TWENTY-SEVEN
The first of July, Canada Day, dawned misty and cool. It threatened rain. Armand Gamache looked across the breakfast table at Irene Finney. Between them sat her Earl Grey teapot and his cafe au lait. In the background waiters set up the morning buffet.
‘When can I bury my daughter, Chief Inspector?’
‘I’ll call the coroner, madame, and let you know. I expect she’ll release your daughter in the next day or so. Where will you have the funeral?’
She hadn’t expected this question. To be asked about her family, yes. Herself, almost certainly. Their history, their finances, even their feelings. She’d been prepared for an interrogation, not a conversation.
‘Is that really your business?’
‘It is. We reveal ourselves in our choices. The only way I’ll find your daughter’s killer is if he reveals himself.’
‘What an odd man you are.’ It was clear Madame Finney didn’t like odd. ‘You really think where a murder victim is buried is a clue?’
‘Everything’s a clue. Especially where bodies are buried.’
‘But you’re asking me. Does that mean you suspect me?’
The woman in front of him was unflinching, almost daring him to press her.
‘I do.’
Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘You can’t possibly suspect an eighty-five-year-old woman of pushing a several-ton statue onto her own daughter. But perhaps you’ve lost sight of reality. Must run in the family.’
‘Perhaps. Frankly, madame, it is as likely that you did it as anyone. None of you could have shoved Charles Morrow from his pedestal, and yet it happened, I’m sorry to say.’
The less gracious she became the more gracious he grew. And she was quickly becoming very ornery indeed. Not a surprise to the Chief Inspector who knew she was of the type who could be both extremely courteous and excessively offensive.
‘Thank you.’ She smiled to the young waiter, then turned ice water eyes on Gamache. ‘Go on. You were accusing me of killing my own daughter.’
‘That isn’t true.’ He leaned forward, careful not to invade her personal space, but close enough to threaten it. ‘Why would you say that? I can’t imagine you aren’t desperate to find out who really did it. So why aren’t you helping?’
He spoke with curiosity, his voice calm and reasonable.
She radiated rage now. He felt his face would bubble and scald. And he knew why none of the Morrow children had ever been this close. And wondered, fleetingly, about Bert Finney, who had.
‘I am trying to help. If you’d ask sensible questions I’ll answer them.’
Gamache leaned back slowly and looked at her. Her face was etched with a network of tiny lines, like a glass that had just shattered and not yet collapsed. Small patches of pink marked her cheeks, making her even lovelier, more vulnerable. He wondered how many poor souls had been taken in.
‘What are the sensible questions?’
This too surprised her.
‘Ask about my family, ask about their upbringing. They wanted for nothing, you know. Education, sports. Ski trips in winter, tennis and sailing in the summer. And I know you think we gave them things.’ She picked up the sugar bowl and thumped it down, a geyser of sugar leaping out and landing on the honeysuckle wood. ‘And we did. I did. But we also gave them love. They knew they were loved.’
‘How did they know?’
‘Another foolish question. They knew because they knew. They were told. They were shown. If they didn’t feel it that was their problem. What have they told you?’
‘They’ve said nothing about love, but I haven’t asked.’
‘You ask me but not them? Blame the mother, is that it?’
‘You mistake me, madame. When it comes time to blame, you’ll know it. I’m simply asking questions. And you were the one to mention love, not me. But it’s an interesting question. Do you think your children love each other?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘And yet they’re strangers to each other. It doesn’t take a detective to know they barely tolerate each other. Have they ever been close?’
‘Before Julia left, yes. We used to play games. Word games. Alliteration. And I’d read to the children.’
‘Peter told me about that. He still remembers those times.’
‘Peter’s an ungrateful man. I heard what he told you. That I’d be better off dead.’
‘He didn’t say that. We were talking about family dynamics and whether the children would continue to see each other after you’re gone. He said it was possible they’d grow even closer.’
‘Really? Why’s that?’
She snapped it out, but Gamache thought he detected genuine curiosity.
‘Because now they come to see you, and only you. They see each other as competition. But when you go—’
‘Die, Chief Inspector. Don’t you mean die?’
‘When you die, they’ll have to find a reason to see each other, or not. The family will either disappear or they’ll grow even closer. That’s what Peter meant.’
‘Julia was the best of them, you know.’ She was gliding the bowl back and forth across the spilled sugar as she spoke, not looking at him. ‘Kind and gentle. She asked for almost nothing. And she was always such a lady. Her father and I tried to teach all of them that, to be little ladies and gentlemen. But only Julia understood. Beautiful manners.’
‘I noticed that too. My father always said a gentleman puts others at ease.’
‘Funny thing for a man who hurt so many people to say. He sure put himself at ease, letting others do the fighting. How does it feel to have a father so vilified?’
Gamache held her gaze then stared at the lawn sloping to the golden lake, and the dock. And the ugly old man doing his sums. The man who’d known his father. He longed to ask Finney about him. Gamache had been eleven when the police car had pulled up. He’d been staring out of the window, his soft cheek on the prickly back of the sofa. Waiting for his parents. Every other time they’d come home. But they were late.
He’d seen the car and known it wasn’t theirs. Was it a slight difference in the sound? The tilt of the headlights? Or did something else tell him this wasn’t them? He’d watched the Montreal police get out, put their hats on, pause, then start up the walk.
All very slowly.
His grandmother had also seen the car arrive, the headlights gleaming through the window, and had gone to the door to greet his parents.
Slowly, slowly he saw her walk, her hand outstretched for the doorknob. He tried to move, to say something, to stop her. But while the world had slowed, he had stopped.
He simply stared, his mouth open.
And then the knock. Not a sharp rap but something more ominous. It was almost a scratch, a gentle rub. He saw his grandmother’s expression change in the instant before she opened the door. Surely his parents wouldn’t knock? He’d run to her then, to stop her from letting this thing into the house. But there was no stopping it.
Before the officer had even spoken she’d shoved Armand’s face into her dress, so that to this day when he smelled mothballs it made him gag. And he felt her large, strong hand on his back still, as though to keep him from falling.
All his childhood, all his teen years and into his twenties Armand Gamache had wondered why God had taken them both. Couldn’t He have left one, for him? It wasn’t a demand on his part or an accusation against a clumsy and thoughtless God, more of a puzzle.
But he’d found his answer when he’d found Reine-Marie, had loved and married her and loved her more each day. He knew then how kind God had been not to take one and leave the other. Even for him.
His eyes looked away from the lake and returned to the elderly woman in front of him, who’d just spewed her hurt all over him.
He looked at her with kindness. Not because he knew it would confuse or anger her further, but because he knew he’d had time to absorb his loss. And hers was fresh.
Grief was dagger shaped and sharp and pointed inwards. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward. At Armand Gamache.
‘I loved my father then and I love him now. It’s pretty simple,’ he said.
‘He doesn’t deserve it. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth, and I have to speak it. The truth will set you free.’ She seemed almost sorry.
‘I believe it,’ he said. ‘But I also believe it’s not the truth about others that will set you free, but the truth about yourself.’
Now she bristled.
‘I’m not the one who needs freeing, Mr Gamache. You refuse to see your father clearly. You’re living with a lie. I knew him. He was a coward and a traitor. The sooner you accept that the sooner you can get on with your life. What he did was despicable. He doesn’t deserve your love.’
‘We all deserve love. And at times pardon.’