The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

But Armand didn’t. He sat waiting. For more.

“Ruth,” Monsieur Béliveau said quietly. “We have to tell him everything.”

“I didn’t want to bring Jane into it,” she said at last.

“Why not?” Armand asked. “Why suggest Al Lepage, someone you didn’t like? Why give him the job and not your closest friend?”

Ruth looked cornered, desperate, and Armand wished he could help her but he didn’t know how, except to say, “The truth, Ruth. Tell me.”

“He looked perfectly normal, of course,” she said. “They do, don’t they? But he wasn’t. He was like Clément’s apple.”

“Gerald Bull?”

Ruth shook her head.

“Al Lepage?”

“No.”

Gamache thought. Who else?

And then he looked from Ruth to Monsieur Béliveau.

“The project manager,” said Armand.

“Oui,” said Clément Béliveau. “He was small, slight. Easy to overlook in the company of Gerald Bull. But if you looked at him, really looked at him, you could see it. Or feel it. There was something wrong with him. Inside.”

Monsieur Béliveau sighed. Heavily. The very thought of the man a weight on the grocer’s chest.

“I sent them over to Ruth.” He placed his large hand on her tiny one. “I was afraid, and I just wanted to get rid of them. Of him.” He squeezed Ruth’s hand. “I’ve never forgiven myself that cowardice.”

“But who was he?” asked Gamache.

“You know him,” said Ruth.

Gamache thought, his lips moving slightly as he murmured to himself, going through the possibilities. Then he finally shook his head.

“I don’t know who you mean.”

“The third man in that picture,” said Ruth.

“What picture?”

“The one you showed me. With Gerald Bull and Guillaume.”

“This one?” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the old black-and-white photo taken at the Atomium in Brussels.

There was the grinning, almost buffoonish Guillaume Couture. The taciturn Gerald Bull.

And one other. His head down and away from the camera.

“Would I meet your eyes, and stand,/rooted and speechless,” said Ruth. “While the pavement cracked to pieces/and the sky fell down.”

Gamache looked at her.

“I wrote it after he left.” She gestured to the photograph. “After I sent him on. I did the same thing, Clément. I threw them Al Lepage, in the hopes they’d take him and leave me. I’d have done anything to get rid of him. After Gerald Bull left, the project manager returned. Alone. He knocked on the door and that’s when he asked if I could write a few lines to accompany the drawing of the Whore of Babylon. I told him I couldn’t. I told him I wasn’t really a poet. That it was just a lie I told myself.”

Her hands were trembling now, and while Monsieur Béliveau held one, Armand took the other.

“When he left I went up to St. Thomas’s,” she said, looking at the small clapboard chapel. “I prayed he’d never come calling again. I sat there and cried for shame. For what I’d done. Then I wrote those words, sitting in the pew, and didn’t write again for a decade.”

Gamache looked down at the black-and-white photograph. It seemed, in just that instant, that the third man tilted his face up. And looked straight at him.

Would I meet your eyes, and stand,/rooted and speechless.

The blood ran from his face and his hands grew cold and Armand Gamache knew who it was.

While the pavement cracked to pieces/and the sky fell down.

“It’s John Fleming,” he said beneath his breath.

“Yes,” said Ruth, her cold hand squeezing his. “The rough beast.”





CHAPTER 34

Ten lambs were lined up down the center of the conference table in the Incident Room, facing Al and Evie Lepage.

“You drew the etching,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “You knew the gun was there. What did you do, Monsieur Lepage, when your son came home and told you what he’d found in the forest? A giant gun with a monster on it. We’ve been looking for someone, just one person, who’d believe such a far-fetched story. And we’ve found him. You. Did you take him back there? Did you kill your son to keep your secret?”

Al gaped at them, his blue eyes wide with terror.

“You knew if the gun was found, the etching would eventually be traced back to you,” Lacoste pressed on. “And we’d start asking questions. We’d find out who you really are. And what you did.”

Evelyn turned to her husband. “Al?”

Gamache sat across from the couple and waited for the answer.

He’d been on the bench with Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau when the vehicles drew up to the old railway station.

He’d been trying to absorb the news that John Fleming was once in Three Pines. Was in fact Gerald Bull’s project manager. In a slight daze he watched Beauvoir and Lacoste get out of the car with Al Lepage, while Clara and Evie climbed out of the pickup truck. Evie ran to her husband’s side while Clara hesitated, then walked back to her home.