They were dangerous, because they hid their thoughts, hid their feelings, behind a smiling face. Who could tell what was really going on in their heads? They said one thing and thought another. Who knew what rancid thing lived, curled up, in that space between words and thoughts?
Yes. These people might look kind and concerned. But they were dangerous.
The sooner this was over, thought Beauvoir smiling at them over the rim of his beer, the better.
FIVE
Once at the bottom of the ladder Gamache looked round. Industrial lamps had been brought down and he could see light flooding from one of the chambers. Like anyone else he was drawn to it, but resisted and instead looked into the gloom, allowing his eyes to adjust.
After a moment he saw what men and women stretching back hundreds of years had seen. A low, vaulted, stone basement, a sous-sol in French. No sun had ever reached here, only darkness, interrupted over the centuries by candlelight, by whale oil lamps, by gaslight and now, finally, by blinding, brilliant electric lights. Brighter than the sun, brought down so they could see the darkest of deeds.
The taking of a life.
And not just any life, but Augustin Renaud.
Porter Wilson, for all his paranoia was right, thought Gamache. The people who wanted Québec to separate from Canada will have a field day. Anything that cast suspicion on the English population was fodder for the separatist cause. Or at least, the more radical factions. The vast majority of separatists, Gamache knew, were thoughtful, reasonable, decent people. But a few were quite crazy.
Gamache and his young guide were in an antechamber. The ceilings were low, though perhaps not for the people who’d built it. Poor diet and grinding conditions had made them many inches shorter. But still, Gamache suspected, most would have ducked, as he did now. The floors were dirt, and it was cool but not cold down there. They were well below the frost line, beneath the sun but also beneath the frozen earth. Into a sort of dim purgatory, a place never hot, nor cold.
The Chief Inspector touched the rough stone wall, wondering how many men and women, long dead, had touched it too as they’d come down to get root vegetables from the cellars. To keep starving prisoners alive long enough to kill them.
Off the antechamber there was a room. The room with the light.
“After you,” he gestured to the officer, and followed him.
Inside his eyes had to adjust again though this didn’t take so long. Large industrial lamps were positioned to bounce off the vaulted stone ceiling and walls but most were beamed into one corner of the room. And in that corner a handful of men and women worked. Some taking photographs, some collecting samples, some huddled over something Gamache couldn’t quite see but could imagine.
A body.
Inspector Langlois stood and brushing dirt from his knees he approached. “I’m glad you changed your mind.”
They shook hands.
“I needed to think about it. Madame MacWhirter also asked me to come, to act as a sort of honest-broker between them and you.”
Langlois smiled. “She thinks they need one?”
“Well, it’s more or less what you asked, wasn’t it?”
The Inspector nodded. “It’s true. And I’m grateful you’re here, but I wonder if we might keep this on an informal basis. Perhaps we could consider you a consultant?” Langlois looked behind him. “Would you like to see?”
