Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

‘There’s a bus for Montreal tomorrow morning at six from St Rémy. Take it.’

He had no more to say. Agent Yvette Nichol was left shaking with rage on the cold dark stoop of Arts Williamsburg. She wanted to pound on the closed door. It seemed all her life doors were being shut in her face and here she was again, on the outside. Throbbing with fury she took two steps over to the window and looked in, at the people milling around, at Gamache talking to that Morrow woman and her husband. But there was someone else in the picture. After a moment she realised it was her own reflection.

How was she going to explain this to her father? She’d blown it. Somehow, somewhere, she’d done something wrong. But what? But Nichol was beyond reasoning. All she could think of was walking into her miniscule home with the immaculate front yard in east end Montreal, and telling her father she’d been kicked off the case. Shame on you. A phrase from the investigation floated into her head.

You’re looking at the problem.

That meant something. Something significant she was sure. And then, finally, she understood.

The problem was Gamache.

There he was talking and laughing, smug and oblivious to the pain he caused. He was no different than the police her father had told her about in Czechoslovakia. How could she have been so blind? With relief she realised she needn’t tell her father anything. After all, it wasn’t her fault.

Nichol turned away, the sight too painful, of people having fun and her own lonely reflection.

An hour later the party had emigrated from Arts Williamsburg to Jane’s home. The wind was picking up and the rain was just beginning. Clara stationed herself in the middle of the living room, just as Jane might have, so that as everyone arrived she could see their reactions.

‘Oh. My. God.’ was heard a lot, as was ‘Holy shit’ and ‘Tabarouette’. ‘Tabarnouche’ and ‘Tabernacle’ bounced off the walls. Jane’s living room had become a shrine to multilingual swearing. Clara felt pretty much at home. A beer in one hand and cashews in the other, she watched as the guests arrived and were swept away by amazement. Most of the downstairs walls had been exposed and there, swooping and swirling before them, was the geography and history of Three Pines. The cougars and lynx, long since disappeared, the boys marching off to the Great War, and straight on to the modest stained-glass window of St Thomas’s, commemorating the dead. There were the dope plants growing outside the Williamsburg police station, a happy cat sitting on the window looking down at the healthy growth.

The first thing Clara did, of course, was find herself on the wall. Her face poked out from a bush of Old Garden Roses, while Peter was found crouching behind a noble statue of Ben in shorts, standing on his mother’s lawn. Peter was in his Robin Hood outfit and sported a bow and arrow, while Ben stood bold and strong, staring at the house. Clara looked quite closely to see whether Jane had painted snakes oozing out of the old Hadley home, but she hadn’t.

The home was quickly filling with laughter and shrieks and howls of recognition. And sometimes a person was moved to tears they couldn’t explain. Gamache and Beauvoir worked the room, watching and listening.

‘... but what gets me is the delight in the images,’ Myrna was saying to Clara. ‘Even the deaths, accidents, funerals, bad crops, even they have a kind of life. She made them natural.’

‘Hey, you,’ Clara called out to Ben who came over eagerly. ‘Look at yourself.’ She waved at his image on the wall.

‘Very bold.’ He smiled. ‘Chiseled, even.’

Gamache looked over at Ben’s image on Jane’s wall, a strong man, but staring at his parent’s home. Not for the first time he thought Timmer Hadley’s death might have been quite timely for her son. He might finally get away from her shadow. Interestingly, though, it was Peter who was standing in shadow. Ben’s shadow. Gamache wondered what that could mean. He was beginning to appreciate that Jane’s home was a kind of key to the community. Jane Neal had been a very observant woman.

Elise Jacob arrived at that moment, nodding to Gamache as she walked in. ‘Phew, what a night, -’ but her eyes quickly refocused to the wall behind him. Then she spun around to examine the wall behind her.

‘Christ,’ said the lovely, soignée woman, waving to Gamache and the room in general as though perhaps she was the first to notice the drawings. Gamache simply smiled and waited for her to gather herself.

‘Did you bring it?’ he asked, not altogether sure her ears were working yet.

‘C’est brillant,’ she whispered. ‘Formidable. Magnifique. Holy shit.’