A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #2)

What wouldn’t freeze?

Something specially designed not to.

Anti-freeze windshield washer fluid. The ubiquitous light blue liquid everyone in Canada poured by the gallon into their cars. It was designed to be sprayed onto the windshield to wipe away the slush and salt. And not to freeze.

Was it that easy?

‘It’s windshield washer fluid,’ said Lacoste.

Apparently so, thought Gamache. At least something about this case was straightforward.

‘How did the murderer spill washer fluid there without being seen?’ Lacoste asked.

‘Well, we don’t know that the murderer wasn’t seen,’ said Gamache. ‘We haven’t asked that question. And someone was sitting right beside Madame de Poitiers. That person might have seen.’

‘Who?’ Beauvoir asked.

‘Kaye Thompson.’ Now Gamache got up and walked to the drawing Beauvoir had made of the scene of crime. He told them about his interviews of the day before then he drew three Xs clustered round the heat lamp.

‘Lawn chairs. They were meant for the three elderly women who brought them, but only one ended up using a chair. Kaye Thompson was sitting in this one.’ Gamache pointed to one of the Xs. ‘The other two women were curling and CC sat in the chair closest to the lamp. Now this chair,’ he circled the chair closest to the curling rink, ‘was on its side. It’s also the one with the fluid under it, am I right?’ he asked Lacoste, who nodded.

‘It’s in the lab being tested but I suspect we’ll find that the chair was the murder weapon,’ she said.

‘But wasn’t the heat lamp?’ one of the agents asked, turning to Beauvoir. ‘I thought you said the victim touched the thing that was electrified. That’s the heat lamp.’

‘C’est vrai,’ Beauvoir conceded. ‘But it appears that wasn’t what killed her. The chair did, we think. If you look at the wounds on her hands, they’re consistent with the aluminum tubing at the back of the chair.’

‘But how?’ one of the technicians asked.

‘That’s what we have to find out,’ said Beauvoir, so wrapped up in the mystery he failed to tell the technician to get back to work. She’d asked the right question. How did a charge get from the heat lamp to create an electric chair?

An electric chair.

Jean Guy Beauvoir rolled the concept round in his clear, analytical mind. Was that somehow important? Was there a reason the murderer had chosen to kill CC de Poitiers by electric chair?

Was this retribution? Revenge? Was it punishment for some crime of CC’s? If so, it was the first such execution in Canada in fifty years.

‘What do you think?’ Gamache turned to the technician who’d asked the question, a young woman in overalls and a toolbelt. ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Céline Provost, sir. I’m an electrician with Sûreté technical services. I’m just here to wire up the computers.’

‘Bon, Agent Provost. What’s your theory?’

She stared at the diagram for a full minute, considering. ‘What was the voltage of the generator?’

Beauvoir told her. She nodded and thought some more. Then she shook her head.

‘I was wondering whether the murderer could have attached some more booster cables from the lamp to the chair, then buried the wires under the snow. That would electrify the chair.’

‘But?’

‘But it would mean the chair was live with electricity the whole time. As soon as the murderer attached the cables the chair would be electrified. Anyone touching it would get the charge. The murderer couldn’t guarantee Madame de Poitiers would be the first to touch it.’

‘There’d be no way to turn the current on and off?’

‘None, except from the truck generator and they make a lot of noise. Everyone would have noticed it going off. And if the murderer put the cables on at the last minute, that woman you said was sitting right there, well, she would have seen for sure.’

Gamache thought about it. She was right.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Other reports?’ Gamache asked as he sat back down.

For the next twenty minutes various agents reported on the crime scene findings, the preliminary analyses, the initial background checks.

‘So far,’ Agent Lacoste reported, ‘we know that Richard Lyon works as a glorified clerk in a clothing factory. He does their paperwork and makes out shift assignments. But in his spare time he’s invented this.’ She held up a diagram.

‘Enough mysteries,’ said Beauvoir. ‘What is it?’