A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(101)

Paul Gélinas had no idea what was going through Gamache’s head, but he himself was preoccupied with what he’d found. And what it meant. And how it could be pertinent, and useful.

Gélinas had spent the afternoon researching the backgrounds of Michel Brébeuf and Armand Gamache. It was like archeology. There was digging and there was dirt. And there were broken things.

He’d thought Brébeuf and Gamache had first met in the academy, as roommates, but he soon found out he was wrong. Their friendship went back to the streets of Montréal as children. They’d been neighbors. Attended the same kindergarten, played on the same teams, double-dated and went to dances together. Bummed around Europe for six months before joining the academy. Together.

The only time they were really apart was when Armand Gamache went to Cambridge to read history. That’s where he’d picked up his English. While Brébeuf stayed behind and went to Laval University in Quebec City.

They’d been each other’s best man at their weddings, and stood up for each other at christenings.

Michel Brébeuf had excelled in the S?reté, rising quickly through the ranks to the position of Superintendent. Poised to become the next Chief Superintendent.

Armand Gamache had quickly achieved Chief Inspector in homicide, and built that department into one of the finest in the nation.

And then he’d stalled. And seen his best friend’s rise continue.

There had been no hint, though, of envy. They’d remained close friends outside of work, and collaborative colleagues at work.

Their lives had been lived side by side. Until the two roads, the personal and the professional, collided. And went downhill. Fast.

Armand Gamache had gotten whiffs of something wrong within the S?reté. There were always scandals, of course. Misuses of power. But they’d been swiftly dealt with in the past by the senior officers, including Brébeuf.

But this was different. So huge as to be almost invisible, the scale impossible to comprehend.

At first Gamache gave little credence to the rumors. They’d come through back channels. People who had reason to smear the S?reté.

But something stuck, and he started to quietly investigate.

It started in the northern territories. Among the Cree and the Inuit. Remote areas that were almost impossible to penetrate. And for good reason, Gamache knew.

Try as he might, he couldn’t get purchase on the rumors.

Until one day he’d met a Cree elder on a bench outside the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City. Her community had spent months raising enough money to send her down south, to speak to the leaders. To tell them about the beatings and murders. The missing. So desperate was their need, they’d finally risked trusting the white authorities.

But no one would listen. No one would even let her past the front door.

And so she’d sat down. Exhausted, hungry, out of money and hope.

Until she was joined on the bench by the large man with the kind eyes. Who asked if she needed help.

She told him everything. Everything. Not knowing who he was, but having no choice. He was the last house, the last ear, the final hope.

He’d listened. And he’d believed her.

And so began a battle that lasted years and that landed at the door of the very person Gamache trusted the most.

Michel Brébeuf.

The rot went even deeper than that and ended in catastrophe. But not the great scale of disaster it would have been had Armand Gamache not stopped it.

Brébeuf had been banished and Gamache had resigned, losing his job and almost losing his life.

And it wasn’t over yet, Gélinas knew.

The S?reté had been cleaned out, but there remained the academy. The training ground for cruelty and corruption.

The corrosion within the S?reté and subsequent events were well known to the general public. The media had covered it to the point of their own brutality.

What interested Gélinas now was what was unknown. The men’s personal lives.

He’d dug and he’d dug that afternoon. Until he struck dirt.

For all his professional venality, Michel Brébeuf’s personal life appeared conventional. He’d married. Had three children. Joined service clubs.

Brébeuf was a model husband and father and grandfather. But his home life had shattered when the degree of his professional deceit became known. His wife had left him, and there was a rift with his children that had yet to be healed.

But the dirt the RCMP officer sought and found came from a different source.

Not Brébeuf. But Gamache.

Gélinas had found it when he’d dug deep enough into Armand Gamache’s personal life and found a few lines in a long-dormant document. The words had uncurled and re-formed. And walked off the page. Into the present.

Into the waiting hands of the man charged with ensuring a fair investigation.

*

“A shrewdness of apes,” Myrna read from the reference book, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, before looking up to see Armand and the others arrive.

Reine-Marie got up to greet her husband.

“We’re playing a game,” she explained. “Naming groups of animals.”

“We started off trying to come up with a collective name for a group of S?reté cadets,” said Myrna, gesturing toward the students.

“I’m thinking it’s a gloom of cadets,” said Ruth.