Summary

In Chapter 8, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, spent Boxing Day looking through cold case files from Montreal Metropolitan Police. It was an arrangement that Marc Brault, the department’s head inspector, and Gamache (who worked with the Sûreté) had made to trade cold case files and see if they could find anything. Gamache told Brault that if he were murdered, he would hope someone would do the same for him.

Reine-Marie found a file from just a few days prior and assumed it had been misfiled. She read it and realized the woman killed was the bag lady from the Berri bus station. She had been killed on Dec. 22 by Olgivy’s. Reine-Marie was offended because the inspecting officers had not even bothered to learn the woman’s name. She was called Elle but most often they referred to...