Brutal Telling Read online

  They filed into the bistro, sticking close as though the dead man might reach out and take one of them with him. Inching toward him they stared down, rain dripping off their heads and noses onto his worn clothes and puddling on the wide-plank floor. Then Myrna gently pulled them back from the edge.

  And that’s how both men felt. They’d woken on this holiday weekend in their comfortable bed, in their comfortable home, in their comfortable life, to find themselves suddenly dangled over a cliff.

  All three turned away, speechless. Staring wide-eyed at each other.

  There was a dead man in the bistro.

  And not just dead, but worse.

  As they waited for the police Gabri made a pot of coffee, and Myrna took off her raincoat and sat by the window, looking into the misty September day. Olivier laid and lit fires in the two stone hearths at either end of the beamed room. He poked one fire vigorously and felt its warmth against his damp clothing. He felt numb, and not just from the creeping cold.

  When they’d stood over the dead man Gabri had murmured, “Poor one.”

  Myrna and Olivier had nodded. What they saw was an elderly man in shabby clothing, staring up at them. His face was white, his eyes surprised, his mouth slightly open.

  Myrna had pointed to the back of his head. The puddled water was turning pink. Gabri leaned tentatively closer, but Olivier didn’t move. What held him spellbound and stunned wasn’t the shattered back of the dead man’s head, but the front. His face.

  “Mon Dieu, Olivier, the man’s been murdered. Oh, my God.”

  Olivier continued to stare, into the eyes.

  “But who is he?” Gabri whispered.

  It was the Hermit. Dead. Murdered. In the bistro.

  “I don’t know,” said Olivier.

  Chief Inspector Armand Gamache got the call just as he and Reine-Marie finished clearing up after Sunday brunch. In the dining room of their apartment in Montreal’s Outremont quartier he could hear his second in command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, and his daughter Annie. They weren’t talking. They never talked. They argued. Especially when Jean Guy’s wife, Enid, wasn’t there as a buffer. But Enid had to plan school courses and had begged off brunch. Jean Guy, on the other hand, never turned down an invitation for a free meal. Even if it came at a price. And the price was always Annie.

  It had started over the fresh-squeezed orange juice, coursed through the scrambled eggs and Brie, and progressed across the fresh fruit, croissants and confitures.

  “But how can you defend the use of stun guns?” came Annie’s voice from the dining room.

  “Another great brunch, merci, Reine-Marie,” said David, placing dishes from the dining room in front of the sink and kissing his mother-in-law on the cheek. He was of medium build with short, thinning dark hair. At thirty he was a few years older than his wife, Annie, though he often appeared younger. His main feature, Gamache often felt, was his animation. Not hyper, but full of life. The Chief Inspector had liked him from the moment, five years earlier, his daughter had introduced them. Unlike other young men Annie had brought home, mostly lawyers like herself, this one hadn’t tried to out-macho the Chief. That wasn’t a game that interested Gamache. Nor did it impress him. What did impress him was David’s reaction when he’d met Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache. He’d smiled broadly, a smile that seemed to fill the room, and simply said, “Bonjour.”

  He was unlike any other man Annie had ever been interested in. David wasn’t a scholar, wasn’t an athlete, wasn’t staggeringly handsome. Wasn’t destined to become the next Premier of Quebec, or even the boss of his legal firm.

  No, David was simply open and kind.

  She’d married him, and Armand Gamache had been delighted to walk with her down the aisle, with Reine-Marie on the other side of their only daughter. And to see this nice man wed his daughter.

  For Armand Gamache knew what not-nice was. He knew what cruelty, despair, horror were. And he knew what a forgotten, and precious, quality “nice” was.

  “Would you rather we just shoot suspects?” In the dining room Beauvoir’s voice had risen in volume and tone.

  “Thank you, David,” said Reine-Marie, taking the dishes. Gamache handed his son-in-law a fresh dish towel and they dried as Reine-Marie washed up.

  “So,” David turned to the Chief Inspector, “do you think the Habs have a chance at the cup this year?”

