SIX
“Where to?” Isabelle Lacoste asked.
Gamache checked the dashboard clock. Almost seven.
“I need to get home for Henri, then back to headquarters for a few minutes.”
He knew he could ask his daughter Annie to feed and walk Henri, but she had other things on her mind.
“And Madame Landers?” Lacoste asked, as she turned the car toward the Chief’s home in Outremont.
Gamache had been wondering about that too.
“I’ll head down later tonight, and tell her in person.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“Merci, Isabelle, but that isn’t necessary. I might stay over at the B and B. Chief Inspector Brault said he’d send over what files he has. I’d like you to download them tomorrow morning. I’ll find out what I can in Three Pines.”
They didn’t stay long at his home, only long enough for the Chief to pack an overnight bag for himself and Henri. Gamache beckoned the large German shepherd into the backseat of the car and Henri, his satellite ears forward, received this command with delight. He leapt in, then, fearing Gamache might change his mind, immediately curled into as tight a ball as he could manage.
You can’t see me. Yoooou can’t seeeee meeee.
But in his excitement, and having eaten too fast, Henri gave himself away in an all-too-familiar fashion.
In the front seat, both the Chief Inspector and Isabelle Lacoste cracked open their windows, preferring the bitter cold outside to what threatened to melt the upholstery inside.
“Does he do that often?” she gasped.
“It’s a sign of affection, I’m told,” said the Chief, not meeting her eyes. “A compliment.” Gamache paused, turning his head to the window. “A great compliment.”
Isabelle Lacoste smiled. She was used to similar “compliments” from her husband and now their young son. She wondered why the Y chromosome was so smelly.
At S?reté headquarters, Gamache clipped Henri on the leather leash and the three of them entered the building.
“Hold it, please!” Lacoste called as a man got into the elevator at the far end of the corridor. She walked rapidly toward it, Gamache and Henri a pace behind, then she suddenly slowed. And stopped.
The man in the elevator hit a button. And hit it again. And again.
Lacoste stopped a foot from the elevator. Willing the doors to close so they could take the next one.
But Chief Inspector Gamache didn’t hesitate. He and Henri walked past Lacoste and into the elevator, apparently oblivious to the man with his finger pressed hard against the close button. As the doors began to close Gamache put his arm out to stop them and looked at Lacoste.
“Coming?”
Lacoste stepped inside to join Armand Gamache and Henri. And Jean-Guy Beauvoir.
Gamache acknowledged his former second in command with a small nod.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir did not return the greeting, preferring to stare straight ahead. If Isabelle Lacoste didn’t already believe in things like energy and vibes when she entered the elevator, she would have when she left. Inspector Beauvoir was throbbing, radiating strong emotion.
But what emotion? She stared at the numbers—2 … 3 … 4—and tried to analyze the waves pounding out of Jean-Guy Beauvoir.
Shame? Embarrassment? She knew she’d certainly be feeling both of those if she was him. But she wasn’t. And she suspected what Beauvoir felt and radiated was baser. Coarser. Simpler.
What poured out of him was rage.
6 … 7 …
Lacoste glanced at Beauvoir’s reflection in the pocked and dented door. She’d barely seen him since he’d transferred out of homicide and into Chief Superintendent Francoeur’s department.
Isabelle Lacoste remembered her mentor as lithe, energetic, frenetic at times. Slender to Gamache’s more robust frame. Rational to the Chief’s intuitive. He was action to Gamache’s contemplation.
Beauvoir liked lists. Gamache liked thoughts, ideas.
Beauvoir liked to question, Gamache liked to listen.
And yet there was a bond between the older man and the younger that seemed to reach through time. They held a natural, almost ancient, place in each other’s lives. Made all the more profound when Jean-Guy Beauvoir fell in love with Annie, the Chief’s daughter.
