by Louise Penny
‘What’s that?’ Gamache finally spoke, pointing to the huge mushroom that towered over the scene like a very small and frozen A-bomb.
‘It’s a heating element, sir. Like a lamp post, except it throws heat.’
‘I’ve seen them on the terrasses in Quebec City,’ said Gamache, remembering the glasses of white wine on the old stone terrasses in Vieux Québec, and the heating elements that allowed people to enjoy outdoor dining into the early autumn. ‘But they were much smaller.’
‘Most are. These are industrial. Used for outdoor construction sites in the winter and some sporting events. I imagine that one was borrowed from the Bantam hockey league in Williamsburg. They play most of their games outside and a few years ago they had a big fundraiser to build bleachers and get something to keep spectators warm.’
‘Are you from round here?’
‘Yes sir. I was raised in St-Rémy. My family’s moved but I wanted to come back here after police college.’
‘Why?’
Why? The question surprised Lemieux. No one had asked him that. Was this a test, a trick on the part of Gamache? He looked at the large man in front of him and decided probably not. He didn’t seem the sort who needed tricks. Still, it was best to give a diplomatic answer.
‘I wanted to work with the Sûreté and I figured I’d have an advantage working here since I know so many people.’
Gamache watched him for a moment. An uncomfortable moment, then he turned back to look at the heat standard. Lemieux relaxed a little.
‘That must be electric. The electricity that killed Madame de Poitiers probably came from that. And yet she was so far from it when she collapsed. Could the heater have had a bad connection, and somehow Madame de Poitiers came in contact with it and managed to stagger a few paces before collapsing, I wonder? What do you think?’
‘Am I allowed to guess?’
Gamache laughed. ‘Yes, but don’t tell Inspector Beauvoir.’
‘People use generators all the time round here to make electricity. Everyone has one. I think it’s possible someone attached her to one.’
‘You mean used a jumper cable and clipped the two prongs onto her?’ He tried not to sound incredulous, but it was difficult. ‘Do you think she might have noticed?’
‘Not if she was watching the curling.’
It seemed young Agent Lemieux and Chief Inspector Gamache had different experiences with curling. Gamache liked it enough to watch the national finals on television. It was almost a Canadian requirement. But riveting it never was. And he’d certainly know if Reine-Marie suddenly started up a generator and attached a couple of huge alligator clips to his ears.
‘Any other ideas?’
Lemieux shook his head and tried to give the impression of massive thought.
Jean Guy Beauvoir had broken away from the CSI and joined Gamache, now standing near the heat lamp.
‘How was this powered, Jean Guy?’
‘Not a clue. We’ve dusted and photographed it so you can touch it if you like.’
The two men circled the lamp, alternately bowing and looking heavenward, like two monks on a very short pilgrimage.
‘Here’s the on switch.’ Gamache flipped it and, not surprisingly, nothing happened.
‘One more mystery.’ Beauvoir smiled.
‘Will it never end?’
Gamache looked toward Agent Lemieux sitting on the bleachers, blowing on his frozen hands, and writing in his notebook. The chief had asked him to put his notes in order.
‘What do you think of him?’
‘Lemieux?’ Beauvoir asked, his heart sinking. ‘He’s all right.’
‘But…’
How’d he know there was a but? Not for the first time Beauvoir hoped Gamache couldn’t actually read his mind. There was a lot of junk up there. As his grandfather used to say, ‘You don’t want to go into your head alone, mon petit. It’s a very scary place.’
The lesson had stuck. Beauvoir spent very little time looking around his own head, and even less looking into others’. He preferred facts, evidence, things he could see and touch and hold. He left the mind to braver men, like Gamache. But now he wondered whether the chief hadn’t discovered a way into his own mind. He’d find a lot of embarrassing stuff up there. More than a little pornography. A fantasy or two about Agent Isabelle Lacoste. Even a fantasy about Agent Yvette Nichol, the disastrous trainee from a year or so ago. That fantasy involved dismemberment. But if Gamache was ferreting around in Beauvoir’s mind, he’d only find respect for himself. And if he dug deep enough Gamache might eventually find the room Beauvoir tried to keep hidden even from himself. In that room waited Beauvoir’s fears, fetid and hungry. And slouching there, hidden below the fear of rejection and intimacy, sat the fear that someday Beauvoir would lose Gamache. And beside that fear, in that hidden room, sat something else. It was where Beauvoir’s love hid, curled into a tiny protective ball and rolled into the furthest corner of his mind.
