The Beautiful Mystery (7 page)

“I can’t tell you how often Mathieu and I sat here. He’d sit where you are now. Sometimes we’d discuss the business of the monastery, sometimes we’d just read. He’d bring his scores for the chants. I’d be gardening, or sitting quietly and hear him humming under his breath. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it or that I could hear. But I could.”

The abbot’s gaze drifted to the wall and the tips of the forest, like dark steeples, beyond. He sat quietly for a moment, lost in what was now and forever the past. The scene he described would never be repeated. That overheard sound would never be heard again.

“Murder?” he finally whispered. “Here?” He returned to Gamache. “And you’ve come to find out which of us did it. The Chief Inspector, you said. So we get the boss?”

Gamache smiled. “Not the big boss, I’m afraid. I also have bosses.”

“Don’t we all,” said Dom Philippe. “At least yours can’t see everything you do.”

“And know everything I think and feel,” said Gamache. “I’m grateful for that every day.”

“Though neither can they bring you peace and salvation.”

Gamache nodded. “That much is certain.”

“
Patron?
” Beauvoir was standing a few feet away.

Excusing himself, Gamache walked over to his Inspector.

“We’re ready to move the body. But where should we take him?”

Gamache thought about that for a moment, then looked at the two praying monks. “That man over there,” Gamache pointed to Frère Charles, “is the
médecin.
Go with him to get a stretcher and take Frère Mathieu back to the infirmary.” Gamache paused for a moment, and Beauvoir knew him well enough to wait. “He was the choir director here, you know.” Gamache looked once again at the balled-up body of Frère Mathieu.

To Beauvoir this was just another fact. A piece of information. But he could see it meant more to the Chief.

“Is that important?” asked Beauvoir.

“It could be.”

“It’s important to you, isn’t it,” said Beauvoir.

“It’s a shame,” said the Chief. “A great loss. He was a genius, you know. I was listening to his music on the way in.”

“I thought maybe you were.”

“Have you ever heard it?”

“Hard not to. It was everywhere a couple years ago. Couldn’t turn on a damned station without hearing it.”

Gamache smiled. “Not a fan?”

“Are you kidding? Of Gregorian chants? A bunch of men singing without instruments, practically in a monotone, in Latin? What’s not to love?”

The Chief smiled at Beauvoir and returned to the abbot.

“Who could have done such a thing?” Dom Philippe asked under his breath when Gamache resumed his seat. “I’ve been asking myself that all morning.” The abbot turned to his companion. “And why didn’t I see it coming?”

Gamache was silent, knowing the question wasn’t directed at him. But the answer would come from him, eventually. And he realized something else.

Dom Philippe had not tried to imply that an outsider had somehow done this. He’d not even tried to convince Gamache, or himself, that it was an accident. An unlikely fall.

There was none of the usual squirming away from the awful truth.

Frère Mathieu had been murdered. And one of the other monks had done it.

On the one hand Gamache admired Dom Philippe’s ability to face reality, no matter how terrible. But Gamache was also puzzled that this man so easily accepted it.

The abbot claimed to be astonished that murder should happen here. And yet he didn’t do what would be most human. He didn’t look for another explanation, no matter how ludicrous.

And Chief Inspector Gamache began to wonder just how shocked Dom Philippe really was.

“Frère Mathieu was killed between eight fifteen, when your service ended, and twenty to nine, when he was found by your secretary,” said the Chief. “Where were you at that time?”

“Right after Lauds I went to the basement to discuss the geothermal system with Frère Raymond. He looks after the physical plant. The engineering of the monastery.”

“You have geothermal here?”

“That’s right. Geothermal heats the monastery and solar panels power it. With winter coming I had to make sure it was working. I was down there when Brother Simon found me and told me the news.”

“What time was that?”

“Close to nine, I think.”

“What did Frère Simon say?”

“Only that it appeared Frère Mathieu had had some sort of accident in my garden.”

“Did he tell you that Frère Mathieu was dead?”

“Eventually. As I rushed back he came out with it. He’d gone to get the doctor first and then me. By then they knew it was fatal.”

“But did he tell you any more?”

“That Mathieu had been killed?”

