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“All right, but this is the last time.”
Parents. The worst.
But when Agent Ferdinand heard what his father had found when he’d looked up some of the sites, some of the theories, his hands grew cold and numb.
“Thanks!” He hung up and immediately called homicide, asking, then demanding to be put through to Chief Inspector Gamache.
They did not do that. But they did connect him to Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, the Chief’s second-in-command.
Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir were in a meeting at Sûreté headquarters in Montréal with the forensic accounting team. Usually only the agent who did the actual research would report, but this time the whole department was there. All looking eager. Including the head of the department.
“I’ll tell you, patron,” said Inspector Eidinger. “We were so surprised we had to check and double-check. Didn’t want to give you the wrong information.”
“So what did you find, Samantha?”
It was then the Chief’s phone rang. It was Reine-Marie. A text also came in at that exact moment, marked urgent, from Isabelle Lacoste.
While Armand glanced down at his phone, Jean-Guy’s began to buzz.
They looked at each other.
Something had happened.
“Pardon,” said Gamache, stepping away from the desk. “Reine-Marie?”
“Agent Ferdinand, this had better be good.”
“It is, sir. That date. I’ve figured it out.” No need to mention his father …
“May 29, 1914, Armand,” said Reine-Marie. “I know what it means.”
As he listened, Chief Inspector Gamache touched his screen, and the urgent text from Inspector Lacoste appeared.
He listened to Reine-Marie while reading Isabelle’s message. Beside him, Beauvoir was listening to Agent Ferdinand.
Everyone, at once, had the same thing to say.
Gamache and Beauvoir clicked off their phones and, looking at each other, they spoke at the same time.
“The Empress of Ireland.”
“Really?” said Samantha Eidinger, the head of forensic accounting. “Funny you should say that.”
CHAPTER 23
How could he not have known?
Armand Gamache sat in his office, his hands on either side of his suddenly heavy head, staring at his computer screen and the site describing the sinking of the great ocean liner.
When the Empress of Ireland went down off the coast of Rimouski, she took more than one thousand men, women, and all but four of the children with her.
How could this be news to him? How was this catastrophe not as famous, infamous, as the Titanic?
And the fact it happened in Canada? Wide-eyed, barely breathing, Armand read the reports.
Imagining …
A few feet away, Jean-Guy had installed himself on the sofa in the seating area of Gamache’s office.