‘I think he’s trying too hard. There’s something wrong. I don’t trust him.’
‘Is that because he defended the villagers who were trying to help Madame de Poitiers?’
‘Of course not,’ Beauvoir lied. He hated to be contradicted, especially by a kid. ‘He just seemed beyond his depth, and he shouldn’t be. Not for a Sûreté officer.’
‘But he’s not trained in homicide. He’s like a GP who suddenly has to operate on someone. Theoretically he should be able to do it, and he’s probably better trained than a bus conductor, but it’s not what he does. I’m not sure how well I’d do if I was suddenly transferred to narcotics or internal affairs. I suspect I’d make a few mistakes. No, I think Agent Lemieux hasn’t done badly.’
Here we go, thought Beauvoir. ‘Not doing badly isn’t good enough,’ he said. ‘That’s a pretty low bar you’re setting, sir. This is homicide. The elite division in the Sûreté.’ He could see Gamache bristle as he always did when that was said. For some reason unfathomable to Beauvoir, Gamache resisted this statement of the obvious. Even the top bosses admitted as much. The best of the best made it into homicide. The smartest, the bravest, the people who got up each morning from the comfort of their homes, kissed their children and went into the world to deliberately hunt people who deliberately killed. There was no place for the weak. And trainees, by their very nature, were weak. And weakness led to mistakes and mistakes led to something going horribly wrong. The murderer could escape to kill again, maybe even a Sûreté agent. Maybe even you, maybe – the door crept open slightly and a ghoul escaped the well hidden room – maybe Armand Gamache. One day his need to help young agents will kill him. Beauvoir slammed the door shut, but not before feeling a bristling of rage against the man standing before him.
‘We’ve been through this before, sir,’ his voice now hard and angry. ‘This is a team. Your team, and we’ll always do as you ask. But please, please stop asking this of us.’
‘I can’t, Jean Guy. I found you at the Trois-Rivières detachment, remember?’
Beauvoir rolled his eyes.
‘You were sitting among the reeds in a basket.’
‘Weed, sir. How many times must I tell you, it was weed. Dope. I was sitting with stacks of dope we’d confiscated. And it wasn’t a basket, it was a bucket. From Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I wasn’t in it.’
‘Now I feel badly. I told Superintendent Brébeuf I found you in a basket. Oh dear. You do remember, though? There you were buried alive under stacks of evidence, and why? Because you’d so annoyed everyone they’d assigned you permanently to the evidence room.’
Beauvoir remembered that day every day. He’d never forget being saved. By this large man in front of him, with the trim graying hair, the impeccable clothes and the eyes of deepest brown.
‘You were bored and angry. I took you on when no one else wanted you.’ Gamache was speaking so softly no one else could hear. And he was speaking with open affection. Beauvoir suddenly remembered the lesson he always hurried to forget. Gam
ache was the best of them, the smartest and bravest and strongest because he was willing to go into his own head alone, and open all the doors there, and enter all the dark rooms. And make friends with what he found there. And he went into the dark, hidden rooms in the minds of others. The minds of killers. And he faced down whatever monsters came at him. He went to places Beauvoir had never even dreamed existed.
That was why Armand Gamache was their chief. His chief. And that was why he loved him. And that was why Jean Guy Beauvoir struggled every day trying to protect this man who made it clear he neither wanted nor needed protection. Indeed, every day he tried to convince Beauvoir the protection was a travesty, a ruse. All it did was block his view of whatever horrible thing was heading his way. Best to see it, and meet it. And not try to hide behind armor that won’t protect anyway. Not against what they hunted.
‘But I’ll tell you what, Jean Guy,’ now Gamache smiled brilliantly and completely, ‘if you don’t want Agent Lemieux I’ll take him. I won’t impose him on you.’
