Had he been surprised?
Certainly when he’d seen who was standing on the porch of his home in the small Québec village, he’d been surprised. It had been hard to tell at first exactly who was in the heavy coat, with the hood up over the head. Man, woman? Young, old? Gamache could still hear the ice pellets striking his home, as the bitter November rain had changed over to sleet.
Just thinking about it now, in the July heat, he felt a chill.
Yes. It had been a surprise. He hadn’t expected the visit.
As for what happened next, surprise didn’t begin to cover it.
“I don’t want my first homicide case to end up in the appeals court,” Judge Corriveau said quietly, so that only Gamache could hear.
“I think it’s too late for that, Your Honor. This case began in a higher court, and it’s going to end there.”
Judge Corriveau shifted in her chair. Trying to get comfortable again. But something had changed. In that odd and private exchange.
She was used to words, cryptic or otherwise. It was the look in his eyes that threw her. And she wondered if he knew it was there.
Though Judge Corriveau couldn’t really say what it was, she did know the Chief Superintendent of the S?reté should not look like that. While sitting in the witness box. At a murder trial.
Maureen Corriveau did not know Armand Gamache well at all. Only by reputation. They’d passed each other in the halls of the Palais de Justice many times over the years.
She’d been prepared to dislike the man. A hunter of other humans. A man who owed his living to death. Not actually meting it out, but profiting from it.
No murder, no Gamache.
She remembered one chance meeting, when he was still head of homicide for the S?reté, and she was still a defense attorney. They’d passed in the hall, and again she’d caught his eyes. Sharp, alert, thoughtful. But again, she’d caught something else there.
And then he was gone, bending his head slightly to listen to his companion. A younger man she knew was his second-in-command. A man in the courtroom now.
A very slight scent of sandalwood and rose had lingered. Barely there.
Maureen Corriveau had gone home and told her wife about it.
“I followed him and sat in on the trial for a few minutes this afternoon, to listen to his testimony.”
“Why?”
“I was curious. I’ve never been up against him, but I thought if I was I should do some homework. And I had some time to kill.”
“So? What was he like? Wait, let me guess.” Joan shoved the tip of her nose to one side and said, “Yeah, da punk offed da guy. Why’re we wastin’ time wid a trial, ya yella-bellied, flea-infested cowards. Hang him!”
“That’s uncanny,” said Maureen. “Were you there? Yes, he turned into Edward G. Robinson.”
Joan laughed. “Still, Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck never got to be head of homicide.”
“Good point. He paraphrased Sister Prejean.”
Joan put down her book. “In a trial?”
“In his testimony.”
Gamache had sat in the witness box, composed, relaxed but not casual. He was distinguished looking, though not perhaps, at first glance, handsome. A large man in a well-tailored suit. He sat upright, alert. Respectful.
His hair, mostly gray, was trimmed. His face clean-shaven. Even from the gallery, Maureen Corriveau could see the deep scar by his temple.
And then he’d said it.
“No man is as bad as the worst thing he’s done.”
“Why would he quote a death-row nun?” asked Joan. “And those words especially?”
“I think it was a subtle plea for leniency.”
“Huh,” said Joan, and thought for a moment. “Of course the opposite is also true. No one is as good as the best thing.”
And now Judge Corriveau sat on the bench, in her robes, in judgment. And tried to figure out what Chief Superintendent Gamache was up to.
This was closer than she’d ever been to him, and for a more sustained length of time. The deep scar at his temple was still there, and always would be, of course. As though his job had branded him. Close up, she could see the lines radiating from his mouth. And eyes. Life lines. Laugh lines, she knew. She had them too.
A man at the height of his career. At ease. At peace with what he’d done and must now do.
But in those eyes?
The look she’d caught a long time ago, in the halls, had been so unexpected that Maureen Corriveau had followed him, and listened to his testimony.
It was kindness.
But what she saw today wasn’t that. It was worry. Not doubt, she thought. But he was worried.
And now she was too, though Judge Corriveau couldn’t say why.
She turned away and they both returned their attention to the Crown attorney. He was playing with a pen, and when he made to lean against his desk, Judge Corriveau gave him a look so stern he immediately straightened up. And put down the pen.
“Let me rephrase the question,” he said. “When did you first have your suspicions?”
“Like most murders,” said Gamache, “it began long before the actual act.”
“So you knew a murder would happen, even before the death?”
“Non. Not really.”
No? Gamache asked himself. As he had asked himself every day since the body was found. But really what he asked himself was how he could not have known.
“So again, I ask you, Chief Superintendent, when did you know?”
There was an edge of impatience in Zalmanowitz’s voice now.
“I knew there was something wrong when the figure in the black robe appeared on the village green.”
That caused a commotion in the courtroom. The reporters, off to the side, bent over their electronic notebooks. He could hear the tapping from across the room. A modern Morse code, signaling urgent news.
“By ‘village,’ you mean Three Pines,” said the prosecutor, looking at the journalists as though the Chief Crown knowing the name of the village where Gamache lived, and the victim died, should be noteworthy. “South of Montréal, by the Vermont border, is that correct?”
“Oui.”
“It’s quite small, I believe.”
“Oui.”
“Pretty? Tranquil even?”
Zalmanowitz managed to make “pretty” sound lackluster and “tranquil” sound tedious. But Three Pines was far from either.
Gamache nodded. “Yes. It’s very pretty.”
“And remote.”
The Crown made “remote” sound disagreeable, as though the further one got from a major city, the less civilized life became. Which might be true, thought Gamache. But he’d seen the results of so-called civilization and he knew that as many beasts lived in cities as in forests.
“Not so much remote as off the path,” explained Gamache. “People mostly come upon Three Pines because they’re lost. It’s not the sort of place you drive through on the way to somewhere else.”
“It’s on the road to nowhere?”
Gamache almost smiled. It was probably meant as an insult, but it was actually apt.