The Nature of the Beast

“You drew it on paper?” asked Lacoste. “Not directly onto the gun?”

“I knew nothing about a gun,” said Lepage. “No amount of money would have made me agree to that.”

“What were the men’s names?” Lacoste asked.

“It was thirty years ago,” said Lepage. “I can’t remember.”

Lacoste looked at Gamache. The photograph was sitting facedown on the conference table in front of him. He slid it over to her, and she handed it to Al Lepage.

“Anyone look familiar?”

Lepage studied it, though Gamache had the impression he was really just trying to figure out what best to say. How much to admit.

“This is one,” he pointed to Gerald Bull. “And this is the other. The one who came to get the work and to pay me.”

He was pointing at John Fleming.

Gamache listened to the words but also to the tone. Lepage seemed to be skimming across the surface of his feelings, reporting something factual that had no emotional content at all. And yet his etching of the Whore of Babylon had reeked of pain and despair. It was not simply lines on a piece of paper, or a gun. Each of those etched lines came from some horrific place and Armand could guess where.

“Didn’t you question why someone would want the Whore of Babylon?” asked Lacoste.

Al Lepage fell silent but they could hear him panting, like a man pursued.

“If you met him you wouldn’t wonder.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Beauvoir.

“He seemed like the sort of person who’d be drawn to that image.”

“As do you,” said Beauvoir.

He turned his laptop around so the Lepages could see the screen, then he hit a key and beyond the field of lambs in the foreground, a newsreel played out.

Beauvoir, Lacoste and Gamache couldn’t see the images, but they could see their effect. Evelyn Lepage put her hand to her mouth. Al Lepage closed his eyes for a moment, then forced them open. Sounds, so small they might have come from an infant, escaped his throat.

Jean-Guy had muted the reporter’s commentary so all the Lepages had were the pictures, made the more powerful by the silence.

Al Lepage’s framed lambs had their backs to the Sûreté officers, and Gamache read the writing on the back of each. Laurent, aged 2, Laurent, aged 3, and so on. But it was the very first one that caught his attention.

“My Son,” it said. Just that. And a heart. My Son.

Son My.

Had this man killed again? His own son this time, and Antoinette Lemaitre? To keep his secret safe? It was a hell of a secret, and a hell of a crime.

“Al?” Evie said, when the newsreels ended in a freeze frame. “Why’re they showing us this?”

“She doesn’t know?” asked Beauvoir.

Al shook his head then turned to her. He took her hand and looked down at it. So familiar. So unexpected. To have found her late in life, and fallen in love. And taken her hand.

“I’m not a draft dodger, Evie,” he said quietly. “And my name isn’t Al Lepage. It’s Frederick Lawson. I was a private in the army. I deserted.”

His wife looked from him to the screen, then back.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “It’s not true.” She stared at him, searching his face. Then her eyes returned to the pile of bodies on the path, the bright green fields behind them and the little lambs in front. Her hand slid out of his.

No one moved, no one spoke. There was complete and utter silence, as though they too had been paused. And then it was shattered by a single word, screamed.

“Nooooooo.”

It came out of her like a blast furnace and she began pounding his chest, no longer making words but just sounds. Howling.

Lacoste started to get up but sat back down.

Lepage did nothing to defend himself, except close his eyes. It seemed he even leaned in to the fists, welcoming the beating. The Sûreté officers watched as Evelyn Lepage’s life well and truly collapsed. Armand narrowed his eyes, not wishing to watch something so private, so intimate, so painful. But needing to see it.

He watched and wondered if little Frederick Lawson had raced through the woods, as Laurent had. A stick for a gun. Playing soldier. Fighting the enemy. Sacrificing himself in deeds magnificent and heroic.

One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?