The Brutal Telling (4 page)

The rest of the world saw a strong, noble lioness. He looked at his daughter and saw Bert Lahr, though he’d never tell her that. Or her husband.

“Can we talk?” Annie asked her father, ignoring Beauvoir. Gamache nodded and handed the dish towel to David. They walked down the hall and into the warm living room where books were ranged on shelves in orderly rows, and stacked under tables and beside the sofa in not-so-orderly piles.
Le Devoir
and the
New York Times
were on the coffee table and a gentle fire burned in the grate. Not the roaring flames of a bitter winter fire, but a soft almost liquid flame of early autumn.

They talked for a few minutes about Daniel, living in Paris with his wife and daughter, and another daughter due before the end of the month. They talked about her husband David and his hockey team, about to start up for another winter season.

Mostly Gamache listened. He wasn’t sure if Annie had something specific to say, or just wanted to talk. Henri jogged into the room and plunked his head on Annie’s lap. She kneaded his ears, to his grunts and moans. Eventually he lay down by the fire.

Just then the phone rang. Gamache ignored it.

“It’s the one in your office, I think,” said Annie. She could see it on the old wooden desk with the computer and the notebook, in the room that was filled with books, and smelled of sandalwood and rosewater and had three chairs.

She and Daniel would sit in their wooden swivel chairs and spin each other around until they were almost sick, while their father sat in his armchair, steady. And read. Or sometimes just stared.

“I think so too.”

The phone rang again. It was a sound they knew well. Somehow different from other phones. It was the ringing that announced a death.

Annie looked uncomfortable.

“It’ll wait,” he said quietly. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

“Should I get that?” Jean Guy looked in. He smiled at Annie but his eyes went swiftly to the Chief Inspector.

“Please. I’ll be there in a moment.”

He turned back to his daughter, but by then David had joined them and Annie had once again put on her public face. It wasn’t so different from her private one. Just, perhaps, a bit less vulnerable. And her father wondered briefly, as David sat down and took her hand, why she needed her public face in front of her husband.

“There’s been a murder, sir,” whispered Inspector Beauvoir. He stood just inside the room.

“
Oui
,” said Gamache, watching his daughter.

“Go on, Papa.” She waved her hand at him, not to dismiss him, but to free him of the need to stay with her.

“I will, eventually. Would you like to go for a walk?”

“It’s pelting down outside,” said David with a laugh. Gamache genuinely loved his son-in-law, but sometimes he could be oblivious. Annie also laughed.

“Really, Papa, not even Henri would go out in this.”

Henri leaped up and ran to get his ball. The fatal words, “Henri” and “out,” had been combined unleashing an undeniable force.

“Well,” said Gamache as the German shepherd bounded back into the room. “I have to go to work.”

He gave Annie and David a significant look, then glanced over at Henri. His meaning even David couldn’t miss.

“Christ,” whispered David good-humoredly, and getting off the comfortable sofa he and Annie went to find Henri’s leash.

B
y the time Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir arrived in Three Pines the local force had cordoned off the bistro, and villagers milled about under umbrellas and stared at the old brick building. The scene of so many meals and drinks and celebrations. Now a crime scene.

As Beauvoir drove down the slight slope into the village Gamache asked him to pull over.

“What is it?” the Inspector asked.

“I just want to look.”

The two men sat in the warm car, watching the village through the
lazy arc of the wipers. In front of them was the village green with its pond and bench, its beds of roses and hydrangea, late flowering phlox and hollyhocks. And at the end of the common, anchoring it and the village, stood the three tall pines.

Gamache’s gaze wandered to the buildings that hugged the village green. There were weathered white clapboard cottages, with wide porches and wicker chairs. There were tiny fieldstone houses built centuries ago by the first settlers, who’d cleared the land and yanked the stones from the earth. But most of the homes around the village green were made of rose-hued brick, built by United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. Three Pines sat just kilometers from the Vermont border and while relations now with the States were friendly and affectionate, they weren’t back then. The people who created the village had been desperate for sanctuary, hiding from a war they didn’t believe in.

The Chief Inspector’s eyes drifted up du Moulin, and there, on the side of the hill leading out of the village, was the small white chapel. St. Thomas’s Anglican.

Gamache brought his eyes back to the small crowd standing under umbrellas chatting, pointing, staring. Olivier’s bistro was smack-dab in the center of the semicircle of shops. Each shop ran into the next. Monsieur Béliveau’s general store, then Sarah’s Boulangerie, then Olivier’s Bistro and finally Myrna’s new and used bookstore.

“Let’s go,” Gamache nodded.

Beauvoir had been waiting for the word and now the car moved slowly forward. Toward the huddled suspects, toward the killer.

But one of the first lessons the Chief had taught Beauvoir when he’d joined the famed homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec was that to catch a killer they didn’t move forward. They moved back. Into the past. That was where the crime began, where the killer began. Some event, perhaps long forgotten by everyone else, had lodged inside the murderer. And he’d begun to fester.

What kills can’t be seen, the Chief had warned Beauvoir. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s not a gun or a knife or a fist. It’s not anything you can see coming. It’s an emotion. Rancid, spoiled. And waiting for a chance to strike.

The car slowly moved toward the bistro, toward the body.

“
Merci
,” said Gamache a minute later as a local Sûreté officer opened
the bistro door for them. The young man was just about to challenge the stranger, but hesitated.

Beauvoir loved this. The reaction of local cops as it dawned on them that this large man in his early fifties wasn’t just a curious citizen. To the young cops Gamache looked like their fathers. There was an air of courtliness about him. He always wore a suit, or the jacket and tie and gray flannels he had on that day.

