by Louise Penny
The Chief Inspector touched the rough stone wall, wondering how many men and women, long dead, had touched it too as they’d come down to get root vegetables from the cellars. To keep starving prisoners alive long enough to kill them.
Off the antechamber there was a room. The room with the light.
“After you,” he gestured to the officer, and followed him.
Inside his eyes had to adjust again though this didn’t take so long. Large industrial lamps were positioned to bounce off the vaulted stone ceiling and walls but most were beamed into one corner of the room. And in that corner a handful of men and women worked. Some taking photographs, some collecting samples, some huddled over something Gamache couldn’t quite see but could imagine.
A body.
Inspector Langlois stood and brushing dirt from his knees he approached. “I’m glad you changed your mind.”
They shook hands.
“I needed to think about it. Madame MacWhirter also asked me to come, to act as a sort of honest-broker between them and you.”
Langlois smiled. “She thinks they need one?”
“Well, it’s more or less what you asked, wasn’t it?”
The Inspector nodded. “It’s true. And I’m grateful you’re here, but I wonder if we might keep this on an informal basis. Perhaps we could consider you a consultant?” Langlois looked behind him. “Would you like to see?”
“S’il vous plaît.”
It was a scene familiar to the Chief Inspector. A homicide team in the early stages of collecting evidence that would one day convict a man of murder, or a woman. The coroner was still there, just rising, a young doctor sent over from Hôtel-Dieu hospital where the Chief Coroner of Québec kept an office. This man wasn’t the Chief. Gamache knew him, but he was a doctor and judging by his composure he was experienced.
“He was hit from behind with that shovel there.” The doctor pointed to a partly buried tool beside the body. He was speaking to Inspector Langlois but shooting glances at Gamache. “Fairly straightforward. He was hit a few times. I’ve taken samples and need to get him onto my table, but there doesn’t seem to be any other trauma.”
“How long?” Langlois asked.
“Twelve hours, give or take an hour or so. We’re lucky with the environment. It’s consistent. No rain or snow, no fluctuation in temperature. I’ll tell you more precisely later.” He turned, collected his kit then nodded to Langlois and Gamache. But instead of leaving the coroner hesitated, looking round the cellar.
He seemed reluctant to leave. When Langlois peered at him the young doctor lost some of his composure but rallied.
“Would you like me to stay?”
“Why?” asked Langlois, his voice uninviting.
But still the doctor persevered. “You know.”
Now Inspector Langlois turned to him completely, challenging him to go further.
“Tell me.”
“Well,” the doctor stumbled. “In case you find anything else.”
Beside him Gamache felt the Inspector tense, but Gamache leaned in and whispered, “Perhaps he should stay.”
Langlois nodded once, his face hard, and the coroner stepped away from the pool of light, across the sharp border into darkness. And there he waited.
In case.
Everyone in that room knew “in case” of what.
Chief Inspector Gamache approached the body. The harsh light left nothing to the imagination. It bounced off the man’s dirty clothing, off his stringy, long, white hair, off his face, twisted. Off his hands, clasped closed, over dirt. Off the horrible wounds on his head.
Gamache knelt.
Yes, he was unmistakable. The extravagant black moustache, at odds with the white hair. The long, bushy eyebrows political cartoonists were so fond of caricaturing. The bulbous nose and fierce, almost mad, blue eyes. Intense even in death.
“Augustin Renaud,” said Langlois. “No doubt.”
“And Samuel de Champlain?”
Gamache had said out loud what everyone in that room, everyone in that sous-sol, everyone in that building had been thinking. But none had voiced. This was the “in case.”
“Any sign of him?”
“Not yet,” said Langlois, unhappily.
For where Augustin Renaud was there was always someone else.
Samuel de Champlain. Dead for almost four hundred years, but clinging to Augustin Renaud.
Champlain, who in 1608 had founded Québec, was long dead and buried.
But where?
That was the great mystery that hounded the Québécois. Somehow, over the centuries, they’d lost the founder.
They knew where minor functionaries from the early 1600s were buried, lieutenants and captains in Champlain’s brigade. They’d unearthed, and reburied, countless missionaries. The pioneers, the farmers, the nuns, the first habitants were all accounted for. With solemn graves and headstones, visited by school children, by priests on celebration days, by tourists and tour guides. Names like Hébert and Frontenac and Marie de l’Incarnation resonated with the Québécois, and stories were told of their selflessness, their bravery.
But one remained missing. One’s remains were missing.
The father of Québec, the most revered, the most renowned, the most courageous. The first Québécois.
Samuel de Champlain.
And one man had spent his entire adult life trying to find him. Augustin Renaud had dug and tunneled and hacked away under much of old Quebec City, following any whimsical clue that surfaced.
And now here he was, beneath the Literary and Historical Society, that bastion of Anglo Quebéc. With a shovel.
Dead himself. Murdered.
Why was he here? There seemed only one answer to that.
“Should I tell the premier ministre?” Langlois asked Gamache.