  “No,” yelled Annie. “I expect you to learn how to apprehend someone without having to maim or kill them. I expect you to genuinely see suspects as just that. Suspects. Not sub-human criminals you can beat up, electrocute or shoot.”

  “I think they do,” said Gamache, handing David a plate to dry and taking one himself. “I like their new goalie and I think their forward line has matured. This is definitely their year.”

  “But their weakness is still defense, don’t you think?” Reine-Marie asked. “The Canadiens always concentrate too much on offense.”

  “You try arresting an armed murderer. I’d love to see you try. You, you . . .” Beauvoir was sputtering. The conversation in the kitchen stopped as they listened to what he might say next. This was an argument played out every brunch, every Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthday. The words changed slightly. If not tasers they were arguing about daycare or education or the environment. If Annie said blue, Beauvoir said orange. It had been this way since Inspector Beauvoir had joined the Sûreté du Québec’s homicide division, under Gamache, a dozen years earlier. He’d become a member of the team, and of the family.

  “You what?” demanded Annie.

  “You pathetic piece of legal crap.”

  Reine-Marie gestured toward the back door of the kitchen that gave onto a small metal balcony and fire escape. “Shall we?”

  “Escape?” Gamache whispered, hoping she was serious, but suspecting she wasn’t.

  “Maybe you could just try shooting them, Armand?” David asked.

  “I’m afraid Jean Guy is a faster draw,” said the Chief Inspector. “He’d get me first.”

  “Still,” said his wife, “it’s worth a try.”

  “Legal crap?” said Annie, her voice dripping disdain. “Brilliant. Fascist moron.”

  “I suppose I could use a taser,” said Gamache.

  “Fascist? Fascist?” Jean Guy Beauvoir almost squealed. In the kitchen Gamache’s German shepherd, Henri, sat up in his bed and cocked his head. He had huge oversized ears which made Gamache think he wasn’t purebred but a cross between a shepherd and a satellite dish.

  “Uh-oh,” said David. Henri curled into a ball in his bed and it was clear David would join him if he could.

  All three looked wistfully out the door at the rainy, cool early September day. Labor Day weekend in Montreal. Annie said something unintelligible. But Beauvoir’s response was perfectly clear.

  “Screw you.”

  “Well, I think this debate’s just about over,” said Reine-Marie. “More coffee?” She pointed to their espresso maker.

  “Non, pas pour moi, merci,” said David, with a smile. “And please, no more for Annie.”

  “Stupid woman,” muttered Jean Guy as he entered the kitchen. He grabbed a dish towel from the rack and began furiously drying a plate. Gamache figured that was the last they’d see of the India Tree design. “Tell me she’s adopted.”

  “No, homemade.” Reine-Marie handed the next plate to her husband.

  “Screw you.” Annie’s dark head shot into the kitchen then disappeared.

  “Bless her heart,” said Reine-Marie.

  Of their two children, Daniel was the more like his father. Large, thoughtful, academic. He was kind and gentle and strong. When Annie had been born Reine-Marie thought, perhaps naturally, this would be the child most like her. Warm, intelligent, bright. With a love of books so strong Reine-Marie Gamache had become a librarian, finally taking over a department at the Bibliothèque nationale in Montreal.

  But Annie had surprised them both. She was smart, competitive, funny. She was fierce, in everything she did and felt.

  They should have had an inkling about this. As a newborn Armand would take her for endless rides in the car, trying to soothe her as she howled. He’d sing, in his deep baritone, Beatles songs, and Jacques Brel songs. “La Complainte du phoque en Alaska” by Beau Dommage. That was Daniel’s favorite. It was a soulful lament. But it did nothing for Annie.

  One day, as he’d strapped the shrieking child into the car seat and turned on the ignition, an old Weavers tape had been in.

  As they sang, in falsetto, she’d settled.

  At first it had seemed a miracle. But after the hundredth trip around the block listening to the laughing child and the Weavers singing “Wimoweh, a-wimoweh,” Gamache yearned for the old days and felt like shrieking himself. But as they sang the little lion slept.

