TWENTY-EIGHT
Peter ushered Gamache into their home and took his coat. There was a definite smell of popcorn and the sounds of a Gothic choir in the background.
‘They’re just finishing the movie,’ said Peter.
‘It’s over,’ said Clara, popping into the kitchen to greet Gamache. ‘Even better the second time, I think. And we found something.’
They walked through to the living room to find Jean Guy Beauvoir staring at the screen, wide-eyed, as the credits rolled.
‘Mon Dieu, no wonder you English won on the Plains of Abraham,’ he said. ‘You’re all nuts.’
‘It does help, in war,’ agreed Peter. ‘But we’re not all like Eleanor of Aquitaine or Henry.’ He was tempted to point out that Eleanor and Henry were actually both French, but decided that would be rude.
‘You think not?’ Beauvoir asked. He’d seen enough of the Anglos in Quebec to make him wonder. It was their secrecy that always scared him. He couldn’t figure out what they were thinking. And if he couldn’t figure that out, he couldn’t begin to know what they’d do. He felt exposed and endangered around the English. And he didn’t like it. Frankly, he didn’t like them, and this film had done nothing to change his mind.
Terrifying.
‘Here.’ Clara pressed the rewind and the tape whizzed. ‘It’s at about minute seventeen. The tape goes strange.’
Gamache had finally figured out Clara’s garbled message. Video tapes stretch when someone stops them at the same spot often enough. And when they stretch, the picture goes wonky. Clara’s message had been that if Peter stopped his videos at an important point and the tape stretched, then maybe CC had done the same thing.
‘There is a spot where the tape goes strange,’ said Lemieux. ‘But we watched it over and over and nothing’s happening there.’
‘I think you’ll find,’ Gamache turned to the young officer, ‘that there’s a reason for every frame of this film. And there’s a reason CC stopped it there.’
Lemieux blushed. It was the same lesson all over again. There’s a reason for everything. Gamache had spoken matter-of-factly, but they both knew this was the second time he’d had to tell Lemieux that.
‘OK, here we go.’ Clara sat down and hit the play button.
A barge was approaching the dreary shore. Katharine Hepburn, as an aging Eleanor, was wrapped in shawls, splendid and brittle. There was no dialogue, just a long, pastoral shot of the boat, the oarsmen and the queen arriving.
The barge was almost at the shore, and the tape went strange. Just for a moment. It squirmed.
‘There.’ Clara hit pause. ‘Here, let me show you again.’
Twice more she rewound and hit play and twice more Eleanor arrived for her devastating Christmas with her family.
Clara paused the picture at the very moment it went squiggly. The prow of the barge almost filled the screen. No faces were visible. No actors at all. Just leafless, lifeless trees, a near dead landscape, gray water and the bow of the boat. Nothing. Lemieux might be right, thought Gamache.
He leaned back on the sofa and stared. Eventually the pause released itself and Clara had to rewind, play and pause again.
The minutes went by.
‘What do you see?’ he asked everyone in the room.
‘The boat,’ said Clara.
‘Trees,’ said Peter.
‘Some water,’ said Beauvoir, anxious to say something before everything was taken.
Lemieux could have kicked himself. There was nothing left to say. He caught Gamache looking at him with amusement, and something else. Approval. Better to say nothing than say something just for the sake of speaking. Lemieux smiled back and relaxed.
Gamache turned back to the screen. Boat, trees, water. Was it just a coincidence CC had stopped the movie here? Was he trying to read way too much into this? Had she stopped just to get a drink or go to the washroom? But the tape wouldn’t stretch from just one pause; she’d have to have stopped it here many times to cause the damage.
He got up and stretched his legs.
‘No need to keep staring. There’s nothing there. You were right, and I was wrong. My apologies,’ he said to Lemieux, who was so stunned he didn’t know what to do.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clara, walking with them back to the mudroom. ‘I thought I was on to something.’
‘And you might have been. You have an instinct for crime, madame.’
‘You flatter me, monsieur.’
Had Peter been a dog his hackles would have risen. Try as he might he couldn’t quite get over his jealousy of Gamache and his easy relationship with Clara. In the mudroom Gamache pulled a book from his coat and presented it gently to Clara. After speaking to Myrna he had an inkling of what he was about to do, and wished he didn’t have to.
‘How kind, but I already have Ruth’s latest book.’
‘But not this one,’ he said almost in a whisper. Peter strained to hear the words, as did the others.
