Reine-Marie.
“Non,” her husband agreed. “He’s not done yet.”
He looked out the window. In the darkness, the cobrador looked like another pine. A fourth tree. A now permanent part of their lives setting down roots deep in their little community.
Then Gamache followed the line of the cobrador’s eyes. The stare he’d held, unflinching, even while being threatened with a beating. Possibly death.
There, framed in a mullioned window, was one of the few people who hadn’t come out onto the village green. To defend or attack the cobrador.
Then Jacqueline turned away, to go back to her kneading.
CHAPTER 10
“You told him to leave. You must’ve known then what would happen,” said the Crown Prosecutor. “There’d even been a death threat.”
“The man was enraged and provoked,” said Chief Superintendent Gamache. “People say things they don’t mean.”
“And people do things they later regret,” said the Crown. “When they’re angry. But it’s still done and can’t be undone. It might be manslaughter and not murder, but still a man would have been slaughtered. Surely your experience as head of homicide taught you that.”
“It has,” Gamache admitted.
“And still you didn’t act. If not then, when? What were you waiting for?”
Gamache looked into the face of the prosecutor, then at the crowd jammed into the stuffy courtroom. He knew how it sounded. How it probably would’ve sounded to him.
But there was nothing he could have done that would have been legal. Or effective.
What happened that November evening proved that the cobrador was having an effect.
Chief Superintendent Gamache had doubted what happened had been Marchand’s idea. He was fairly new to the village and hadn’t been any trouble, until that night. It seemed someone had gotten to him. Told him, either directly or through manipulation, to threaten the cobrador.
Gamache doubted that the goal was to kill the Conscience. More likely, it was to scare him away. After all, who wouldn’t run when faced with a poker-wielding madman?
Despite the cliché, the dead weren’t silent. They told all sorts of tales. If the cobrador had been killed, they’d have unmasked him, and found out who he was. And probably found out why he was there.
But if the cobrador had just run away, no one would ever know who he was, or why he was in Three Pines.
Or who he was there for.
Though the why was beginning to dawn on Gamache. It had come in the form of a tiny plastic bag.
The plague.
But the plan had failed. The Conscience hadn’t budged. Hadn’t even flinched. Had been willing to risk death, for his cause.
The Conscience knew something about someone in the village. And that someone was getting mighty rattled.
But none of this came out in court. The Crown Prosecutor didn’t ask, and Armand Gamache didn’t offer this information.
“Mr. Zalmanowitz,” said the judge, and the Crown Prosecutor approached the bench. “Monsieur Gamache is not on trial. Censor yourself.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
But he looked like he thought Gamache should be another defendant, and not a witness for the prosecution.
Beyond Zalmanowitz’s desk, reporters were madly taking notes.
There were, Judge Corriveau knew, many ways of being on trial. And different types of courts.
Chief Superintendent Gamache would be found guilty.
She turned her attention back to the Crown Prosecutor. That horse’s ass.
Judge Corriveau no longer even tried to repress her private thoughts. But she fought hard to keep them from creeping into her public utterances.
Therein lay a mistrial. And this case would indeed find itself in a higher court.
“How did it strike you,” the Crown asked, “when you saw Lea Roux come to the defense of the cobrador?”
“I would’ve been surprised to see anyone standing between a man swinging a fireplace poker and his target.”
“And yet, that’s what you were planning to do, wasn’t it?”
“I’m trained.”
“Oh yes, I keep forgetting.”
That brought a round of appreciative chuckles from the crowd and a tap of the gavel from Judge Corriveau, who wished it could have been on top of the Crown’s head.
“I knew Madame Roux,” said Gamache. “Her rise in politics. It’s a fierce arena, especially in Québec.”
“Did you think it was a stunt, then? To gain political capital?”
“If it had been that, she’d have sided with the mob, don’t you think?” asked Gamache. “A populist feeding anger and fear is more likely to get elected. If that’s what she was after, I doubt she’d have protected the outsider, the intruder.”
That shut the Crown up and brought a slight snort from above Gamache and to his left.
“I began to say that I knew Madame Roux by reputation. In my position I have