  Annie Gamache became their cub. And grew into a lioness. But sometimes, on quiet walks together, she’d tell her father about her fears and her disappointments and the everyday sorrows of her young life. And Chief Inspector Gamache would be seized with a desire to hold her to him, so that she needn’t pretend to be so brave all the time.

  She was fierce because she was afraid. Of everything.

  The rest of the world saw a strong, noble lioness. He looked at his daughter and saw Bert Lahr, though he’d never tell her that. Or her husband.

  “Can we talk?” Annie asked her father, ignoring Beauvoir. Gamache nodded and handed the dish towel to David. They walked down the hall and into the warm living room where books were ranged on shelves in orderly rows, and stacked under tables and beside the sofa in not-so-orderly piles. Le Devoir and the New York Times were on the coffee table and a gentle fire burned in the grate. Not the roaring flames of a bitter winter fire, but a soft almost liquid flame of early autumn.

  They talked for a few minutes about Daniel, living in Paris with his wife and daughter, and another daughter due before the end of the month. They talked about her husband David and his hockey team, about to start up for another winter season.

  Mostly Gamache listened. He wasn’t sure if Annie had something specific to say, or just wanted to talk. Henri jogged into the room and plunked his head on Annie’s lap. She kneaded his ears, to his grunts and moans. Eventually he lay down by the fire.

  Just then the phone rang. Gamache ignored it.

  “It’s the one in your office, I think,” said Annie. She could see it on the old wooden desk with the computer and the notebook, in the room that was filled with books, and smelled of sandalwood and rosewater and had three chairs.

  She and Daniel would sit in their wooden swivel chairs and spin each other around until they were almost sick, while their father sat in his armchair, steady. And read. Or sometimes just stared.

  “I think so too.”

  The phone rang again. It was a sound they knew well. Somehow different from other phones. It was the ringing that announced a death.

  Annie looked uncomfortable.

  “It’ll wait,” he said quietly. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

  “Should I get that?” Jean Guy looked in. He smiled at Annie but his eyes went swiftly to the Chief Inspector.

  “Please. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  He turned back to his daughter, but by then David had joined them and Annie had once again put on her public face. It wasn’t so different from her private one. Just, perhaps, a bit less vulnerable. And her father wondered briefly, as David sat down and took her hand, why she needed her public face in front of her husband.

  “There’s been a murder, sir,” whispered Inspector Beauvoir. He stood just inside the room.

  “Oui,” said Gamache, watching his daughter.

  “Go on, Papa.” She waved her hand at him, not to dismiss him, but to free him of the need to stay with her.

  “I will, eventually. Would you like to go for a walk?”

  “It’s pelting down outside,” said David with a laugh. Gamache genuinely loved his son-in-law, but sometimes he could be oblivious. Annie also laughed.

  “Really, Papa, not even Henri would go out in this.”

  Henri leaped up and ran to get his ball. The fatal words, “Henri” and “out,” had been combined unleashing an undeniable force.

  “Well,” said Gamache as the German shepherd bounded back into the room. “I have to go to work.”

  He gave Annie and David a significant look, then glanced over at Henri. His meaning even David couldn’t miss.

  “Christ,” whispered David good-humoredly, and getting off the comfortable sofa he and Annie went to find Henri’s leash.

  By the time Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir arrived in Three Pines the local force had cordoned off the bistro, and villagers milled about under umbrellas and stared at the old brick building. The scene of so many meals and drinks and celebrations. Now a crime scene.

  As Beauvoir drove down the slight slope into the village Gamache asked him to pull over.

  “What is it?” the Inspector asked.

  “I just want to look.”

  The two men sat in the warm car, watching the village through the lazy arc of the wipers. In front of them was the village green with its pond and bench, its beds of roses and hydrangea, late flowering phlox and hollyhocks. And at the end of the common, anchoring it and the village, stood the three tall pines.

