Page 38 of The Grey Wolf
“Isabelle’s traced his phone calls. Looks like it was a burner phone. New. Only one call made from it.”
Armand’s plan had been to send Beauvoir to Action Québec Bleu, while he went back to the city apartment, showered, changed, then met the Chief Super. But the next call he made, the last one Charles Langlois had made, changed that. A man answered. Yes, he knew him.
“He’s our son. Why’re you asking?”
While Beauvoir went to Action Québec Bleu, Armand made his way to Charles’s parents’ place. The home was small, neat, almost painfully clean. “Propre” was the word that came to Armand’s mind. Not just clean, but immaculate.
At the door Madame Langlois had, quite reasonably, asked to see his ID. Gamache showed them, painfully aware of the state of his clothes. The state of him.
Before leaving Charles’s building, Armand had asked the downstairs neighbor if he could use her bathroom, to wash up. When he’d emerged, after washing his hands and face and wiping down his clothes as best he could, she’d studied him and nodded.
“Better.”
Though better was a sliding scale, and he was at the very low end. Still, it was better.
Madame and Monsieur Langlois invited him in. They were about Gamache’s age, and while guarded, they obviously had not seen the video or heard from family or friends.
He broke the news to them as gently as he could, but also clearly. There could be no doubt, no way for delusion and wishful thinking to find purchase. That would not be a kindness.
He looked at Madame Langlois as he spoke the final words. He expected to see, in those eyes so like her son’s, a death there too. As the light drained away. With his words, which allowed no escape, he would end their lives as they’d known them, and send them off into a netherworld. Of perpetual twilight. Time would stop and be remeasured from this moment forward.
But Madame Langlois did not actually register surprise. And neither did Charles’s father.
They told him then that they hadn’t heard from their son in almost a year. They’d banned him from their home, from their lives, when his addictions took over. When he’d stolen from them. Over and over. When he’d threatened his mother with a knife if she didn’t give him more money.
They lived in fear that he’d return. And had accepted that one day someone would knock on the door and tell them he was dead.
Gamache was that someone. This was the day.
Madame and Monsieur Langlois seemed almost relieved. The worst had happened. Now they could stop waiting for the nightmare. They had grieved for their lost little boy for so long, now they finally had a body to bury.
It was horrific, tragic, but it was not a surprise.
“Do you know anything about his life now?” Gamache asked.
They shook their heads.
“The last call he made was to you, this morning.”
“Oui.I know,” said his mother. “We didn’t answer, and he didn’t leave a message.”
She did not seem to regret that. In fact, she seemed defiant, challenging Gamache to challenge her. It wasn’t, Gamache thought, because she didn’t care, but because her love for their son was buried beneath so much hurt and pain that she could not yet retrieve it.
He thought of his own son, Daniel, and their struggles with him when he’d been in his late teens. How horrific it had been, trying to reach a young man who was out of control. Out of reach. How wide the crevasse between them and their son, their child, had become. How deep the wound. A hurt, Armand knew, he had made far worse.
How close it had come to Reine-Marie and him sitting where the Langlois were now. Listening to some poor officer giving them the bad, the worst, news.
Thankfully it never came to that. To this.
Even now, Armand could not think of those days, those months and even years, without feeling sick.
Both Daniel and Charles had finally gotten straight. Daniel had come back to them. Slowly, tentatively. Like some wounded animal approaching the hunter for help.
And Charles might have returned to his family had he been given more time.
Armand didn’t know if what he was about to say would make it worse, or better, but he felt the need to say it.
“Your son was, from what I could see, straight and sober. His last thought was of you.” Armand looked from father to mother. Settling on Madame Langlois. “He was a brave man.”
