A Trick of the Light

even allowed in here.”

“All right,” said Gamache, raising his hand, though his voice was still reasonable. Both men paused, mouths open, ready to attack. “Enough. I’d like to speak with you, Mr. Justice Pineault. I think my Inspector has a good point.”

But before speaking with the Chief Justice, Gamache took Beauvoir aside and whispered, “Keep yourself in check, Inspector. No more of that.”

He held Beauvoir’s gaze.

“Yessir.”

Beauvoir took himself off to the bathroom and sat once again in a stall. Quietly. Gathering himself up. Then he washed his face and hands, and taking half a pill he looked at his reflection.

“Annie and David are having difficulties,” he whispered and felt himself calm down. Annie and David are having difficulties. The pain in his gut began to slip away.

Outside in the Incident Room, Chief Inspector Gamache and Chief Justice Pineault had walked a distance from the others and now stood beside the large red fire truck.

“Your man is treading too close to the line, Chief Inspector.”

“But he’s right. You need to decide. Are you here as Suzanne Coates’s advocate or her AA—” he paused, not sure what word to use, “—friend.”

“I can be both.”

“You can’t, and you know it. You’re the Chief Justice. Decide, sir. Now.”

Armand Gamache faced Chief Justice Pineault, waiting for an answer. The Chief Justice was taken aback, clearly not thinking he’d be challenged.

“I’m here as her AA friend. As Thierry P.”

The answer surprised Gamache and he showed it.

“You think that’s the weaker role, Chief Inspector?”

Gamache didn’t say anything, but he obviously did.

Thierry smiled briefly, then looked very serious. “Anyone can make sure her rights aren’t violated. I think you can. But what you can’t do is guard her sobriety. Only another alcoholic can help her stay sober through this. If she loses that she loses everything.”

“Is it that fragile?” asked Gamache.

“It’s not that sobriety is so fragile, it’s that addiction is so cunning. I’m here to guard her against her addiction. You can guard her rights.”

“You trust me to do that?”

“You I do. But your Inspector?” The Chief Justice nodded toward Beauvoir, who was just leaving the restrooms. “You need to watch him.”

“He’s a senior homicide officer,” said Gamache, his voice cold. “He needs no watching.”

“Every human needs watching.”

That sent chills down Gamache, and he wondered at this man who had such power. Who had so many gifts, and so many flaws. And he wondered, once again, who was Chief Justice Pineault’s sponsor. What was he whispering into that powerful ear?

“Monsieur Pineault has agreed to be Madame Coates’s AA friend and to help her in that role,” said the Chief Inspector as they took their seats.

Both Lacoste and Beauvoir looked surprised but didn’t say anything. It made their job easier.

“You lied to us,” Beauvoir repeated, and held the review up to Suzanne’s face. “Everyone quoted it wrong, didn’t they? Remembered it as being written about some guy no one could remember. But it wasn’t about a man, it was about a woman. You.”

“Suzanne,” warned Thierry, then looked at Gamache. “I’m sorry. I can’t just stop being a jurist.”

“You’ll have to try harder, monsieur,” said Gamache.

“Besides,” said Suzanne, “it’s a little late for caution, don’t you think?” She turned back to the Surete officers. “A Chief Justice, a Chief Inspector, and now it appears I’ve become the chief suspect.”

“Too many chiefs again?” asked Gamache with a rueful smile.

“Way too many for my comfort,” said Suzanne. She waved at the sheet of paper and snorted. “Goddamned review. Bad enough to be insulted like that, but then to have it misquoted. The least they could do is get the insult right.”

She seemed more amused than angry.

“It threw us off,” admitted Gamache, leaning his elbows on the table. “Everyone quoted it as ‘He’s a natural…’ when in fact the review says, ‘She’s a natural.…’”

“How’d you finally realize that?” asked Suzanne.

“Reading the AA book helped,” said Gamache, nodding toward the large book still on his desk. “It talks about the alcoholic as ‘he,’ but clearly many are ‘she’s.’ All the way through this investigation people did it. Where a gender was in question there was an assumption it was ‘he’ and not ‘she.’ I realized it’s a sort of automatic position. When people couldn’t remember who the review was written about they just said, ‘He’s a natural…,’ when in fact Lillian wrote it about you. Agent Lacoste here finally found it in the clippings morgue of La Presse.”