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They huddled around the site.

“Looks like a real person,” said Beauvoir. “At the bottom he credits two professors, Paul Robinson and Colette Roberge, with giving him the idea.”

“I think in repeating the phrase Colette was trying to guide me to this,” said Gamache. “If not the site, then the concept.”

“What concept?” asked Isabelle.

“That Abigail Robinson’s conclusions were no more legitimate than the connection between”—he bent down and read off Beauvoir’s screen—“per capita cheese consumption and people who died after being caught up in their bedsheets.”

“Really?” Beauvoir leaned closer. He himself often woke up in the night, entangled. And he liked cheese.

Gamache now wondered if the Chancellor had also been trying to warn him about making connections that did not exist. It was, of course, the bane of any investigator. To misinterpret, to overinterpret.

Was he connecting two things that were not related? The death of Maria Robinson and the murder of Debbie Schneider forty years later. Was he making a spurious correlation?

He didn’t know. What he did know was that yet another thread led back to the Chancellor.

“We need a search warrant,” he said as he moved to the door. “For Colette Roberge’s home.”

It was time to give that thread a tug.

Chapter 41

Colette?” said her husband. “Who are these people? Why’re they searching our home?”

He stood in the kitchen, a seventy-six-year-old man, bewildered.

Armand, who hadn’t spoken to Monsieur Roberge in a few years, and had only seen him from a distance in his recent visits, looked from him to Colette. It was clear that Jean-Paul Roberge, who’d risen to the top of a large Montréal accounting firm, was now living with dementia.

“I didn’t know,” Armand said to Colette.

“Would it have changed anything if you had?” she asked.

“It might have.”

While Inspector Beauvoir led the search, Armand went for a walk outside with Jean-Paul and Colette, getting the older man away from the activity that was so clearly agitating him. Armand was on one side of Monsieur Roberge, taking his hand, while Colette took the other. Holding him steady and upright in case of ice underfoot.

Armand listened as Jean-Paul told him about his recent visit with his mother. And his plans to take Colette to Prague for their honeymoon.

Jean-Paul stopped and turned bright blue eyes on Armand. “Are you my brother?”

“No, sir. I’m a friend.”

“Are you? Really?” asked Monsieur Roberge.

Standing beside her husband, Colette stared at Armand, clearly asking the same thing.

“I hope so,” he said. He could see Beauvoir at the door, his hand up to get his attention. “Perhaps we should go inside.”

“Yes,” said Jean-Paul. “We should pack.”

“Good idea,” said his wife. “I’ve put the suitcases on the bed. Maybe you can start.”

When they got inside, Armand gestured to Beauvoir to wait a moment while he walked with Monsieur Roberge to their bedroom. He was surprised to see that suitcases really were on the bed.

“It gives him something to do,” Colette explained, as they watched Jean-Paul take socks out of a chest of drawers and carefully place them in one of the cases. “When he goes to bed, I unpack.”

“I’m sorry,” said Armand.