They’d notice the mustache, trimmed and graying. His dark hair was also graying around the ears, where it curled up slightly. On a rainy day like this the Chief wore a cap, which he took off indoors, and when he did the young officers saw the balding head. And if that wasn’t enough they’d notice this man’s eyes. Everyone did. They were deep brown, thoughtful, intelligent and something else. Something that distinguished the famous head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec from every other senior officer.

His eyes were kind.

It was both his strength, Beauvoir knew, and his weakness.

Gamache smiled at the astonished officer who found himself face to face with the most celebrated cop in Quebec. Gamache offered his hand and the young agent stared at it for a moment before putting out his own. “
Patron
,” he said.

“Oh, I was hoping it would be you.” Gabri hurried across the room, past the Sûreté officers bending over the victim. “We asked if the Sûreté could send you but apparently it’s not normal for suspects to order up a specific officer.” He hugged the Chief Inspector then turned to the roomful of agents. “See, I do know him.” Then he whispered to Gamache, “I think it would be best if we didn’t kiss.”

“Very wise.”

Gabri looked tired and stressed, but composed. He was disheveled, though that wasn’t unusual. Behind him, quieter, almost eclipsed, stood Olivier. He was also disheveled. That was very unusual. He also looked exhausted, with dark rings under his eyes.

“Coroner’s just arriving now, Chief.” Agent Isabelle Lacoste walked across the room to greet him. She wore a simple skirt and light sweater and managed to make both look stylish. Like most Québécoises, she was petite and confident. “It’s Dr. Harris, I see.”

They all looked out the window and the crowd parted to let a woman with a medical bag through. Unlike Agent Lacoste, Dr. Harris managed
to make her simple skirt and sweater look slightly frumpy. But comfortable. And on a miserable day like this “comfortable” was very attractive.

“Good,” said the Chief, turning back to Agent Lacoste. “What do we know?”

Lacoste led Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir to the body. They knelt, an act and ritual they’d performed hundreds of times. It was surprisingly intimate. They didn’t touch him, but leaned very close, closer than they’d ever get to anyone in life, except a loved one.

“The victim was struck from behind by a blunt object. Something clean and hard, and narrow.”

“A fireplace poker?” Beauvoir asked, looking over at the fires Olivier had set. Gamache also looked. It was a damp morning, but not all that cool. A fire wasn’t necessary. Still, it was probably made to comfort more than to heat.

“If it was a poker it would be clean. The coroner will take a closer look, of course, but there’s no obvious sign of dirt, ash, wood, anything, in the wound.”

Gamache was staring at the gaping hole in the man’s head. Listening to his agent.

“No weapon, then?” asked Beauvoir.

“Not yet. We’re searching, of course.”

“Who was he?”

“We don’t know.”

Gamache took his eyes off the wound and looked at the woman, but said nothing.

“We have no ID,” Agent Lacoste continued. “We’ve been through his pockets and nothing. Not even a Kleenex. And no one seems to know him. He’s a white male, mid-seventies I’d say. Lean but not malnourished. Five seven, maybe five eight.”

Years ago, when she’d first joined homicide, it had seemed bizarre to Agent Lacoste to catalog these things the Chief could see perfectly well for himself. But he’d taught them all to do it, and so she did. It was only years later, when she was training someone else, that she recognized the value of the exercise.

It made sure they both saw the same things. Police were as fallible and subjective as anyone else. They missed things, and misinterpreted things. This catalog made it less likely. Either that or they’d reinforce the same mistakes.

“Nothing in his hands and it looks like nothing under his fingernails. No bruising. Doesn’t appear to have been a struggle.”

They stood up.

“The condition of the room verifies that.”

They looked around.

Nothing out of place. Nothing tipped over. Everything clean and orderly.

It was a restful room. The fires at either end of the beamed bistro took the gloom out of the day. Their light gleamed off the polished wood floors, darkened by years of smoke and farmers’ feet.

Sofas and large inviting armchairs sat in front of each fireplace, their fabric faded. Old chairs were grouped around dark wooden dining tables. In front of the mullioned bay windows three or four wing chairs waited for villagers nursing steaming
café au lait
and croissants, or Scotches, or burgundy wine. Gamache suspected the people milling outside in the rain could do with a good stiff drink. He thought Olivier and Gabri certainly could.

Chief Inspector Gamache and his team had been in the bistro many times, enjoying meals in front of the roaring fire in winter or a quiet cool drink on the
terrasse
in summer. Almost always discussing murder. But never with an actual body right there.

Sharon Harris joined them, taking off her wet raincoat then smiling at Agent Lacoste and shaking hands solemnly with the Chief Inspector.

“Dr. Harris,” he said, bowing slightly. “I’m sorry about disturbing your long weekend.”

She’d been sitting at home, flipping through the television channels, trying to find someone who wasn’t preaching at her, when the phone had rung. It had seemed a godsend. But looking now at the body, she knew that this had very little to do with God.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Gamache. Through the windows he saw the villagers, still there, waiting for news. A tall, handsome man with gray hair bent down to listen as a short woman with wild hair spoke. Peter and Clara Morrow. Villagers and artists. Standing like a ramrod beside them and staring unblinking at the bistro was Ruth Zardo. And her duck, looking quite imperious. Ruth wore a sou’wester that glistened in the rain. Clara spoke to her, but was ignored. Ruth Zardo, Gamache knew, was a drunken, embittered old piece of work. Who also happened
to be his favorite poet in the world. Clara spoke again and this time Ruth did respond. Even through the glass Gamache knew what she’d said.

“Fuck off.”

Gamache smiled. While a body in the bistro was certainly different, some things never changed.

“Chief Inspector.”

The familiar, deep, singsong voice greeted him. He turned and saw Myrna Landers walking across the room, her electric yellow boots clumping on the floor. She wore a pink tracksuit tucked into her boots.