It had surprised Lacoste slightly that Beauvoir would fall for Annie. She wasn’t anything like Beauvoir’s ex-wife, or the parade of gorgeous Québécoise he’d dated. Annie Gamache chose comfort over fashion. She was neither pretty nor ugly. Not slender, but neither was she fat. Annie Gamache would never be the most attractive woman in the room. She never turned heads.
Until she laughed. And spoke.
To Lacoste’s amazement, Jean-Guy Beauvoir had figured out something many men never got. How very beautiful, how very attractive, happiness was.
Annie Gamache was happy, and Beauvoir fell in love with her.
Isabelle Lacoste admired that in him. In fact, she admired many things about her mentor, but what she most admired were his passion for the job and his unquestioned loyalty to Chief Inspector Gamache.
Until a few months ago. Though, if she was being honest, fissures had begun to appear before that.
Now she shifted her glance to Gamache’s reflection. He seemed relaxed, holding Henri’s leash loosely in his hands. She noticed the scar at his graying temple.
Nothing had been the same since the day that had happened. It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be. But it had taken Lacoste a while to realize just how much everything had changed.
She was standing in the ruins now, amid the rubble, and most of it had fallen from Beauvoir. His clean-shaven face was sallow, haggard. He looked much older than his thirty-eight years. Not simply tired, or even exhausted, but hollowed out. And into that hole he’d placed, for safekeeping, the last thing he possessed. His rage.
9 … 10 …
The faint hope she’d held, that the Chief and Inspector Beauvoir were just pretending to this rift, vanished. There was no harbor. No hope. No doubt.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir despised Armand Gamache.
This wasn’t an act.
Isabelle Lacoste wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t been in the elevator with them. Two armed men. And one with the advantage, if it could be called that, of near bottomless rage.
Here was a man with a gun and nothing more to lose.
If Jean-Guy Beauvoir loathed Gamache, Lacoste wondered how the Chief felt.
She studied him again in the scratched and dented elevator door. He seemed perfectly at ease.
Henri chose, if such a thing is a choice, to hand out another great compliment at that moment. Lacoste brought her hand to her face, in an involuntary survival instinct.
The dog, oblivious to the curdled air, looked around, his tags clinking cheerily together. His huge brown eyes glanced up at the man beside him. Not the one who held his leash. But the other man.
A familiar man.
14 … 15.
The elevator stopped and the door opened, bringing with it oxygen. Isabelle wondered if she’d have to burn her clothes.
Gamache held it open for Lacoste and she left as quickly as possible, desperate to get out of that stink, only part of which could be blamed on Henri. But before Gamache could step out, Henri turned to Beauvoir, and licked his hand.
Beauvoir pulled it back, as though scalded.
The German shepherd followed the Chief from the elevator. And the doors closed behind them. As the three walked toward the glass doors into the homicide division, Lacoste noticed that the hand that held the leash trembled.
It was slight, but it was there.
And Lacoste realized that Gamache had perfect control over Henri, if not Henri’s bowels. He could have held the leash tight, preventing the German shepherd from getting anywhere close to Beauvoir.
But Gamache hadn’t. He’d allowed the lick. Allowed the small kiss.
*
The elevator reached the top floor of S?reté headquarters and the doors clunked open to reveal a couple of men standing in the corridor.
“Holy shit, Beauvoir, what a stink.” One of them scowled.
“It wasn’t me.” Beauvoir could feel Henri’s lick, moist and warm on his hand.
“Right,” said the man, and caught the eye of the other agent.
“Fuck you,” Beauvoir mumbled as he pushed between them and into the office.
*
Chief Inspector Gamache looked at his homicide department. Where busy agents would once have sat into the night, the desks were now empty.
He wished the tranquillity was because all the murders had been solved. Or, better yet, there were no more murders. No more pain so great it made a person take a life. Someone else’s, or his own.
Like Constance Ouellet. Like the body below the bridge. Like he’d felt in the elevator just now.
But Armand Gamache was a realist, and knew the long list of homicides would only grow. What had diminished was his capacity to solve them.