He could see the blue eyes, cold like marbles. And he could sense the brain, active, rushing from fact to fact, desperate to refute them. At first Arnot had been relaxed, confident in his superiority, sure no one could ever get the better of him. But as the meeting progressed he grew restive, furtive.
Gamache had done his homework. Had worked on the case for almost a year, quietly, in his spare time and on holidays. Until every single escape route Arnot might try was locked and barred and blocked, and locked again.
Gamache knew he had only one shot, and that was this meeting. If Arnot walked free Gamache and many others, Brébeuf included, were doomed.
He’d marshaled his facts but he knew there was one potent weapon Arnot would use. Loyalty. Officers of the force would rather die than be disloyal, to each other and to the Sûreté. Arnot commanded great loyalty.
And Arnot had won.
Faced with the facts he’d admitted the crimes of incitement to murder and actual murder. But he’d prevailed upon the council, in recognition of his position and his years of service, to allow him and the two officers implicated with him to not be arrested. Not yet. They’d put their affairs in order, make things right for their families, say their goodbyes, and then go to Arnot’s hunting camp in the Abitibi region. And kill themselves.
Avoid the shame of a trial. Spare the Sûreté the public humiliation.
Gamache had argued ferociously against such folly. But he’d been defeated by a council afraid of Arnot and afraid of the public.
To Gamache’s astonishment Pierre Arnot had walked free. At least for a while. But a man like that can create a lot of grief in very little time.
‘And that’s when we took the case in Mutton Bay?’ asked Beauvoir.
‘As far from Montreal as we could get, yes,’ admitted Gamache. He’d sent Reine-Marie away and asked his friend Marc Brault with the Montreal police to assign officers to protect his children. Then he himself had taken a ski plane to Quebec City then on to Baie Comeau, then Natashquan, Harrington Harbour and finally the tiny fishing village of Mutton Bay. And there he’d looked for a murderer and found himself. In a dingy diner on the rocky shore of the village. It smelled of fish, both fresh and fried, and a ragged, craggy fisherman, as though made from the rocks themselves, sitting alone in a booth had looked over and given Gamache a smile of such unexpected radiance Gamache had immediately known what he had to do.