Page 66 of A Better Man

“Can you make him tell you?” Reine-Marie shouted above the torrent.

“Short of putting a gun to his head or beating it out of him, no.”

In her silence, he knew what she was feeling, if not thinking.

Maybe, just this once …

Maybe in some cases it was justified. Maybe torture. Maybe beatings. Maybe even murder was justified. Sometimes.

“Situational ethics?” he asked.

“Don’t be smug,” Reine-Marie said. “We all have them. Even me. Even you.”

She was right, of course.

It was the asp at the breast of any decent cop. Any military leader. Any politician.

Any mother or father.

Any human.

Maybe. Just this once …

“I’d take Ruth,” said Olivier.

“Thank you,” said the old poet.

“Because she’s a witch and would float?” asked Clara.

“Of course,” said Olivier. “We could cling to her.”

“I’d rather drown,” said Gabri.

They turned to Billy.

“I think you’d know what I’d take,” he said.

“Your tractor?” asked Myrna.

“So that’s how you’re doing it,” Lysette Cloutier muttered as she stared at the IP address. “You shit.”

Over the fifteen years she’d worked in accounting for the Sûreté, Lysette had rarely used foul language. And rarely had she heard it.

But in homicide she’d heard, and discovered within herself, a whole new vocabulary. It was, she thought, a form of verbal violence to counter the horrific things they saw every day.

Instead of lashing out physically, they lashed out verbally.

And yet, she thought as she put more commands into her laptop, she’d rarely heard Chief Inspector Gamache swear. She tried to think if she’d ever heard him.

Maybe that’s why he was in charge. What was it he’d said to that Cameron? The population had a right to expect that people with a gun and a badge would also have self-control.

Maybe he had greater control over himself than most.

But what was he controlling? And what would happen if it ever broke free?

Bob Cameron sat in his car. The sleet had stopped. The skies were clearing. The temperature dropping.

His windshield was frosting over, but he could still see stars, the Milky Way. And that single light in the house.