A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(120)

Olivier smiled. “Talking about Clairton reminded me how great this movie is.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think it’s the bond—”

“No, I mean, why Clairton?”

“It’s the town the main characters come from. There, that’s it.”

He waved at the screen as a shot of a steel town in Pennsylvania came on.

“I’ll leave you to it.”

Olivier watched Armand walk back into the living room and the world of Mary Poppins, where the father was singing “The Life I Lead.”

On his screen, Robert De Niro was threatening a barroom brawl with a Green Beret.

*

Jean-Guy’s wipers were taking the sleet off the windshield as fast as they could.

He liked driving. It was a chance to listen to music and think. And at the moment he was thinking about those fingerprints, and the blatant contradiction in what his father-in-law had said.

The prints were his. But he had never touched the gun.

The key to the crime was in the prints.

Did he mean Amelia Choquet?

Despite Annie’s protests, and his own gut feeling, Jean-Guy retained a fragment of doubt. Could the Goth Girl be Gamache’s daughter? She didn’t look at all like either Annie or her brother, Daniel. But maybe she did, and he was simply distracted by all the accoutrements. The tattoos and piercings disguising who and what she really was.

Could Amelia, who perhaps not coincidently shared a name with Gamache’s mother, be the result of a momentary lapse twenty years earlier?

But if he knew who she was, why did Gamache admit her to the academy?

Maybe he didn’t know Amelia existed until he saw the application, saw the birth mother, saw the birth date. Saw the name. And put it all together.

And then he’d want to see the girl.

And after the crime, he’d want to protect her. The daughter he never knew he had.

Did Gamache think she killed Serge Leduc? And was he shielding her, intentionally muddying the investigation by admitting the prints were his, when they weren’t?

Misdirection. Another whale.

All truth with malice in it.

The wipers swished the slush, clearing the windshield. And despite the mess, Jean-Guy felt he was seeing clearer. Getting closer.

Suppose he took a different tack? Suppose Gamache was telling the truth. The prints were his, even though he’d never touched the gun.

How could that be?

Swish, swish, swish.

Jean-Guy was almost there, he could feel the answer just ahead, in the darkness.

Swish, swish— He slowed the car and pulled off into a service station. And there he sat in the idling vehicle, the sleet slapping the roof and steamy windows.

If Monsieur Gamache hadn’t touched the revolver, but the prints were his, then someone must’ve placed them there. Someone with such skill and expertise that even the S?reté’s own lab didn’t detect the fake.

While the S?reté Academy was stuffed with professors, top in their field, and soon-to-be agents and visiting experts, few people had the ability to do that.

It demanded not just skill, but someone especially gifted in forensics and manipulation. This was a plan that didn’t just happen. It must’ve been months in the making.

It needed patience, and timing, and nerve. To plant evidence like that needed a great tactician. And the academy had one of those. Someone recruited by Gamache himself.

Hugo Charpentier.

Swish, swish, swish.

*

Armand placed his hand over Reine-Marie’s, which was gripping the shoe box even as she watched the movie.

Just as Mary Poppins slid up the banister, to the astonishment of the Banks children, Armand leaned over and whispered, “I’ll do this.”

“I should.”

“No, I should.”

Her grip loosened and her hands slid off the old cardboard box.

Armand took it and stepped between the cadets sprawled on the floor, their eyes glued to the screen. Walking into the kitchen, he poured himself another coffee and sat at the harvest table.

At the far end of the room, Olivier had his feet up watching his movie.

Taking a deep breath, Armand looked down at the box filled with telegrams and remembered the number of times he’d been the one to deliver the news.

To see the door open and the expectant, then perplexed, then frightened faces of parents, or spouses, or siblings, or children.

And then to tell them what had happened.

He remembered each and every time over the past thirty years. He closed his eyes and could see all those faces, those eyes, pleading with him. To tell them it wasn’t true. And he could feel their hands gripping his arm, as they fell. Mothers, fathers, husbands and wives crumpled to the floor. While he held them, and gently lowered them. To the ground.

And stayed with them until they could get up again. A strange resurrection. Changed forever.

To the accompaniment of Mary Poppins singing about a spoonful of sugar and medicine, he opened the box. And started reading the telegrams. Looking for one name. Turcotte.

He thought he could just hurry through, scanning for the name. But he could not. He found himself reading each and every one. There was a devastating sameness about them. The commanding officers clearly overwhelmed by the number that had to be written. After a while, the telegrams were written in a sort of shorthand, a scrawl, that made sense a hundred years later when the place names were familiar, but that must have, at the moment of delivery, been meaningless. Their child gone, forever. In some unintelligible foreign field.