The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

“In a fortune?” asked Beauvoir. “Even Professor Rosenblatt admitted there’d be people out there still looking for the mythical Supergun. What I’m not clear on is, after Laurent found the gun and was killed to stop him blabbing, why did the murderer wait a week or more to kill Antoinette and search her house for the plans? If he knew her uncle had worked on the Supergun, why not go there right away?”


Gamache took a deep inhale, held it a moment, then exhaled.

It was a very good question. There was a reason, of course. And perhaps the answer was—

“Maybe they aren’t the same person,” said Armand. “Maybe someone killed Laurent and someone else, on hearing of the find, came down to see it and look for the plans. They knew that Guillaume Couture was Antoinette’s uncle, and if anyone had the plans to Project Babylon it would be him.”

“They?” asked Lacoste. “You’re thinking of Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme, aren’t you?”

“I’m not sure what I’m doing could really be called ‘thinking,’” said Gamache. “But yes, they’re a possibility. I put in that call to my contact in CSIS this morning. We should know more about them later today.”

Lacoste looked around the stage. They’d printed, swabbed and bagged the items they knew were from Antoinette’s home but hadn’t found the firing mechanism or the plans.

Gamache picked up a few of the bagged items and examined them. A pen set. A bookend. The peeing boy.

“I don’t suppose…” Gamache turned the Manneken Pis around, and around.

“You think that’s the firing mechanism?” asked Beauvoir, trying not to laugh.

“I think if a weapon’s powerful enough to wipe out an entire region, and is worth billions, some effort might be made to disguise the one component that will make it work. And that”—Gamache handed the Manneken Pis to Jean-Guy—“is not it.”

Beauvoir looked at it with distaste. “It does look familiar. Don’t Florence and Zora…?”

“Oui,” said Gamache. “Reine-Marie bought them each one. Guess what you’re getting for Christmas.”

They heard heavy steps on the stairs and turned around to see Brian emerging from the wings.

“I was sitting in the greenroom when I realized that Antoinette has a desk down there. I almost looked but then thought you might want to do it yourselves.”

“I’ll go,” said Beauvoir, handing the small statue back to Gamache. “I’m rethinking your gift now, patron.”

He came back up twenty minutes later, shaking his head. “Just old scripts and crap. When’s the team getting here from Montréal? It’s a real rat’s nest down there with costumes and props.” He looked out into the body of the theater. “It’ll take hours to go through this place. Maybe days.”

A few minutes later the forensics team arrived and began the arduous task of searching the theater.

*

Gamache drove through what was now drizzle. The dramatic dawn with its broken clouds and shafts of light had made way for the storm, which in turn became just a dreary, cold, rainy early autumn afternoon.

Now the wipers made a lazy, rhythmic motion as he drove south from the Knowlton Playhouse toward the Vermont border, listening to Neil Young on CD sing about the place his memory went when he needed comfort. All his changes were there.

Helpless …

Gamache had left Lacoste and Beauvoir and the forensics team at the theater and was following his GPS along the route Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme had taken two days before. Just south of Mansonville, he turned right and drove into Highwater.

Bounded by a hill on one side and a river on the other, it should have been a picturesque little village. Could have been. Would have been. Almost certainly had been a pretty little village, once. But now it felt abandoned, forgotten. Not even a memory.

… helpless.

It was far from the first run-down little community Armand Gamache had arrived in. He looked around and saw the old train station, shuttered. The transport link, like an artery, was severed and the once vital community had died. Slowly. The young people seeping away for jobs elsewhere, leaving aging parents and grandparents.

Gamache looked at his GPS. He was in Highwater, but the CSIS agents seemed to have traveled slightly beyond it. Turning right again, then left, he came to a line of high chain-link fencing and a gate with a rusty chain and a new lock.

Without compunction, or hesitation, Gamache reached into his glove compartment, brought out a small pouch of tools, and within moments the lock was open. He drove in, parked the car behind an old building, then taking the GPS and an umbrella with him, he started to walk.

Up.