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“Agreed.”

There were children in the auditorium now. Gamache had instructed his people to make them the priority, should the worst happen.

That was the nightmare, of course. People crushing the life out of others in a mad rush to get into, or out of, a place should anything happen. And the children were the most vulnerable.

“Any weapons?”

“No guns. No knives,” Beauvoir reported. “A few bottles, and we’ve confiscated a whole lot of placards. People were pretty pissed about that. You’d have thought it was in the Charter of Rights to bring what amounts to a club into a crowded room.” He looked down at the pile in the snow by the brick wall.

Most were homemade, in crayon, and stapled to sticks of wood. It was somehow worse when threats were in crayon. Some placards had even been made by children, with the phrase Ça va bien aller.

All will be well.

That alone was enough to make Beauvoir’s blood boil. The demonstrators had co-opted a phrase that had, through the recent pandemic, meant comfort. And now they’d twisted it into a code, a subtle threat. Or, worse, made their children do it.

He looked out at the crowd and saw some pushing now, as spectators began to suspect they might not get in, and that their rival might.

“Things are getting more tense here,” said Beauvoir. “I think we should shut it down, patron.”

“Merci,” said Gamache, and sighed.

While he’d certainly weigh what Beauvoir advised, and Jean-Guy might even be right, Gamache had to admit that in this rare instance, he didn’t trust his second-in-command’s judgment. It couldn’t help but be colored by his personal feelings. Which was why, despite Beauvoir’s protests, he’d been assigned the security outside, and not inside, the auditorium.

Gamache looked at his watch. Five minutes to four.

It was time for him to call it. To go ahead or not.

Glancing behind him once again, he saw two middle-aged women standing together in the darkness.

The one on the left, in black slacks and a gray turtleneck, held a clipboard and was looking anxious.

But it was the other one who held Gamache’s attention.

Professor Abigail Robinson was nodding as the other woman talked. She laid a hand on her colleague’s arm and smiled. She was calm. Focused.

She wore a light blue cashmere sweater and a camel knee-length skirt. Tailored. Simple, classic. Something, Gamache thought, that his wife, Reine-Marie, would wear.

It was not a comfortable thought.

The university lecturer in statistics was the reason these people had come out on a bitterly cold late December day.

They could be skiing or skating or sitting by the fire with a hot chocolate. But instead they were here, crowded together. Pushing and shoving. Hoping for a better view of this statistician.

Some came to cheer, some to jeer and protest. Some to hear, some to heckle.

And maybe some, maybe one, to do worse.

The Chief Inspector had yet to meet the woman who was about to take the stage, though her assistant, who’d introduced herself as Debbie Schneider, had approached him when they’d arrived and offered what had sounded like a favor, a rare personal audience.

He’d declined, explaining he had a job to do. And he had.

But he was honest enough with himself to admit that had it been anyone else, he’d have wanted to meet them. Would have asked to meet them, to go over the security arrangements. To lay down some rules. To look them in the eye and make that personal connection between protected and protector.

It was the first time in his career he’d declined, politely, to meet the person whose life was in his hands. Instead he’d gone through those arrangements with Madame Schneider, and left it at that.

He turned back to the auditorium. The sun was setting. It would be dark in twenty minutes.

“The event goes ahead,” he said.