“How long?” Langlois asked.
“Twelve hours, give or take an hour or so. We’re lucky with the environment. It’s consistent. No rain or snow, no fluctuation in temperature. I’ll tell you more precisely later.” He turned, collected his kit then nodded to Langlois and Gamache. But instead of leaving the coroner hesitated, looking round the cellar.
He seemed reluctant to leave. When Langlois peered at him the young doctor lost some of his composure but rallied.
“Would you like me to stay?”
“Why?” asked Langlois, his voice uninviting.
But still the doctor persevered. “You know.”
Now Inspector Langlois turned to him completely, challenging him to go further.
“Tell me.”
“Well,” the doctor stumbled. “In case you find anything else.”
Beside him Gamache felt the Inspector tense, but Gamache leaned in and whispered, “Perhaps he should stay.”
Langlois nodded once, his face hard, and the coroner stepped away from the pool of light, across the sharp border into darkness. And there he waited.
In case.
Everyone in that room knew “in case” of what.
Chief Inspector Gamache approached the body. The harsh light left nothing to the imagination. It bounced off the man’s dirty clothing, off his stringy, long, white hair, off his face, twisted. Off his hands, clasped closed, over dirt. Off the horrible wounds on his head.
Gamache knelt.
Yes, he was unmistakable. The extravagant black moustache, at odds with the white hair. The long, bushy eyebrows political cartoonists were so fond of caricaturing. The bulbous nose and fierce, almost mad, blue eyes. Intense even in death.
“Augustin Renaud,” said Langlois. “No doubt.”
“And Samuel de Champlain?”
Gamache had said out loud what everyone in that room, everyone in that sous-sol, everyone in that building had been thinking. But none had voiced. This was the “in case.”
“Any sign of him?”
“Not yet,” said Langlois, unhappily.
For where Augustin Renaud was there was always someone else.
Samuel de Champlain. Dead for almost four hundred years, but clinging to Augustin Renaud.
Champlain, who in 1608 had founded Québec, was long dead and buried.
But where?
That was the great mystery that hounded the Québécois. Somehow, over the centuries, they’d lost the founder.
They knew where minor functionaries from the early 1600s were buried, lieutenants and captains in Champlain’s brigade. They’d unearthed, and reburied, countless missionaries. The pioneers, the farmers, the nuns, the first habitants were all accounted for. With solemn graves and headstones, visited by school children, by priests on celebration days, by tourists and tour guides. Names like Hébert and Frontenac and Marie de l’Incarnation resonated with the Québécois, and stories were told of their selflessness, their bravery.
But one remained missing. One’s remains were missing.
The father of Québec, the most revered, the most renowned, the most courageous. The first Québécois.
Samuel de Champlain.
And one man had spent his entire adult life trying to find him. Augustin Renaud had dug and tunneled and hacked away under much of old Quebec City, following any whimsical clue that surfaced.
And now here he was, beneath the Literary and Historical Society, that bastion of Anglo Quebéc. With a shovel.
Dead himself. Murdered.
Why was he here? There seemed only one answer to that.
“Should I tell the premier ministre?” Langlois asked Gamache.
“Oui. The premier ministre, the Minister for Public Security. The Chief Archeologist. The Voice of English-speaking Québec. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society. The Parti Québécois.” Gamache looked at Langlois sternly. “Then you need to call a news conference and tell the population. Equally. At the same time.”
Langlois was clearly amazed by the suggestion. “Don’t you think it’s better to downplay this? I mean, really, it’s only Augustin Renaud, not the premier ministre. The man was a bit of a buffoon. No one took him seriously.”
“But they took his search seriously.”
Inspector Langlois stared at Gamache but said nothing.
“You’ll do as you want, of course,” said the Chief Inspector, sympathizing with the man. “But as your consultant that’s my counsel. Tell all and tell it quickly before the militant elements start spreading rumors.”
Gamache looked past the circle of intense light to the dark caverns beyond the main room.
Was Samuel de Champlain here right now? Armand Gamache, a student of Québec history, felt a frisson, an involuntary thrill.
And if he felt that, he thought, what will others feel?
Elizabeth MacWhirter was feeling ill. She turned her back to the window, a window and view that had always given her pleasure, until now. Out of it she still saw the metal roofs, the chimneys, the solid fieldstone buildings, the snow falling thicker now, but she also saw the television trucks and cars with radio station logos stenciled to the sides. She saw men and women she recognized from television, and photos in Le Soleil and La Presse. Journalists. And not the gutter press. Not just Allô Police, though they were there too. But respected news anchors.
They stood in front of the building, artificial lights on them, cameras pointed, they lined up like some game of Red Rover, and told their stories to the province. Elizabeth wondered what they were saying.
But it couldn’t be good, just degrees of bad.
She’d called the members of the library to give them what little information was available. It didn’t take long.
Augustin Renaud was found murdered in the basement. Pass it on. She glanced out the window again at the quickly gathering reporters and snow, a storm of each, a blizzard, and moaned.
“What is it?” asked Winnie, joining her friend by the window. “Oh.”
Together they watched Porter descend the stairs, approach the swarming reporters and give what amounted to a news conference.
“Jesus,” sighed Winnie. “Do you think I can reach him with this?” She hefted the first volume of the Shorter Dictionary.
“You going to throw the book at him?” smiled Elizabeth.
“Shame no one donated a crossbow to the library.”
Inspector Langlois sat at the head of the polished table in the library of the Literary and Historical Society. It was a room at once intimate and grand. It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was “Googled” and “blogged.” Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge. It was an old library, filled with old books and dusty old thoughts.
It was calm and comforting.
It had been a long while since Inspector Langlois had been in a library. Not since his school days. A time filled with new experiences and the aromas that would be forever associated with them. Gym socks. Rotting bananas in lockers. Sweat. Old Spice cologne. Herbal Essence shampoo on the hair of girls he kissed, and more. A scent so sweet, so filled with longing his reaction was still physical whenever he smelt it.
And libraries. Quiet. Calm. A harbor from the turmoil of teenage life. When the Herbal Essence girls had pulled away, and mocked, when the gym sock boys had shoved and he’d shoved back, laughing. Roughhousing. Keeping the terror behind savage eyes.