Elizabeth MacWhirter was feeling ill. She turned her back to the window, a window and view that had always given her pleasure, until now. Out of it she still saw the metal roofs, the chimneys, the solid fieldstone buildings, the snow falling thicker now, but she also saw the television trucks and cars with radio station logos stenciled to the sides. She saw men and women she recognized from television, and photos in Le Soleil and La Presse. Journalists. And not the gutter press. Not just All? Police, though they were there too. But respected news anchors.
They stood in front of the building, artificial lights on them, cameras pointed, they lined up like some game of Red Rover, and told their stories to the province. Elizabeth wondered what they were saying.
But it couldn’t be good, just degrees of bad.
She’d called the members of the library to give them what little information was available. It didn’t take long.
Augustin Renaud was found murdered in the basement. Pass it on.
She glanced out the window again at the quickly gathering reporters and snow, a storm of each, a blizzard, and moaned.
“What is it?” asked Winnie, joining her friend by the window. “Oh.”
Together they watched Porter descend the stairs, approach the swarming reporters and give what amounted to a news conference.
“Jesus,” sighed Winnie. “Do you think I can reach him with this?” She hefted the first volume of the Shorter Dictionary.
“You going to throw the book at him?” smiled Elizabeth.
“Shame no one donated a crossbow to the library.”
Inspector Langlois sat at the head of the polished table in the library of the Literary and Historical Society. It was a room at once intimate and grand. It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was “Googled” and “blogged.” Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge. It was an old library, filled with old books and dusty old thoughts.
It was calm and comforting.
It had been a long while since Inspector Langlois had been in a library. Not since his school days. A time filled with new experiences and the aromas that would be forever associated with them. Gym socks. Rotting bananas in lockers. Sweat. Old Spice cologne. Herbal Essence shampoo on the hair of girls he kissed, and more. A scent so sweet, so filled with longing his reaction was still physical whenever he smelt it.
And libraries. Quiet. Calm. A harbor from the turmoil of teenage life. When the Herbal Essence girls had pulled away, and mocked, when the gym sock boys had shoved and he’d shoved back, laughing. Rough-housing. Keeping the terror behind savage eyes.
He remembered how it felt to find himself in the library, away from possible attack but surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors.
For here thoughts were housed.
Young Langlois had sat down and gathered that power to him. The power that came from having information, knowledge, thoughts, and a calm place to collect them.
Inspector Langlois, of the Quebec City homicide squad, looked round the double-height library with its carved wood and old volumes and wondered at the people he was about to interview. People who had access to all these books, all this calm, all this power.
English people.
To his right sat his assistant, taking notes. On his left sat a man he’d only seen at a distance before today. Heard lecture. Seen on television. At trials, at public hearings, on talk shows. And at the funerals, six weeks ago. Close up, Chief Inspector Gamache looked different. Langlois had only ever seen him in a suit, with his trim moustache. Now the man was not only wearing a cardigan, and corduroys, but also a beard. Shot with gray. And a scar above his left temple.
“Alors,” Langlois started. “Before the first one comes in I want to go over what we know so far.”
“The victim,” his assistant read from his notebook, “is identified as Augustin Renaud. Seventy-two years of age. His next of kin has been notified, an ex-wife. No children. She’ll formally identify him later, but there’s no doubt. His driver’s license and health card both identify him. Also in his wallet was forty-five dollars and there was a further three dollars and twenty-two cents change in his pockets. When the body was removed we found another twenty-eight cents beneath him, fallen from his pocket we think. They’re modern coins. All Canadian.”
“Good,” said Langlois. “Go on.”
Beside him Chief Inspector Gamache listened, one hand holding the other on the table.
“We found a satchel underneath the body. Inside was a map of Québec, hand-drawn by him.”
It was on the table in front of them. The map showed areas of the city he’d excavated for Champlain, and the dates, going back decades.
“Any ideas?” Langlois asked Gamache as all three men examined the paper.
“I find this significant.” The Chief’s finger hovered over a blank spot on the map. A map that only acknowledged buildings and streets significant to Renaud’s search. Places Samuel de Champlain might have been buried. It showed the Basilica, it showed the Café Buade, it showed assorted restaurants and homes unfortunate enough to be targeted by Renaud.
It was as though the rest of the magnificent old city didn’t exist for Augustin Renaud.
And where Gamache’s finger pointed was the Literary and Historical Society. Missing. Not plotted. Not in existence in Renaud’s Champlain-centric world.
Langlois nodded. “I’d seen that too. Maybe he just didn’t have time to put it in.”
“It’s possible,” said Gamache.
“What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it would be a mistake to be blinded by Renaud’s passion. This murder may have nothing to do with Champlain.”
“Then why was he digging?” the young assistant asked.
“Good question,” smiled Gamache, ruefully. “It would seem a clue.”
“Right.” Langlois gathered up the map and returned it to the satchel. As he watched Gamache wondered why Renaud had needed the large leather bag to carry just that one slim piece of paper.
“Nothing else was in there?” Gamache nodded to the satchel in Langlois’s hand. “Just the map?”
“That’s all. Why?”
“He could have carried the map in his pocket. Why the satchel?”
“Habit,” said the assistant. “He probably carried it everywhere in case he found something.”