Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

‘How’d you find out about Philippe?’

‘When we got home. Suzanne had been silent in the car, then once we got back she laid into me. She was furious, violent almost, because I’d asked you back to look at the bows and arrows. She told me then. She’d found out because she found Philippe’s clothes ready for the wash, blood stains on them. Then she’d gone into the basement and found the bloody arrow. She got the story from Philippe. He thought he’d killed Miss Neal, so he grabbed the bloody arrow and ran, thinking it was his. He didn’t look at it, neither did Suzanne. I guess they didn’t notice it wasn’t the same as the others. Suzanne burned the arrow.’

‘What did you do when you heard all this?’

‘I burned his clothes in the furnace but then you arrived so I told Suzanne to burn the bow, to destroy everything.’

‘But she didn’t.’

‘No. When I put the clothes in it smothered the flames, so she had to build them back up. Then she realised the bow would have to be chopped up. She didn’t think she could do it without making a noise so she came upstairs, to try to warn me. But you wouldn’t let her go back down. She was going to do it when we were out shooting arrows.’

‘How’d you know how Miss Neal’s body was lying?’

‘Philippe showed me. I went to his room, to confront him, to hear the story from him. He wouldn’t speak to me. Just as I was leaving his room he stood up and did that.’ Croft shuddered at the memory, baffled by where this child could have come from. ‘I didn’t know what he meant by it at the time but later, when you asked me to show you how she was lying, it clicked. So I just did what Philippe had done. What does that mean?’ Croft nodded to the arrow.

‘It means’, said Beauvoir, ‘someone else shot the arrow that killed Miss Neal.’

‘It means’, clarified Gamache, ‘that she was almost certainly murdered.’

Beauvoir tracked down Superintendent Michel Brébeuf at the Montreal Botanical Gardens, where he volunteered one Sunday a month in the information booth. The people gathered around waiting to ask where the Japanese garden was were left to wonder just how wide a mandate these volunteers had.

‘I agree, it sounds like murder,’ said Brébeuf over the phone, nodding and smiling to the suddenly guarded tourists waiting in front of him. ‘I’m giving you the authority to treat this as a homicide.’

‘Actually, sir, I was hoping it’d be Chief Inspector Gamache’s investigation. He was right, Matthew Croft didn’t kill Miss Neal.’

‘Do you really think that’s what this was about, Inspector? Armand Gamache was suspended not because we disagreed over who did it, but because he refused to carry out a direct order. And that’s still true. Besides, as I recall, left to himself he would’ve arrested a fourteen-year-old boy.’

A tourist reached out and took the hand of his teenage son, who was so shocked he actually allowed his father to hold it, for about a nanosecond.

‘Well, not arrested, exactly,’ said Beauvoir.

‘You’re not helping your case here, Inspector.’

‘Yes, sir. The Chief Inspector knows this case and these people. It’s been a week already, and we’ve let the trail go cold by being forced to treat this as a probable accident. He’s the logical person to lead this investigation. You know it, and I know it.’

‘And he knows it.’

‘At a guess I’d have to agree. Voyons, is this about punishment, or getting the best results?’

‘All right. And tell him he’s lucky to have an advocate like you. I wish I did.’

‘You do.’

When Brébeuf hung up he turned his attention to the tourists at his booth and found he was alone.

‘Thank you, Jean Guy,’ Gamache took his warrant card, badge and gun. He’d thought about why it had stung so much to give them up. Years ago, when he’d first been issued with the card and gun, he’d felt accepted, a success in the eyes of society and, more important, in the eyes of his parents. Then, when he’d had to give up the card and gun he’d suddenly felt afraid. He’d been stripped of a weapon, but more than that, he’d been stripped of approval. The feeling had passed, it was no more than an echo, a ghost of the insecure young man he’d once been.

On the way home after being suspended, Gamache had remembered an analogy someone told him years ago. Living our lives was like living in a long house. We entered as babies at one end, and we exited when our time came. And in between we moved through this one, great, long room. Everyone we ever met, and every thought and action lived in that room with us. Until we made peace with the less agreeable parts of our past they’d continue to heckle us from way down the long house. And sometimes the really loud, obnoxious ones told us what to do, directing our actions even years later.