“Do you hear yourself?” Gélinas leaned close to him. “You’re as bad as Leduc. Treating the S?reté Academy as your personal city-state. This isn’t the Vatican and you’re not the pope. You’re behaving as though you’re all-powerful. Infallible. Well, you’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“Not necessarily,” said Charpentier. “Tactically it makes sense if—”
“The fewer who know where the students are the better,” said Gamache, cutting off the tactician.
“Better for who?” asked Gélinas. “Not me. Not the investigation. Better for you, perhaps.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Beauvoir.
“Whose prints were on the murder weapon?” Gélinas demanded.
“Partials,” said Beauvoir.
“Whose prints were on the map? Who stayed with the body, refusing company, until others arrived?” said Gélinas. “How many minutes? Ten? Twenty? Plenty of time to set the scene, to manipulate it. And then almost the first thing you do, sir, is scoop up important suspects, including the one who actually found the body, and take them away. That’s why you left right after the murder, isn’t it? To take the cadets down to the village.”
“To make sure they were safe, yes,” said Gamache.
“Safe? What danger could they be in here, any more than any of the other cadets? Why them?”
“As I said, they were closest to Leduc,” said Gamache, the throb underneath the words warning that he was straining to keep his temper. “Don’t the prints alone tell you that? They had extraordinary access to the man. And he to them. They’re the most likely to know something. They had to be protected.”
“The only thing that will protect them is telling us everything they know,” said Gélinas. “And it’s possible, probable, that if they do know something it’s because one of them did it. One of them killed Leduc. Have you thought of that, your holiness?”
“Don’t call me that, and of course I have,” said Gamache. “Even more reason to isolate them, don’t you think?”
“Or to hide them,” said Gélinas. “So they can’t tell me and others who mentored them into murder.”
Gélinas glared at Gamache.
“Are you suggesting Commander Gamache did this?” asked Lacoste, trying to control her own anger. “That he convinced one or all of the cadets to murder a professor?”
“The evidence is suggesting it,” said Gélinas. “His own actions are screaming it. It’s as though you’re just begging me to suspect you.”
“I didn’t kill Serge Leduc,” said Gamache. “You know it.”
“You asked for me specifically, monsieur, apparently to make sure it’s a fair and thorough investigation—”
“You asked for him?” Lacoste looked at Gamache, confused, while Charpentier leaned back in his chair and watched. No longer perspiring.
“Now I’m beginning to wonder if you chose me because you thought after years away, I’d be out of practice,” Gélinas continued. “I might be easily misdirected. Might even fall under your influence, like the cadets? Be flattered by the great man’s attentions? Was that it?”
“I asked for you, Deputy Commissioner, because I admire you and knew you’d be rigorous and fair,” said Gamache. “And would not be taken in by attempts to confuse. You would defend the law.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” Gélinas pointed to the tablet and the forensics report. “Not an indictment of your own actions, but an attempt to confuse? Are you saying someone is setting you up?”
“Why are there prints on the revolver?” asked Gamache. “Don’t you think it’s strange in the extreme that the killer knew enough to drop the weapon, but not enough to wipe it or wear gloves? If I killed Leduc, don’t you think I’d at least do both?”
“So you think all this is staged?”
“I think we have to consider that.”
“Who better to stage it than the former head of homicide for the S?reté? The man most learnèd in murder? I want you to consider something.”
Deputy Commissioner Gélinas turned away from Gamache and spoke to the others.
“Is it possible he killed Serge Leduc,” he held up his hand to stop Beauvoir’s protest, “to protect the students? He came to suspect abuse. Not simply inappropriate punishments of cadets, but something systematic and targeted and shattering. The emotional, psychological, physical and perhaps sexual abuse of certain cadets. He had no proof. He invited those students he suspected were most at risk to join his informal gatherings, in the hopes they’d grow to trust him. He invited them to research the map, as a way of bonding with them. But they kept running back to Leduc. To their abuser. There was only one way to save them. And others.”
Beauvoir and Lacoste sat silent. Imagining the scenario.
“Could you see Monsieur Gamache murdering, to save young lives?”
It was clear both Lacoste and Beauvoir wanted to deny it. To defend Gamache. But it was also clear that they could, in fact, see it. If Armand Gamache was ever to commit murder, if would be to save others.
“He’s also the only person here who didn’t have to kill him,” said Charpentier, calmly, and all eyes swung to him.
“Explain,” said Gélinas.
“He’s the Commander. He alone could get rid of Leduc by just firing him.”
Beauvoir nodded approval and turned to the RCMP officer. Waiting for his reply.
“And pass the problem on to someone else?” asked Gélinas. “The Commander himself has admitted he would not do that.”
“You know he didn’t do it,” said Beauvoir. “You’re just playing into the murderer’s hands. Chasing the whale.”
“All that most maddens and torments,” said Gélinas, glaring at Gamache. “All truth with malice in it, all evil were visibly personified, and made practically assailable—”
“—in Moby Dick,” said Charpentier, finishing the quote. “You got it mostly right. I have the students read it as an insight into obsession. Into what can drive a man mad. I see you know it too.”
“—but not a whale,” said Gélinas, his eyes never leaving Gamache. “A man. For you, sir, it was personified by Serge Leduc. And like Ahab, you had to stop him.”
Gamache sat immobile. Neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
In the face of his silence, Gélinas continued. “The pick of the litter. You used that phrase just now. Your wife had the pick of the litter and she chose the runt. You did the same thing. You picked the runts and invited them to your soirées. Invited them into your home. Like she did with Gracie. You want to save them. Sometimes that means removing them from danger. And sometimes it means removing the danger.”
Armand Gamache took a deep breath and looked at the photograph of a man he’d grown to despise. A man now dead. Then he looked up at Gélinas.
“I’m not Ahab. And Leduc was not my whale. Yes, I know a lot about murder. Enough not to commit it.” He tapped his glasses a couple of times on his hand, considering Paul Gélinas. “I just finished telling the cadets that it’s in the murderer’s best interest to create chaos. To make us turn on each other. Suspect each other even.”
“Maybe, but last night when you, Professor Charpentier, were asked where you’d start to look for the killer, do you remember what you said?”
Charpentier hesitated, perspiration now pouring off him. He glanced at Gamache, who gave the slightest of nods.
“I said Matthew 10:36.”
“Oui.” Gélinas turned to Gamache. “You know the reference.”
“I taught it to all the new S?reté agents,” said Gamache. “I’ve asked Michel Brébeuf to use it as the core of his course.”
“And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household,” said Gélinas. “Powerful advice. You were right, professor. That’s where I’d start too, to look for the killer. In our own household.”
“He didn’t do it,” said Lacoste. “You know that. Why are you even pursuing it?”
“Because you won’t.”
And for a moment he looked like a man with a whale in his sights.
CHAPTER 27
“Yup, that’s what it is,” said the young woman as she wiped her hand on her white apron. “An orienteering map. But it’s old, eh? Where’d you get it?”
She looked from the slender, simply dressed Chinese Girl to the Goth Girl. An odd couple if there ever was one.