A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(5)

Choquet.

It was unusual, though not unique. The normal spelling would be Choquette.

He strode across to his study and, grabbing her file off the floor, he opened it. Scanning down the pathetically scant information. Then he closed it, his hand trembling.

He glanced at the fire, and briefly considered laying her there. Letting her go up, or down, in flames. A witch for the burning.

But instead he went downstairs, to the basement.

There he unlocked the back room. Where all his files on old cases were kept. And at the very back of the back room, he unlocked a small box.

And there he found it.

Confirmed it.

Choquet.

Logic told him he could be wrong. What were the chances, after all? But in his heart he knew he was right.

Returning upstairs, his feet heavy on the steps, he stood at the window and watched the snow falling.

Children, in hastily unpacked snowsuits smelling of cedar, were running around the village green, chasing and tackling each other into the soft snow. Pelting anyone in their sights with snowballs. Rolling out snowmen. They shrieked and yelled and laughed.

He went into his study and spent the next hours doing research. And when Reine-Marie arrived back, he greeted her with a large Scotch and the news.

He had to go to the Gaspé.

“The Gaspé?” she asked, making certain she’d heard correctly. It was the last thing she expected him to say. Go to the bathroom. Go to the store. Go to Montréal even, for meetings. But the Gaspé Peninsula? Hundreds of miles away, where the edge of Québec met salt water.

“Are you going to see him?”

When he nodded, she said, “Then I’m coming with you.”

He returned to his study. Staring through the mullioned windows, he saw the exhausted children falling on their backs, one after the other, into the snow, sweeping their arms and legs up and down.

Then they got up and trudged home, squirming as snow melted down their necks and trickled in rivulets down their backs. It stuck to their mitts and the back of their tuques. Their faces were bright red and their noses ran.

They left behind them angels in the snow.

And in the study, his hand trembling slightly, Armand took a deep breath and changed the dot on Amelia’s file. To green.





CHAPTER 2

Michel Brébeuf could see the car approaching along the cliff highway for quite a distance. At first he watched through his telescope and then with the naked eye. There was nothing to obscure his view. Not a tree, not a house.

The wind had rubbed the land down to its essence. Some rough grass, and rock. Like a worry stone. Inundated in the summer by tourists and part-time residents who came for the rugged beauty of the area and left before the snow moved in, only a rare few appreciated the glories the Gaspé had to offer the rest of the year.

They clung to the peninsula because they had no desire to leave, or nowhere else to go.

Michel Brébeuf was among the latter.

The car slowed and then, to his surprise, it stopped at the foot of his drive, pulling onto the soft shoulder of the provincial highway.

It was true that he had a particularly spectacular view of Percé Rock, out in the bay, but there were better and safer places to pull over for a photograph.

Brébeuf grabbed his binoculars, sitting on the windowsill, and trained them on the car. It was a rental. He could tell by the plates. There were two people in it. Man and woman. Caucasian. Middle-aged, perhaps in their fifties.

Affluent, but not flashy.

He couldn’t see their faces, but quickly, instinctively, surmised this by their choice of rental and their clothing.

And then the man in the driver’s seat turned to speak to the woman beside him.

And Michel Brébeuf slowly lowered the binoculars and stared out to sea.

The snow that had whacked central Québec had arrived the day before in the Gaspé Peninsula as heavy rain. The sort of drenching common in the Maritimes in November. If it were possible to render sorrow, it would look like a November gale.

But then, like sorrow, it too passed and the new day arrived almost impossibly clear and bright, the sky a perfect blue. Only the ocean held on to the distress. It churned and broke against the stones of the shoreline. Out in the bay, standing all alone, was the magnificent Percé Rock, the Atlantic Ocean hurtling against it.

By the time he dragged his eyes back, the couple had turned the car into his driveway and were almost at the house. As he watched, they got out. And stood there. The man had his back on the house and stared out to sea. To the great rock with the great hole worn through it.

The woman went to him and took his hand. And then, together, they walked the last few yards to the house. Slowly. As reluctant, it would appear, to see him as he was to see them.

His heart was throbbing now and he wondered if he might drop dead before the couple arrived at his porch.

He hoped so.

His eyes, trained to these things, went to Armand’s hands. No weapon. Then to his coat. Was there a bulge there by the shoulder? But surely he hadn’t come to kill him. If he’d wanted to do that, he’d have done it before now. And not in front of Reine-Marie.

It would be a private assassination. And one Michel had, privately, been expecting for years.

What he hadn’t expected was a social call.

*

After making sure no blood would be spilled, Reine-Marie had gone inside, leaving Armand and Michel to sit on the porch, wrapped in sweaters and jackets, on cedar chairs turned silver by time and exposure. As had they.