The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel (30 page)

They stared at each other. Then Gamache’s eyes were drawn to the script. So much seemed to circle back to it. The goddamned play.

Beauvoir followed the glance. “Yes, we were wondering the same thing. Could her death have something to do with the Fleming play? Were they looking for it? Does that explain the mess in their home? Brian had taken it to Montréal, but they couldn’t have known that.”

Gamache got up. “I’ve almost finished reading it. There’s nothing hidden in the plot that I can see. Do you need me for anything? I was going to drive to Highwater, but it’s getting late, and with this news, I think I’ll stay here. Do you mind if I tell Reine-Marie?”

“No. In fact, we might as well tell everyone,” said Lacoste, joining him. “I’ll come with you and start the interviews.”

“There’s something else you need to know, Isabelle.”

He stopped, and she turned to him. “I asked Mary Fraser about Highwater. They know that we know they were there.”

“And her reaction?”

“She asked if I was threatening her.”

“Huh,” said Lacoste. “That’s strange. I wonder what she meant.”

“I wonder what’s in Highwater.”

“I’ll look it up when I get back to the Incident Room.”

“You have other things to do,” he said. “I can look it up. I still have my security codes.”

“Oh, the damage you could do,
patron
,” Lacoste said, with a smile.

“Funnily enough, Mary Fraser seems to think the same thing. She all but accused me of being involved in Laurent’s death and somehow involved in the hunt for Gerald Bull’s Supergun.”

“If she thinks that she’s crazy.”

“She’s complex,” he said. “I was talking with an old friend at CSIS just a week or so ago. I’ll call her up again and have Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme checked out, on the quiet of course. But there’s something else. They know you were the one who leaked the information about Project Babylon.”

Isabelle Lacoste’s eyes widened, just a bit, and she sighed. “Well, bound to happen. I’m not worried.”

But she looked worried. As well she should be, thought Armand as they walked into the quiet village and parted ways. He was beginning to think Mary Fraser was not someone you wanted on the other side. The question was, which side was she on?

CHAPTER 25

Clara Morrow sank onto the chair in the bistro. She’d been having drinks with a few friends, including Myrna, when Isabelle Lacoste had come in.

They could tell by her face that she had news that would not be good. But neither Clara nor anyone else in the bistro thought it could be quite that bad.

Antoinette was dead. Murdered.

Like everyone else in the room, Clara had gotten to her feet on hearing the news. Then she’d sunk back down, staring at Myrna, who’d also dropped to her seat.

“What’s happening here?” asked Clara.

“It’s the goddamned play,” said Ruth, a few tables over. “She should never have decided to produce it.”

They fell silent again, thinking of the play and its author.

It felt as though a long, elongated shadow had slipped between the bars of Fleming’s cell, stretching toward them. Like a finger. Thin and grotesque.

And last night, it had arrived.

Clara and Myrna went over to join the old poet, who was scribbling in her notebook. Lines of poetry, Clara saw, but couldn’t read the words. Gabri and Olivier were already at the table.

Professor Rosenblatt sat at a corner table, watching them from the outer edge of their universe. Clara motioned to him and he got up and joined them. There seemed safety in numbers, though they all knew safety was comforting but an illusion.

Chief Inspector Lacoste pulled a chair over to their table.

“What happened?” Olivier asked.

She told them what she could.

“Do you have any idea who did this to Antoinette?” Myrna asked.

They spoke in hushed tones.

“Not yet.”

“Or why?” asked Clara.

Again, Lacoste shook her head. “When Antoinette called last night and said she wasn’t coming for dinner, did she say anything else?”

Clara thought about that. “She said she was tired and thought she’d have a quiet evening to herself.”

“What impression did you get?” Lacoste asked.

Clara shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I got no impression at all beyond what she said. She wanted an evening to herself, with Brian away and all.”

“How did you know he was gone for the night?”

“She told me when I called to invite them that afternoon.”

“Did anyone else know he’d be away?” Lacoste looked around the gathering. Everyone was shaking their heads. “Did you know Brian had regular meetings in Montréal?”

