How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #9)(9)

“You, of course, patron.”

“How nice of you to say that, but we both know it isn’t true. I just hope we didn’t leave any matches lying around.”

As the door closed, Gamache heard the agent he’d spoken with say to the others, “It’s about life…”

He was lampooning the Chief, in a high, childish voice. Making him sound idiotic.

The Chief walked down the long corridor to the elevator, and smiled.

In the elevator, they watched the numbers. 15, 14 …

The other person in the elevator got out, leaving them alone.

… 13, 12, 11 …

Lacoste was tempted to ask the one question that must never be overheard.

She looked at the Chief, watching the numbers. Relaxed. But she knew him enough to recognize the new lines, the deeper lines. The darker circles under his eyes.

Yes, she thought, let’s get out of here. Cross the bridge, get off the island. As far from this damned place as we can.

8 … 7 … 6 …

“Sir?”

“Oui?”

He turned to her and she saw, again, the weariness that came in unguarded moments. And she hadn’t the heart to ask what had happened to Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache’s second in command before her. Her own mentor. Gamache’s protégé. And more than that.

For fifteen years Gamache and Beauvoir had been a formidable team. Twenty years younger than the Chief Inspector, Jean-Guy Beauvoir was being groomed to take over.

And then suddenly, coming back from a case at a remote abbey a few months earlier, Inspector Beauvoir had been transferred out, into Chief Superintendent Francoeur’s own department.

It had been a mess.

Lacoste had tried to ask Beauvoir what’d happened, but the Inspector wanted nothing to do with anyone from homicide, and Chief Inspector Gamache had issued an order. No one in homicide was to have anything to do with Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

He was to be shunned. Disappeared. Made invisible.

Not only persona non grata, but persona non exista.

Isabelle Lacoste could hardly believe it. And the passage of time hadn’t made it more believable.

3 … 2 …

That was what she wanted to ask.

Was it true?

She wondered if it was a ruse, a way to get Beauvoir into Francoeur’s camp. To try to figure out what the Chief Superintendent was up to.

Surely Gamache and Beauvoir were still allies in this dangerous game.

But as the months passed, Beauvoir’s behavior had grown more erratic and Gamache had grown more resolute. And the gulf between them had grown into an ocean. And now they appeared to inhabit two different worlds.

As she followed Gamache to his car, Lacoste realized she hadn’t asked the question to spare his feelings, but her own. She didn’t want the answer. She wanted to believe that Beauvoir remained loyal, and Gamache had a hope of stopping whatever plan Francoeur had in place.

“Would you like to drive?” Gamache asked, offering her the keys.

“With pleasure.”

She drove through the Ville-Marie Tunnel, then up onto the Champlain Bridge. Gamache was silent, looking at the half-frozen St. Lawrence River far below. The traffic slowed almost to a stop once they approached the very top of the span. Lacoste, who was not at all afraid of heights, felt queasy. It was one thing to drive over the bridge, another thing to be stopped within feet of the low rail. And the long plunge.

She could see, far below, sheets of ice butting against each other in the cold current. Slush, like sludge, moved slowly under the bridge.

Beside her, Chief Inspector Gamache inhaled sharply, then exhaled and fidgeted. She remembered that he was afraid of heights. Lacoste noticed his hands were balled into fists, which he was tightening, then releasing. Tightening. Releasing.

“About Inspector Beauvoir,” she heard herself say. It felt a bit like jumping from the bridge.

He looked as though she’d slapped him. Which was, she realized, her goal. To slap him. Break the squirreling in his head.

She couldn’t, of course, physically hit Chief Inspector Gamache. But she could emotionally. And she had.

“Yes?” He looked at her but neither his voice nor his expression was encouraging.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

The car ahead moved a few feet, then put on its brakes. They were almost at the top of the span. The highest point.

“No.”

He’d slapped her back. And she felt the sting.

They sat in uncomfortable silence for a minute or so. But Lacoste noticed the Chief was no longer flexing his fists. Now he just stared out the window. And she wondered if she might have hit him too hard.

Then his face changed and Lacoste realized he was no longer looking at the dark waters of the St. Lawrence, but to the side of the bridge. They’d crested and could now see what the delay was. Police cars and an ambulance were blocking the far right lane, just where the bridge connected with the south shore.

A covered body, strapped to a wire basket, was being hauled up the embankment. Lacoste crossed herself, through force of habit and not out of any faith that it would make a difference to the dead or the living.

Gamache did not cross himself. Instead he stared.

The death had occurred on the south shore of Montréal. It wasn’t their territory, and not their body. The S?reté du Québec was responsible for policing all of Québec, except those cities with their own forces. It still left them plenty of territory, and plenty of bodies. But not this one.