‘Fine, take him, but don’t come crying to me when you find out he’s the murderer.’
Gamache laughed. ‘I have to admit, I’ve made a lot of bad choices, especially recently,’ he meant, but would never say, Agent Yvette Nichol, ‘but that would be the winner. Still, better to risk than live in fear.’
Gamache patted him on the arm with such easy affection it almost took Beauvoir’s breath away. And then he was gone, walking purposefully across the ice, nodding to the other investigators, as he made his way to Agent Robert Lemieux, to make the young man’s day. His week. His career.
Beauvoir watched as Gamache quietly spoke with Lemieux. He saw the young man’s face open in a look of such astonishment Beauvoir felt maybe the angels had appeared. It was a look Beauvoir had often seen from people speaking to Gamache. And had never, ever seen from anyone looking at him.
Beauvoir shook his head in wonderment and returned to the task at hand.
TEN
‘Look who’s here,’ Peter called from the kitchen into the living room. Clara closed her book and joined her husband at the sink. Holding the curtains back she could see a familiar, well-liked figure coming up their path and beside him came someone else. A stranger.
Clara hurried into the mudroom to open the door, stepping over Lucy, who showed no interest in protecting the home. The only person she barked at was Ruth and that was only because Ruth barked back.
‘Cold enough for you?’ Clara called.
‘Snow’s coming, I hear,’ said Gamache.
Clara smiled as he spoke. She hadn’t seen him for more than a year, since Jane’s murder. She’d sometimes wondered whether, upon seeing Gamache again, some of the old hurt would also come back. Would she for ever associate him with that horrible time? Not just the loss of Jane, but those terrifying minutes trapped in the basement of the old Hadley house? But now, seeing him arrive, all she felt was gladness. And comfort. And she’d forgotten the delight of hearing perfect English, with a slight British accent, coming from a senior Sûreté officer. She’d meant to ask him where he’d learned it, but kept forgetting.
Gamache gave Clara a kiss on both cheeks and shook Peter’s hand with affection. ‘May I present Agent Robert Lemieux. He’s been seconded to us from the Cowansville Sûreté.’
‘Enchanté,’ said Lemieux.
‘Un plaisir,’ replied Clara.
‘So it was murder,’ said Peter, taking their coats. He’d gone to the hospital with CC and had known long before they’d arrived that she was dead. He’d been on the curling rink watching Mother’s magnificent last shot when he’d looked over to the bleachers and seen the crowd that should have been watching the curlers rising from their seats and watching something else entirely. He’d dropped his broom and raced over.
And there she was, CC de Poitiers, unconscious on the snow. All her muscles taut as though straining against some force.
They’d tried to revive her, had called an ambulance, and had finally concluded it was fastest to take her to the hospital themselves. So they’d piled her into the open back of Billy Williams’s pickup and bumped and jostled along at breakneck speed on the snow-covered back roads, making for Cowansville. He and Olivier and Ruth in the open truck while Billy Williams drove like a maniac. Beside Billy in the cab sat CC’s lump of a husband and their daughter. Staring straight ahead. Silent and unmoving, like snowmen. Peter knew he was being uncharitable, but he couldn’t help being annoyed at the man who did nothing to save his wife while perfect strangers did everything.
Olivier was leaning rhythmically on and off CC’s chest, massaging her heart. Ruth was counting the beats. And Peter drew the short straw. He’d had to breathe into her dead lungs. And they were dead. They all knew it, but still they kept it up as Billy hit every pothole and ice patch between Williamsburg and Cowansville. Kneeling on the frozen metal floor Peter could feel himself lift with each bump and crash down on his knees, bruising them more and more each time. But still he persevered. Not for CC. But because beside him Olivier was suffering the same fate. And holding CC’s head tenderly and firmly was Ruth, also kneeling, her bad hip and old knees slamming into the floor, her voice never wavering as she counted the beats. He’d continued CPR, pressing his warm lips to CC’s increasingly cold and rigid ones, until finally it felt as it had when he was a child and had kissed his ski poles. Just to see. They were so cold it burned, and his lips had refused to come away. He’d finally peeled them off, leaving a thin layer of himself on the poles. His lips bleeding, he’d quickly looked around to make sure no one had seen.
