The Nature of the Beast

She was about to argue with him, but stopped. If anyone believed in second chances, it was the man who sat before her. She’d been his friend and his unofficial therapist. She’d heard his deepest secrets, and she’d heard his most profound beliefs, and his greatest fears. But now she wondered if she’d really heard them all. And she wondered what demons might be nesting deep inside this man, who specialized in murder.

“What do you know, Armand, that we don’t?”

“I can’t say.”

“I also followed the court case—” She stopped, and regarded him.

Then it dawned on her. What he was really saying by not saying anything.

“We didn’t hear everything, did we, Armand? There was another trial, a private one, for Fleming.”

A trial within a trial.

Myrna knew, from her association with the law, that the system allowed for such things, but she’d never ever heard of one actually being held.

There would be the public trial for public consumption, but behind closed and locked and bolted doors, there would be another. Where evidence, deemed too horrific for the community, would be revealed.

How bad, Myrna wondered, would something have to be to go against the fundamental beliefs of their society? How horrific would that truth have to be, to hide it from the public? Only the accused, the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, a guard, a court reporter would be present. And one other.

One person, not associated with the case, would be chosen to represent all Canadians. They would absorb the horror. They would hear and see things that could never be forgotten. And then, when the trial was over, they would carry it to their grave, so that the rest of the population didn’t have to. One person sacrificed for the greater good.

“You more than read his file, didn’t you?” said Myrna. “There was a closed-door trial, wasn’t there?”

Armand stared at her, his lips compressed slightly.

*   *   *

Gamache and Henri left the bookstore and walked around the village green, feeling the fresh, cool autumn air on their faces. Breathing in the scent of overripe apples and fresh-cut grass, their feet shuffling through newly fallen leaves.

He didn’t tell Myrna, of course. He couldn’t. It was confidential. And even if he was allowed to tell Myrna what he knew about the crimes committed by John Fleming, he wouldn’t do it.

He wished he himself didn’t know.

Each day, when the door had been unlocked and he’d been allowed out, Armand had returned to his office at Sûreté headquarters in Montréal and stared out the window at the people below. Waiting for lights to change. Going for drinks, or to the dentist. Thinking about groceries, and bills, and the boss.

They didn’t know. They read the newspapers and saw the television reports on the trial and thought Fleming a monster. But they didn’t know the half of it.

Armand Gamache was eternally grateful to the judge who’d had the courage to enact that most extreme of clauses. And he wondered if the courtroom had been scrubbed down when it was over. Disinfected. Burned to the ground.

Or had they simply closed the doors and gone back to their lives and, in the nighttime, in the darkness, had they prayed to a God they hoped was powerful, to forget? Prayed for dreamless sleep. Prayed to turn back the clocks to a time when they did not know.

Knowledge wasn’t always power. Sometimes it was crippling.

Myrna had suggested therapy could, over time, rid Fleming of his demons. But Armand Gamache knew that wasn’t true. Because John Fleming was the demon.

And now, from that prison cell, he’d managed to escape. He’d slid out between the bars. In the form of words.

John Fleming was out in the world again.

He’d come to play.

CHAPTER 5

“What do you want?” Antoinette called into the darkness.

She stood on the brightly lit stage, her hand to her forehead, peering like a mariner looking for land.

“To talk to you,” came Armand’s voice from the theater.

“I think you’ve done enough, don’t you?”

Brian came out of the wings carrying a prop lamp. “Who’re you talking to?”

Armand climbed the steps onto the stage. “Me. Salut, Brian.”

“Are you happy?” Antoinette demanded, walking over to him. “Myrna and Gabri have quit. Brian here has to take over Gabri’s lead role—”

“I do?”

“A play’s hard enough to put on without actors dropping out,” she said.

“You’re going on with the production then?” Gamache asked.