A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(42)

“They’re both here,” said the agent. “We’ve put them in your office.”

“Merci. I’ll join them in a few minutes.”

“Fucking Leduc,” muttered Beauvoir. “Keeping a loaded gun in his rooms. Unlocked. In a school. Stupid, stupid man.”

“Either Leduc brought the gun out, or the murderer did,” said Lacoste. “In which case, the murderer must have known Leduc well enough to know there was a gun and where it was kept.”

“There’s something I need to show you,” said Commander Gamache.

*

Amelia Choquet sat at the long table, empty chairs between herself and the cadets on either side.

They’d been moved into the dining hall so that a search of their rooms could be conducted. Around her conversation buzzed, and far from dying down after the first flush of news, it had grown as speculation spread.

Rumor was loose in the air,

hunting for some neck to land on.

The cadets were shocked. And excited. Some were frightened and trying to hide it inside bravado.

Every now and then, there was a glance in her direction. She could tell what they were thinking. If there had to be a killer, let it be the weird one.

The easiest target. The one no one would defend.

Amelia shoved the sleeves of her uniform up to her elbows. Showing them the images and words etched into her skin, like a birthmark.

Their pink and perfect faces frowned in disapproval.

She was sticking her neck out, she knew.

Professor Leduc was dead. Murdered.

And she wondered how long it would be before they came for her.

“Can I sit down?”

She looked up, and there was Nathaniel, a soft white hand on the back of the chair next to her.

A fuck off caught in her throat, but instead she nodded.

“No one wants to sit with me,” he said. “Once I told them everything I knew. I think they think I did it and sitting close to me would make them look guilty too.”

“They’re afraid,” said Amelia.

“I’m afraid,” said Nathaniel. “Aren’t you? Look at what happened. How it happened—”

“Be quiet,” she warned, and deeply regretted letting him join her.

“Commander Gamache was asking about the map,” he whispered, leaning close to her. “He wanted me to find mine.”

He brought out a piece of paper and smoothed it on the table, but she swept it off.

“Get away from me.”

But it was too late.

With him joining her, the hunt for a neck to land on was over. She could tell. Not by the way the other students looked at her, but the way they looked away.

*

Gamache reached out and, using a pen, he pulled open the drawer of the bedside table.

“This was almost certainly already seen by your agents,” he said, replacing the pen in his breast pocket and putting his hands behind his back. “But the Scene of Crime team couldn’t know its significance.”

“And what is its significance?” asked Lacoste.

“I’ve seen it before,” said Beauvoir, bending closer. “It’s a map.”

Like Gamache, he held his hands behind his back.

For years, he’d assumed it was a mannerism of the older man, but as the investigations piled up, Inspector Beauvoir came to appreciate it for what it really was.

In holding his hands behind his back, Chief Inspector Gamache was less likely to instinctively reach out and touch something that should not be touched. From there, it became a mannerism. But the root of it was practical.

There was, Beauvoir was beginning in his late thirties to understand, a purpose for every action. From the blaring act of murder to the subtle grasp of one hand in the other.

Now Beauvoir turned to Gamache.

His mentor, his boss, his father-in-law. But still, in so many ways, a mystery.

“You saw it when we first found the body,” he said. No use hiding that fact, even if he’d wanted to. “When I opened the drawer. You suggested we leave, and so I closed it without even looking. But you saw. That’s why you hustled me out. Why didn’t you say something then?”

“I needed to think,” said Gamache.

“About what?” asked Lacoste. She too was surprised that Armand Gamache should conceal evidence. That might be overstating it, she knew. He didn’t so much hide the map as fail to point it out as soon as he himself had seen it.

“This is a copy.” Gamache waved toward the paper. “I have the original, here in my rooms.”

“You do?” asked Lacoste. “Then why … how?”

“Yes,” said Gamache. “Why. How. Jean-Guy is right. I saw the map when he opened the drawer, but it was fleeting and from a distance. I needed to make sure.”

“You didn’t touch it?” asked Lacoste.

“Non.”

“But why didn’t you tell us right away?”

“I used the map as an assignment for four of the cadets,” he explained. “I gave them each a copy. Nathaniel Smythe was one of the cadets.”

“And you thought—?” she asked.

“I wondered if he’d given his to Leduc,” said Gamache. “But he claims to still have it. He went back to his dorm to look for it.”