  Gamache’s gaze wandered to the buildings that hugged the village green. There were weathered white clapboard cottages, with wide porches and wicker chairs. There were tiny fieldstone houses built centuries ago by the first settlers, who’d cleared the land and yanked the stones from the earth. But most of the homes around the village green were made of rose-hued brick, built by United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. Three Pines sat just kilometers from the Vermont border and while relations now with the States were friendly and affectionate, they weren’t back then. The people who created the village had been desperate for sanctuary, hiding from a war they didn’t believe in.

  The Chief Inspector’s eyes drifted up du Moulin, and there, on the side of the hill leading out of the village, was the small white chapel. St. Thomas’s Anglican.

  Gamache brought his eyes back to the small crowd standing under umbrellas chatting, pointing, staring. Olivier’s bistro was smack-dab in the center of the semicircle of shops. Each shop ran into the next. Monsieur Béliveau’s general store, then Sarah’s Boulangerie, then Olivier’s Bistro and finally Myrna’s new and used bookstore.

  “Let’s go,” Gamache nodded.

  Beauvoir had been waiting for the word and now the car moved slowly forward. Toward the huddled suspects, toward the killer.

  But one of the first lessons the Chief had taught Beauvoir when he’d joined the famed homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec was that to catch a killer they didn’t move forward. They moved back. Into the past. That was where the crime began, where the killer began. Some event, perhaps long forgotten by everyone else, had lodged inside the murderer. And he’d begun to fester.

  What kills can’t be seen, the Chief had warned Beauvoir. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s not a gun or a knife or a fist. It’s not anything you can see coming. It’s an emotion. Rancid, spoiled. And waiting for a chance to strike.

  The car slowly moved toward the bistro, toward the body.

  “Merci,” said Gamache a minute later as a local Sûreté officer opened the bistro door for them. The young man was just about to challenge the stranger, but hesitated.

  Beauvoir loved this. The reaction of local cops as it dawned on them that this large man in his early fifties wasn’t just a curious citizen. To the young cops Gamache looked like their fathers. There was an air of courtliness about him. He always wore a suit, or the jacket and tie and gray flannels he had on that day.

  They’d notice the mustache, trimmed and graying. His dark hair was also graying around the ears, where it curled up slightly. On a rainy day like this the Chief wore a cap, which he took off indoors, and when he did the young officers saw the balding head. And if that wasn’t enough they’d notice this man’s eyes. Everyone did. They were deep brown, thoughtful, intelligent and something else. Something that distinguished the famous head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec from every other senior officer.

  His eyes were kind.

  It was both his strength, Beauvoir knew, and his weakness.

  Gamache smiled at the astonished officer who found himself face to face with the most celebrated cop in Quebec. Gamache offered his hand and the young agent stared at it for a moment before putting out his own. “Patron,” he said.

  “Oh, I was hoping it would be you.” Gabri hurried across the room, past the Sûreté officers bending over the victim. “We asked if the Sûreté could send you but apparently it’s not normal for suspects to order up a specific officer.” He hugged the Chief Inspector then turned to the roomful of agents. “See, I do know him.” Then he whispered to Gamache, “I think it would be best if we didn’t kiss.”

  “Very wise.”

  Gabri looked tired and stressed, but composed. He was disheveled, though that wasn’t unusual. Behind him, quieter, almost eclipsed, stood Olivier. He was also disheveled. That was very unusual. He also looked exhausted, with dark rings under his eyes.

  “Coroner’s just arriving now, Chief.” Agent Isabelle Lacoste walked across the room to greet him. She wore a simple skirt and light sweater and managed to make both look stylish. Like most Québécoises, she was petite and confident. “It’s Dr. Harris, I see.”

  They all looked out the window and the crowd parted to let a woman with a medical bag through. Unlike Agent Lacoste, Dr. Harris managed to make her simple skirt and sweater look slightly frumpy. But comfortable. And on a miserable day like this “comfortable” was very attractive.

  “Good,” said the Chief, turning back to Agent Lacoste. “What do we know?”

  Lacoste led Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir to the body. They knelt, an act and ritual they’d performed hundreds of times. It was surprisingly intimate. They didn’t touch him, but leaned very close, closer than they’d ever get to anyone in life, except a loved one.

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