Lacoste stared at them, momentarily at a loss. “Okay, let’s go back. Walk me through this.”
“The cobrador showed up the night after Halloween,” said Gamache. “At the annual costume party here in Three Pines. We didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. No one knew who he was, or what he was supposed to be. There was a general feeling of unease, but nothing more. Until the next morning, when we woke up to find him on the village green.”
“Passed out?” asked Lacoste. “Drunk?”
Gamache shook his head and reached into his pocket for his iPhone. As he brought it out, something fell to the linoleum floor.
The napkin from lunch that day.
He and Beauvoir both bent for it, Jean-Guy getting there first and handing it to Gamache. But not before noticing some words in the chief’s distinctive handwriting.
“Merci,” said Gamache, taking the napkin. He carefully refolded and replaced it in his pocket. Then he scrolled through his iPhone.
“I took this picture Saturday morning and sent it to Jean-Guy, asking him to see what he could find out.”
He showed it to Lacoste.
She was trained not to react to sights, sounds, words. To take things in, but give nothing away. Most people watching her would not see any noticeable change as she studied the image.
But Gamache did, as did Beauvoir, being so close to her.
The very, very slight widening of her eyes. The very, very slight compression of her lips.
For a highly trained homicide investigator, it was the equivalent of a yell.
She raised her eyes from the iPhone and looked from Gamache to Beauvoir and back again.
“It looks like Death,” she said, her voice neutral, almost matter-of-fact.
“Oui,” said Gamache. “That’s what we thought too.”
The figure in the photograph was powerful, threatening. But there was also something almost majestic about it. There was a calm, a certainty. An inevitability about it.
A stark contrast to the rumpled mound in the root cellar. One looked like Death. The other actually was.
“What did you do?” Lacoste asked.
Gamache shifted slightly on the hard chair. It was the first time he’d have to officially answer that question, though he suspected it was far from the final. And he could already sense the expectation that the Chief Superintendent of the S?reté should have done something. Anything. To prevent this.
“I spoke to him. Asked who he was and what he wanted. But he didn’t answer. He just continued standing there. Staring.”
“At what?”
“At the shops. I wasn’t sure which one.”
“And then what happened?”
“Nothing. It just stood there.”
“For two days,” said Beauvoir.
“Pardon?” asked Lacoste.
“It stood there for two days,” said Beauvoir.
“Dressed like that?”
“Well, not the whole time,” said Gamache. “I stayed up that first evening, to watch. Sometime in the night it disappeared, but it was too dark to see it go. I went to bed and in the morning it was back.”
Lacoste took a deep breath, then looked behind her at the misshapen lump on the floor of the root cellar, and the coroner kneeling beside it. Him. Her.
It looked pathetic now, drained of all life and any menace it once had. Like an animal curled in a corner to die.
But there was nothing natural about this ruined creature.
“You called it a cobrador,” she said. “I’ve never heard of it. Spanish, you say?” Gamache told her about the cobrador del frac. The Spanish debt collector, who followed and shamed people into paying their debts.
As Lacoste listened, her brows drew together in concern.
When he’d finished, she said, “So the cobrador was here to shame someone into paying a debt?”
“Not exactly,” said Gamache. “The modern cobrador does that. But what we had here was older. The ancestor. The original.”
“And what was that?”
Gamache turned to Jean-Guy, who picked up the story. Telling Lacoste what he’d found out. The island. The plague victims, lepers, babies with birth defects, the witches. And the conscience the authorities created.
“The cobradors were arrested,” said Gamache. “And tortured, to tell them who they were and where they came from. But none talked. Those who didn’t die under torture were executed. But others kept coming, taking their place. Finally the authorities figured out where they were coming from and sent soldiers to the island. They killed everyone.”
“Everyone?” asked Lacoste.
The problem with having an imagination was being able to imagine scenes like that. Men. Women. Children.
“But it seems some escaped,” said Gamache. “Maybe even helped by soldiers sickened by what they’d been ordered to do.”
Tormented, he thought, by their own conscience.
“Now, you’re not telling me what you had on the village green was some sort of ancient avenger,” said Lacoste. “From the Dark Ages.”
“You don’t believe it?” asked Gamache, then smiled slightly before Lacoste could answer. “Non. I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that someone knew about the ancient cobrador and decided to use it to get what they wanted.”
“That someone being Katie Evans,” said Lacoste.
“No,” said Gamache. “It couldn’t have been her. I saw her at the boulangerie and in the bookstore when the cobrador was on the village green. And Reine-Marie saw her and her husband heading for dinner in Knowlton last night.”
“So if Katie Evans wasn’t the cobrador, who was?”
It was a question impossible to answer at the moment.
“And if she wasn’t the cobrador,” said Lacoste, “she must’ve been his target. But what’s she doing in his costume?”
They shook their heads.
“Whoever did this will be long gone by now,” said Beauvoir.
“I’m afraid so,” said Gamache. “We’ll hear more from the coroner, but it must’ve happened sometime in the night. The cobrador wasn’t there this morning when I walked Henri and Gracie.”
“What time was that?” asked Lacoste.
“Just after seven.”
“And when did you last see it?”
Gamache thought. “Last night, but I can’t tell you when it left.”
“But it wasn’t there this morning,” said Lacoste. “What did you think had happened to it?”
“I thought it left because it got what it wanted.”
“And what it wanted was Katie Evans,” said Lacoste.
“It would seem so.”
“I wonder what she did,” said Lacoste, “that was so bad.”
Gamache was staring straight ahead of him. Not into the root cellar, but into space.
“What is it?” asked Jean-Guy.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Really?” he said. “A guy in a black cape and mask doesn’t make sense?”
Gamache gave him a stern look, then turned to Isabelle Lacoste. “A modern cobrador is a debt collector, not a killer. And the original cobrador, from the time of the plague, was a conscience. Not a killer. Even when provoked, even to save its own life, it didn’t resort to violence. And neither did this one, last evening.”
He told them about the mob.
“So why did this one kill?” asked Beauvoir.
His question was met with silence.
CHAPTER 16