Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

‘It would make a nice change.’

‘Look.’ Clara pointed again at the woman. ‘Jesus, now that I look more closely I must have been blind not to see it before. It’s like this huge carbuncle.’ Try as they might none of them could see what she meant.

‘For God’s sake, just tell us, before I spank you,’ said Ruth.

‘There.’ Clara zigzagged her finger around the woman’s face, and sure enough, looking more closely, they could see a tiny smudging. ‘It’s like a wart, a huge blemish on this work.’ She pointed to nearly invisible fuzzy marks. ‘That’s done by a rag and mineral spirits, right, Ben?’

But Ben was still peering almost cross-eyed at Fair Day.

‘And look at that, those brush strokes. All wrong. Look at Peter’s face beside her. Totally different strokes.’ Clara waved her whole arm back and forth then up and down. ‘Up and down. Jane doesn’t do up and down strokes. Lots of sideways, but no straight up and down. Look at this woman’s hair. Up and down strokes. A dead giveaway. Do you notice the paint?’ She turned to Peter, who seemed uncomfortable.

‘No. Nothing strange about the paints.’

‘Oh, come on. Look. The whites are different. Jane used Titanium white here, here and here. But over here,’ she pointed to the woman’s eyes, ‘this is Zinc white. That’s Ochre Yellow.’ Clara was pointing to the woman’s vest. ‘Jane never used Ochre, only Cadmium. So obvious. You know, we’ve done so much art, teaching it, and even sometimes picking up extra money restoring things for the McCord, that I can tell you who painted what, just by their brush strokes, never mind their choice of brushes and paints.’

‘Why would someone paint in a face?’ Myrna asked.

‘That’s the question,’ agreed Gamache.

‘And not the only one. Why add a face, yes, great question, but whoever did it also took out a face. You can tell by the smudges. They didn’t just paint on top of the existing face, the one Jane did, they actually erased that whole face. I don’t get it. If Jane, or anyone, wanted to erase a face it would be easiest to just paint over the existing one. You can do that with acrylic, in fact, everyone does that with acrylic. You almost never bother erasing. Just paint over your mistakes.’

‘But if they did that could you remove that face and find the original underneath?’ Gamache asked.

‘It’s tricky,’ said Peter, ‘but a good art restorer could.

It’s like we’re doing upstairs here, taking off one layer of paint to find the image underneath. With a canvas, though, you can also do it with x-ray. It’s a little blurry, but you might get an idea of who’s there. Now, well, it’s destroyed.’

‘Whoever did this didn’t want the face found,’ said Clara. ‘So she removed hers and painted in another woman’s.’

‘But’, Ben jumped in, ‘they gave themselves away when they erased the original face and drew a new one on top. They didn’t know Jane’s work. Her code. They made up a face not realising Jane never did that

‘And they used the wrong strokes,’ said Clara.

‘Well, that lets me out,’ said Gabri.

‘But why do it at all? I mean, whose face was erased?’ Myrna asked.

There was silence for a moment while they all considered.

‘Can you take this face off and get an idea of the original?’ Gamache asked.

‘Maybe. Depends how thoroughly the original face was removed. Do you think the murderer did this?’ Clara asked.

‘I do. I just don’t know why.’

‘You said, “she”,’ said Beauvoir to Clara. ‘Why?’

‘I guess because the new face is female. I assumed the person who did this would paint the easiest thing and that’s what we see in the mirror every day.’

‘You think this is the murderer’s face?’ Beauvoir asked.

‘No, that wouldn’t be very smart. I think it’s the murderer’s gender, that’s all. Under pressure a white man is most likely to paint a white man, not a black man, not a white woman - but the thing he’s most familiar with. The same here.’

It’s a good point, thought Gamache. But he also thought that if a man was painting to deceive he might very well paint a woman.

‘Would it take skill to do this?’ he asked.

‘Remove one face and replace it with another? Yes, quite a lot. Not necessarily to take the first face off, but then again most people wouldn’t know how. Would you?’ she asked Beauvoir.