“That he’d been murdered.”

“The doctor did. When I arrived here the doctor was standing at the door waiting. He tried to stop me from going closer, and said Mathieu wasn’t just dead, but that it looked as though someone had killed him.”

“And what did you say?”

“I can’t remember what I said, but I suspect it was something not taught at the seminary.”

Dom Philippe cast his mind back. He’d shoved by the doctor and run, stumbling, to the far end. To what looked like a mound of dark earth. But wasn’t. As he saw it in his memory he described it to the large, quiet Sûreté officer beside him.

“And then I dropped to my knees beside him,” said Dom Philippe.

“Did you touch him?”

“Yes. I touched his face, and his robe. I think I straightened it. I don’t know why. Who would do such a thing?”

Again, Gamache ignored the question. Time enough for the answer.

“What was Frère Mathieu doing here? In your garden?”

“I have no idea. It wasn’t to see me. I’m always out at that time. It’s when I do my rounds.”

“And he’d know that?”

“He was my prior. He knew it better than most.”

“What did you do after you’d seen his body?” Gamache asked.

The abbot thought about that. “We prayed first. And then I called the police. We have only one phone. It’s a satellite thing. Doesn’t always work, but it did this morning.”

“Did you consider not calling?”

The question surprised the abbot and he studied this quiet stranger with new appreciation. “I’m ashamed to admit it was my first thought. To keep it to ourselves. We’re used to being self-sufficient.”

“Then why did you call?”

“Not for Mathieu, I’m afraid, but for the others.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mathieu is gone now. He’s with God.”

Gamache hoped that was true. For Frère Mathieu there were no more mysteries. He knew who took his life. And he now knew if there was a God. And a Heaven. And angels. And even a celestial choir.

It didn’t bear thinking about what happened to the celestial choir when yet another director showed up.

“But the rest of us are here,” Dom Philippe continued. “I didn’t call you in for vengeance or to punish whoever did this. The deed is done. Mathieu is safe. We, on the other hand, are not.”

It was, Gamache knew, the simple truth. It was also the reaction of a father. To protect. Or a shepherd, to keep the flock safe from a predator.

Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups. Saint Gilbert among the wolves. It was a curious name for a monastery.

The abbot knew there was a wolf in the fold. In a black robe, and shaved head, and whispering soft prayers. Dom Philippe had called in hunters to find him.

Beauvoir and the doctor had returned with the stretcher and had placed it beside Frère Mathieu. Gamache stood and gave a silent signal. The body was lifted onto the stretcher and Frère Mathieu left the garden for the last time.

*   *   *

The abbot led the small procession, followed by Frères Simon and Charles. Then Captain Charbonneau at the head of the stretcher and Beauvoir behind.

Gamache was the last to leave the abbot’s garden, closing the bookcase behind him.

They walked into the rainbow corridor. The joyful colors played on the body, and the mourners. As they arrived at the church, the rest of the community stood and filed from the benches. Joining them. Walking behind Gamache.

The abbot, Dom Philippe, began to recite a prayer. Not the rosary. Something else. And then Gamache realized the abbot wasn’t speaking. He was singing. And it wasn’t simply a prayer. It was a chant.

A Gregorian chant.

Slowly the other monks joined in and the singing swelled to fill the corridor, and join with the light. It would have been beautiful, if not for the certainty that one of the men singing the words of God, in the voice of God, was a killer.

SIX

Four men gathered around the gleaming examination table.

Armand Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir stood on one side, the doctor across from them and the abbot off to the side. Frère Mathieu lay on the stainless steel table, terrified face to the ceiling.

The other monks had gone off to do what monks did at a time like this. Gamache wondered what that might be.

Most people, in Gamache’s experience, groped and stumbled, barking their shins against familiar scents and sights and sounds. As though struck with vertigo, falling over the edge of their known world.

Captain Charbonneau had been detailed to search for the murder weapon. It was, Gamache believed, a long shot, but one that needed to be taken. It appeared the prior had been killed by a rock. If so, it had almost certainly been tossed over the wall, to be lost in the old-growth forest.

