Page 133

He looked down and saw his reflection, distorted, grotesque. Gamache raised his head at the small sound of the door handle moving. He inhaled.

The heavy metal door was pushed open.

Through it came a clinking. Clanging. Closer, closer. As a man in chains approached.

Gamache got to his feet, turned to the door, and braced himself. The head guard stepped into the room, followed by a man in prison garb, his hands and feet chained.

His eyes were downcast, but then he raised them and met the Chief Inspector’s.

“This,” said Gamache, “is not John Fleming.”

CHAPTER 30

“Of course it’s him,” said the warden as they sat in his office. “Look.”

He skidded the file across his desk. Gamache stopped it from sliding right over the edge. He was also trying to keep himself from falling over an edge. He realized that his rage was not helpful. It was also, he knew, rooted in fear. In terror, in fact, that John Fleming was no longer in the SHU. He was out. Somewhere.

And Gamache could guess where.

After confronting the imposter, who refused to speak, Gamache had left the interview room.

“I need to search the prison for Fleming,” he told the head guard. “You need to come with me.”

“But there’re hundreds of inmates.”

Gamache turned on him. “Do you have any idea who John Fleming is? What he’s capable of? What it means if he’s not here?”

“But he is.” The guard gestured toward the closed door of the interview room, where the false Fleming was still chained to the metal table.

“I’ve met Fleming,” snapped Gamache. “I helped put him here. He’s unmistakable. I don’t know who that is”—he gestured angrily toward the door—“but it’s not Fleming.”

“Fine. We’ll look. But it’s a massive waste of time.”

Before starting the search, Gamache called Beauvoir. “You spoke to the warden of the SHU yesterday.”

“Yes,” said Beauvoir. He didn’t tell the Chief he was in the car on his way to the prison, for fear Gamache would order him back to Three Pines.

“Call him again. Tell him to come right away and meet me in his office.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

Gamache told him.

“Fucking—” was as far as Beauvoir got before the line went dead. “—hell.”

“Let’s go,” said Gamache, stuffing the phone back into his jacket pocket.

Through the locked barriers they went. One, two, three doors. They were searched and scanned. Gamache’s phone was taken away. Finally, there was a screech of an alarm as the last barrier between them and bedlam closed. They were locked in.

Gamache had been in any number of prisons, but no other was even remotely like the SHU. It was fairly new but felt ancient and derelict. A ruin.

The very air was heavier here. Denser. As though guilt and gravity had partnered, pressing the weight of the accumulated crimes down on them.

Along the concrete corridor the two of them strode, Gamache looking into the cells, looking into the eyes of every madman in the prison. Many he’d put there. Word spread through the population that Chief Inspector Gamache was there, and an uproar ensued. Men, barely more than beasts, screamed his name. Screamed abuse.

They shook and rattled the bars, dragging anything they could find across them.

The head guard began to breathe heavily, his eyes moving this way and that. Trying to keep himself from panicking.