*
Gamache took his seat again and reached for his coffee. They all looked at the new list. Under the heading How are the two séances different? he’d written,
Hazel
Sophie
Dinner party
Old Hadley house
Jeanne Chauvet more serious
He explained that on being interviewed the psychic had said she wasn’t prepared for the first, it had been Gabri’s little surprise, and so she hadn’t taken it seriously. She’d judged they were really just a bored group of villagers looking for titillation. So she’d given them the cheap, Hollywood version. Silly melodrama. But when someone later told her about the old Hadley house and somehow the idea of contacting the dead there had come up, she’d taken it seriously.
‘Why?’ asked Lemieux.
‘You’re not really that thick,’ snapped Nichol. ‘The old Hadley house is supposedly haunted. She contacts ghosts for a living. Hello?’
Beauvoir, ignoring Nichol, got up and wrote,
Candles
Salt
‘Anything else?’ he asked. He liked writing things on the board. Always had. He liked the smell of magic marker. The squeak it made. And the order it created from random ideas.
‘Her incantations,’ said Gamache. ‘They’re important.’
‘Right,’ said Nichol, rolling her eyes.
‘For setting atmosphere,’ said Gamache. ‘That was a major difference. From what I understand the Good Friday séance was frightening, but the Sunday night one was terrifying. Maybe the murderer tried to kill Madeleine Friday night but it just wasn’t scary enough.’
‘So who suggested the old Hadley house?’ asked Lemieux and shot Nichol a look, daring her to mock him again. She just sneered and shook her head. He could feel the rage rising from his chest, boiling there and bubbling to his throat. It was bad enough to be mocked, to be insulted, to be accused of sucking up. But to be dismissed as pathetic was the worst.
‘I don’t know,’ said Gamache. ‘We’ve asked and no one can remember.’
‘But if you think the move to the old Hadley house was key then that lets out Hazel and Sophie,’ said Beauvoir.
‘Why?’ asked Lemieux.
‘They weren’t there to suggest it.’
There was a pause.
‘But Sophie’s the only person who’s different from the first to the second séance,’ said Nichol. ‘I don’t think the first had anything to do with murder. I think it only occurred to someone later. And that’s because that someone wasn’t at the first séance.’
‘But Sophie isn’t the only new person,’ said Lemieux. ‘Her mother was only at the second séance as well.’
‘But she could have been at the first. She was invited. If she’d wanted to kill Madeleine then she would have been there.’
‘And maybe that was why she went to the second,’ said Gamache. ‘The first didn’t work, so she had to make sure the second did.’
‘And bring along her own daughter? Come on.’ Nichol opened her notebook and brought out the photo she’d taken off the fridge door at the Smyth place.
‘Look at this.’ She flicked it onto the table. Beauvoir handed it down the table to Gamache who stared at it. The photo showed three women. Madeleine in the middle in profile looking with great and open affection at Hazel, who was wearing a silly hat and smiling. Happy and delighted, a look of great affection on her face too. She was also in profile, looking off camera. At the other end of the picture sat a plump young woman, a piece of cake about to go into her mouth. In the foreground sat a birthday cake.
‘Where’d you get this?’
‘The Smyth place, from the fridge.’
‘Why’d you take it? What interests you about it?’ Gamache was leaning forward, watching Nichol intently.
‘It’s the face. It says it all.’
Nichol waited to see whether the others would get it. Would they see that Madeleine Favreau, so pretty and smiling and attentive, was a fake? No one was really that happy. She had to be pretending.
‘You’re right,’ said Gamache, turning to Beauvoir. ‘Do you see? Her?’ Gamache put his large finger close to the photo.
Beauvoir leaned in and studied the picture then his eyes opened wide.
‘That’s Sophie. That girl taking a bite of cake. It’s Sophie.’
‘Heavier,’ Gamache nodded.
He turned the photograph over. Across the back was written the date the picture was taken. Two years ago.
In only two years Sophie Smyth had dropped twenty, thirty pounds?
Gamache’s phone rang just as the meeting was breaking up.
‘Chief, it’s me,’ said Agent Lacoste. ‘I finally have the report on the fingerprints. We know who broke into the room at the old Hadley house.’
Hazel Smyth seemed to have trouble functioning now. Like a toy whose connections were faulty, she lurched from full speed to stop, then top speed again.
‘We have some questions, Madame Smyth,’ said Beauvoir. ‘And we’ll need to do a thorough search. A few officers from the Cowansville detachment will be here soon. We have a warrant.’
He reached into his pocket but she whizzed off, saying, ‘No need, Inspector. Sophie! Sooophieee.’
‘What is it?’ came the petulant reply.
‘Visitors. It’s the police again.’ She seemed to sing-song it.
Sophie appeared, clunking down the stairs with her crutches, her leg wrapped tightly now in a tenser bandage. The injury seemed to be getting worse, judging by her winces. Beauvoir wondered whether maybe she wasn’t injured after all.