The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

“Thank God,” he said, quickly following Brian inside. “But shouldn’t this be locked?”


He closed the door against the beating rain.

“Antoinette sometimes forgets to lock it,” said Brian, running his hands through his wet hair. “I’m okay now, you can go if you want to.”

“I think I might wait until the storm passes,” said Armand, feeling a little bad since he knew Brian desperately wanted time alone. “I’ll just wait in the theater for a few minutes.”

Brian went over to a panel and with a clunk turned on the stage lights, but not the house lights. While Armand took off his sodden overcoat and chose a seat in the darkness a few rows back, Brian sat on the sofa on the stage. Folding his hands on his lap, a calm seemed to come over him. He looked like a man meditating. Eyes closed, face tilted slightly upward, peaceful though not, Gamache supposed, at peace.

This was Brian’s sanctuary and Gamache was aware he was an intruder. He felt like a voyeur. Watching an intimate act. An uninvited audience at a private play.

He averted his eyes, looking around the set.

It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. It started as a vague sense that something was different. Not wrong, not threatening, just a little different.

Brian wouldn’t have noticed. His back was to the set and his eyes were closed. But Armand sensed it, then saw it.

There were more items on the set. The tatty furniture was the same, but there were more books on the shelves, and little ornaments filled some of the empty spaces.

Armand cocked his head to one side, looking at the items. They were too far away to see clearly, though one caught his eye. He stared at it, and then stood up.

Walking to the wings, he climbed the few steps to the stage and into the floodlights. Brian, hearing the footsteps, opened his eyes.

“Leaving?” he asked, with more than a little hope in his voice.

“Not yet,” said Armand, distracted, staring at the items on the bookshelf. Then he took a step to his left and bent down, reading the spines of the books. Some were dusty old volumes that had been there before, no doubt bought in bulk at a rummage sale and used for props in many productions. But there were a few others, including—he bent closer and put on his reading glasses—Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, Barrier Trajectories and one called Applied Physics, Theory and Design.

Straightening up, his eyes moved swiftly over the bookshelf, the desk, the chest of drawers, all meant to convey the living room of a boardinghouse in the Fleming play.

And then his eyes stopped. There, at the back of the desk behind a pen set, was a small photograph in a silver frame of a smiling man with a little girl in pigtails leaning against his knee.

Gamache brought out the photo of the three scientists and compared the faces. Both smiling. Both slightly disheveled. Both Guillaume Couture.

And the girl was almost certainly Antoinette Lemaitre, when she really was a girl and not a woman-child.

He reached for his cell phone and called Isabelle Lacoste.

“Antoinette brought her uncle’s things to the theater,” he said. “They’re scattered around the set on the stage.”

“Are the plans there?” she asked immediately. “The firing mechanism?”

“I don’t know yet, I just discovered it.”

Brian had come over and was standing next to Gamache. He reached out for the framed photograph but Gamache stopped his hand.

“We’ll be over right away,” said Lacoste. “Don’t touch anything.”

It was out before she realized what she’d said.

“We’ll try not to,” said Gamache, eyeing Brian.

“I’m sorry, patron,” said Lacoste. “Of course you won’t.”

After he’d hung up, Gamache asked Brian if he could point out which props had been there for a while and which ones might be new.

Brian took his time, pointing to, but not touching, the pen set, the photo, some books, some bric-a-brac.

When he finished, he turned back to Armand. “Did I hear you say Antoinette put these things out? That they belonged to her uncle?”

“She must have,” said Armand. “The books were suggestive, but that photograph puts it beyond doubt. How about this?” Armand motioned to the ornament that had first caught his attention. Brian had pointed it out as something he’d never seen before. “Are you sure this isn’t from your props department?”

Brian gnawed on his lower lip. “Pretty sure. It’s kind of memorable, isn’t it?”

It was that, Gamache agreed. And it was manufactured to be just that. Memorable. He was certain it hadn’t been on the stage when he’d visited Antoinette a few days earlier. He’d have remembered.

It was, after all, a souvenir. Bending closer, he came eye to eye with the statue. It was small and tacky and cheap. He knew because he’d bought one himself, but not for himself. Or Reine-Marie.