“We knew he had to go in every now and then,” said Olivier. “And that they have a small apartment in the city, but I don’t think we knew when he went.”

“Oh, my God, poor Brian,” said Gabri. “Does he know?”

“He found her,” said Lacoste. “This morning.”

“I’ll call him,” said Gabri, getting up and going to the phone. “See if he wants to come stay with us for a few days.”

“Is her death connected to the gun?”

That question was asked by Professor Rosenblatt, who up to now had sat quietly.

“We don’t know,” said Lacoste.

“But how could it be?” asked Myrna. “Antoinette had nothing to do with it, did she?”

“Not that we know of,” said Lacoste.

“It was the play,” Ruth repeated. “It was John Fleming.”

“Someone might’ve killed Antoinette because they were angry about the play,” conceded Lacoste. “And then made it look like robbery. It seems the most likely motive. But it wasn’t John Fleming. He’s in prison. Has been for years.”

“Has he?”

“What’re you saying, Ruth?” Clara asked.

“You of all people should know.” The old poet turned to her. “Creations are creatures, and they have lives of their own. That play is Fleming and Fleming is a murderer.”

“
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
,” said Rosenblatt, looking down at Ruth’s notebook, “
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
”

Ruth glared at him and closed her notebook with such a snap they all jumped.

*   *   *

After breaking the news to Reine-Marie about Antoinette, and talking about it until there seemed little more to say, Armand went into the study and started searching the files for information on Highwater.

It seemed an innocuous little village. Like many communities, it was settled along the border with Vermont and had once thrived with lumber mills and a train station. But, like many small communities, it had shrunk once the railway had closed the station. And now it was almost invisible.

He spent a couple of hours but found absolutely nothing remarkable about Highwater. Absolutely no reason two intelligence agents should spend the day there.

But something was there. Something, or someone, had drawn Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme to Highwater.

He wandered out of the study and his eyes fell on his own copy of the Fleming play. He grabbed a day-old copy of
La Presse
and settled in. Then he got up to see if Reine-Marie was all right. She was in the kitchen, making dinner.

“Can I help?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

When upset, Reine-Marie liked to chop, to measure, to stir. To follow a recipe. Everything in order. No guessing, no surprises.

It was creative and calming and the outcome was both comforting and predictable.

“No, I’m fine. And yes, I mean that sort of FINE,” said Reine-Marie, making reference to the title of one of Ruth’s poetry books, where FINE stood for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.

He laughed, kissed her and returned to the living room, picking up a
New Yorker
. But his eyes were drawn to the play on the table by the door.

Finally he poured a drink for Reine-Marie and one for himself, then he picked up the goddamned play, and read.

He had to remind himself that there was nothing supernatural about what he held in his hands. Nothing malevolent. It contained only the power he gave it.

Armand forced himself to read a few more pages, then looked over at the bookcases lining their walls crammed with cherished volumes.

Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.

He laid the script on the sofa and got up, browsing the shelves. Reading the familiar titles. Touching the covers.

Renewed, he returned to the play. And plowed onward.

A few minutes later the phone rang and Gamache realized he was gripping the play so tightly it took an effort to let it go.

“Chief?” said Lacoste. There was excitement in her voice.

“Oui?”

“Can you come over to the Incident Room? We’ve found something.”

“About the Lemaitre case?”

“Yes, but something else too.”

“I’ll be right there.”

He asked Reine-Marie to hold dinner for a few more minutes and explained where he was going.

“Invite them back if you’d like,” she called after him. “There’s plenty.”

She was four courses upset and considering an
amuse-bouche
.

*   *   *

“Adam,” said Gamache, taking the younger man’s hand in a grip that was strong and enveloping. “A sight for sore eyes.”

“Chief,” said Adam Cohen with delight.

“Are you one of the investigators on the Lemaitre case?”

“Oh, God no, sir. They won’t let me near the place,” said Agent Cohen. “Chief Inspector Lacoste barely lets me leave my desk at headquarters.”

