Page 1 of The Grey Wolf
CHAPTER1
The phone rang. Again.
It was the fourth time in eight minutes.
All from the same number. All ignored by the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec. In the hopes it would go away.
But like most things ignored, it just got worse.
The first peal had interrupted the peace of the Gamaches’ back garden this Sunday morning in mid-August, in the Québec village of Three Pines. It broke into Armand’s thoughts as he sat on the fieldstone terrasse, absently brushing croissant flakes from his shirt and sipping strong, smooth café au lait.
While Reine-Marie read the paper, his section lay folded and warming and gathering crumbs on his lap. He tilted his head back slightly to the sun, taking a deep breath of the late-summer air. Then he contemplated the bobbing black-eyed Susans and the morning glories and sweet pea and purple Jackmanii Superba clematis climbing the fence that separated them from the mad poet next door.
It was a lovely, though ineffective, barrier. Barbed wire would have to be added.
Actually, the duck was the menace. Thank God Rosa seemed to have forgotten that she could fly. Or, more likely, she simply chose not to.
Paper read, or ignored, and mugs in hand, they strolled down the long dew-glistening lawn, past the huge maple with the swing for thegrandchildren, pausing now and then to examine the perennial beds, until they reached the point where their property ended and the rest of the world began.
This was the Gamaches’ Sunday ritual. In lives so unpredictable, they found sanctuary in certainty. Even if just for a moment.
Life was, after all, made up of tiny choices. Like a pointillist painting, no one dot, no one choice, defined it. But together? There emerged a picture. A life.
Where to live, where to sit. What to eat, to drink, to wear. Whether to cut the grass or let it become meadow. What to say and, perhaps more important, what not to say.
What job to take. What calling.
What call.
Returning to the sun-trap that was the stone terrace, he stretched out his legs, leaned back, closed his eyes, and Armand Gamache thought of… nothing. His mind a welcome blank.
So much peace. So much to break.
When that first call came through, Armand had reached for the phone, with every intention of answering. It was, after all, his private number. Only friends and family had it.
But his finger stopped on its way to swiping the screen.
Then he slowly replaced the phone on the table, narrowed his eyes, and as the ringing continued, he stared ahead. No longer seeing the garden. No longer hearing the birds or the cicadas, which managed to be both intrusive and comforting.
All were consumed by the ringing, ringing. As was he.
Reine-Marie lowered the newspaper slightly. Just enough to look at her husband, then down at the phone. She could not see the number, but she could see the creases forming at the corners of Armand’s eyes and mouth.
Now in his late fifties, his clean-shaven face was lined and weathered. From decades spent kneeling in snowy fields, in forests, and on the rocky shores of turbulent lakes, on sunbaked pavements. Staring down at a corpse.
As the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, ArmandGamache had seen more than his share of death. Violent, brutal, devastating death. Unnatural death.
Which was why, to balance the details of an autopsy, he sought the bumble of bees and racket of crickets. To offset a report from one of his agents into a murder, he listened to the wind through the forest, and smelled the musky scent of autumn leaves. They were his balm. His calm.
It was why home and family and a peaceful Sunday in a garden meant so much. To him. To them.
His hair was wavy and now mostly grey. It curled around his ears and at his collar.He needs a trim, Reine-Marie thought.
He was tall, over six feet, sturdily built, and far more likely to be mistaken, by anyone who met him casually, for a professor of arcane history than for a man who hunted killers.
And still the ringing continued. And the creases on his face deepened into crevices.
He could have, she knew, declined the call. But he didn’t. He could have shut off the phone. But he didn’t. Instead, he allowed it to ring. And ring. As he stared into the distance.
