The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

He turned his laptop around so the Lepages could see the screen, then he hit a key and beyond the field of lambs in the foreground, a newsreel played out.

Beauvoir, Lacoste and Gamache couldn’t see the images, but they could see their effect. Evelyn Lepage put her hand to her mouth. Al Lepage closed his eyes for a moment, then forced them open. Sounds, so small they might have come from an infant, escaped his throat.

Jean-Guy had muted the reporter’s commentary so all the Lepages had were the pictures, made the more powerful by the silence.

Al Lepage’s framed lambs had their backs to the S?reté officers, and Gamache read the writing on the back of each. Laurent, aged 2, Laurent, aged 3, and so on. But it was the very first one that caught his attention.

“My Son,” it said. Just that. And a heart. My Son.

Son My.

Had this man killed again? His own son this time, and Antoinette Lemaitre? To keep his secret safe? It was a hell of a secret, and a hell of a crime.

“Al?” Evie said, when the newsreels ended in a freeze frame. “Why’re they showing us this?”

“She doesn’t know?” asked Beauvoir.

Al shook his head then turned to her. He took her hand and looked down at it. So familiar. So unexpected. To have found her late in life, and fallen in love. And taken her hand.

“I’m not a draft dodger, Evie,” he said quietly. “And my name isn’t Al Lepage. It’s Frederick Lawson. I was a private in the army. I deserted.”

His wife looked from him to the screen, then back.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “It’s not true.” She stared at him, searching his face. Then her eyes returned to the pile of bodies on the path, the bright green fields behind them and the little lambs in front. Her hand slid out of his.

No one moved, no one spoke. There was complete and utter silence, as though they too had been paused. And then it was shattered by a single word, screamed.

“Nooooooo.”

It came out of her like a blast furnace and she began pounding his chest, no longer making words but just sounds. Howling.

Lacoste started to get up but sat back down.

Lepage did nothing to defend himself, except close his eyes. It seemed he even leaned in to the fists, welcoming the beating. The S?reté officers watched as Evelyn Lepage’s life well and truly collapsed. Armand narrowed his eyes, not wishing to watch something so private, so intimate, so painful. But needing to see it.

He watched and wondered if little Frederick Lawson had raced through the woods, as Laurent had. A stick for a gun. Playing soldier. Fighting the enemy. Sacrificing himself in deeds magnificent and heroic.

One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?

Evelyn only stopped pounding on her husband’s chest when she was too exhausted to go on.

“You did that?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

He tried to take her hand again, but she batted him away, flailing her arms.

“Go away, get back,” she demanded.

“I was a different man back then,” he pleaded. “It was war, I was young. The platoon leader said they were Viet Cong.”

“The babies?” she said, her voice barely audible.

“I had no choice. It was strategic. They were the enemy.”

His voice petered out and with it the litany, the liturgy, the story he’d told himself every day, until he believed it. Until the miracle occurred, the transubstantiation. Until Frederick Lawson became Al Lepage. Troubadour. Raconteur. Organic gardener and aging hippie. Draft dodger.

Until a lie became the truth.

But the ghosts had pursued him over the border and across the years.

There had been no escape for Frederick Lawson after all. No second chance. No rebirth. His past had shown up one day, and knocked on his door, and asked him to do an etching. Looking into those dead eyes, Frederick Lawson knew this pretty village had offered him sanctuary but not pardon.

“There was one young girl—”

Al Lepage stopped, and Gamache thought he could go no further. Hoped he could go no further. But Lepage gathered himself, and his burden, and moved on.

“She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She knelt on the ground in front of me, her arms out. She said nothing. Not a word, not a sound. No begging, no crying. There was no fear. None. All I could see in her eyes was pity.”

Pity, thought Gamache. That was the expression Lepage had put on the face of the Whore of Babylon. The emotion he couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t contempt, it wasn’t arrogance, or amusement. It was pity. For the hell to come.

That was the root of that etching. The rot.

But Al Lepage wasn’t finished yet.