Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

Normally, in fact habitually for the past few months, Matthew and Suzanne had had to fight with Philippe to get him to remove the Discman, Matthew arguing with him in English and Suzanne speaking with him in her mother tongue, French. Philippe was bilingual and bicultural and equally deaf to both languages.

‘We’re a family,’ Matthew had argued, ‘and NSYNC isn’t invited to dinner.’

‘Who?’ Philippe had huffed. ‘It’s Eminem.’ As though that was somehow significant. And Philippe had given Matthew that look, not of anger or petulance, but of dismissal. Matthew might as well have been what? Not the refrigerator. He seemed to have a good relationship with the fridge, his bed, the TV, and his computer. No, he looked at his dad as though he was NSYNC. Passé. Discarded. Nothing.

Philippe would eventually take the Discman off, in exchange for food. But tonight was different. Tonight both his mom and dad were happy to have him plugged in and removed. He’d eaten greedily, as though this slop was the best food he’d ever been given. Suzanne had even felt resentment about that. Every night she worked hard to give them good, home-made dinners. Tonight all she could manage was to open two cans, from their emergency supply, and warm them up. And tonight Philippe wolfed it down as though it was gourmet food. She looked at her son and wondered if he did it on purpose, to insult her.

Matthew leaned closer to his plate and fine tuned the ravioli road. Each tiny ridge on the outside of the squares needed to fit into the opposing indentations. Or else? Or else the universe would explode in fire and their flesh would bubble and sear off, and he would see his whole family die in front of him, milliseconds before his own horrible death. There was a lot riding on Chef Boyardee.

He looked up and caught his wife watching him. Mesmerised by the precision of his movements. Stuck on the stutter of a decimal point. The line suddenly came to him. He’d always liked it, from the moment he’d read it at Miss Neal’s. It was from Auden’s Christmas Oratorio. She’d pushed it on him. She was a lifelong admirer of Auden. Even this cumbersome, somewhat strange work, she seemed to love. And understand. For himself, he’d struggled through it, out of respect for Miss Neal. But he hadn’t liked it at all. Except for that one line. He didn’t know what made it stand out from the gazillion other lines in the epic work. He didn’t even know what it meant. Until now. He, too, was stuck on the stutter of a decimal point. His world had come down to this. To look up was to face disaster. And he wasn’t ready for that.

He knew what tomorrow brought. He knew what he’d seen coming from so far off. Inexorably. Without hope of escape he waited for it to arrive. And it was almost there, on their doorstep. He looked over at his son, his little boy, who had changed so much in the last few months. They’d thought it was drugs, at first. His anger, his slipping grades, his dismissal of everything he had previously loved, like soccer, and movie night, and ‘NSYNC’. And his parents. Himself in particular, Matthew felt. For some reason Philippe’s rage was directed at him. Matthew wondered what was going on behind that euphoric face. Could Philippe possibly know what was coming, and be happy about it?

Matthew adjusted the ravioli, just in time, before his world exploded.

Each time the phone rang in the Incident Room activity stopped. And it rang often. Various officers checking in. Shopkeepers, neighbors, bureaucrats returning phone calls.

The old Canadian National rail station had proven perfect for their needs. A team had worked with the volunteer fire department and cleared a space in the center of what must have been the waiting room. Glowing varnished wood went a quarter of the way up the walls and the walls themselves had held posters with fire tips and past winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards, a hint as to who the fire chief might be. The Sûreté officers had removed those, neatly rolling them up, and replaced them with flow charts and maps and lists of suspects. It now looked like any other incident room, in an old and atmospheric train station. It was a space that seemed used to waiting. All those hundreds, thousands, of people who’d sat in this room, waiting. For trains. To take them away, or to bring their loved ones home. And now men and women again sat in the space, waiting. This time for a report from the Sûreté lab in Montreal. The report that would send them home. The report that would destroy the Crofts. Gamache got up, pretended to stretch, and started to walk. The chief always paced, his hands clasped behind his back, his head down looking at his feet, when he got impatient. Now, as the others pretended to work the phones and gather information, Chief Inspector Gamache circled them, slowly, with a measured pace. Unhurried, unperturbed, unstoppable.