A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(8)

But the previous head of the school had commanded in name only. The reality was, he bowed to, then bent and finally broke under the demands of the former head of the S?reté, who ran the school as his personal training ground.

But Chief Superintendent Francoeur was no longer the head of the S?reté. No longer with the force. No longer on this earth. Gamache had seen to that.

And now Gamache was cleaning up the merde the man left behind.

The first step was to establish autonomy, but also a courteous collaboration with his counterpart at the S?reté.

Commander Gamache watched as Chief Superintendent Brunel made her way down the pile of proposed professors, occasionally making notes or small comments, mumbling to herself. Until she reached the final dossier. She stared at it, then, without even opening it, she looked up at Gamache and held his eyes.

“Is this a joke?”

“No.”

She looked back down but didn’t touch the manila file. It was enough to see the name.

Michel Brébeuf.

When she looked up again, there was anger, bordering on rage, on her face.

“This is madness, Armand.”





CHAPTER 3

Serge Leduc waited.

He was prepared. All morning his iPhone had buzzed with text messages from colleagues, other professors at the academy, to say that the new commander was going to visit them.

At eight in the morning they’d assumed it was a courtesy call. Armand Gamache was making the rounds to introduce himself and perhaps ask their opinions and advice.

By nine o’clock a slight pall of doubt had descended, and the texts became more guarded.

By eleven, the stream of information had become a trickle as fewer and fewer messages appeared in Professor Leduc’s inbox. And those that did were curt.

Have you heard from Roland?

Anyone know anything?

I can hear him coming down the corridor.

And finally, by noon, Leduc’s iPhone had fallen silent.

He sat in his large office and looked at the books lining his walls. On weapons. On federal and provincial regulations. On common law and the Napoleonic Code. There were case histories and training manuals. The wall space not taken up with textbooks was allocated to his citations and an old etching of the parts of a musket.

A small man in his mid-forties, but still powerfully built, Leduc had been moved to the academy after he’d been caught with drugs stolen from the S?reté evidence locker.

Leduc had nursed a slight suspicion that Chief Superintendent Francoeur had engineered the whole thing. Not that he wasn’t guilty. Leduc had been skimming from the mountain of seized drugs for years, selling them on to crime syndicates. What struck him as suspicious was that he’d suddenly been caught just as an opening for the number two position at the academy had come up.

Francoeur had presented Inspector Leduc with a choice. Become second-in-command at the academy or be fired.

Serge Leduc had navigated the realpolitik of the S?reté by being a pragmatist. If this was what the Chief Superintendent wanted, then so be it. It was unhelpful and unhealthy to nurse a grudge or to fight the inevitable. Especially against Sylvain Francoeur. Leduc himself had been an enforcer long enough to know what being fired by Francoeur might mean.

That had been almost a decade ago, and with his transfer a new era had dawned. Though not, perhaps, an Age of Enlightenment.

On Francoeur’s orders, Serge Leduc had reshaped the academy. Picking and choosing the recruits. Changing the curriculum. Guiding, nurturing, and whipping the young men and women into shape. And the shape they took was that of Serge Leduc.

Any recruit who resisted or even appeared about to question was marked for special treatment. Something guaranteed to create an attitude adjustment.

The actual head of the academy had protested feebly but was just going through the motions. The Commander excelled at form without function. He was an impressive figurehead, a relic kept in place to calm worried mothers and fathers who naturally, though mistakenly, believed the primary danger to their children was physical.

The Commander inspired confidence with his gray hair and straight back, in his dress uniform on entrance day when he smiled at the eager recruits, and on graduation when they smiled at him smugly, knowingly. The rest of the time he cowered in his office, afraid of the phone, afraid of the knock on the door, afraid of the night and afraid of the dawn.

And now he was gone. And Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone. “Fired,” as it were, in an irony not lost on Leduc.

And now Professor Leduc waited for the knock on the door.

He wasn’t worried. He was the Duke. And all this belonged to him.

*

Armand Gamache walked down the long corridor. They’d torn down the old academy, where he himself had trained, a few years earlier and relocated to the South Shore of Montréal to this new glass and concrete and steel structure.

Gamache, while appreciating tradition and respecting history, had not mourned the loss of the former academy. It was only bricks and mortar. What mattered wasn’t what the building looked like but what happened inside.

Two S?reté agents walked behind Gamache, personally chosen for this detail and lent to him by Thérèse Brunel.

He stopped at the door. The final one on his list. And without hesitation, he knocked.

*

Leduc heard it and despite himself gave a tiny, involuntary spasm. And he realized that a small part of himself never thought the rap on the door would ever really come.