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“That they’re all fake?” Armand nodded. “I’ve asked his assistant to have them evaluated. She’s at his home now with the curator from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. When they’re finished there, they’ll look at the art in his office.”

“Mon Dieu,” whispered the curator. Feeling light-headed again, he sat down and gazed around the room.

Then his expression turned quizzical.

“Have you noticed that all the works are either pastoral or domestic? Peaceful. No torture, no death. Not even any hunting scenes. Huh. It can’t be a coincidence. I wonder why.”

Armand was so used to the paintings that he hadn’t actually noticed this. Neither had Reine-Marie.

But now that the curator had pointed it out, they saw it. Stephen, the exorcist, had covered his walls floor to ceiling with scenes of peace.

“I’m sorry to have given you this bad news,” said de la Coutu. “Will you alert the authorities, or should I?”

“I will. Could you keep this to yourself for now?”

“Of course. Clara told me you’re a senior officer with the Sûreté du Québec. I hope you find out who did this. And, more to the point, who did that.”

He looked at the drawing on the floor.

They put Professor de la Coutu into a taxi and watched as it headed back to the Louvre.

“Poor Stephen,” said Reine-Marie as Armand took her hand. “He’s going to be devastated.”

“I doubt it,” he said, quietly.

She looked at him. Armand was coming to terms, she thought, with the reality that Stephen would almost certainly never return home, and never find out that his collection, the work of a lifetime, had been stolen.

They waited for a gap in the traffic on rue des Sèvres, then darted across the street.

Jacques led them to a secluded table in bar Joséphine. But Armand pointed to a table right beside a rowdy group of visitors speaking Spanish. “Over there, perhaps?”

The maître d’ raised a brow but showed them to the table.

Reine-Marie found herself glancing around the bar, trying to make out where those photographs she’d seen in the archives, from the war, had been taken. She felt a knot in her stomach and understood why Zora had loathed the place.

Was she one of the ones who’d been brought here straight out of the concentration camp? Had she searched for her family through these corridors? In the grand ballroom, in bars and restaurants, in guest rooms? In vain.

Once Jacques had taken their orders, Armand leaned close to Reine-Marie. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, another text came in.

His phone was on the table, and she could see it, too. It was from Mrs. McGillicuddy. At office now. We were right.

Armand typed. Same here.

“His whole collection is fake?” asked Reine-Marie, eyes wide. “Even the ones in Montréal? All of it stolen? What happened to it?”

“I don’t think those paintings were stolen,” he said, leaning close to her and keeping his voice low. “I think Stephen sold them.”

It took Reine-Marie a moment to take that in. “Why do you say that?”

“Because Stephen knew art. He’d know immediately if there was even one fake, never mind all of them.”

“Why would he sell them?”

“To quietly raise capital. And a lot of it. He couldn’t cash in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stocks or holdings without anyone noticing, but he could discreetly sell his collection. Then he had to have each painting replaced so no one would know.”

Reine-Marie’s mind raced. “Why would he need that money? Was he in financial trouble?”

“No, not at all.”