The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #5)

Gamache nodded toward the painting he’d been staring at. “Who is she?”

“Oh, just someone I know.”

Gamache waited, but Clara was uncharacteristically closed, and he decided it really didn’t matter. She wandered off and Gamache continued to stare. And as he did so the portrait changed. Or perhaps, he thought, it was a trick of the uncertain light. But the more he stared the more he got the sense Clara had put something else in the painting. Where Ruth’s was of an embittered woman finding hope, this portrait also held the unexpected.

A happy woman seeing in the near and middle distance things that pleased and comforted her. But her eyes seemed to just be focusing on, registering, something else. Something far off. But heading her way.

Gamache sipped his cognac and watched. And gradually it came to him what she was just beginning to feel.

Fear.

NINE

The three Sûreté officers said their good-byes and walked across the village green. It was eleven o’clock and pitch-black. Lacoste and Gamache paused to stare at the night sky. Beauvoir, a few paces ahead as always, eventually realized he was alone and stopped as well. Reluctantly he looked up and was quite surprised to see so many stars. Ruth’s parting words came back to him.

“ ‘Jean Guy’ and ‘bite me’ actually rhyme, don’t they?”

He was in trouble.

Just then a light went on above Myrna’s bookstore, in her loft. They could see her moving about, making herself tea, putting cookies on a plate. Then the light went out. “We just saw her pour a drink and put cookies on a plate,” said Beauvoir.

The others wondered why he’d just told them the obvious.

“It’s dark. To do anything inside you need light,” said Beauvoir.

Gamache thought about this string of obvious statements, but it was Lacoste who got there first.

“The bistro, last night. Wouldn’t the murderer need to put on the lights? And if he did, wouldn’t someone have seen?”

Gamache smiled. They were right. A light at the bistro must have been noticed.

He looked around to see which houses were the most likely to have seen anything. But the homes fanned out from the bistro like wings. None would have a perfect view, except the place directly opposite. He turned to look. The three majestic pines on the village green were there. They’d have seen a man take another man’s life. But there was something else directly opposite the bistro. Opposite and above.

The old Hadley house. It was a distance away, but at night, with a light on in the bistro, it was just possible the new owners could have witnessed a murder.

“There’s another possibility,” said Lacoste. “That the murderer didn’t put the lights on. He’d know he could be seen.”

“He’d use a flashlight, you mean?” asked Beauvoir, imagining the murderer in there the night before, waiting for his victim, turning a flashlight on to make his way around.

Lacoste shook her head. “That could also be seen from outside. He wouldn’t want to risk even that, I think.”

“So he’d leave the lights off,” said Gamache, knowing where this was leading. “Because he wouldn’t need lights. He’d know his way around in the dark.”

The next morning dawned bright and fresh. There was some warmth in the sun again and Gamache soon took off his sweater as he walked around the village green before breakfast. A few children, up before parents and grandparents, did some last-minute frog hunting in the pond. They ignored him and he was happy to watch them from a distance then continue his solitary and peaceful stroll. He waved at Myrna, cresting the hill on her own solitary walk.

This was the last day of summer vacation, and while it had been decades since he’d gone to school, he still felt the tug. The mix of sadness at the end of summer, and excitement to see his chums again. The new clothes, bought after a summer’s growth. The new pencils, sharpened over and over, and the smell of the shavings. And the new notebooks. Always strangely thrilling. Unmarred. No mistakes yet. All they held was promise and potential.

A new murder investigation felt much the same. Had they marred their books yet? Made any mistakes?

As he slowly circled the village green, his hands clasped behind his back and his gaze far off, he thought about that. After a few leisurely circuits he went inside to breakfast.

Beauvoir and Lacoste were already down, with frothy café au lait in front of them. They stood up as he entered the room, and he motioned them down. The aroma of maple-cured back bacon and eggs and coffee came from the kitchen. He’d barely sat down when Gabri swept out of the kitchen with plates of eggs Benedict, fruit and muffins.