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Armand turned in his seat to look at her. “Demons?”

Reine-Marie nodded. “It was an age of demons and witchcraft. Mother Catherine was obsessed with them. A woman in Montréal, accused of being a witch, was said to have a grimoire. But if she did, it was lost.”

“And you think you can find it?” he asked.

“I think we might have it somewhere in the archives.”

“Wouldn’t the clerics have destroyed it?” asked Armand.

“Not necessarily. Mother Catherine was a powerful figure. My theory is, she’d have asked to keep it. To study it.”

“Know your enemy.”

“Yes. We have her papers and books in the archives.”

“Then wouldn’t this grimoire have already been found among them?”

Reine-Marie gave him a pitying look. “And what do the Sûreté archives look like?”

“Archives? You mean the piles of old papers going back a hundred years, dumped into containers in the basement?”

“That’s pretty much what the basement of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationale du Québec looks like.”

He envied her her job. Had he not been a cop, he’d have loved to be a historian or archivist. Going over old papers, finding curiosities buried in obscure libraries.

Now, as he stared at himself in the mirror, Armand wondered if he hadn’t just found a grimoire. Not the same as Reine-Marie described. Not an ancient book to summon demons. This one simply named the ones already here.

It was late, well past midnight, and he could not wake her up to tell her about his own grim discovery. Instead, he dried his face with a rough paper towel and willed himself to go back out.

As he returned to the open office, he half expected to see four horsemen. But instead, he saw his officers hard at work and, among them, Agent Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

The young man in the basement. Who’d refused to be corrupted. Who’d stood his ground.

And Armand knew there was hope.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir looked up from booking one of his former colleagues and watched Chief Inspector Gamache surrounded by his officers. He looked tired and rubbed his forehead as he listened closely to each report. Each person vying for his attention.

Under the look of fatigue, thought Jean-Guy, the attack of migraine and the sigh / There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

CHAPTER 11

The forensics team flew back to Montréal early the next morning with their prisoners.

The hikers had been released, though Gamache had assigned an agent to look more closely into their identities. He also wanted to know more about Clotilde’s history and her family. There must be someone. Parents, siblings, the father of her children.

He and Inspector Chernin stayed behind to fill in some details, leaving Agent Beauvoir to run the detachment.

“You mean I’m in command?” He looked around the empty space as though he’d been given the keys to the kingdom.

Less than a day earlier he’d been in the basement, and now he was in charge.

“Yes,” said Gamache. “It’s all yours. Don’t burn it down.”

As they left, they heard a phone ring. “Sûreté. Agent Beauvoir. How can I help?”

Gamache and Chernin met first with the coroner, who confirmed that death was due to a blow to Clotilde’s head. Almost certainly a brick.

There was no semen. It appeared she had not been sexually assaulted. Most of the bruises were either older or postmortem.