A Great Reckoning

by Louise Penny

  All his senses were shutting down.

  On the screen, an officer in tactical gear was moving forward. Then he suddenly stopped. And stood straight up. And in a grotesque parody of a ballet move, he spun gracefully. And fell.

  A voice called, “Jean-Guy.”

  Jacques watched as Professor Beauvoir was dragged to safety. Then the camera switched and he saw Commander Gamache, completely focused. Quickly assessing the wounded man, as gunfire sounded, pounded, around them.

  Beauvoir stared up at Gamache as he tried to stanch the bleeding. Beauvoir was silent but his eyes were wide with terror. Pleading.

  “I have to go,” said Gamache, putting a pressure bandage in the younger man’s hands and holding it to the wound. Gamache paused for a moment. Then leaning forward, he kissed him gently on the forehead.

  * * *

  Ruth Zardo stood at the threshold and stared at the boy in the bed.

  He slept soundly, deeply. She listened to the rhythm of his breathing. Then she closed the door and went downstairs.

  The old poet didn’t sleep much anymore. Didn’t seem to need it. What she needed was time. She could see the shore ahead. A distance away still, she thought. But visible now.

  The boy had left his copy of the map in the kitchen. Ruth made a cup of chamomile and sat in her usual seat next to Rosa, who was asleep in her rag bed beside the oven.

  Rosa muttered in her sleep, exhaling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  Ruth stared at the map. She’d thought maybe she’d be moved to write a poem. To purge her feelings onto paper. As the person who’d made this map had so obviously done.

  But now she felt there was no need. The map said it all.

  In the fine contours. The roads and rivers. The stranded cow, the elated snowman.

  The three small but vibrant pines.

  And the smears. Of mud. Or blood.

  Yes, the map said it all.

  She looked up. Heavenward, but not all the way to the heavens. Her thoughts stopped at the second floor of her home. Where a young man, who just that morning had found one of his professors murdered, lay dead to the world.

  A thing like that would scar a person. Invade his waking and sleeping mind.

  And yet young Nathaniel slept, apparently undisturbed by what had happened.

  * * *

  Jacques Laurin’s heart pounded in his chest, his temples, his throat.

  The gunmen were dead. And Sûreté agents were also dead or wounded. But, incredibly, a few had escaped unhurt. Because of the calm and the tactics, on the fly, of their commander. Who’d led them through the factory and beaten the unbeatable scenario and now lay unconscious on the concrete floor. Paramedics working on him. Blood seeping from his head.

  An agent, a woman, knelt beside him, holding his bloody hand.

  Cadet Laurin turned off the laptop and pushed away from the desk.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Café?”

  Mayor Florent tipped the carafe toward the two investigators.

  Paul Gélinas, out of his RCMP uniform and into civilian clothing, shook his head but Isabelle Lacoste nodded.

  The mayor’s office in the town hall was infused with the scent of stale and slightly burnt coffee. She suspected the glass pot, stained with decades of caffeine, sat on the hotplate all day. If nothing else, this man could give his constituents a coffee.

  At seven thirty on a cold March morning, it was no mean offering.

  He added milk and sugar, at her request, and handed Lacoste the mug.

  This was not an office made to impress. Once, perhaps, but not anymore. The laminate wood paneling on the walls was coming loose in spots and there was more than one dark mark on the acoustic tiles of the ceiling. The carpet had seen better days, and God only knew what else it had seen.

  And yet, for all that, the room was cheerful, with mismatched fabric on the chairs and a desk recycled from some old convent school, Lacoste suspected. The walls were crammed with photographs of local sports teams, smiling and holding up pennants proclaiming they’d come in third, or second, or fifth in some tournament.

  Among the young athletes was the mayor. Beaming proudly from each picture.

  Some of the photos were quite faded, and as they progressed around the office walls, the mayor had grown more and more rotund, as his hair had thinned. And grayed.

  Many of these girls and boys would have children of their own now.

  On Mayor Florent’s desk were smaller framed pictures of his own family. Children, grandchildren. Hugging dogs and cats and a horse.

  The mayor took his seat and leaned toward them, a look of concern on his face.

  He was not at all what Chief Inspector Lacoste had expected. Given Monsieur Gamache’s description, she was prepared to meet some wiry whip of a man, worn thin by disappointment and worry and the north wind.

  But as she looked into those mild, expectant eyes, the eyes of her grandfather, she realized that Monsieur Gamache had never described him physically, but had only said the mayor had a keen sense of right and wrong. And held on to resentments.

  She had filled in the rest.

  He’d also said he liked the man. And Lacoste could see why. She liked him too. Beside her, the RCMP officer had relaxed and crossed his legs.

  Mayor Florent might very well have murdered Serge Leduc, but he did not seem a threat to anyone else.

  Isabelle Lacoste decided to take a tack she rarely used.

  “Did you kill Serge Leduc, Your Honor?”

  Mostly because it was almost never successful.

  His bushy gray eyebrows rose in surprise, and Deputy Commissioner Gélinas turned in his seat to stare at her.

  Then the mayor laughed. Not long, not loud, but with what seemed genuine amusement.

