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Armand pushed himself out of the chair. It was time.

Chapter 34

Vincent Gilbert watched as Chief Inspector Gamache closed the door to the library. That was expected, in a private conversation.

What happened next was not.

Gamache turned the key in the lock. And pocketed it.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir sat in one of the leather chairs across from Gilbert, while Gamache took the other.

A chill crept over the doctor and he looked at the hearth. There was no fire. Not even one laid and ready to be lit. Instead it was just a dark hole, with ash in the grate and a slight smell of burning.

Gamache brought a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to him.

Gilbert unfolded it, saw the letterhead, and let it go. It fell to the coffee table, unread. Had there been a fire in the grate, he might have tried to throw the letter in. Consign it to where it belonged. Though he wasn’t sure it would burn.

But there was no fire. There was no escape. Not into an illustrious career. Not onto boards of charities. Not deep into the woods.

Vincent Gilbert had known for years, decades, that this day would come. That one day he’d be found.

He’d been through the files in the Osler and quietly, over the years, removed all reference to his time with Ewen Cameron. But he couldn’t retrieve the letters sent to the patients. He just had to hope they’d destroyed them. After all, who would keep something that grotesque?

But at least one person had. He glanced down at the name. Enid Horton.

It meant nothing to him.

But this Enid Horton had found him. And brought the head of homicide with her.

“You knew” was all Gamache said.

Gilbert nodded. “Yes. I knew what Ewen Cameron was doing.”

He could have left it at “yes.” But he had to say the words. To say out loud what he had never even admitted to himself.

I knew what Ewen Cameron was doing.

“Tell us,” said Gamache.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir shot a glance at the Chief Inspector. Surely, he thought, there were specific questions to be asked. Ones that would nail Gilbert. Trap him and lead to his arrest. Because that was where this was heading.

Vincent Gilbert killed, or tried to kill, Abigail Robinson not to save others, but to save himself. To stop her from revealing the one thing he’d spent his life hiding from. His complicity in the torture of hundreds of men and women. Then sending them home crippled, shattered. With a bill for their services.

The Asshole Saint. What, Beauvoir wondered, were saints called in Hell?

He remembered now, from his brief time in Sunday school before the nuns expelled him, that there was a concept of the “wicked angel.” The idea had stuck with little Jean-Guy. Somehow, for a binary-minded boy who thought in black and white, the idea that an angel could be wicked was terrifying. Because it suggested chaos.

Were they locked in with, trapped with, not an Asshole Saint but a Wicked Angel?

And Jean-Guy understood, in a moment of complete clarity, why Armand Gamache had not asked a question, but had simply invited Dr. Vincent Gilbert to explain.

It was perhaps to trap the Wicked Angel.

But more likely to free him. To give him an opening, one last shot at redemption.

“Like so much else,” Gilbert began, “it started innocently. I needed a part-time job, and all the good ones were taken. No one wanted to work in that place, and no one wanted that job. Looking after lab animals at the Allan.” He stopped and looked directly at Gamache. “Have you ever been there? To the Allan Memorial?”

When Gamache shook his head, Gilbert looked at Beauvoir, who also indicated he hadn’t.