Chief Inspector Gamache met Beauvoir at the bench on the village green. Around them, villagers walked dogs. They did their shopping. Some worked in their gardens. But no one stopped moving. It was too cold.
But the two men on the bench had something worse than cold to worry about. They had murder on their minds.
Gamache pulled his coat tighter around him and looked at his inspector.
“Okay,” said Beauvoir. “We ran James Hill’s fingerprints and licence plate. He lived and worked in Ottawa. With the government. In the Department of Records.”
Armand Gamache shifted a bit on the bench. The Department of Records. It was huge, of course. It kept track of Canada’s official documents. Not people’s private lives, but their public ones. Taxes, passports, court papers. Any time a Canadian came in contact with the government, the records ended up in James Hill’s department.
“He took the job fifteen years ago. Before that, he was living in Thunder Bay.”
“In northwestern Ontario?”
“Exactly. With his wife and daughter. But they were killed twenty years ago. Their car was hit by a pickup truck filled with kids.”
Gamache looked down briefly. He could not imagine surviving the loss of his own wife and daughter. How had James Hill coped?
“Here’s a picture of them.”
From a file folder Beauvoir pulled a printout of a newspaper article. It showed a young James Hill, smiling. His pretty wife, also beaming. And their daughter. Debbie. She looked like her mother. Dark hair, laughing.
Gone, in a moment.
Gamache felt an almost physical pain. A terrible loss.
He scanned the article.
Mrs. Hill and Debbie had been returning from a birthday party when their car was side-swiped. They slid off the road, down a cliff. Both died at the scene.
The other vehicle had four kids in it. Two boys. Two girls. Three were sixteen years old. One was fifteen. None seriously injured.
The chief inspector looked at Beauvoir.
“What happened?”
“The cops investigated, of course. It was clear that the kids had hit the Hill car. What wasn’t clear was who was driving.”
Gamache nodded. He could see that coming.
“By the time help arrived, the kids had gotten out of the truck. They had minor injuries, but that was all. One of them had wiped the steering wheel. To get the blood off, he said, but everyone suspected that he did it to protect whoever was driving.”
“Fingerprints,” said Gamache. “No convictions?”
“Not even an arrest. Hill spent years trying to get someone to take the blame. But the kids’ lawyers wouldn’t even let them say they were sorry. They just stopped talking.”
Gamache was silent for a moment, thinking.
“So finally James Hill moved away,” said the chief. “To Ottawa.”
“To the Department of Records,” said Beauvoir. He held up another file. “Hill was a busy man.”
Beauvoir handed the file to Gamache. In it were more reports, of more deaths. A young man killed ten years ago in Victoria. A young woman killed seven years ago in Halifax.
Both hanged.
“Arthur Ellis,” said Gamache. Beauvoir nodded.
The official executioner, alive again. And passing death sentences.
“The victims were two of the people in the truck that night,” said Beauvoir.
“Both murdered,” said Gamache. “One on the west coast, the other on the east. No police force would connect the two.”
“Exactly,” said Beauvoir. “In fact, the first was considered a suicide, but the cause of death was changed to murder later. No one was arrested.”
“James Hill,” said Gamache. He got up from the bench and started walking slowly around the edge of the village green. Beauvoir joined him and listened as the chief thought out loud. “He got his job so he could find the four young people in the pickup. And when he found them, he killed them.”
“Didn’t just kill,” said Beauvoir. “He executed them. Sentenced them to death.”
Gamache thought of the young men and women in the truck that night. How horrible it must have been for them. Did the guilt weigh them down? Or were they so scared they hid it away? Comforted themselves with the lie that the accident wasn’t their fault.
But Gamache knew what happened when a terrible truth was buried. It didn’t just go to sleep. No. It grew. Big. It became huge. Monstrous. It ate away a person’s insides.
And left him hollow. Empty.
That’s what had happened to those four kids. That’s what had happened to James Hill, too. He’d died in the car that night, with his wife and daughter. Hill had died in spirit and Arthur Ellis had been reborn in him. Now he had one goal. To punish the young men and women who had killed his wife and daughter.
Chief Inspector Gamache put his hands behind his back and thought as he walked.
“James Hill used his position at the Department of Records to track down two of the people in the truck, and he killed them,” Gamache said. “What about the other two?”
“I think one of them is here,” said Beauvoir. “He tracked him here and intended to hang him.”
“That’s why he was asking about young men?” Gamache asked.
“Yes. But that doesn’t make sense,” said Beauvoir. “If the kids were sixteen when this happened, they’d be almost forty now. Not exactly young.”
“True. When was the last time you visited your mother?”
“Oh, Jesus, she hasn’t gotten to you, too?”
Gamache smiled. “No. I’m just wondering.”
“A couple of weeks ago. We went over for dinner. Why?”
“What did she make?”
“My favourite. What she always makes when I visit. Beef stew.”
“She’s made it for you since you were a kid, right?”
“Right. Why are we talking about my mother?”
“When our children come home, we do the same thing. Make their favourite foods. Annie had to explain the other day that pink cupcakes aren’t actually her favourite anymore. We knew that, but still we make them.”
“Is this going anywhere, or have you finally lost your mind? Sir.”
Gamache laughed. “Perhaps a bit of both. My point is that parents always see their children as children. In our heads, we know their real age, but in our hearts, they’re still kids. I think that’s what happened with Hill.”
“He sees his daughter as a child?” asked Beauvoir, a little lost.
“Probably. But I meant the kids in the pickup. The last time he saw them, they were in their teens. Their images must have been burned into his mind. He would forever see them as teens.”
“He talked about a young man,” said Beauvoir, “but he was actually looking for someone much older.”
“In his mid- to late thirties,” said Gamache. “Who are the two survivors from that truck?”
“Cindy Pane and Tim Short.”
“Tim Short,” said Gamache. “Tom Scott?”
He stopped walking and looked into the distance. “And yet, perhaps he was lying,” the chief murmured. “Covering up.”
“What did you say?” asked Beauvoir.
Gamache turned to look at him. “James Hill came here to kill someone. Execute, he would say. But it comes to the same thing. He would hang his victim from a tree. But was it a him he was looking for? Or a her?”
“He said ‘him.’ He said ‘young man.’”
“True,” said Gamache, walking again. “But he also said his name was Arthur Ellis. He lied once, maybe he lied twice.”
They walked quickly up the slope, headed to the Inn and Spa.
“You think he wasn’t looking for a man,” said Beauvoir. “He was looking for a woman.”