Brutal Telling

“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 Beliveau’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 Surete du Quebec 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 Surete 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 Surete du Quebec from every other senior officer.