Clara opened the book and smiled broadly. ‘You stink, love Ruth. You found it. The one I lost. Did I drop it on the road, or at the bistro?’
‘No, you dropped it in Montreal.’
Clara looked at Gamache, puzzled. ‘And you found it? But that’s not possible.’
‘It was found on the body of a dead woman.’ He said the words slowly and carefully, giving her every chance to hear them and to understand. ‘She was found outside Ogilvy’s, just before Christmas.’ Gamache was staring at Clara, examining her face, her reactions. Still she looked puzzled, amazed. Nothing more.
‘She was a vagrant, a bag lady.’
And now he could see the light go on. Her eyes opened slightly wider and she brought her head up and away from him, as though repulsed by his words.
‘No,’ Clara whispered and went very white. She breathed into the silence a couple of times. ‘The old woman, the bum on the street?’
The silence stretched on, all eyes watching Clara as she struggled with this news. Clara felt herself falling, not to the floor, but way below it, into the abyss filled with crushed dreams.
I’ve always loved your art, Clara.
No. That means the vagrant wasn’t God after all. Just a pathetic old woman. As delusional as Clara. They both thought her art was good. And they were wrong. CC and Fortin were right.
Your art is amateurish and banal. You’re a failure. You have no voice, no vision, no worth. You’ve wasted your life.
The words ground into Clara, weighing her down and dragging her over the edge.
‘Oh, my God,’ was all she could think to say.
‘Peter, could you make a cup of tea, please? Hot and sweet?’ Gamache asked and Peter was both annoyed Gamache had thought of it and grateful for something to do.
‘Go back to the Incident Room and see what progress Agent Lacoste has made,’ Gamache whispered to Beauvoir quickly, then he turned back and led Clara into the living room, kicking himself once there because he hadn’t given Beauvoir the video to take back. He hoped he wouldn’t forget it.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said to Clara once he had her seated by the warm fire.
‘I stepped right over her on my way into Ogilvy’s. It was the night of Ruth’s book launch. I felt badly about that, all my good fortune and all.’ She left the sentence hanging, knowing Gamache would understand. Once again she saw the scene. Leaving the launch, buying the food, getting on the fateful escalator. Passing CC.
Your art is amateurish and banal.
Walking in a daze into the cold night and wanting to take off down the street, howling and crying and shoving all the revelers aside. But instead bending over the vagrant, the heap of stinking shit and despair, and meeting those rheumy eyes.
‘I’ve always loved your art, Clara.’
‘She said that?’ Gamache asked.
Clara nodded.
‘Did you know her?’
‘Never saw her before.’
‘But you must have,’ said Agent Lemieux, speaking for the first time in an interrogation, the words jumping unbidden from his mouth. He clamped his mouth shut and looked at Gamache, waiting for the reprimand. Instead Gamache was looking at him with interest. Then he turned back.
Relieved, Lemieux listened, but wanted to squirm in his seat. He found this whole exchange deeply unsettling.
‘How do you explain it?’ Gamache asked, watching Clara closely.
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes you can,’ Gamache encouraged her, exploring, probing, asking her to let him in. ‘Tell me.’
‘I think she was God. Thought she was God.’ Clara struggled to compose herself, clamping her throat against the tears.
Gamache sat quietly, waiting. He looked away, giving her the semblance of privacy. Staring at the television he saw in his mind’s eye the frozen image of the barge. No. Not the barge, just the prow. With a design. A sea serpent. A snake. No. A bird.
An eagle.
A shrieking eagle.
And Gamache knew then why CC had stopped the tape just there. He had to get to the Incident Room before Lacoste left. The clock on the mantel said just after six. It might already be too late. Gesturing to Lemieux he whispered in the young man’s ear. Lemieux left the room quickly and quietly. A moment later Gamache saw him hurrying along the front path and out the gate.
Gamache cursed himself for forgetting to give the video to Lemieux to put back in the evidence box. He had a sneaking suspicion he’d leave without it himself. Peter arrived with the tea and Clara roused herself.
‘I need to ask you this again, Clara. Are you sure you’d never seen Elle before?’
‘Elle? Was that her name?’
‘That’s what the police report called her. We don’t know her real name.’
‘I’ve thought about it a great deal since that night. Myrna also asked. I didn’t know her. Believe me.’
Gamache did.
‘How did she die?’ asked Clara. ‘Was it the cold?’
‘She was murdered, shortly after she spoke to you.’