Em nodded. ‘I do love them. I love all this.’ She looked around the cheerful room, the fires crackling in the grates, Olivier and Gabri talking to customers, price tags dangling from chairs and tables and chandeliers. When he’d been annoyed at Olivier one day Gabri had waited on tables with a price tag dangling from himself.

‘My life’s never been the same since that day I opened the door. I’m happy now. Content. Funny, isn’t it? I had to go to Hell to find happiness.’

‘People expect me to be cynical because of my job,’ Gamache found himself saying, ‘but they don’t understand. It’s exactly as you’ve said. I spend my days looking into the last room in the house, the one we keep barred and hidden even from ourselves. The one with all our monsters, fetid and rotting and waiting. My job is to find people who take lives. And to do that I have to find out why. And to do that I have to get into their heads and open that last door. But when I come out again,’ he opened his arms in an expansive movement, ‘the world is suddenly more beautiful, more alive, more lovely than ever. When you see the worst you appreciate the best.’

‘That’s it.’ Émilie nodded. ‘You like people.’

‘I love people,’ he admitted.

‘What was your God doing to the wall in the diner?’

‘He was writing.’

‘God wrote on the wall of the diner?’ Em was incredulous, though she didn’t know why. Her God walked around with a prefabricated construction sign.

Gamache nodded and remembered watching the grizzled, beautiful fisherman at the screen door to the fly-filled diner that smelled of the sea. He’d looked back at Gamache and smiled. Not the radiant, full frontal beam of a few minutes earlier, but a warm and comforting smile, as though to say He understood and that everything would be all right.

Gamache had gotten up and slid into the booth and read the writing on the wall. He’d pulled out his notebook, stuffed with facts about death, about murder and sorrow, and he’d written down the four simple lines.

He knew then what he had to do. Not because he was a brave man or a good man, but because he had no choice. He had to return to Montreal, to Sûreté headquarters, and he had to sort out the Arnot case. He’d known for months he had to do it, and yet he’d run from it and hidden behind work. Behind dead bodies and the solemn, noble need to find killers, as though he was the only one on the force who could.

The writing on the wall hadn’t told him what to do. He knew that. It’d given him the courage to do it.