‘Her marriage had failed. We were each living on our own so we decided to share. She was in Montreal at the time.’
‘Was it hard making space?’
‘Now I think you’re being diplomatic, Chief Inspector,’ and Hazel smiled. He realized he liked her. ‘Had she brought a toothpick we’d have been in trouble. Happily she didn’t. Madeleine brought herself, and that was enough.’
There it was. Simple, unforced, private. Love.
Across from him Hazel closed her eyes and smiled again, then her brows drew together.
The room suddenly ached. Gamache wanted to take her composed hands in his. Any other senior officer in the Surete would think this not only weakness, but folly. But Gamache knew it was the only way he could find a murderer. He listened to people, took notes, gathered evidence, like all his colleagues. But he did one more thing.
He gathered feelings. He collected emotions. Because murder was deeply human. It wasn’t about what people did. No, it was about how they felt, because that’s where it all started. Some feeling that had once been human and natural had twisted. Become grotesque. Had turned sour and corrosive until its very container had been eaten away. Until the human barely existed.
It took years for an emotion to reach that stage. Years of careful nurturing, protecting, justifying, tending and finally burying it. Alive.
Then one day it clawed its way out, something terrible.
Something that had only one goal. To take a life.
Armand Gamache found murderers by following the trail of rancid emotions.
Beside him Beauvoir squirmed. Not, Gamache thought, because he was impatient. Not yet anyway. But because the sofa seemed to have found a life of its own and was sending out tiny spikes.
Hazel opened her eyes and looked at him, smiling a little in thanks, he thought, for not interfering.
Upstairs they heard a thump.
‘My daughter, Sophie. She’s visiting from university.’
‘She was at the seance last night, I believe,’ said Gamache.
‘It was stupid, stupid.’ Hazel hit the arm of her chair with her fist. ‘I knew better.’
‘Then why did you go?’
‘I didn’t go to the first one, and tried to stop Madeleine—’
‘The first one?’ Beauvoir sat up and actually forgot that a million little pins were sticking into his bottom.
‘Yes, didn’t you know?’
Gamache was always amazed and a little disconcerted that people seemed to think they knew everything immediately.
‘Tell us, please.’
‘There was another seance on Friday night. Good Friday. At the bistro.’
‘And Madame Favreau was at that?’
‘Along with a bunch of other people. Nothing much happened though so they decided to try another. This time at that place.’
Gamache wondered whether Hazel Smyth deliberately didn’t name the old Hadley house, like actors who call
‘Do they do many seances in Three Pines?’ Gamache asked.
‘Never before as far as I know.’
‘So why two in one weekend?’
‘It was that woman’s fault.’ As she spoke a chunk fell from her facade and he glimpsed something inside. Not sorrow, not loss.
Rage.
‘Who, madame?’ Gamache asked, though he knew the answer.
The needles stuck deeper into Beauvoir’s bottom and were heading forward.
‘Why are you here?’ Hazel asked. ‘Was Madeleine murdered?’
‘Who are you talking about? What woman?’ Gamache repeated firmly.
‘That witch. Jeanne Chauvet.’
All roads lead back to her, thought Gamache. But where was she?
FIFTEEN