“Oui. The premier ministre, the Minister for Public Security. The Chief Archeologist. The Voice of English-speaking Québec. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society. The Parti Québécois.” Gamache looked at Langlois sternly. “Then you need to call a news conference and tell the population. Equally. At the same time.”
Langlois was clearly amazed by the suggestion. “Don’t you think it’s better to downplay this? I mean, really, it’s only Augustin Renaud, not the premier ministre. The man was a bit of a buffoon. No one took him seriously.”
“But they took his search seriously.”
Inspector Langlois stared at Gamache but said nothing.
“You’ll do as you want, of course,” said the Chief Inspector, sympathizing with the man. “But as your consultant that’s my counsel. Tell all and tell it quickly before the militant elements start spreading rumors.”
Gamache looked past the circle of intense light to the dark caverns beyond the main room.
Was Samuel de Champlain here right now? Armand Gamache, a student of Québec history, felt a frisson, an involuntary thrill.
And if he felt that, he thought, what will others feel?
Elizabeth MacWhirter was feeling ill. She turned her back to the window, a window and view that had always given her pleasure, until now. Out of it she still saw the metal roofs, the chimneys, the solid fieldstone buildings, the snow falling thicker now, but she also saw the television trucks and cars with radio station logos stenciled to the sides. She saw men and women she recognized from television, and photos in Le Soleil and La Presse. Journalists. And not the gutter press. Not just Allô Police, though they were there too. But respected news anchors.
They stood in front of the building, artificial lights on them, cameras pointed, they lined up like some game of Red Rover, and told their stories to the province. Elizabeth wondered what they were saying.
But it couldn’t be good, just degrees of bad.
She’d called the members of the library to give them what little information was available. It didn’t take long.
Augustin Renaud was found murdered in the basement. Pass it on.
She glanced out the window again at the q
uickly gathering reporters and snow, a storm of each, a blizzard, and moaned.
“What is it?” asked Winnie, joining her friend by the window. “Oh.”
Together they watched Porter descend the stairs, approach the swarming reporters and give what amounted to a news conference.
“Jesus,” sighed Winnie. “Do you think I can reach him with this?” She hefted the first volume of the Shorter Dictionary.
“You going to throw the book at him?” smiled Elizabeth.
“Shame no one donated a crossbow to the library.”
Inspector Langlois sat at the head of the polished table in the library of the Literary and Historical Society. It was a room at once intimate and grand. It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was “Googled” and “blogged.” Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge. It was an old library, filled with old books and dusty old thoughts.
It was calm and comforting.
It had been a long while since Inspector Langlois had been in a library. Not since his school days. A time filled with new experiences and the aromas that would be forever associated with them. Gym socks. Rotting bananas in lockers. Sweat. Old Spice cologne. Herbal Essence shampoo on the hair of girls he kissed, and more. A scent so sweet, so filled with longing his reaction was still physical whenever he smelt it.
And libraries. Quiet. Calm. A harbor from the turmoil of teenage life. When the Herbal Essence girls had pulled away, and mocked, when the gym sock boys had shoved and he’d shoved back, laughing. Rough-housing. Keeping the terror behind savage eyes.
He remembered how it felt to find himself in the library, away from possible attack but surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors.
For here thoughts were housed.
Young Langlois had sat down and gathered that power to him. The power that came from having information, knowledge, thoughts, and a calm place to collect them.
Inspector Langlois, of the Quebec City homicide squad, looked round the double-height library with its carved wood and old volumes and wondered at the people he was about to interview. People who had access to all these books, all this calm, all this power.
English people.
To his right sat his assistant, taking notes. On his left sat a man he’d only seen at a distance before today. Heard lecture. Seen on television. At trials, at public hearings, on talk shows. And at the funerals, six weeks ago. Close up, Chief Inspector Gamache looked different. Langlois had only ever seen him in a suit, with his trim moustache. Now the man was not only wearing a cardigan, and corduroys, but also a beard. Shot with gray. And a scar above his left temple.
“Alors,” Langlois started. “Before the first one comes in I want to go over what we know so far.”
“The victim,” his assistant read from his notebook, “is identified as Augustin Renaud. Seventy-two years of age. His next of kin has been notified, an ex-wife. No children. She’ll formally identify him later, but there’s no doubt. His driver’s license and health card both identify him. Also in his wallet was forty-five dollars and there was a further three dollars and twenty-two cents change in his pockets. When the body was removed we found another twenty-eight cents beneath him, fallen from his pocket we think. They’re modern coins. All Canadian.”
“Good,” said Langlois. “Go on.”
Beside him Chief Inspector Gamache listened, one hand holding the other on the table.
“We found a satchel underneath the body. Inside was a map of Québec, hand-drawn by him.”
It was on the table in front of them. The map showed areas of the city he’d excavated for Champlain, and the dates, going back decades.
“Any ideas?” Langlois asked Gamache as all three men examined the paper.
“I find this significant.” The Chief’s finger hovered over a blank spot on the map. A map that only acknowledged buildings and streets significant to Renaud’s search. Places Samuel de Champlain might have been buried. It showed the Basilica, it showed the Café Buade, it showed assorted restaurants and homes unfortunate enough to be targeted by Renaud.
