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Gamache got up and went to the painting, pointing. “Look. Here. Here. There.”

He kept pointing. And Jean-Guy kept counting. With each number he felt the vomit rising, burning, until finally at the seventh he could taste wild mushrooms and sage brown butter in his mouth.

He swallowed hard and saw Armand turn pale. His deep brown eyes wide in near panic.

“It’s not possible.” Jean-Guy’s voice was hoarse from the acid burning his throat. He’d turned from the painting, no longer daring to look, not daring to catch the accusing eyes of the seven figures who stared out at them.

“I called,” he said, feeling his own panic threatening to overwhelm him. “I spoke to the warden. He assured me…”

But he knew the Chief was right.

Armand covered his mouth with his hand and turned back to the canvas. Forcing himself to meet those eyes. To let those faces, those people, come to him. And with them came some rough beast slouching toward him.

“Come on, come on.” Reine-Marie’s voice was soft, coaxing. It was the tone she used for Fred when she needed the old dog to try to climb back up the basement stairs.

Amelia moaned. “Can’t we sleep? Just for a little while. I promise. Not long.”

She’d gotten on the plane excited. She got off exhausted. Who knew transatlantic flights were so long? And boring. And now it was nine in the morning in London but—she checked her watch—four a.m. back home.

She hadn’t slept. Tried. Failed. Had shifted this way. That. And then the person in front had put their seat back. All the way.

Fuck. Fuckity, fuck, fuck.

Beside her, Madame Gamache had read for a while, then closed her eyes. What made it worse was knowing that, in the front of the plane, people had beds. Beds. Beds!

“Puh-leeez,” she begged.

Reine-Marie had arranged for a driver, David Norman, to meet them. The same man she and Armand used every visit.

“You can sleep in the car,” she said as she spotted David waiting just beyond the barrier at Heathrow. “And by the way, you did sleep on the flight.”

“Did not.”

Reine-Marie didn’t argue. She knew that tone from when Annie was a child. She knew it from overtired grandchildren. She also knew Amelia had slept. And had dropped her head onto Reine-Marie’s shoulder. She had the drool marks to prove it.

She waved to David, who came over to greet them and take their carry-ons.

He said hello to Amelia, who just grunted.

“Your daughter?” he asked, trying to make it sound like that would be a good thing.

“A friend.” She didn’t dare tell him the truth.

They got in the car for the almost three-hour drive from Heathrow to the Norwich Castle Museum.

Armand stood in front of the locked and bolted metal door in the basement that housed and guarded and imprisoned his files.

Putting in the code, he unlocked it, first glancing behind him to make sure he was alone.

Once inside, he locked the door behind him and opened the drawer where the Beast of Babylon lived. Buried there. Buried alive.

Armand placed the iron ring on the desk. The engineer’s ring he’d found half buried in the dirt. Then he brought out the file and reread it. Forcing himself to relive the details. To go through the photographs again. Every now and then he got up and stepped away, turning his back on the desk.

Then he walked back, sat down, and went through it all again.

CHAPTER 29

Armand placed the call.