Not “What’s this about?” Not “Do you need to speak to my mother?”
No. They were the words of someone worried that something had happened to her mother. And you don’t ask that when your parents are asleep a few feet away.
Tessier called his counterpart in Vancouver.
*
“Wait,” said Gamache. He was leaning forward, his reading glasses on, looking at the screen. “Go back, please.”
Jér?me did.
“What is it, Armand?” Thérèse Brunel asked.
He looked white. She’d never seen him like that. She’d seen him angry, hurt, surprised. But never, in the years they’d worked together, had she ever seen him so shocked.
“Jesus,” Gamache whispered. “It’s not possible.”
He had Jér?me bring up other files, apparently unrelated. Some very old, some very recent. Some based in the far north, some in downtown Montréal.
But all to do with construction of some sort. Repair work. On roads and bridges and tunnels.
Finally the Chief Inspector sat back and stared ahead of him. On the screen was a report on recent road repair contracts, but he seemed to be staring right through the words. Trying to grasp a deeper meaning.
“There was a woman,” he finally said. “She killed herself a few days ago. Jumped from the Champlain Bridge. Can you find her? Marc Brault was investigating for the Montréal police.”
Jér?me didn’t ask why Gamache wanted to know. He went to work and found it quickly in the Montréal police files.
“Her name’s Audrey Villeneuve. Age thirty-eight. Body found below the bridge. Dossier closed two days ago. Suicide.”
“Personal information?” asked Gamache, searching the screen.
“Husband’s a teacher. Two daughters. They live on Papineau, in east-end Montréal.”
“And where did she work?”
Jér?me scrolled down, then up. “It doesn’t say.”
“It must,” said Gamache, pushing forward, nudging Jér?me out of the way. He scrolled up and down. Scanning the police report.
“Maybe she didn’t work,” said Jér?me.
“It would say that,” said Thérèse, leaning in herself, searching the report.
“She worked in transportation,” said Gamache. “Marc Brault told me that. It was in the report and now it’s gone. Someone erased it.”
“She jumped from the bridge?” asked Thérèse.
“Suppose Audrey Villeneuve didn’t jump.” Gamache turned from the screen to look at them. “Suppose she was pushed.”
“Why?”
“Why was her job erased from her file?” he asked. “She found something out.”
“What?” asked Jér?me. “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? From some despondent woman to murder?”
“Can you go back?” Gamache ignored his comment. “To what we were looking at before?”
The construction contract files came up. Hundreds of millions of dollars in repair work for that year alone.
“Suppose this is all a lie?” he asked. “Suppose what we’re looking at was never done?”
“You mean the companies took the money but never did the repairs?” asked Thérèse. “You think Audrey Villeneuve worked for one of these companies, and realized what was happening? Maybe she was blackmailing them.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Gamache. His face was ashen. “The repair work hasn’t been done.” He paused to let that sink in. There materialized, in midair in the old schoolhouse, images. Of overpasses over the city, of tunnels under the city. Of the bridges. Huge great spans, carrying tens of thousands of cars every day.
None of it repaired, perhaps in decades. Instead, the money went into the pockets of the owners, of the union, of organized crime, and those who were entrusted to stop it. The S?reté. Billions of dollars. Leaving kilometer after kilometer of roads and tunnels and bridges about to collapse.
*
“Got ’em,” said Lambert.
“Who are they?” Francoeur demanded. He’d returned to his office and was connected to the search on his own computer.
“I don’t know yet, but they got in through the S?reté detachment in Schefferville.”
“They’re in Schefferville?”
“No. Tabarnac. They’re using the archives. The library grid.”
“Which means?”
“They could be anywhere in the province. But we have them now. It’s just a matter of time.”
“We have no more time,” said Francoeur.
“Well, you’ll have to find it.”
*
“Can we lose them?” Thérèse asked, and her husband shook his head.
“Then ignore them,” said Gamache. “We have to move forward. Get into the construction files. Dig as deep as you can. There’s something planned. Not just ongoing corruption, but a specific event.”
Jér?me threw away all caution and plunged into the files.
*
“Stop him,” yelled Francoeur into the phone.
On his computer a name had appeared, then in a flash it disappeared. But he’d seen it. And so had they.
Audrey Villeneuve.
He watched, aghast, as his screen filled with file after file. On construction. On repair contracts.