Page 4

“Oui, patron.”

Chapter 2

Gamache once again walked the backstage area, getting reports from the agents stationed there. Checking the doors and dark corners.

He asked the technician to turn the lights up.

“Who are these people?” the sound technician asked, cocking her head to indicate the crowd. “Who holds an event between Christmas and New Year’s? Who comes out to one?”

It was a good question.

Gamache recognized a few faces in the crowd. They were, he knew, good, decent people. Some wore the buttons. Some did not.

Some of them were neighbors. Friends even. But most were strangers.

Québec was a society that felt things strongly and wasn’t afraid to express them. Which was a very good thing. It meant they were doing something right. The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views.

But there was a limit to that expression, a line. And Armand Gamache knew he was standing on it.

If he’d had any thoughts that he might be overreacting, his doubts had been banished earlier in the day when he, along with Beauvoir and Lacoste, had arrived for the final walk-through.

As they’d pulled in, they were surprised to see cars already in the parking lot and people lined up at the door. They were shuffling from foot to foot, punching their arms, rubbing their mittened hands together in the bitter cold. Clouds of breath, like opaque thoughts, hung over them.

It was still hours until the event.

Taking off his own gloves, Gamache had pulled out his notebook and, ripping out pages, he’d given each a number depending on their place in line, with his initials.

“Go home. Get warm. When you come back, show that to the officers at the door. They’ll let you in right away.”

“Can’t,” said a woman at the front of the line as she took the paper. “We drove from Moncton.”

“New Brunswick?” asked Beauvoir.

“Yes,” said her husband. “Drove all night.”

Others were now pressing forward, reaching for a number as though they were starving and this was food.

“The local café will be open,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “Go there, have lunch, and come back when the doors open at three thirty.”

Some did. But most elected to stay, taking turns sitting in warm cars.

As the Sûreté officers entered the building, Lacoste muttered, “When were these seeds of anger sown / And on what ground.”

It was an apt quote, from a poem by their friend Ruth Zardo. Though the Sûreté officers knew perfectly well who’d sown the seeds that now had landed on the ground beneath their feet.

It wasn’t joy, wasn’t happiness, wasn’t optimism that had propelled that couple almost a thousand kilometers from their home in a different province, through the night, along snowy and icy roads, to here.

It wasn’t pleasure that had lifted others from their armchairs in front of their fires. Leaving behind their families. Their Christmas trees lit and cheery, the remnants of turkey dinner in the fridge. The preparations for New Year’s Eve unfinished.

To stand in the biting cold.

It was the seeds of anger, sown by a genteel statistician and taking root.

The building caretaker, Éric Viau, was waiting for them in the old gymnasium. Gamache had met him two days before, when he’d first been given the unexpected assignment.

Armand had been on the outdoor rink in the middle of the village of Three Pines with Reine-Marie and two of their granddaughters. He had his own skates on and was kneeling down, lacing up eight-year-old Florence’s skates, while Reine-Marie knelt in front of little Zora, doing up hers.

They were the girls’ first pair. A Christmas gift from their grandparents.