“And yet, here you are in Three Pines. You’ll have to come down more often. I normally have to content myself with my son-in-law.”

Gamache gestured toward Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

“I’m afraid your daughter has shown questionable taste, sir.” Agent Cohen lowered his voice in the pretense of a whisper.

“It runs in the family,” said Gamache. “Her mother did too.”

He examined the young agent. Cohen had washed out of the academy and taken a job as a prison guard. But he’d come to Gamache’s aid during a terrible time, when everyone else was deserting the Chief, and Gamache had not forgotten. He’d managed to get Cohen back into the academy, tutoring him until he’d graduated.

Gamache had asked Lacoste, as one of her first acts and his final one, to take on Adam Cohen as a trainee and protégé. To take care of him.

“What are you doing here?” Gamache asked.

“Chief Inspector Lacoste asked me to look into Antoinette Lemaitre’s family. I tried to send what I found, but the Internet connection here is so weak I decided to bring it down myself to make sure it arrived.”

“He gnawed through his chain,” said Beauvoir, leading everyone over to the conference table.

Gamache sat down and looked from one to the other to the other, finally settling on Isabelle.

“What have you found?”

She leaned forward. “The home Antoinette Lemaitre was living in was in her name, but before that it belonged to her uncle.”

Gamache nodded. He knew that. Brian had told them.

Armand noticed that in front of Agent Cohen there was a page, facedown.

Cohen, Gamache realized, had more than a little bit of the dramatist about him. He must have studied under Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

“Guillaume Couture’s family was from the area,” Agent Cohen reported. “He built the house on some of the land they owned. There were no other relatives. He retired in the early 1990s.” Cohen’s fingers moved to the edge of the paper. “He died in 2005. Cancer. But before he retired he held a fascinating job.”

“He was an engineer,” said Gamache. “Antoinette said he built overpasses. Not dull, but not what I’d describe as fascinating.”

Adam Cohen turned the page over.

It was a grainy black-and-white photograph blown up from a smaller image. It showed a group of men standing in what looked like a tube.

Gamache put on his glasses and leaned closer.

“That,” Adam Cohen pointed, “is Guillaume Couture.”

The nondescript man grinned, almost maniacally, into the camera. His hair was lank and he wore glasses with thick black frames and an ill-fitting suit and tie. Two men stood on either side of him. The one in a cap was caught looking down and away from the camera, while the other appeared disinterested, even disdainful. Impatient.

Gamache felt his cheeks grow cold. He looked up from the photograph into the glowing eyes of Agent Cohen.

Then Armand took off his glasses and looked from Beauvoir to Lacoste.

They were staring at him in triumph. And for good reason.

“
Voilà
,” said Lacoste, putting her finger right onto the churlish face of the third man in the picture. “The connection.”

It was Gerald Bull.

Gamache took a deep breath, trying to take it in. “Guillaume Couture knew Gerald Bull.”

“More than knew him, sir,” said Agent Cohen. “The picture’s from Dr. Couture’s obit. Not the one in the newspaper, but the one in the McGill Alumni News.”

“Guillaume Couture went to McGill?” asked Gamache.

“No. He graduated from the Université de Montréal,” said Cohen. “But he worked at McGill.”

“In what department?” Gamache asked.

“Dr. Couture was a mechanical engineer,” said Chief Inspector Lacoste. “But he was seconded to the physics department, to work on the High Altitude Research Project.”

“HARP,” said Adam Cohen, leaning back, then deciding that was far too casual, he sat forward again. “The forerunner of Project Babylon.”

“Antoinette’s uncle worked with Gerald Bull,” said Gamache.

CHAPTER 26

Dinner was served, starting with parsnip and apple soup, with a drizzle of walnut-infused oil on top.

“Olivier gave me the recipe,” said Reine-Marie, turning down the light in the kitchen.

Candles were lit, not so much to create a romantic atmosphere for herself and Armand, and Isabelle and Jean-Guy and young Mr. Cohen. It was for the calm that came with twilight, and tea lights, and the small flickering flames. If the topic of conversation was harsh, at least the atmosphere could be gentle.