It was as though the rest of the magnificent old city didn’t exist for Augustin Renaud.
And where Gamache’s finger pointed was the Literary and Historical Society. Missing. Not plotted. Not in existence in Renaud’s Champlain-centric world.
Langlois nodded. “I’d seen that too. Maybe he just didn’t have time to put it in.”
“It’s possible,” said Gamache.
“What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it would be a mistake to be blinded by Renaud’s passion. This murder may have nothing to do with Champlain.”
“Then why was he digging?” the young assistant asked.
“Good question,” smiled Gamache, ruefully. “It would seem a clue.”
“Right.” Langlois gathered up the map and returned it to the satchel. As he watched Gamache wondered why Renaud had needed the large leather bag to carry just that one slim piece of paper.
“Nothing else was in there?” Gamache nodded to the satchel in Langlois’s hand. “Just the map?”
“That’s all. Why?”
“He could have carried the map in his pocket. Why the satchel?”
“Habit,” said the assistant. “He probably carried it everywhere in case he found something.”
Gamache nodded. It was probably right.
“The coroner says Renaud was killed by the shovel sometime around eleven last night,” said Langlois. “He fell face forward into the dirt and an attempt was made to bury him.”
“Not deeply,” said the assistant. “Not well. Do you think he was meant to be found?”
“I wonder how often that cellar is used,” mused Langlois. “We’ll have to ask. Send in the first person, the head of the board. A,” the Inspector consulted his notes, “Porter Wilson.”
Porter entered. He tried not to show it, but he was deeply shocked to see this library, his library, occupied by the police force.
He had no rancor toward the French. It was impossible to live in Quebec City and feel like that. It would be a torturous life and an unnecessary torment. No, Porter knew the Francophones to be gracious and inclusive, thoughtful and stable. Most of them. There were radicals on either side.
And that was his problem. Tom Hancock, the minister, kept telling him so. He saw it as “sides,” no matter how many years went by, no matter how many French friends he had. No matter his daughter had married a Francophone and his grandchildren went to French schools and he himself spoke perfect French.
He still saw it as “sides,” with himself on the out-side. Because he was English. Still, he knew himself to be as much a Québécois as anyone else in that elegant room. Indeed, his family had been there for hundreds of years. He’d lived in Québec longer than that young officer, or the man at the head of the table, or Chief Inspector Gamache.
He’d been born there, lived a full life there, would be buried there. And yet, for all their friendliness, he would never be considered a Québécois, would never totally belong.
Except here. In the Literary and Historical Society, in the very center of the old city. Here he was at home, in an English world created by English words, surrounded by the busts of great Anglos before him.
But today, on his watch, the French force had moved in and were occupying the Lit and His.
“Please,” said Inspector Langlois, swiftly standing and indicating a seat. He spoke in his best, highly accented, English. “Join us.”
As though Mr. Wilson had a choice. They were the hosts and he was the guest. With an effort he swallowed a retort, and sat, though not in the seat indicated.
“We have some questions,” said Inspector Langlois, getting down to business.
Over the course of the next hour they interviewed everyone there. They learned from Porter Wilson that the library was locked every evening at six, and had been locked that morning wh
en he’d arrived. Nothing was out of place. But Langlois’s people had examined the large, old lock on the front door and while it showed no signs of tampering a clever six-year-old could have unlocked it without a key.
There was no alarm system.
“Why would we bother with an alarm?” Porter had asked. “No one comes when we’re open, why would anyone come when we’re closed?”
They learned this was the only place in old Quebec City English books could be found.
“And you seem to have a lot of them,” said Gamache. “I couldn’t help but notice as I walked through the back corridors and rooms that you have quite a few books not displayed.”
That was an understatement, he thought, remembering the boxes of books piled everywhere.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just an observation.”
“It’s true,” said Porter, reluctantly. “And more coming every day. Every time someone dies they leave us their books. That’s how we find out someone’s dead. A box of worthless books appears. More accurate than the Chronicle-Telegraph obits.”
“Are they always worthless?” asked Langlois.
“Well, we found a nice book of drawings once.”
“When was that?”
“1926.”
“Can you not sell some?” Gamache asked.
Porter stared at the Chief Inspector. Gamache stared back, not certain what had caused this sudden vitriolic look.
“Are you kidding?”
“Non, monsieur.”
“Well, we can’t. Tried once, members didn’t like it.”
“In 1926?” Langlois asked.
Wilson didn’t answer.
Winnie Manning came in next and confirmed that the night was indeed a strawberry, but added that the English were good pumpkins and that the library had a particularly impressive section on mattresses and mattress warfare.
“In fact,” she turned to Gamache. “I think that’s an area you’re interested in.”
“It is,” he admitted, to the surprise of both Langlois and his assistant. After Winnie left, saying she had to launch a new line of doorknobs, Gamache explained.
“She meant ‘naval’, not ‘mattress’.”