Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

‘Merci, Agent Lemieux,’ she said, putting out her hand while the Chief Inspector’s back was turned, watching the wretched ‘Anglais’. Lemieux took it, as she hoped he would. ‘Au revoir.’ Lemieux stood uncertainly for a moment, looking from her to Gamache’s broad back. Then he shrugged and left.

Armand Gamache turned his attention from the living to the dead. He walked a few paces and knelt down beside the body that had brought them there.

A clump of hair had fallen into Jane Neal’s open eyes. Gamache wanted to brush it away. It was fanciful, he knew. But he was fanciful. He had come to allow himself a certain latitude in that area. Beauvoir, on the other hand, was reason itself, and that made them a formidable team.

Gamache stared quietly at Jane Neal. Nichol cleared her throat, thinking perhaps he’d forgotten where he was. But he didn’t react. Didn’t move. He and Jane were frozen in time, both staring, one down, one up. Then his eyes moved along her body, to the worn camel-hair cardigan, the light-blue turtleneck. No jewelry. Was she robbed? He’d have to ask Beauvoir. Her tweed skirt was where you’d expect it to be, in someone who’d fallen. Her leotards, patched in at least one place, were otherwise unmarred. She might have been robbed, but she hadn’t been violated. Except for being killed, of course.

His deep brown eyes lingered on her liver-spotted brown hands. Rough, tanned hands that had known seasons in a garden. No rings on her fingers, or sign there had ever been. He always felt a pang when looking at the hands of the newly dead, imagining all the objects and people those hands had held. The food, the faces, the doorknobs. All the gestures they’d made to signal delight or sorrow. And the final gesture, surely, to ward off the blow that would kill. The most poignant were the hands of young people who would never absently brush a lock of gray hair from their own eyes.

He stood up with Beauvoir’s help and asked, ‘Was she robbed?’

‘We don’t think so. Mr Hadley says she never wore jewelry, and rarely carried a handbag. He thinks we’ll find it in her home.’

‘Her house key?’

‘No. No key. But again, Mr Hadley says people don’t lock up around here.’

‘They will now.’ Gamache stooped over the body and stared at the tiny wound, hardly large enough, you’d have thought, to drain the life from a whole human being. It was about the size of the tip of his little finger.

‘Any idea what did this?’

‘It’s hunting season, so perhaps a bullet, though it doesn’t look like any bullet wound I’ve ever seen.’

‘It’s actually bow-hunting season. Guns don’t start for two weeks,’ said Nichol.

The two men looked at her. Gamache nodded and the three of them stared at the wound as though perhaps with enough concentration it would talk.

‘So where’s the arrow?’ Beauvoir asked.

‘Is there an exit wound?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Beauvoir. ‘We haven’t let the medical examiner move her.’

‘Let’s get her over here,’ said Gamache as Beauvoir waved to a young woman in jeans, field coat and carrying a medical bag.

‘Monsieur l’Inspecteur,’ said Dr Sharon Harris, nodding and kneeling. ‘She’s been dead about five hours, perhaps slightly less. That’s just a guess.’ Dr Harris rolled Jane over. Dried leaves clung to the back of her sweater. A retching noise was heard and Nichol looked over to see Ben Hadley, his heaving back turned to them, throwing up.

‘Yes, there’s an exit wound.’

‘Thank you, doctor. We’ll leave you to it. Now, walk with me, Beauvoir, you too, Agent Nichol. Tell me what you know.’

In all the years Jean Guy Beauvoir had worked with Gamache, through all the murders and mayhem, it never ceased to thrill him, hearing that simple sentence. ‘Tell me what you know.’ It signaled the beginning of the hunt. He was the alpha dog. And Chief Inspector Gamache was Master of the Hunt.

‘Her name’s Jane Neal. Aged seventy-six. Never been married. We got this information from Mr Hadley who says she was the same age as his mother who died a month ago.’

‘That’s interesting. Two elderly women die within a month of each other in this tiny village. I wonder.’

‘I wondered too, so I asked. His mother died after a long battle with cancer. They could see it coming for a year.’

‘Go on.’

‘Mr Hadley was walking in the woods at about eight this morning, a regular occurrence. Miss Neal’s body was lying across the path. Impossible to miss.’