A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(70)

Gamache was in the living room, in front of the fire. Their dinner of poached salmon and asparagus on foldout tables in front of them.

“Waiting for me?” Charpentier asked. “Where’s Madame Gamache?”

“I asked her to join us, but she’s taken a tray to the bedroom. She wanted to leave us alone to talk.”

“We have that much to talk about?”

“I think we do. Don’t you? Wine?”

“Please, patron.”

There weren’t many whom Hugo Charpentier called patron, but Monsieur Gamache was one.

He poured them each a glass of white.

“Why are those students here?” Charpentier asked.

Armand Gamache had been waiting for just that question.

“They were the four who were closest to Professor Leduc. Cadets Cloutier and Laurin are in their final year and have been his protégés for almost three years now.”

“You think they’ve been infected,” said Charpentier. “Too close, for too long, to the plague that was Leduc.”

Gamache didn’t disagree.

“The other two are freshmen. Leduc’s newest protégés.”

“Why did he choose them?”

“I don’t know. We might never know.”

“Oh, I think we suspect, don’t you? Cadet Smythe is Anglo and gay and too eager to please. A disastrous combination in the hands of someone like Leduc. And the other? The Goth? Cadet Choquet? You only have to look at her to see the wounds. A man like Leduc crawls in through hurts like that.”

The tactician studied Gamache.

“Now the question, Commander, is whether you brought them here for their own good or to protect the rest of the student body? Did you bring possible victims to your village, or the killer?”

“Recently, at one of the soirées, I gave them the exercise of investigating that map,” said Gamache, choosing not to answer the question directly. “To hone their investigative skills. This morning, I told them that a copy of it was found in Leduc’s bedside table, and that what had started as a simple assignment was now part of the murder investigation.”

“Clever. It gave you an excuse to bring them here, and gave them something apparently important to do.”

“Well, it wasn’t completely without value.”

“What do you mean?”

“A copy was found in Leduc’s bedside table.”

Hugo Charpentier stared. It was difficult to surprise a man who specialized in seeing all possibilities at once, but this did.

“How did it get there?”

Gamache shook his head.

“Whose was it?” Charpentier asked. “One of the students’? Had to have been. But which one?”

“Amelia Choquet’s map is missing.”

Charpentier nodded, his head bobbing up and down like a toy on a dashboard.

“The bedside table,” he finally said.

“Oui,” agreed Gamache. “That struck me too. The map was put away, but not hidden.”

“The killer wasn’t looking for it,” said Charpentier. “So it was of no consequence to him, only to Leduc.”

“But why would Leduc care about this?”

They both looked down at the map. It had taken on a slight rose hue in the fading firelight.

“There is another possibility,” said Gamache.

“That it was placed there by the killer to implicate one of the cadets,” said Charpentier. “Choquet’s is missing? Then she’s the next victim. He’d make it look like suicide. A troubled, vulnerable freshman who killed a professor, then took her own life once the investigation closed in.”

Gamache showed no surprise at this scenario. It had occurred to him too.

That’s what he’d had to think about, in those few minutes alone in Leduc’s room with the body.

What the map meant. And where it might lead them. And what to do about it.

The only answer was to spirit the four cadets away to someplace safe. Quickly. Quietly. Before the murderer could implement the next phase of his plan.

“Of course, maybe her map was a random choice by the killer,” said Charpentier, thinking out loud. “It’s possible hers was the most easily taken. He just needed someone’s. It wouldn’t matter to the killer. He wanted a scapegoat. A cadet tethered to the body. Her suicide would close the case. Unless, of course—”

“Yes, I know.”

The other thing Gamache had thought about, in those long minutes with the dead man.

“Unless she killed him.”

“Or one of the other three did,” said Charpentier. “After all, they’d know she had the map. Who better to place it there, to implicate her, than one of the others? And you brought them all down here. Together.”

“I have at least placed them in separate billets,” said Gamache.

Charpentier nodded. “A wise precaution. Makes a pillow over the face in the middle of the night more difficult.”

The professor picked up the map. “We can surmise why it was in the bedside table of a dead man. To point suspicion at one of the cadets.” He looked at it closely. “But why are you in a stained-glass window?”

Charpentier waited, as though the snowman, or cow, or one of the pines might tell him.