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“Monsieur Beauvoir.” Sam got to his feet. “Is this table okay? I asked for the best one.”

“It’s fine. It’s perfect.”

Jean-Guy tried, he really did, to keep up that professional wall between them. To be courteous but cool to this young man. But as soon as he’d spotted Sam sitting alone at the far end of the bistro by the bathrooms, at the worst table, his resolve began to crumble.

By the time he greeted the young man, the wall was rubble. He once again felt the child in his arms, clutching his new Sûreté-issue coat. The small face buried in it to stifle the sobs.

Those tears, of a ten-year-old whose mother had just been murdered, had stained the coat so that each day, for years, when Agent Beauvoir put it on to go with the Chief Inspector to investigate other murders, he saw the marks.

Every day Agent Jean-Guy Beauvoir was reminded that, as Gamache had said, this was not a puzzle. It wasn’t an exercise. It wasn’t even a job. This was a sacred duty. To the dead, and those who wept.

“What would you like?” Sam asked. “And please, you’re my guest.”

“No, of course not. The Sûreté will pay.”

“Are you sure—” Sam stopped suddenly.

“What?”

“No, never mind.”

“Say it.”

Sam shifted uneasily, then leaned forward and said, “I just don’t think Monsieur Gamache would approve.”

Beauvoir didn’t know where to begin with that. The idea that he needed the Chief Inspector’s approval to put a lunch on a tab. Sam’s comment made him wonder if that was everyone’s perception. That he was that much of an underling.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, picking up the menu. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But I do. I don’t want you to get into trouble because of me.”

“I won’t,” snapped Beauvoir.

They both ordered steak frites. The most expensive thing on the menu. But what the hell. He was allowed.

Snapping the menu shut, he said to Sam, “Did you go into the Gamache home the other night?”

“No, of course not. Is that what this’s about?”

“I need the truth.”

“Why would I go into the home of someone who doesn’t want me?”

Exactly, thought Jean-Guy, studying the man, the man-child, across from him. Why would he?

“Did Monsieur Gamache say I did? Why would he even think that?”

“Some objects were moved. It seems someone was there. And you made some sort of gesture to him the next morning. Like the clicking of a camera.”

Sam looked puzzled. Then Jean-Guy showed him, lifting his hand and moving his index finger up and down.

“That’s not a camera,” said Sam. “This’s a camera.” He mimicked hitting the red photo “button” on a smartphone. “I don’t know what this”—he did what Jean-Guy did—“is. And I can’t think when I would’ve even done it.”

“Yesterday morning, when you and Harriet were standing outside here, and the Chief Inspector was getting into his car.”

Sam thought for a moment, then his brow cleared and he laughed. “Oh, you mean this.”

He made another gesture, close but not exactly what Gamache had shown Beauvoir.