award you deserve. You helped the Chief Superintendent come up with this plan. He kept the napkin, you know. From your lunch. It’s in his desk, below the notebook.”
Toussaint nodded. Beauvoir was right. This all began that afternoon months ago, over lunch, when she’d used a cliché. And Chief Superintendent Gamache had written it down on the only thing available.
The cliché was so common that she’d failed to consider what it really meant. And she sure hadn’t foreseen what it would mean to Gamache. And how he’d use it.
“Burn our ships,” she said, remembering that moment in the brasserie when Chief Superintendent Gamache had looked at her with a gleam. The ember of an idea.
“Burn our ships,” Beauvoir repeated. “Do you know where it comes from?”
She nodded. She’d looked it up, as the days and months had passed and things got worse and worse instead of better and better, and Madeleine Toussaint had begun to wonder what she’d done.
What she found out was no comfort.
“It was Cortés,” she said. “Five hundred years ago. When the Spanish landed in what’s now Mexico.”
Beauvoir nodded. “They stood on the beach and Cortés ordered his men to burn their ships.”
“So there was no going back.”
The two senior Sûreté officers stood at the door and imagined that moment. What would those men have done? Would they have argued? Begged? Plotted mutiny?
Or would they have meekly done it, so conditioned were they to follow orders?
The conquistadors had traveled to the New World to conquer it. They would in a few short years destroy a great Aztec civilization. And in return they’d be given wealth beyond imagining. Except. Except.
Most would never leave those shores.
How had they felt, as they’d stood on that beach? The strange continent in front of them. Home and family and safety behind them. And in between, a smoldering ship.
Neither Beauvoir nor Toussaint had to work very hard at imagining how those conquistadors had felt.
There was no going back for them either.
They could smell the burning timbers.
“I’ll let you know how it goes,” said Beauvoir, patting his pocket where the piece of paper sat. As he left, he felt the dark thing follow him out into the glaring sunshine.
Madeleine Toussaint closed the door and walked to her desk. She sat heavily in the chair, then hit the intercom and asked her assistant to call Inspector Gaugin. She stared out the window, and wondered how she’d explain to him what she’d just done.
A dark thing, like some charred remain, stood quietly in the corner, and watched.
* * *
“The defendant actually came to you, is that right, Chief Superintendent?”
“It is. I was at home in Three Pines with my wife—”
“Reine-Marie Gamache,” Zalmanowitz reminded the jury. “She’s the one who found the body of Katie Evans earlier that day.”
“Exactly. Chief Inspector Isabelle Lacoste, the head of homicide, was staying with us, as was Inspector Beauvoir, my second-in-command.”
“Are they in the courtroom now?”
“Non.”
The Crown Prosecutor turned around, looked at the gallery, then turned back to Gamache. Surprised. A glance passed between them.
Judge Corriveau caught it, and tucked it away.
More than noting the understanding in that glance from Crown to Chief Superintendent, the judge recognized something else. Something completely unexpected.
Sympathy.
Maureen Corriveau’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. She considered calling an early end to the day’s testimony and dragging both men into her chambers. And forcing the truth from them.
But she was a patient woman and she knew if she gave them space and time, they’d eventually drop enough pieces for her to see what was actually happening.
“It was during dinner that the defendant arrived?”
“Actually, it was after dinner. Quite late.”
“Were you surprised by what the defendant told you?”
“I was shocked. We would have gotten there eventually, of course. The crime lab backs up the confession. By then, we were pretty sure that Madame Evans’s murder was premeditated.”
“Why?”
“The cobrador costume. It speaks of a knowledge only someone close to the victim could have had. Some secret she thought she’d buried.”
“But the cobrador costume, the cobrador presence, speaks of something else,” said Zalmanowitz. “Not just a secret, but a guilt so profound it needed to be avenged.”
Gamache shook his head. “That’s what was so strange. The original cobradors weren’t intent on revenge. They didn’t physically attack their targets. Their mission was to accuse and expose. To act as a conscience.”
“And leave the punishment to a higher court?” said Zalmanowitz.
“A higher court?” asked Judge Corriveau. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that phrase in this testimony. What’s it supposed to mean?”