Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(14)

He’d listened to their protests, their arguments. And then he said something he’d hoped wouldn’t be necessary. He didn’t want to shatter their confidence, or drain their energy. Or undermine their commitment.

But he could see now that they needed to know. They deserved to know.

“We’ve lost.”

They looked at him blankly. And then some, those who’d followed his report most clearly, blanched.

“We’ve lost,” he repeated, his voice even. Calm. Certain. “The war on drugs was lost a long time ago. That was bad enough, but what’s happened is the knock-on effect. If drugs are out of control, it isn’t long before we lose our grip on all crime. We aren’t there yet. But we will be. At the rate things are going, growing, we’ll be overwhelmed in just a few years.”

They’d argued, of course. Not wanting to see it. To accept it. And neither had he, when he’d first compiled the information. Put it all together. In the past, the departments had competed, been territorial. Had been reluctant to share information, statistics. Especially those that might make them look bad.

It appeared to Gamache that he was the first one to meld all the information. To put it all together.

He wondered if this was how the captain of a great ship felt when he alone knew it was sinking. To everyone else, it still looked fine. Moving along as it always had.

But he knew the cold waters, unseen, were rising.

At first he’d been in denial too. Going over and over the files. The figures. The projections.

And then one day in early autumn, at home in Three Pines, he’d laid his hand on the last dossier, gotten up from his seat by the fire, and gone for a walk.

Alone. No Reine-Marie. No Gracie. No Henri, who’d stood perplexed and hurt by the door. His ball in his mouth.

Gamache had walked, and walked. He’d sat on the bench above the village and looked out over the valley. The forests. To the mountains, some of which were in Québec. And some in Vermont.

The border, the boundary, impossible to see from there.

Then he’d lowered his head. Into his hands. And he’d kept it there, shutting out the world. The knowledge.

And then he’d gotten back up, and walked some more. For hours.

Trying to find a solution.

Suppose they got a larger budget? Hired more agents? Threw more resources at the crisis?

Surely there was something that could be done. The situation couldn’t possibly be hopeless.

He only stopped when he’d met himself again. The Armand who’d been standing on the side of the quiet road, in the middle of nowhere, waiting. At the intersection of truth and wishful thinking.

Where the straight road splayed.

And he knew then. They were all going down. Not just the S?reté, but the entire province. And not necessarily his generation. But the next. And the next. His grandchildren.

He was up to his neck in crime. They’d be over their heads.

And he knew something else. Something he wished he didn’t know, but could not now deny.

There was nothing that could be done. They’d reached and passed the point of no return. Without even a lifeboat in sight. The corruption of decades within government and police forces had seen to that.

“So what do we do?” asked one of the older officers in the meeting. “Give up?”

“Non. I don’t have a solution. Not yet. So we bear down, do our jobs, communicate. Gather information and share it.”

He looked at each of them, sternly.

“And we try to come up with creative solutions. Come to me with anything, everything. No matter how crazy it sounds.”

What he felt in that room, as he left, wasn’t despair, not quite yet. Not yet panic, but panic adjacent.

*

And now, many months later, they sat in the same conference room.

All had looked so bleak back then. Now they were close, so close to their first major victory.

But it depended on this trial. The outcome, but also the path of it.

Perversely, when things had been at their worst, everything had appeared just fine. Québec, the S?reté, functioning as it should.

Now that there was a glimmer of hope, things appeared to be spinning out of control.

Senior politicians and some media outlets had lately noticed what appeared to be a certain sleight of hand on the part of the head of the S?reté.

Arrests were up. And for a while that had caused outright celebration on the part of politicians and their electorate.

Until the Radio-Canada television show, Enquête, had investigated and discovered that the arrests were mostly for small to medium-size crimes.

“Explain this,” the Premier Ministre du Québec had demanded, having called Chief Superintendent Gamache into his office in Québec City the day after the program aired.

The Premier had slapped a thick file onto his desk. Even from across the room, Gamache could see what it was.

The printout of the latest monthly report on S?reté activities.

“I’ve checked. Fucking Enquête is right, Armand. Yes, arrests are up, and thank God you’re still managing to arrest murderers, but what about the rest? There hasn’t been a significant arrest in other divisions since you took over. No biker gang member, no organized crime figure. No drug arrests or even seizures. Minor trafficking, but nothing more. What the hell are you doing over there?”