TWENTY-ONE
Dr Sharon Harris had just settled into her easy chair and ordered a Dubonnet when Gamache arrived, full of apologies and smiles. He joined her in a Dubonnet and sat down. They had a window seat, looking through the mullions at the frozen pond and Christmas trees. Over her shoulder he could see the fire crackling and playing in the hearth. Dr Harris was absently toying with a discreet white tag hanging from their table. She glanced at it.
‘Two hundred and seventy dollars.’
‘Not the Dubonnet, I hope.’ Gamache stopped his untouched drink partway to his mouth.
‘No.’ She laughed. ‘The table.’
‘Santé.’ He took a sip and smiled. He’d forgotten. Everything in the bistro was an antique, collected by Olivier. And everything was for sale. He could finish his drink and buy the cut crystal glass. It was, actually, a lovely glass. As he held it up and looked through it the crystal picked up and refracted the amber light from the fireplace, splitting it into parts. Like a very warm rainbow. Or the chakras, he thought.
‘Are you still looking to move here?’ he asked, bringing himself back to the table and catching her wistful gaze out the window.
‘If a place comes up I would, though when they do they get bought fast.’
‘The old Hadley home came up about a year ago.’
‘Except that place, though I have to admit I looked at the listing. Cheap. Almost gave it away.’
‘How much were they asking?’
‘I can’t remember exactly but it was less than a hundred thousand.’
‘C’est incroyable,’ said Gamache, taking a handful of cashews.
Dr Harris looked around the bistro, filling up with patrons. ‘No one seems too bothered by the murder. Not a popular woman, our victim?’
‘No, it seems not. She was the one who bought the Hadley house.’
‘Ahh,’ said Dr Harris.
‘Ahh?’ questioned Gamache.
‘Anyone who’d buy that house must have been insensitive in the extreme. I didn’t even like looking at its picture on the computer listing.’
‘People have different sensibilities.’ Gamache smiled.
‘True,’ she agreed, ‘but would you buy it?’
‘I don’t even like going in it,’ he whispered to her conspiratorially. ‘Gives me the willies. What’ve you got for me?’
Dr Harris leaned down and drew a dossier from her briefcase. Placing it on the table she took a handful of nuts, leaned back and looked out the window again, sipping her drink between salty mouthfuls.
Gamache put on his half-moon reading glasses and spent the next ten minutes going over the report, finally putting it down and taking a contemplative sip of Dubonnet.
‘Niacin,’ he said.
‘Niacin,’ she agreed.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Besides the niacin she was a healthy, though perhaps underweight, forty-eight-year-old woman. She’d given birth. She was pre-menopausal. All very natural and normal. Her feet were charred from the shock and her hands were blistered, in the same pattern as the tubing of the chair. There was a tiny cut underneath that but it was old and healing. It’s all consistent with electrocution except for one thing. The niacin.’
Gamache leaned forward, taking his glasses from his face and tapping them gently on the manila folder. ‘What is it?’
‘A vitamin. One of the B complex.’ She leaned forward so that they were both talking over the table. ‘It’s prescribed for high cholesterol and some people take it thinking it can increase brain power.’
‘Can it?’
‘No evidence.’
‘Then why do they think that?’
‘Well, what it does produce is a facial flush, and I guess someone thought that meant blood was rushing to the brain and you know what that can only mean.’
‘More brain power.’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ She shook her head in disdain. ‘Fitting that people with so little brain power would come to that conclusion. A normal dose is five milligrams. It’s enough to slightly raise the heart rate and the blood pressure. As I said, it’s often prescribed by doctors, but it’s also available over the counter. I don’t think you can overdose on it. In fact, it’s even put into some breakfast cereals. Niacin and thiamin.’
‘So if the normal dose is five, what did CC have in her?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Phew. That’s a lot of cereal.’
‘Captain Crunch a suspect?’