  “Oh my dear, I can understand why you’d think that.”

  Not many could get away with calling Chief Inspector Lacoste “my dear,” but she felt absolutely no annoyance with him. It was so obviously said without wanting to belittle her.

  “I’d think that too,” he went on. “If I was you. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. You weren’t joking. A man’s been killed, and I should be sad. Upset. But I’m not.”

  The mayor interlocked his fingers. His jovial eyes grew sharp.

  “I despised Serge Leduc. If I was ever going to commit murder, it would be him. If anyone deserved to be killed, it was him. I go to church every Sunday. Sometimes I go there on weekdays, to pray for a citizen in trouble or distress. And I always pray for Serge Leduc.”

  “For his soul,” said Gélinas.

  “For his death.”

  “You hated him that much?” Lacoste asked.

  Mayor Florent leaned back in his chair and was quiet for a moment, and in the silence Isabelle Lacoste thought she heard the distant shouts and happy screams of children at play.

  “You’re here because you know the story. Because Commander Gamache has told you what happened with your academy.”

  Lacoste was about to say it wasn’t her academy, but decided to let it pass. She understood what he meant.

  “I won’t repeat the details then, but I will tell you that this is a small community. We don’t have much. Our wealth is our children. We worked for years to raise money to build them a proper place to play. Where they could have social clubs and do sports all year round. So that they could grow up strong and healthy. And then they’d almost certainly move away. There isn’t much here anymore for young people. But we could give them their childhoods. And send them into the world sturdy and happy. Serge Leduc stole all that. Could I have killed him? Yes. Did I? No.”

  But as he spoke, he throbbed. With rage suppressed.

  Here was a bomb, Lacoste knew. Wrapped in flesh. Human, certainly. But that only made him more likely to explode.

  “I understand Commander Gamache and you have worked out a plan where the local children can use the academy’s facilities,” said Lacoste. “Surely that helps.”

  “You think?”
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br />   The mayor stared at her with shrewd eyes, and she stared back with an equally penetrating gaze.

  “Where were you two nights ago, sir?”

  He pulled his agenda toward him and turned back a page.

  “I had a Lion’s Club dinner that night. It ended at about nine.” He looked up at them and smiled again. “We’re all getting quite old. Nine is about as late as we can manage.”

  Lacoste smiled back, and hoped and prayed she wouldn’t have to arrest this man.

  God, she knew, sometimes answered prayers. He had, after all, answered the mayor’s.

  “I went home after that. My wife was there with her bridge club. They broke up at the end of that rubber, and we were asleep by ten.”

  “How old’s your wife?” Paul Gélinas asked.

  The mayor looked at him, surprised by the question but not upset.

  “A year younger than me. She’s seventy-two.”

  “Does she wear a hearing aid?” Gélinas asked.

  “Two. And yes, she takes them out at night.” He looked from one to the other of the agents. “And yes, I suppose it might be possible for me to leave and she’d never know it. I sometimes have trouble sleeping. I go downstairs to the kitchen and do some work. As far as I know, Marie doesn’t notice. I try not to disturb her.”

  He was, Chief Inspector Lacoste realized, behaving like a man with nothing to hide. Or nothing to lose.

  “You design software,” said Lacoste, and the mayor nodded. “What sort?”

  “Programs for insurance companies mostly. Actuarial tables. You’d be surprised how many variables need to be taken into account.”

  “Do you do security software?” asked Lacoste.

  “No, that’s a specialty.”

  “The information you work on for insurance companies would be confidential,” said Gélinas. “Private.”

  “Extremely,” agreed Mayor Florent.

  “So you create it in such a way that it can’t be stolen?”

  “No, I just do the programming. Someone else worries about security. Why? Wait. Let me guess.” He studied the two officers in front of him, no longer amused. “You’re wondering about the academy’s security system and if I could break in. Perhaps, but I doubt it. I’m sure their system is very sophisticated. You’re welcome to take my computer and see what I’ve been up to. Any porn you find is my wife’s.”

  Even Deputy Commissioner Gélinas smiled at that.

  “You must be quite good at what you do,” said Chief Inspector Lacoste.

  The mayor looked around. “Does this look like the office of a successful man? If I was that good, don’t you think I’d be in Montréal or Toronto?”

  “I think this looks like the office of a very successful man,” said Lacoste.

  Mayor Florent held her gaze. “Merci.”

  The investigators got up and shook hands with the mayor, who told them they were always welcome back. As they walked down the scuffed hall toward the door and the bright March morning, Lacoste said to Gélinas, “Actuarial tables. They try to predict—”

  “When a person will die.”

  * * *

  Classes were back in session at the academy. Jean-Guy Beauvoir saw to that on Commander Gamache’s orders.

  Not simply to maintain structure and discipline, but also to try to keep the cadets from doing their own investigations. Beauvoir had found them snooping in the halls outside the Duke’s rooms. He found them hanging around the dead man’s office, taking fingerprints from the door handle as though the homicide investigators might have failed to do that.

  He found them in the weight room, where Leduc worked out, searching the lockers. For clues. Though, of course, they didn’t have a clue what they were looking for.

