A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15)(6)

He leaned forward. “You can’t possibly think I have a thin skin, do you?”

Heads shook.

“Good. I doubt you’re going to read anything I haven’t heard before. Let’s get it out in the open. I’ll answer your questions, once, and then we can put it behind us. D’accord?”

The unhappy young man was again clutching his phone and willing the building to collapse.

No one reached the top rank of a police force as large and powerful as the S?reté without being ambitious. And ruthless. And the agent knew what Gamache had had to do to get to the top. He also knew what they were saying about Gamache on social media. That he was no better than a sociopath.

And now that man was staring at him. Inviting him to walk into what was almost certainly a trap.

“I’d rather not, patron.”

“I see.” Gamache lowered his voice, though all could still hear the words. “When I was Chief Superintendent, I had a framed poster in my office. On it were the last words of a favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Noli timere. It’s Latin. Do you know what it means?”

He looked around the room.

“Neither did I,” he admitted when no one spoke. “I had to look it up. It means ‘Be Not Afraid.’” His eyes returned to the unhappy young agent. “In this job you’ll have to do things that scare you. You might be afraid, but you must be brave. When I ask you to do something, you must trust there’s a good reason. And I need to trust that you will do it. D’accord?”

The agent looked down at his phone, clicked it on, and began reading.

“Gamache is a madman. A coward,” he read. His voice was strong and steady, but his face was a bright red. “He should be locked up, not sent back to duty. Québec isn’t safe as long as he’s there.”

The agent looked up, his eyes pleading to be allowed to stop. “They’re just comments, sir. Responding to some article. These aren’t real people.”

Gamache raised his brows. “Unless you’re suggesting they’re bots—”

The agent shook his head.

“—then they are real people. I’m just hoping they’re not Québécois.”

“That one’s from Trois-Rivières.”

Gamache grimaced. “Go on. Anyone else have one?”

They went around the table, reading wildly insulting posts.

“Gamache doesn’t even want to be back,” one agent read. “I heard he turned the job down. He doesn’t care about the people of Québec. He only cares about himself.” The agent looked up and saw a slight wince.

“Others are saying the same thing. That you didn’t want to come back to homicide. To work with us. Is that true?”

“Partly, yes.”

No one in the room expected that answer. All phones were lowered to the table as they stared.

“I did turn down the offer to return to homicide as Chief Inspector,” said Gamache. “But not because I didn’t want it.”

“Then why?”

“Because you have an exceptional leader in Chief Inspector Beauvoir. I would never displace him. I wouldn’t do that to him, or to you.”

There was silence as the officers took that in.

“You’re wondering if I really want to be here or if I took the job to spite those who only offered it to humiliate me?”

Now they stared at him, clearly surprised by his candor. At least the younger ones were. Isabelle Lacoste and other veterans looked on with amusement at their amazement.

“Did you?” asked an agent.

“No. I turned the offer down when I thought Chief Inspector Beauvoir was staying. But when he told me he was taking up a job in private industry, in Paris, he and I talked. I spoke to my wife and decided to accept the position.” He looked around the room. “I understand your concern, but I wouldn’t be here unless I wanted to be. Working in the S?reté, in any capacity, is a privilege. It’s been the greatest honor of my life. I can think of no better way to be useful, or better people to serve with.”

He said it with such conviction, such unabashed sincerity, that the motto on their warrant cards, their vehicles, their badges, suddenly had real meaning.

Service, Intégrité, Justice.

Gamache turned his attention to the long whiteboard covering a wall. He’d come in over the weekend, when it was quiet, and sat in this conference room studying the files. The photographs. Going over the cases, the faces on the wall.

He knew where the investigations stood and what each lead investigator had done—or not done.

Just then all eyes shifted to behind Gamache.



* * *



When Jean-Guy Beauvoir had arrived twenty minutes earlier, he’d gone directly to his office and closed the door. It wasn’t something he normally did. Normally his door was wide open. Normally he went straight to the conference room. Normally he was the only Chief Inspector of homicide there.

But this was not a normal day. How the next half hour or so went would set the tone going forward.

He needed to gather himself.

How would his agents and inspectors react to having not just their former Chief Inspector back but one so storied? A private man who’d become a public figure.

But, even more complex for Beauvoir, he wasn’t really sure how he himself would react. He and Armand had discussed it, of course, at length, but theory and reality were often very different.