Every hour of every day Jean-Guy Beauvoir searched for not just facts, but truth. He hadn’t appreciated, though, how terrifying it was being with someone who spoke it, all the time. Well, her truth anyway.
“I don’t,” he said.
“Bullshit. You hate the country, you hate nature, you think we’re hicks, idiots. Repressed, passive-aggressive and English.”
“I know you’re English,” he laughed. She didn’t.
“Don’t fuck with me. I don’t have that much time left and I refuse to waste it.”
“Then go away if you think I’m such a waste of time.”
They glared at each other. He’d opened up to her the other night, told her things few others knew. He’d been afraid that might lead to some awkwardness but sure enough, when they’d met the next morning she’d looked at him as though he was a stranger.
“I know why you’re here,” he said at last. “For the rest of the story. You just want to hear all the gory details. You feed on it, don’t you? Fear and pain. You don’t care about me or the Chief or Morin or anyone else, all you want from me is the rest of the story, you sick old crone.”
“And what do you want?”
What do I want? he thought.
I want to tell it.
SIXTEEN
Jean-Guy glanced round. The bistro was quiet. Placing his hands on the arms of his chair he hauled himself forward. The chair felt warm from the fire. In the grate the large logs popped, sending embers bouncing against the screen to glow on the stone hearth then slowly die away.
The maple logs smelled sweet, the coffee was strong and rich, the aromas from the kitchen familiar.
Not of home but of here.
He leaned forward and stared into the cold, blue eyes across from him. Winter eyes in a glacier face. Challenging, hard, impenetrable.
Perfect.
He paused and in an instant he was back there, since “there” was never far away.
“My favorite season is autumn, I think,” Gamache was saying.
“I’ve always loved winter,” came the young voice over the monitors. “I think because I can wear thick sweaters and coats and no one can really see how skinny I am.”
Morin laughed. Gamache laughed.
But that was all Inspector Beauvoir heard. He was out the door, through the Incident Room and into the stairwell. There he paused for a moment. Opening his fist he read the note Gamache had scrawled.
There was another note, folded, with Nichol’s name on it. He opened it and groaned. Was the Chief mad? Because Yvette Nichol almost certainly was. She was the agent no one wanted. The agent who couldn’t be fired because she wasn’t quite incompetent or insubordinate enough. But she sure played around the cliff. And finally the chief had assigned her to telecommunications. Surrounded by things, not people. No interaction. Nothing major to screw up. No one to enrage. Just listening, monitoring, recording.
Any normal person would have quit. Any decent agent would have resigned. Like the witch trials of old. If she sank she was innocent, if she survived she was a witch.
Agent Nichol survived.
But still, he didn’t hesitate. Down the stairs he ran, two at a time, until he was finally in the sub-basement. Yanking open a door he looked in. The room was darkened, and it took him a moment to make out the outline of someone sitting in front of green lights. On oval screens lines burst into a frenzy as words were spoken.
Then a face was turned to him. A green face, and eyes glowing green. Agent Yvette Nichol. He hadn’t seen her in years and now he felt a tingling under his skin. A warning. Not to enter. This room. This person’s life.
But Chief Inspector Gamache had wanted him to. And so he did. On the speaker he was surprised to hear the Chief’s voice, talking now about various dog toys.
“Have you ever used a Chuck-it, sir?” Agent Morin asked.
“Never heard of it. What is it?”
“A stick thing with a cup on the end. It helps toss a tennis ball. Does Henri like balls?”
“Above all else,” laughed Gamache.
“Idiotic conversation,” came the female voice. A green voice. Young, ripe, filled with bile. “What do you want?”
“Have you been monitoring the conversation?” Inspector Beauvoir demanded. “It’s on a secure channel. No one’s supposed to have access to it.”
“And yet you were about to ask me to start monitoring it, weren’t you? Don’t look so surprised, Inspector. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. No one comes here unless they want something. What do you want?”
“Chief Inspector Gamache wants your help.” He almost gagged on the words.
“And what the Chief Inspector wants, he gets. Right?” But she’d turned back into the room. Beauvoir felt on the wall and found the light switch. He turned it on and the room was flooded with bright fluorescent lights. The woman, who had seemed so menacing, so otherworldly, suddenly became human.
