Cruelest Month

‘Oh please,’ said Nichol. ‘Don’t try to suck up to him,’ and she flicked her hand toward Gamache.

Lemieux was silent. He’d been instructed to suck up. It was what he did best and did it, he thought, with great subtlety, but now this bitch actually called him on it in the middle of the morning meeting. His facade of reason and longsuffering was cracking under the mocking of Nichol. He despised her, and if he didn’t have a larger purpose he’d turn his attention to her.

‘Look,’ continued Nichol, dismissing Lemieux. ‘It’s so obvious. The question isn’t how they’re connected, but how they’re not. What was different about the two seances?’

She sat back, triumphant.

Oddly, no one jumped to congratulate her. The silence stretched on. Then Chief Inspector Gamache slowly got up and walked over to Beauvoir.

‘May I?’ He reached for the marker then turned and began writing on a clean sheet of paper, How are the two seances different?

Nichol smirked and Lemieux nodded, but beneath the table his hands clenched.

Isabelle Lacoste had gone from Francois Favreau directly to the high school in Notre-Dame-de-Grace. It was a large red-brick building with an 1867 date stone. The building looked and felt nothing like her own high school. Hers had been modern, sprawling, French. Yet as soon as she stepped into the old building she was immediately back in the crowded halls of her school. Trying to remember her combination, trying to get her hair to stay down, or up or whatever the trend was. Always trying, like a kayaker shooting the rapids and feeling one stroke behind.

The sounds were familiar, voices bouncing off metal and concrete, shoes screeching on hard floors, but it was the smells that had transported her. Of books and cleaner, of lunches languishing and rotting behind hundreds of lockers. And fear. High school smelled of that more than anything else, even more than sweaty feet, cheap perfume and rotten bananas.

‘I put together a dossier for you,’ said Mrs Plant, the school secretary. ‘I wasn’t here when Madeleine Gagnon went to school. In fact, none of the teachers or staff is still here. That was thirty years ago. But all our archives are on computer now so I printed out her report cards and found some other things you might be interested in. Including these.’

She put her hand on a stack of yearbooks, the secular school’s Bible.

‘That’s very kind, but I think the report cards will be enough.’

‘But I spent half of yesterday in the storeroom finding these.’

‘Thank you. I’m sure they’ll be great.’ Agent Lacoste hoisted them into her arms, balancing the file on top precariously as they left the office.

‘We have some pictures of her on the wall, you know.’ Mrs Plant walked ahead. The halls were beginning to fill and the place echoed with unintelligible shouts as kids hailed and assailed each other.

‘Down here. All sorts of pictures. I have to get back to the office. Will you be all right?’

‘You’ve been very helpful. I’ll be fine.’

For the next few minutes Lacoste moved slowly down the long, concrete corridor, looking at old photographs framed and hung, of victorious school teams and school government. And there was young Madeleine Favreau, nee Gagnon. Smiling, healthy, with every expectation of a long and exciting life. Jostled by the kids now crowding into the halls Agent Lacoste wondered what high school must have been like for Madeleine. Did she also smell of fear? She didn’t look it, but then the most fearful people often didn’t.

* * *

Gamache took his seat again and reached for his coffee. They all looked at the new list. Under the heading How are the two seances different? he’d written,

Hazel

Sophie

Dinner party

Old Hadley house

Jeanne Chauvet more serious

He explained that on being interviewed the psychic had said she wasn’t prepared for the first, it had been Gabri’s little surprise, and so she hadn’t taken it seriously. She’d judged they were really just a bored group of villagers looking for titillation. So she’d given them the cheap, Hollywood version. Silly melodrama. But when someone later told her about the old Hadley house and somehow the idea of contacting the dead there had come up, she’d taken it seriously.

‘Why?’ asked Lemieux.

‘You’re not really that thick,’ snapped Nichol. ‘The old Hadley house is supposedly haunted. She contacts ghosts for a living. Hello?’

Beauvoir, ignoring Nichol, got up and wrote,

Candles

Salt

‘Anything else?’ he asked. He liked writing things on the board. Always had. He liked the smell of magic marker. The squeak it made. And the order it created from random ideas.

‘Her incantations,’ said Gamache. ‘They’re important.’

‘Right,’ said Nichol, rolling her eyes.

‘For setting atmosphere,’ said Gamache. ‘That was a major difference. From what I understand the Good Friday