  It was natural and would have been endearing even, if it wasn’t so extremely annoying. This was the problem with having a building crammed full of partly trained investigators. And a murder.

  Once the eight a.m. classes had started, Inspector Beauvoir picked up the phone. He’d been hoping for a reply to his email, but there was none.

  He punched in a long line of numbers and listened to the unusual ring tone. The two throbs instead of the one long one he was used to.

  “McDermot and Ryan,” came the cheerful voice, as though she were selling teddy bears or flowers, and not guns.

  “Yes,” said Jean-Guy, struggling to keep his Québécois accent under control. “I’m calling from Canada. I’m with the Sûreté du Québec and we’re investigating a homicide.”

  “One moment, please.”

  Hold? he thought. She put me on hold? Could there possibly be a lineup of calls from police around the world, investigating murders?

  Maybe they had a department dedicated to it.

  Jean-Guy sighed and listened to the classical music, but it didn’t take long for a less cheerful voice to pick up the phone.

  “Inspector Beauvoir?” she said.

  “Oui.”

  “My name is Elizabeth Coldbrook. I’m the vice president in charge of public affairs here at McDermot. I received your email and was just writing a response. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but I wanted to be sure of my facts.”

  Her voice was brusque, and somehow Beauvoir had the feeling he’d done something wrong. He often had that feeling when speaking with people in Paris or London.

  “Can you send me the email anyway,” he asked, “so I have a written record? But I’d like to speak to you now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. It’s a terrible thing that’s happened. Your email said a death. An accident?”

  “Non. Deliberate. A single shot to the temple.”

  “Ahhh,” she said, with some sadness but without surprise.

  When you make handguns, thought Beauvoir, what exactly do you think will happen?

  Instead he asked, “Have you found anything?”

  “Yes. We have an order here for a .45 McDermot MR VI. It was picked up by Serge Leduc on September 21, 2011.”

  “Picked up? In England?”

  “No, at our distributer in Vermont. I can send you the order number and information.”

  She was sounding less brusque. Or he was getting used to it.

  She was certainly being helpful, but then, he suspected, she had a lot of experience speaking with the police about handguns.

  “S’il vous plaît. Is this a popular gun?”

  “Not much anymore. A few police forces still use it, though they’re turning more and more to automatic pistols, of course.”

  “You make those too?”

  “We do. The one you’re interested in, the McDermot .45, is a very old design. A six-shooter.”

  “Like the Wild West?”

  She laughed in a semiautomatic manner. “I guess so. Colt based their design on ours. At least, we like to think that. The height of the McDermot’s popularity was during the Great War. We also supplied quite a few in the Second World War, but then demand fell off.”

  “So why would someone order one today?”

  “Collectors like them. Was your man a collector?”

  “Non. He was a professor at an academy that trains police officers here in Québec.”

  “Then he was interested in weapons.”

  “Yes, but modern ones. Not antiques.”

  “It might be antique, but it does the job.”

  “The job being to kill?”

  There was a pause. “Not necessarily.”

  Beauvoir let that sit there, the pause elongating.

  “Well, yes. Sometimes. Or to prevent bloodshed. We don’t sell handguns into Canada. They’re banned, of course. Which is why Mr. Leduc ordered from the United States. I’m not sure how he got it across the border.”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  The border was more porous than anyone cared to admit.

  “If he wasn’t a collector, can you think why else he’d want this particular make?” asked Beauvoir.

  “Well, it’s sturdy, and there’s not as much kickback as with other revolvers. And it’s very accurate.”

  “Accuracy was not an issue,” said Beauvoir. “And it’s not like he was heading for the trenches. Why would anyone want a six-shooter when they could have an automatic weapon?”

  He could almost hear her shrug. Not out of disinterest, but because she didn’t have the answer any more than he did.

  Beauvoir decided to take another tack.

  “Why would he order from you, all the way from England, and not get a Colt, if they were so similar?”

  “History. And quality. Gun people know our make.”

  “But a Colt or a Smith and Wesson are still good and would be cheaper, non? They’re made right in the States.”

  “Yes, they would be less expensive.”

  “But maybe they don’t make silencers,” said Beauvoir.

  “We don’t either.”

  “You must. The revolver had one. I mentioned that in the email.”

  “I thought that was a typo, or a mistake on your part.”

  “You thought I didn’t know what a silencer was?” he asked.

  “Well, it didn’t make sense to me,” she said. “Revolvers don’t have silencers. They don’t work.”

  “This one did.”

  It seemed one had attached itself to Madame Coldbrook. The quiet became uncomfortable.

  “Who made the silencer?” Beauvoir finally asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If not McDermot, then who?” he pushed. “If someone asks for one, where do you send them?”

  “To the automatic weapons department. Revolvers do not have silencers.” The imperious voice had surfaced yet again. Like Jaws. And then the voice softened. “It’s tragic when someone commits suicide, and this company takes it very much to heart. I take it to heart.”

  And for some reason, he believed her. How many calls in a month, a week, a day did this woman receive from police around the world, a body behind the conversation?

  “It wasn’t a suicide,” said Beauvoir. He didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

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