He opened and shut his mouth. Then took a deep breath. “He was here. The police were right. I found him when I got up in the middle of the night. I got scared and did something stupid.”
“You took the body to the bistro?” Dominique looked as though she’d been slapped by someone she loved, so great was her shock. His mother was staring at him as though he’d peed in the Chateau Frontenac dining room. He knew that look from when he was a boy and peed in the Chateau Frontenac dining room.
Gilbert’s lightning mind zipped all over the place, searching dark corners for someone else to blame. Surely it wasn’t his fault. Surely there were factors his wife didn’t appreciate. Surely this couldn’t be the act of complete idiocy her face accused him of.
But he knew it was.
Dominique turned to Gamache. “You have my permission to shoot him.”
“Merci, madame, but I’d need more than that to shoot him. A gun for instance.”
“Pity,” she said, and looked at her husband. “What were you thinking?”
He told them, as he had the cops, the reasoning that had appeared so obvious, so dazzling, at three in the morning.
“You did it for the business?” said Dominique when he’d finished. “Something’s very wrong when dumping bodies is part of our business plan.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly planned,” he tried to defend himself. “And yes, I made a terrible mistake, but isn’t there a bigger question?” He’d finally found something curled up in one of those dark corners. Something that would take the heat off him. “Yes, I moved the body. But who put it here in the first place?”
They’d obviously been so stunned by his admission they hadn’t even thought of that. But Gamache had. Because he’d noticed something else about the Varathaned floor. The shine, the mar. And the complete lack of blood. So had Beauvoir. Even if Marc Gilbert had scrubbed and scrubbed he’d never have gotten all the blood up. There’d be traces.
But there was nothing. Just some fluff from the dead man’s cardigan.
No, Gilbert might have killed the man, but he didn’t do it at his own front door. The man had already been dead when he’d been placed there.
Gilbert stood up. “That’s one of the reasons I want to see the man who tried to break in. I think he had something to do with it.”
His mother stood up and touched her son’s arm. “I really think you should leave this to the police. The man’s probably unwell.”
She looked to Gamache, but the Chief Inspector had no intention of stopping Marc Gilbert from confronting the intruder. Just the opposite. He wanted to see what happened.
“Come with me,” he said to Marc, then turned to the women. “You’re welcome to join us, if you like.”
“Well, I’m going,” said Dominique. “Maybe you should stay here,” she said to her mother-in-law.
“I’m coming too.”
As they approached the barn the horses looked up from the field. Beauvoir, who hadn’t seen them before, almost stopped in his tracks. He hadn’t seen that many horses in real life. On film, yes. And these didn’t look like any film horses. But then, most men didn’t look like Sean Connery and most women didn’t look like Julia Roberts. But even allowing for natural selection, these horses seemed, well, odd. One didn’t even look like a horse. They began to mosey over, one walking sideways.
Paul Morin, who had seen a lot of horses, said, “Nice cows.”
Dominique Gilbert ignored him. But she felt drawn to the horses. As their own lives so suddenly unraveled the horses’ calm attracted her. As did, she thought, their suffering. No, not their suffering, but their forbearance. If they could endure a lifetime of abuse and pain she could take whatever blow that barn had in store. As the others moved past her Dominique stopped and walked back to the paddock, where she stood on a bucket and leaned over the fence. The other horses, still shy, held back. But Buttercup, big, awkward, ugly and scarred, came forward. Buttercup’s broad, flat forehead pushed softly into Dominique’s chest, as though it fit there. As though it was the key. And as she walked away to join the others and confront whatever that shadow was they could see standing in the barn, she smelled horse on her hands. And felt the reassuring pressure between her breasts.
It took a moment or two for their eyes to adjust as they stepped into the dim barn. Then the shadow became solid, firm. Human. Before them appeared a tall, slender, graceful older man.
“You’ve kept me waiting,” the darkness said.
Marc, whose vision wasn’t quite as good as he pretended, could only just see the outline of the man. But the words, the voice, told him more than enough. He felt light-headed and reached out. His mother, standing next to him, took his hand and held him steady.
“Mother?” he whispered.
“It’s all right, Marc,” the man said.
But Marc knew it wasn’t all right. He’d heard the rumors about the old Hadley house, the ghouls that lived there. He’d loved the stories because it meant no one else had wanted the house, and they could get it dirt cheap.
Dirt to dirt. Something filthy had indeed risen. The old Hadley house had produced one more ghost.
“Dad?”