Giving CPR to CC had felt like that. He’d had the impression that if he kept it up eventually his moist lips would solder to hers and he’d be stuck there until he finally ripped them away, leaving part of him for ever on her, a bloody kiss of life.
It was the most repulsive thing he’d ever had to do, all the more so since he’d found her pretty repulsive in life. Death hadn’t improved her.
‘It was murder. Madame de Poitiers was deliberately electrocuted,’ said Gamache.
Clara turned to her husband. ‘You knew the doctors suspected murder.’
‘I heard Dr Lambert talking to a police officer. Wait a minute. Was that you?’ Peter asked Lemieux.
‘Oui, monsieur. I recognize you as well. In fact, I believe we’ve met at a few community events.’
‘It’s certainly possible. Electrocution,’ said Peter thoughtfully. ‘Well, there was a smell. Barbecue.’
‘Do you know, now that you mention it, I remember that as well,’ said Clara with disgust. ‘There was such a commotion it’s hard to remember back.’
‘That’s what I’m going to ask you to do,’ said Gamache, motioning to Lemieux to take notes. Peter led them into the cozy living room and threw a birch log on the fire, the flames grabbing and crackling and leaping as the bark burst into flames. Gamache noticed again the honey pine wide-plank flooring, the mullioned windows looking out onto the village green, the piano and the bookcase, crammed with books and covering one wall. A sofa faced the open hearth and two easy chairs bracketed it. The hassocks in front of the seats were covered with old newspapers and magazines and books, splayed open. The only thing different about the familiar room for Gamache was the huge and exuberantly decorated Christmas tree, giving off a sweet aroma. Clara followed with a tray of tea and biscuits and all four sat round the warm hearth. Outside the sun was setting, and clouds were gathering on the dim horizon.
‘Where would you like to start?’
‘This morning, please. I understand there was a community breakfast?’
‘In the Royal Canadian Legion, on rue Larry in Williamsburg. Peter and I got there early to help set up. It’s a fundraiser for the hospital.’
‘We got there at about seven this morning,’ Peter picked up the story, ‘and were joined by a few other volunteers. Myrna Landers, Émilie Longpré, Bea Mayer and Kaye Thompson. We have it down pat by now. Put out the tables and chairs, Clara and I do tha
t, while the others get the coffee going and organize the food.’
‘The truth is, by Boxing Day morning most people aren’t actually all that hungry. They pay ten dollars and get an all-you-can-eat breakfast,’ said Clara. ‘Peter and I do the cooking while Em and Kaye serve up. Kaye’s about two hundred years old and still manages to help but now she finds something she can do sitting down.’
‘Like bossing everyone around,’ said Peter.
‘She never bosses you. That’s my job,’ said Clara. ‘It’s voluntary.’
‘Very civic minded.’ Peter smiled with a long-suffering look.
‘What did the others do?’ Gamache asked. Lemieux was surprised by the question. He’d run out of notebook soon if they kept going into such detail over something that was hours away from the murder. He tried to write smaller.
‘Who’s left?’ Peter turned to Clara. ‘Myrna Landers and Bea Mayer.’
‘Bee?’ Lemieux asked.
‘Her name’s Beatrice, but everyone calls her Bea.’ Peter spelled Beatrice for Lemieux.
‘Actually, everyone calls her Mother,’ said Clara.
‘Why?’ asked Gamache.
‘See if you can figure it out,’ said Clara. Lemieux looked at the chief to see if he was annoyed by her flippant and familiar tone, but he was smiling.
‘What did Myrna and Bea do at the breakfast?’ Gamache asked.
‘They cleaned up between sittings and served coffee and tea,’ said Peter.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Clara, ‘Mother’s tea. It’s some herbal brew. Disgusting. I don’t mind tea,’ Clara raised her mug to them, ‘even tisane, but I hate to think what goes into the one Mother offers each year. She’s kind of amazing. No one ever takes it and yet she keeps on trying.’