A Trick of the Light (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #7)

Gamache had examined the public records of Chief Justice Pineault’s professional life. His rise as a prosecutor, his term as professor of law at the Université Laval. His ascent to the bench. And then to Chief Justice.

He was widowed with three children and four grandchildren. Three surviving. One not.

Gamache knew the story. Superintendent Brunel had told him. How the child had been killed by a drunk driver. Gamache wanted to find out who that driver was, and whether it was, as he suspected, Pineault himself.

What else could have shattered the man so much he’d hit bottom? Stopped drinking? Turned his life around. Had the dead grandchild given Thierry Pineault a second chance at life?

That could also explain the strange connection between the Chief Justice and young Brian. Both knew what it felt like to hear the soft thud. The hesitation of the car.

And to know what it was.

Gamache sat at his desk and tried to imagine what that would be like. Tried to imagine being behind the wheel of his Volvo, knowing what had just happened. Getting out.

But his mind stopped there. Some things were beyond imagining.

To clear his mind, Gamache went back to the keyboard and renewed the search for information on the accident. But there was none.

The door of the open society had slowly swung shut. And locked.

But in the quiet Incident Room, in the first glow of a new day, Chief Inspector Gamache slipped below the surface of the public face of Québec. The public face of the Chief Justice. Into the place secrets were kept. Or at least, confidences were kept. The private files of public people.

There he found information about Thierry Pineault’s drinking, his at times erratic behavior, his run-ins with other justices. And then a gap. A three-month leave.

And his return.

The private files also showed that systematically, over the past two years, Thierry Pineault had been calling up all his judgments from the bench. And at least one case had been officially reviewed. And reversed.

And there was another case. Not a Supreme Court case, not one he’d attended, at least not as a judge. But one Chief Justice Pineault had gone back to, over and over and over again. The file described an open-and-shut case, of a child killed by a drunk driver.

But there was no more information. The file had been locked away, in an area even Gamache couldn’t get to.

He sat back in his chair and took his glasses off, tapping them rhythmically on his knee.

*   *   *

Agent Isabelle Lacoste wondered if anyone had ever actually died of boredom, or if she would be the first.

She now knew more than she ever wanted to about the art scene in Québec. The artists, the curators, the shows. The critiques. The themes, the theories, the history.

Famous Québec artists like Riopelle and Lemieux and Molinari. And a whole lot she hadn’t heard of and never would again. Artists Lillian Dyson had reviewed into obscurity.

She rubbed her eyes. With each new review she had to remind herself why she was there. Had to remember Lillian Dyson lying on the soft green grass in Peter and Clara’s garden. A woman who would grow no older. A woman who had stopped, there. In the pretty, peaceful garden. Because someone had taken her life.

Though, after reading all these repulsive reviews Lacoste was tempted to take a club to the woman herself. She felt dirty, as though someone had thrown a pile of merde all over her.

But someone had killed Lillian Dyson, hideous human being or not, and Lacoste was determined to find out who. The more she read the more she was convinced that someone was hiding here. In the newspaper morgue. In the microfiche. The beginning of this murder was so old it existed only on plastic files seen through a dusty viewer. An outdated technology that recorded a murder. Or at least, the birth of a death. The beginning of an end. An old event still fresh and alive in someone’s mind.

No, not fresh. It was rotten. Old and rotten, the flesh falling off it.

And Agent Lacoste knew if she looked long enough, and hard enough, the murderer would be revealed.

*   *   *

For the next hour, as the sun rose and the people rose, Chief Inspector Gamache worked. When he got tired he took off his reading glasses, wiped his face with his hands, leaned back in the chair and looked at the sheets of paper pinned to the walls of the old railway station.

Sheets of paper with answers to their questions in bold red Magic Marker, like trails of blood, leading to a murderer.

And he looked at the photographs. Two in particular. The one given him by Mr. and Mrs. Dyson, of Lillian alive. Smiling.

And one taken by the crime scene photographer. Of Lillian dead.

He thought of the two Lillians. Alive and dead. But more than that. The happy, sober Lillian. The one Suzanne claimed to know. A far cry from the embittered woman Clara knew.