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The man and woman wore the same outsized button on their winter coats that declared, All will be well.

It was, he knew, a play on the word “well.” Since the pandemic, that word had taken on several meanings. Not all of them, in Gamache’s view, healthy.

He grew very still.

He’d been at many demonstrations and more than a few riots in his thirty-year career. He knew the flash points. The harbingers. And he knew how quickly things could spin way out of control.

But, but in all his years as a senior officer in the Sûreté du Québec he’d never seen this.

These two people, the man and woman, were on the same side. Those buttons declared their allegiance. And yet they’d turned their ire, normally reserved for the “other side,” on each other. Anger had become free-floating. Falling on the nearest neck.

The atmosphere in the auditorium was stifling. Though dressing appropriately for the extreme cold outside, people were now inside and overdressed in parkas, heavy boots, scarves, and mitts. They were pulling off their woolen tuques and shoving them into pockets, leaving normally well-groomed people with their hair standing on end, as though they’d had either a great fright or a spectacularly good idea.

Standing cheek by jowl, the crowd was overheating physically as well as emotionally. Chief Inspector Gamache could almost smell the frayed nerve ends frying.

He looked in frustration at the tall windows behind Lacoste. They’d long since been painted shut, and there was no way to open them and bring in crisp fresh air. They’d tried.

The Chief Inspector’s practiced eye continued to move over the crowd. Taking in things seen and unseen. It hadn’t yet, he felt, reached the boiling point, the tipping point. His job, as the senior officer, was to make sure it didn’t.

If it came close, he’d stop it. But he knew that also had its risks. Never mind the moral issue of stopping a gathering that had every legal right to be held, there was, foremost in his mind, the issue of public safety.

Having his agents move in and shut this event down could ignite the very violence he was trying to avoid.

Managing a crowd so it didn’t turn into a mob wasn’t science. Strategies could be taught; he himself had instructed recruits at the Sûreté Academy on managing large, potentially volatile, events. But finally it came down to judgment. And discipline.

Officers had to maintain control of the crowd, but also of themselves. Once, as a cadet, Gamache had seen trained officers at a demonstration panic, break ranks, and begin beating fellow citizens.

It was horrific. Sickening.

It had never happened under his command, but Gamache suspected that, given the right circumstances, it could. The madness of crowds was a terrible thing to see. The madness of police with clubs and guns was even worse.

Now, one by one, he asked his senior officers for their reports. His own voice calm and authoritative.

“Inspector Lacoste, what’s your read?” he spoke into his headset.

There was a brief pause as she weighed her answer. “Our people are on top of things. I think at this point it’s riskier to stop it than to let it go on.”

“Merci,” said Gamache. “Inspector Beauvoir, how are things outside?”

He was always formal when speaking on an open frequency, preferring to use their ranks rather than just their names.

Despite his protests, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir had been assigned, in his view banished, to the entrance.

In his late thirties, Beauvoir was slender, fit, though beginning to flesh out a bit. He shared second-in-command duties with Isabelle Lacoste, and also happened to be Gamache’s son-in-law.

“We’re going to exceed capacity, patron,” he reported from on top of the overturned crate he was standing on.

Jean-Guy held his gloved hand up to his eyes to cut out the glare from the sun bouncing off the snow. Those still in line were stomping their feet, rubbing their mitts to keep the blood circulating, and staring at him, as though Beauvoir were personally responsible for winter.

“I’d say there are a hundred and fifty, maybe hundred and eighty still to go. They’re getting pretty antsy. Some pushing, but no actual fights yet.”

“How many are in now?” Gamache asked.

“We’re at four hundred and seventy.”

“You know the cutoff. What’s likely to happen when you reach it?”

“Hard to tell. There’re some kids here, families. Though why anyone would bring a child to this . . .”