The Chief Inspector glanced around. He’d expected the infirmary to be old, ancient even. He’d privately prepared himself to see something out of the Dark Ages. Operating tables made of stone slabs, with open gutters for the fluids. Wooden shelves with dried and powdered herbs from the garden. Hacksaws for surgery.

Instead, this room was brand-spanking-new, with shining equipment, orderly cabinets filled with gauze and bandages, pills and tongue depressors.

“The coroner will do the autopsy,” said Gamache to the doctor. “We don’t want you doing any medical procedures on the prior. All I need is for his clothes to be removed so we can properly search them. And I need to see his body.”

“Why?”

“In case there are other wounds or marks. Anything else we should see. The faster we can collect the facts the sooner we can get at the truth.”

“But there’s a difference between fact and truth, Chief Inspector,” said the abbot.

“And one day you and I can sit in that lovely garden of yours and discuss it,” said Gamache. “But not now.”

He turned his back on the abbot and nodded to the doctor, who got to work.

The dead man was no longer curled in the fetal position. Though rigor mortis was setting in, they had managed to lay him flat on his back. The prior’s hands, Gamache noted, were still buried up the long black sleeves of his cassock, and wrapped around his midsection, as though gripping in pain.

After untying the cord around the prior’s middle, the doctor pried the dead man’s hands from his sleeves. Both Gamache and Beauvoir leaned forward, to see if they had hold of anything. Was there anything under his nails? Anything in those balled-up fists?

But they were empty. The nails clean and tidy.

The doctor carefully placed Frère Mathieu’s arms at his side. But the left arm slipped off the metal table and dangled. Something dropped from the sleeve and drifted to the floor.

The doctor stooped to pick it up.

“Don’t touch that,” Beauvoir ordered, and the doctor stopped.

Putting on a pair of gloves from the Scene of Crime kit, Beauvoir bent and picked a piece of paper off the stone floor.

“What is it?” The abbot stepped forward. The doctor leaned across the examination table, the body forgotten in favor of what Inspector Beauvoir held.

“I don’t know,” said Beauvoir.

The doctor came around the table and the four men stood in a circle, staring at the page.

It was yellowed and irregular. Not store-bought. Thicker than commercial-grade paper.

On it, in intricate script, were words. The black letters calligraphied. Not ornately, but in a simple style.

“I can’t read it. Is it Latin?” asked Beauvoir.

“I think so.” The abbot leaned forward, squinting.

Gamache put on his half-moon reading glasses and also bent toward the paper. “It looks like a page from an old manuscript,” he finally said, stepping back.

The abbot looked perplexed. “It’s not paper, it’s vellum. Sheepskin. You can tell by the texture.”

“Sheepskin?” asked Beauvoir. “Is that what you use for paper?”

“Not for hundreds of years.” The abbot continued to stare at the page in the Inspector’s hand. “The text doesn’t seem to make sense. It might be Latin, but not from any psalm or Book of Hours or religious text I know. I can only make out two words.”

“What are they?” asked the Chief.

“Here,” the abbot pointed. “That looks like ‘
Dies irae
.’”

The doctor made a small noise that might have been a guffaw. They looked at him, but he fell completely silent.

“What does that mean?” asked Beauvoir.

“It’s from the Requiem Mass,” said the abbot.

“It means ‘day of wrath,’” said Gamache. “
Dies irae
,” he quoted, “
dies illa
. Day of wrath. Day of mourning.”

“That’s right,” said the abbot. “In the Requiem Mass the two are said together. But here, there is no
dies illa
.”

“What does that tell you, Dom Philippe?” asked the Chief.

The abbot was quiet for a moment, considering. “It tells me this isn’t the Requiem Mass.”

“Does it make any sense to you, Frère Charles?” Gamache asked.

The doctor’s brow was creased in concentration as he stared at the vellum in Beauvoir’s hand. Then he shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“Neither of you have seen this before?” Gamache pressed.

The doctor glanced at the abbot. Dom Philippe continued to stare at the words and finally shook his head.

There was a pause then Beauvoir pointed to the page. “What’re those?”

Once again the men leaned forward.

Above each word there were tiny squiggles of ink. Like little waves. Or wings.