“I sent them over to Ruth.” He placed his large hand on her tiny one. “I was afraid, and I just wanted to get rid of them. Of him.” He squeezed Ruth’s hand. “I’ve never forgiven myself that cowardice.”

“But who was he?” asked Gamache.

“You know him,” said Ruth.

Gamache thought, his lips moving slightly as he murmured to himself, going through the possibilities. Then he finally shook his head.

“I don’t know who you mean.”

“The third man in that picture,” said Ruth.

“What picture?”

“The one you showed me. With Gerald Bull and Guillaume.”

“This one?” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the old black-and-white photo taken at the Atomium in Brussels.

There was the grinning, almost buffoonish Guillaume Couture. The taciturn Gerald Bull.

And one other. His head down and away from the camera.

“Would I meet your eyes, and stand,/rooted and speechless,” said Ruth. “While the pavement cracked to pieces/and the sky fell down.”

Gamache looked at her.

“I wrote it after he left.” She gestured to the photograph. “After I sent him on. I did the same thing, Clément. I threw them Al Lepage, in the hopes they’d take him and leave me. I’d have done anything to get rid of him. After Gerald Bull left, the project manager returned. Alone. He knocked on the door and that’s when he asked if I could write a few lines to accompany the drawing of the Whore of Babylon. I told him I couldn’t. I told him I wasn’t really a poet. That it was just a lie I told myself.”

Her hands were trembling now, and while Monsieur Béliveau held one, Armand took the other.

“When he left I went up to St. Thomas’s,” she said, looking at the small clapboard chapel. “I prayed he’d never come calling again. I sat there and cried for shame. For what I’d done. Then I wrote those words, sitting in the pew, and didn’t write again for a decade.”

Gamache looked down at the black-and-white photograph. It seemed, in just that instant, that the third man tilted his face up. And looked straight at him.

Would I meet your eyes, and stand,/rooted and speechless.

The blood ran from his face and his hands grew cold and Armand Gamache knew who it was.

While the pavement cracked to pieces/and the sky fell down.

“It’s John Fleming,” he said beneath his breath.

“Yes,” said Ruth, her cold hand squeezing his. “The rough beast.”

Chapter 34

CHAPTER 34

Ten lambs were lined up down the center of the conference table in the Incident Room, facing Al and Evie Lepage.