A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15) - Louise Penny Page 0,120

no way to convict him.”

“So we try to convict someone else?” asked Jean-Guy. At the look of surprise on Gamache’s face, he backtracked. “Désolé. I didn’t mean you were suggesting we arrest an innocent person, just … I can’t quite get my head around what you’re saying. And why.”

“There’re enough things in this case that we can’t explain,” said Gamache. “Why Vivienne left her dog behind. Why was she on that bridge at all? Why would Carl Tracey kill her there and not at home? Who was she calling in the last hour of her life?”

“Why she didn’t want her father to come get her when he offered earlier in the day,” said Isabelle.

“All last night a phrase kept repeating itself. Dominica Oddly even used it as the title of her piece on Tracey.”

“All truth with malice in it,” said Beauvoir. “It’s a quote, right? Where’s it from? Not ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ I hope.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Gamache, clearing his throat in advance of a recitation.

He smiled slightly as Jean-Guy’s eyes widened and he recoiled from what promised to be an onslaught of poetry. It was a familiar bit of mutual self-mockery.

Dear God, thought Isabelle. How’re they going to live without each other?

“Non,” she said, smiling at this set piece. “It’s from Moby-Dick.”

“You were thinking about a fish?” asked Jean-Guy.

“About human nature,” said Armand. “About obsession. About allowing rancor to cloud judgment. About what happens when we see the malice but fail to see the truth. We were all appalled by what happened to Vivienne. Even before she was found, we more than suspected that her drunken, abusive husband had done something to her. I thought that myself. I had absolutely no doubt that if something had happened to Vivienne, her husband did it.”

“It wasn’t a wild guess,” said Isabelle. “Experience points to him. The statements of others, including a local Sûreté cop, point to him. Her father. Even Agent Cloutier.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Gamache.

He leaned forward. Trying to get them to see what he saw.

“And that’s the point. It was all so obvious, we never even considered anything, anyone else. Not seriously, anyway. I’m not saying Tracey didn’t murder Vivienne. I am saying we owe it to her to look at all possibilities. Including that he was telling the truth.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing all night?” asked Beauvoir, looking at the papers scattered on the coffee table and sofa.

“Yes.” Gamache sorted through them until he found Tracey’s statements.

“I’ll call in Cloutier and Cameron,” said Beauvoir. “We’ll need their help to go back over all this. Again.”

It was impossible to miss the exasperation in his voice. This was, Beauvoir knew, a waste of time. They should be concentrating on nailing Tracey, not looking elsewhere.

But then he wondered if that wasn’t exactly what Chief Inspector Gamache was doing. Trying to get Tracey. Sometimes, sometimes, if you didn’t look directly at a thing, something caught your attention. Out of the corner of your eye.

When Beauvoir looked at Gamache, as he did now, he saw a man who would easily, even in a bathrobe, perhaps especially in a bathrobe, pass as a college professor. A decent and thoughtful man. Who loved sitting by the fire, or in his garden, or in the bistro with a book. He loved good food and poetry and friends. He loved his wife and children and grandchildren. And Armand Gamache loathed violence.

But out of the corner of his eye, Jean-Guy Beauvoir saw cunning. A man who was calculating. Shrewd. Ruthless at times.

And determined. He would stop at nothing to catch a murderer. To catch Tracey.

“Why don’t you look over these.” Gamache handed over Tracey’s statements. “I’ll call Cameron and Cloutier.”

“But before you do…” Beauvoir looked him up and down, and Gamache smiled.

“Good point.”

He left Beauvoir and Lacoste by the fireplace. With their coffees. Reading.

As he mounted the stairs, Gamache looked back at Jean-Guy. He saw a man carefully held together. Taut. Intense. Nervous energy simmering close to the surface. Curt at times. Fierce in a fight. A man who blew off tension by happily smashing opponents into the boards in his hockey games.

But out of the corner of his eye, Armand Gamache saw kindness. Loyalty. A deep, almost inconceivable capacity for love.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir would stop at nothing to catch a killer. This killer.

* * *

“Oh, shit,” said Clara.

She was sober now. She felt she’d never been more sober.

Getting up from the easel, she had a shower, put on clean clothes, made a pot of