Never use the first stall in a public washroom.
Peter almost smiled. It was, he had to admit, very like a Morrow. They were nothing if not anal.
‘He was cruel,’ said Thomas, not wanting to let go.
‘Your father never stopped searching for the person who wrote that graffiti. He thought that way he could show Julia how much he cared. And in the end he found him.’
There was silence then, until the small clearing of a throat broke it.
‘That’s not possible,’ said Peter, standing up and smoothing his hair. ‘Father never said anything to me about it.’
‘And why would he?’ demanded Thomas.
‘Because I was the one who wrote the graffiti.’ He didn’t dare look at his mother.
‘Yes,’ said Finney. ‘That’s what your father said.’
The Morrows stared, speechless.
‘How’d he know?’ asked Peter, feeling light headed, slightly nauseous.
‘It was written in the second stall. Only you and he knew about that. It was his private gift to you.’
Peter inhaled sharply.
‘I wrote the graffiti because she’d hurt my feelings. And because I wanted Father to myself. I didn’t want to share him with anyone. I couldn’t stand that Father loved Julia. I wanted to destroy that. And I did.’
‘Have you not heard a word I said?’
Bert Finney now commanded the room, Gamache willingly ceding his place.
‘It wasn’t yours to destroy. You claim too much for yourself, Peter. Your father loved your sister all his life. You couldn’t destroy that. He knew what you’d done.’
Finney stared at Peter and Peter pleaded with him to stop there. Not to say that last thing.
‘And he loved you anyway. He loved you always.’
Paradise lost.
It was the most devastating thing Finney could have said. Not that Peter was hated by his father. But that he’d been loved all along. He’d interpreted kindness as cruelty, generosity as meanness, support as tethers. How horrible to have been offered love, and to have chosen hate instead. He’d turned heaven into hell.
Gamache stepped forward and took charge of the room once again.
‘The seed for a murder is often planted years earlier,’ said Gamache. ‘Like the black walnut tree, it takes that long to grow and become toxic. That’s what happened here. I made a huge mistake at the very beginning. I assumed the murderer was a member of the family. It almost cost Bean’s life.’ He turned to the child. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You saved my life.’
‘How kind of you to see it that way. But I made a mistake. A massive one. I was looking in the wrong direction.’
‘What made you suspect Patenaude?’ asked Clara.
‘This was such an unusual case,’ said Gamache. ‘It wasn’t the who that got me, or even the why. It was the how. How had the murderer killed Julia Martin? How could that statue have fallen, and without scratching the pedestal? Remember the day of the unveiling you went for that boat ride?’ Gamache asked Peter. ‘We were on the dock and Bean came tearing down the lawn.’
‘Stung by a wasp,’ said Peter.
‘Not a wasp, a bee,’ said Gamache. ‘A honey bee.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clara, ‘but how could it matter if it was a bee or a wasp?’
‘The fact it was a honey bee gave Patenaude away. It was the fatal clue, the one thing he had no control over. Let me explain.’
‘Please,’ said Mrs Finney.
‘The Manoir Bellechasse has its own hives, over there.’ He waved into the forest. ‘Chef Veronique planted a grove of honeysuckle and clover and put the hives in the middle. Honey bees can fly a great distance to get food, but if it’s close they don’t bother. She put the honeysuckle there so the bees wouldn’t leave the glade and disturb the guests. And for years it worked so well we didn’t even know they were there.’
‘Until Bean got stung,’ said Peter, perplexed.
‘Frankly I don’t know the difference between a bee sting and a wasp,’ Gamache admitted. ‘But Inspector Beauvoir became quite interested in honey bees.’ He didn’t say why. ‘According to him a wasp never leaves its stinger, neither do other bees. They can sting over and over. But a worker honey bee can sting only once. As it stings it leaves a barb and a tiny poison sac and that kills the bee. Bean’s stings still had a barb and a poison sac in them. Bean hadn’t been in the glade when stung, but was all the way across the property.’ He arched his arm over from the forest until his hand was pointing in the opposite direction. ‘Bean was stung while playing around the pedestal for the statue. What would a honey bee be doing there, so far from the honeysuckle grove? Especially since all the flowers there were dying, killed by the black walnut?’
‘What was the bee doing there?’ asked Madame Dubois, puzzled.
‘It was one of those tiny mysteries, an inconsistency that nags. A murder investigation is full of them. Some are important, some are just the messiness of everyday life. This turned out to be crucial. I finally got it yesterday at the Canada Day picnic.’
‘Really?’ said Clara, remembering the lunch, the whole village out on the green, the kids hyper on a diet of Coaticook ice cream, cream sodas and toasted marshmallows.
‘What did you see that we didn’t?’ asked Reine-Marie.
‘I saw bees and ants attracted to the puddles of Coke, and I saw spilled salt,’ he said.
‘So did I,’ said Peter, ‘but they didn’t tell me anything.’
‘Do you remember how the Coke spilled?’
‘The little boy shoved it across the table,’ said Peter, remembering.
‘He shoved it across the spilled salt,’ clarified Gamache. ‘Your mother did much the same thing when we spoke this morning.’
Peter turned astonished eyes on his mother.
‘I did no such thing.’
Gamache walked over to the sideboard and picked up a delicate china sugar bowl. ‘May I?’ he asked Madame Dubois, who nodded. He then took the linen tablecloth off one of the dining-room tables, revealing a wood surface underneath. It was antique pine and rough to the touch. Taking the top off the sugar bowl he turned it upside down.
‘Have you lost your mind?’ demanded Mrs Finney.
But she joined everyone else, now crowded round the table, with its pyramid of granular white sugar. Gamache smoothed it out, until it covered half the dark wood surface.
‘This morning as we talked on the terrasse you held a sugar bowl much like this one,’ the Chief Inspector said to Mrs Finney. ‘When you were agitated you moved it back and forth, across some sugar that had spilled.’
‘I was never agitated.’
‘My mistake,’ said Gamache. ‘Perhaps animated would be a better word.’
Mrs Finney looked unhappy with the choice.
‘The point is, the bowl glided across the sugar.’ He demonstrated, sweeping it gently back and forth. ‘That boy at lunch did something similar with his pop can, though not nearly as gracefully. He simply shoved the can across the spilled salt, like this.’
Gamache put the sugar bowl at one end of the wooden table and shoved it forward. It skidded across the top and stopped at the edge.
‘Now, watch what happens on the other half, the part of the table without sugar.’
He tried it again, but this time the china bowl barely moved, catching the rough wood and stopping short.
‘This was how the murder was done.’
Gamache looked into faces no wiser. In fact, considerably more perplexed.
‘I placed a call this afternoon to the Musee Rodin in Paris and spoke to an archivist there who’d heard about the technique. A worker at the Cote des Neiges cemetery had also heard of it, but they haven’t used it for years. It’s a trick for moving statues.’
‘Are we still talking about the Coke can?’ asked Peter. ‘Or the sugar bowl?’
‘We’re talking about the statue of your father. Pierre Patenaude worked one summer in a cemetery and he saw them placing statues. Some of the older workers still used this technique back then.’
Gamache took the sugar bowl and pushed it across the table again. This time it didn’t stop at the edge, but fell off the side. Beauvoir caught it just as it fell.
‘Voila,’ said Gamache. ‘Murder. According to the Musee Rodin, when they placed the Burghers of Calais on top of the pedestal, they put a cushion of sugar on it first, so they could adjust the statue an inch here or there, turn it slightly. Just before the statue of your father arrived Pierre Patenaude did the same thing. He poured a layer of sugar over the base.’