Gamache quickly stepped beside Lea, and in front of the cobrador.
The man pointed the rod at them and waved it. “Get out of my way. He doesn’t belong here.”
“And why not?” ask Lea. “He’s doing no harm.”
“Are you kidding,” another man shouted. “Look at him.”
“He’s terrified my kids,” someone else shouted. “That’s harm.”
“And whose fault is that?” asked Lea, turning around to look at them all. “You taught them to be afraid. He’s done nothing. He’s stood here for two days and nothing bad’s happened. Except this.”
“You’re not even from here,” a man shouted. “This isn’t your home. Get out of the way.”
“So you can beat the shit out of him?” Lea looked at the mob. “You want your children playing on bloodstained grass?”
“Better stained with his blood than theirs,” said a woman. But her voice was no longer so loud, so certain.
“Well, they’ll have to play in my blood too,” said Lea.
“And mine,” said Armand.
“And mine.”
Someone else detached from the crowd. It was the dishwasher, Anton. He looked frightened as he took his place beside Armand and glared at the large man with the fire iron.
Clara, Myrna, Gabri and Olivier joined them. Ruth handed Rosa to a bystander and stepped forward.
“Aren’t we on the wrong side?” she whispered to Clara.
“Be quiet and look resolute.”
But the best the old poet could manage was crazed.
Armand stepped forward and held out a hand for the fireplace poker.
The man lifted it again.
Behind him he heard Reine-Marie whisper, “Armand.”
But he just stood there, his hand out. Staring at the man. Whose eyes were locked on the cobrador. Then he slowly lowered the weapon, until Gamache could take it from him.
“If anything happens,” shouted someone in the crowd, “it’s on you.”
But the mob had turned back into a crowd, and while unhappy, unsatisfied, they at least dispersed.
“Not you,” said Gamache, grabbing at the man’s arm as he started to walk away. “What’s your name?”
“Paul Marchand.”
“Well, Monsieur Marchand”—Gamache patted him down for other weapons and noticed a S?reté vehicle coming down the hill—“you’re in some trouble.”
Armand brought a small pouch out of Marchand’s pocket. It had two pills in it.
Gamache recognized them.
“Where did you get these?” He held up the pouch.
“They’re medicine.”
“They’re fentanyl.”
“Right. For pain.”
The S?reté agents had parked, and were walking swiftly across the village green.
Toward the cobrador.
“Over here,” called Gamache. “This is the one you were called about.”
“In a moment, sir,” said the agent, ignoring the man in the shirtsleeves, soaked through in the rain.
There seemed an abundance of strange behavior for the S?reté agents to choose from. Starting with the robed and masked man.
“No, I mean it,” said Gamache, his voice taking on authority.
It was almost completely dark now, and the agents turned to get a better look at the man who’d just spoken. They walked closer and then their expressions moved from scowls to astonishment.
“Crap,” muttered one.
“I’m sorry, patron,” said the more senior officer, saluting. “I didn’t know it was you.”
“No, and why would you?”
Gamache explained the situation. “Keep him overnight. Watch him. I don’t know if he’s taken any of these.” He gave them the pouch. “Have this sent to the lab.”
Gamache watched as the agents led Marchand away. Something had set the man off, and Gamache wondered if there’d been more pills in that pouch when the evening began.
Ruth, with Rosa back in her arms, turned to the cobrador and whispered, “Can you leave me alone now?”
But as she walked back to the Gamache home with the others, she knew it would not.
Before he left, Armand, beginning to shiver in the cold, walked up to the cobrador and spoke to him.
*
“What did you say?” Reine-Marie asked as Armand got into warm, dry clothes.
“I said that I knew he was a cobrador, a conscience. I asked who he was there for.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“A still and quiet conscience,” she said.
“I also told him to leave Three Pines. That this had gone far enough. Too far. Those were good people out there, who’re frightened. And fear can make decent people do terrible things. I asked if he wanted that on his conscience.”
“He won’t leave,” said Reine-Marie.
“Non,” her husband agreed. “He’s not done yet.”
He looked out the window. In the darkness, the cobrador looked like another pine. A fourth tree. A now permanent part of their lives setting down roots deep in their little community.
Then Gamache followed the line of the cobrador’s eyes. The stare he’d held, unflinching, even while being threatened with a beating. Possibly death.
There, framed in a mullioned window, was one of the few people who hadn’t come out onto the village green. To defend or attack the cobrador.
Then Jacqueline turned away, to go back to her kneading.
CHAPTER 10
“You told him to leave. You must’ve known then what would happen,” said the Crown Prosecutor. “There’d even been a death threat.”
“The man was enraged and provoked,” said Chief Superintendent Gamache. “People say things they don’t mean.”
“And people do things they later regret,” said the Crown. “When they’re angry. But it’s still done and can’t be undone. It might be manslaughter and not murder, but still a man would have been slaughtered. Surely your experience as head of homicide taught you that.”
“It has,” Gamache admitted.
“And still you didn’t act. If not then, when? What were you waiting for?”
Gamache looked into the face of the prosecutor, then at the crowd jammed into the stuffy courtroom. He knew how it sounded. How it probably would’ve sounded to him.
But there was nothing he could have done that would have been legal. Or effective.
What happened that November evening proved that the cobrador was having an effect.
Chief Superintendent Gamache had doubted what happened had been Marchand’s idea. He was fairly new to the village and hadn’t been any trouble, until that night. It seemed someone had gotten to him. Told him, either directly or through manipulation, to threaten the cobrador.
Gamache doubted that the goal was to kill the Conscience. More likely, it was to scare him away. After all, who wouldn’t run when faced with a poker-wielding madman?
Despite the cliché, the dead weren’t silent. They told all sorts of tales. If the cobrador had been killed, they’d have unmasked him, and found out who he was. And probably found out why he was there.
But if the cobrador had just run away, no one would ever know who he was, or why he was in Three Pines.
Or who he was there for.
Though the why was beginning to dawn on Gamache. It had come in the form of a tiny plastic bag.
The plague.
But the plan had failed. The Conscience hadn’t budged. Hadn’t even flinched. Had been willing to risk death, for his cause.