A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #2)

‘That explains a lot,’ said Beauvoir, finishing the letter. ‘The complexity of the crime, why Kaye claimed not to have seen anything. It all makes sense. It needed all three of them. The niacin was in Mother’s tea, Émilie controlled when Mother would make all that noise at the curling, drawing everyone’s attention away from CC. Kaye leaned on the chair, making it crooked. They knew CC would have to straighten it.’ Beauvoir pointed to the letter on his lap. ‘Madame Longpré begs you to let them kill themselves, and you were going to.’

He had no gift for subtlety, but he tried to make it sound less harsh than it was.

Gamache moved out of the emergency room and into the busy hallway. Doctors and nurses were rushing up and down, the emergency room clogged with car accident victims, skiers with broken bones, people suffering hypothermia and frostbite from the storm. The two men found a couple of chairs and sat down.

‘You’re right, I was going to let them die.’ He could barely believe he was saying that. ‘I knew yesterday that they were the only ones who could have killed CC. Em’s letter only confirmed what I’d guessed. But as I watched them struggle onto the lake I thought of Inuit elders and how they’d get on an ice flow and drift to their deaths, to save the community in a time of starvation. They’d give up their lives so that others would live. Then there were CC’s boots.’

‘The mukluks. Inuit boots. You’re not saying there’s an Inuk involved somehow?’ Beauvoir wondered who that might be.

‘No.’ Gamache gave him a small smile.

‘Good. So there were only three of them. I was afraid the whole village was involved.’

A young doctor hurried down the corridor toward them, wiping his hands.

‘Chief Inspector Gamache? I’ve just come from Madame Mayer. It looks as though she’ll live. Looks soft, but she’s tough as nails. She has frostbite, of course, and moderate exposure. Interestingly enough, the snow might have saved them. It created a blanket when it fell and that helped insulate them. But the other woman? Émilie Longpré?’ Gamache closed his eyes for the briefest of moments. ‘I’m afraid she’s already gone.’

Gamache had known. When he’d lifted her up she’d been impossibly light. He’d felt he had to hold on to her otherwise she’d float out of his arms. As he held her he’d poured all his prayers into her. But the vessel was cracked too deeply.

Émilie Longpré was curled in Gus’s arms now, warm and safe and happy, listening to David play Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in D Major. Em was home.

‘Madame Mayer’s awake if you’d like to talk to her.’

‘Very much.’ Gamache started down the hall, following the doctor.

‘Just one more thing,’ said the doctor as they approached the door. ‘Madame Mayer keeps repeating something over and over and I wonder if you can help us.’

‘Namaste,’ said Beauvoir. ‘It means, the God in me greets the God in you.’ Gamache turned to him, surprised. ‘I looked it up.’

‘No, I know namaste,’ said the doctor, opening the door.

Gamache turned to Beauvoir. ‘The Inuit boots. Émilie Longpré didn’t mention them in her letter. She didn’t know about them until I told her, and even then she didn’t see the significance.’ Gamache disappeared into Beatrice Mayer’s room.

Beauvoir stood on the threshold of the room, alone. What was the chief saying?

And then it hit him. Like the Inuit, the Three Graces had tried to kill themselves to save someone else. To save the real murderer.

They hadn’t killed CC. Someone else had.

From inside the room he heard Beatrice Mayer’s voice.

‘Fuck the Pope!’

Beauvoir brought the car up to the house, yet again. It skidded as he applied the brakes, as though it too didn’t really want to stop there.

The old Hadley house was in near darkness, the path to the front door unshoveled and without footprints. No one had been in or out of the place all day.

‘Should I call for backup?’

‘No. I don’t think he’ll be surprised to see us. He might even be relieved.’

‘I still don’t understand why CC married him,’ mumbled Beauvoir, looking at the closed door.

‘His name,’ said Gamache. ‘Nichol gave me that answer.’

‘How’d she figure it out?’

‘Well, she didn’t really, but she told me that she went into the fire to save Saul Petrov because of his name. Saul. She had an Uncle Saul and there’s a collective guilt in her family about those who died in Czechoslovakia. Including Uncle Saul. It worked on a primal level. It wasn’t rational.’