‘I downloaded the preliminary report from the scene. A hard copy is in the file back there.’ Nichol waved toward the back seat while negotiating Blvd St Denis to the autoroute which would take them over the Champlain Bridge and into the countryside.
The rest of the trip was made in silence, as he read the scant information, sipped coffee, ate pastry and watched the flat farmlands around Montreal close in and become slowly rolling hills, then larger mountains, covered with brilliant autumn leaves.
About twenty minutes after turning off the Eastern Townships autoroute they passed a small pockmarked sign telling them Three Pines was two kilometers off this secondary road. After a tooth-jarring minute or two along the washboard dirt road they saw the inevitable paradox. An old stone mill sat beside a pond, the mid morning sun warming its fieldstones. Around it the maples and birches and wild cherry trees held their fragile leaves, like thousands of happy hands waving to them upon arrival. And police cars. The snakes in Eden. Though, Gamache knew, the police were not the evil ones. The snake was already here.
Gamache walked straight toward the anxious crowd that had gathered. As he approached he could see the road dip down, gently sloping into a picturesque village. The growing crowd stood on the brow of the hill, some looking into the woods, where they could just make out the movement of officers in bright yellow jackets, but most were looking at him. Gamache had seen their expression countless times, people desperate for news they desperately didn’t want to hear.
‘Who is it? Can you tell us what happened?’ A tall, distinguished man spoke for the others.
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t even seen for myself yet. I’ll tell you as soon as I can.’
The man looked unhappy with the answer but nodded. Gamache checked his watch: 11 a.m., Thanksgiving Sunday. He turned from the crowd and walked to where they were staring, to the activity in the woods and the one spot of stillness he knew he’d find.
A yellow plastic tape circled the body and within that circle the investigators worked, bowing down like some pagan ritual. Most had been with Gamache for years, but he always kept one position open for a trainee.
‘Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir, this is Agent Yvette Nichol.’
Beauvoir gave a relaxed nod. ‘Welcome.’
At thirty-five years old, Jean Guy Beauvoir had been Gamache’s second in command for more than a decade. He wore cords and a wool sweater under his leather jacket. A scarf was rakishly and apparently randomly whisked around his neck. It was a look of studied nonchalance which suited his toned body but was easily contradicted by the cord-tight tension of his stance. Jean Guy Beauvoir was loosely wrapped but tightly wound.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Nichol wondered whether she would ever be as comfortable at a murder scene as these people.
‘Chief Inspector Gamache, this is Robert Lemieux,’ Beauvoir introduced a young officer standing respectfully just outside the police cordon. ‘Agent Lemieux was the duty officer with the Cowansville Sûreté. He got the call and came here immediately. Secured the scene then called us.’
‘Well done.’ Gamache shook his hand. ‘Anything strike you when you arrived?’
Lemieux looked dumbfounded by the question. At best he’d hoped to be allowed to hang around and watch, and not be shooed away from the scene. He’d never expected to meet Gamache, never mind actually answer a question.
‘Bien sûr, I saw that man there. An Anglais, I suspected by his clothes and his pallor. The English, I have noticed, have weak stomachs.’ Lemieux was pleased to pass this insight on to the Chief Inspector, even though he’d just made it up. He had no idea whether Les Anglais were more prone to pallor than the Quebecois, but it sounded good. It had also been Lemieux’s experience that the English had no clothes sense, and this man in his plaid flannel shirt could not possibly be francophone. ‘His name is Benjamin Hadley.’
On the far side of the circle, half sitting against a maple tree, Gamache could see a middle-aged man. Tall, slim, looking very, very ill. Beauvoir followed Gamache’s gaze.
‘He found the body,’ said Beauvoir.
‘Hadley? As in Hadley’s Mills?’
Beauvoir smiled. He couldn’t imagine how he knew this, but he did. ‘That’s the one. You know him?’
‘No. Not yet.’ Beauvoir cocked his eyebrow at his chief and waited. Gamache explained, ‘The mill has faded writing at the top.’
‘Hadley’s Mills.’
‘Well deduced, Beauvoir.’
‘A wild guess, sir.’
Nichol could have kicked herself. She’d been everywhere Gamache had been and he had noticed that and she hadn’t. What else did he see? What else didn’t she? Damn. She looked suspiciously at Lemieux. He seemed to be ingratiating himself to the Chief Inspector.
‘Merci, Agent Lemieux,’ she said, putting out her hand while the Chief Inspector’s back was turned, watching the wretched ‘Anglais’. Lemieux took it, as she hoped he would. ‘Au revoir.’ Lemieux stood uncertainly for a moment, looking from her to Gamache’s broad back. Then he shrugged and left.
Armand Gamache turned his attention from the living to the dead. He walked a few paces and knelt down beside the body that had brought them there.
A clump of hair had fallen into Jane Neal’s open eyes. Gamache wanted to brush it away. It was fanciful, he knew. But he was fanciful. He had come to allow himself a certain latitude in that area. Beauvoir, on the other hand, was reason itself, and that made them a formidable team.
Gamache stared quietly at Jane Neal. Nichol cleared her throat, thinking perhaps he’d forgotten where he was. But he didn’t react. Didn’t move. He and Jane were frozen in time, both staring, one down, one up. Then his eyes moved along her body, to the worn camel-hair cardigan, the light-blue turtleneck. No jewelry. Was she robbed? He’d have to ask Beauvoir. Her tweed skirt was where you’d expect it to be, in someone who’d fallen. Her leotards, patched in at least one place, were otherwise unmarred. She might have been robbed, but she hadn’t been violated. Except for being killed, of course.
His deep brown eyes lingered on her liver-spotted brown hands. Rough, tanned hands that had known seasons in a garden. No rings on her fingers, or sign there had ever been. He always felt a pang when looking at the hands of the newly dead, imagining all the objects and people those hands had held. The food, the faces, the doorknobs. All the gestures they’d made to signal delight or sorrow. And the final gesture, surely, to ward off the blow that would kill. The most poignant were the hands of young people who would never absently brush a lock of gray hair from their own eyes.
He stood up with Beauvoir’s help and asked, ‘Was she robbed?’
‘We don’t think so. Mr Hadley says she never wore jewelry, and rarely carried a handbag. He thinks we’ll find it in her home.’
‘Her house key?’
‘No. No key. But again, Mr Hadley says people don’t lock up around here.’
‘They will now.’ Gamache stooped over the body and stared at the tiny wound, hardly large enough, you’d have thought, to drain the life from a whole human being. It was about the size of the tip of his little finger.
‘Any idea what did this?’
‘It’s hunting season, so perhaps a bullet, though it doesn’t look like any bullet wound I’ve ever seen.’