A Fatal Grace

THIRTY-FOUR

‘She was our friend,’ said Émilie, holding Gamache’s eyes. ‘We called her El, but she signed her name with just the letter L.’ Em felt calm for the first time in days. ‘She lived next door to me.’ Em pointed to a small Québecois house with a steep metal roof and tiny dormers. ‘Her family sold it years ago and moved away. After El disappeared.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was younger than the rest of us. Very sweet, very kind. Some children like that get picked on. Other kids know they won’t fight back. But not El. She was one of those children who seemed to bring out the best in others. She was bright, in every way. A shining child. When she walked into a room the lights went on and the sun rose.’

Em could still see her, a child so lovely no one was even jealous of her. Perhaps, too, they all sensed that someone that kind and good couldn’t last long. There was something precious about El.

‘Her name was Eleanor, wasn’t it?’ Gamache asked, though he was certain of the answer.

‘Eleanor Allaire.’

Gamache sighed and closed his eyes. There. He’d done it.

‘El, short for Eleanor,’ he whispered.

Émilie nodded. ‘May I?’ Her tiny hands reached across the table and took the box, holding it in open palms as though inviting it to fly away. ‘I haven’t seen this in years. Mother gave it to her when El left the ashram in India. They went there together, you know.’

‘She was the L in B KLM, wasn’t she?’

Em nodded.

‘Mother Bea is B, Kaye is K and you’re M. Bea, Kaye, El and Em.’

‘You’re very clever, Chief Inspector. We would have been friends anyway, but the coincidence of our names all sounding like letters of the alphabet appealed to us. Especially since we all adored reading. It also seemed romantic, a kind of secret code.’

‘Is that where Be Calm came from?’

‘You figured that out as well? How?’

‘There were too many references to Be Calm in this case. Then I visited Mother’s meditation center.’

‘Be Calm.’

‘Yes, but it was the writing on the wall that gave it away.’

‘That seems to happen to you a lot. Must be helpful in your trade to have the answers written on the wall.’

‘It’s recognizing them that’s the trick. It was a misquote and that didn’t seem in character. Mother might give the impression of being not of this world, but I suspect she’s very much here. She’d never have put Be calm, and know that I am God on her wall unless she meant to.’

‘Be still, and know that I am God,’ quoted Em correctly. ‘That was El’s problem. She couldn’t be still. Kaye was the one who noticed that we could put our letters together and make a word, sort of. B KLM. Be calm. Close enough to make sense to us, and far enough away to make it a secret. Our secret. But you figured it out, Chief Inspector.’

‘Took me far too long.’

‘Is there a time limit on these things?’

Gamache laughed. ‘No, I suppose not, but sometimes my own blindness takes my breath away. I’d been staring at these letters for days, knowing they were significant to El. I even had the example of Ruth’s poetry book. I’m FINE. The capital letters all stand for some other word.’

‘Mais non. What?’

‘Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Egotistical,’ he said, slightly embarrassed about using a swear word in front of such a dignified woman, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she was laughing.

‘J’adore Ruth. Just when I think she’s loathsome she does something like that. Parfait.’

‘I kept staring at the letters on the box and assumed the space between the B and the KLM wasn’t significant. But it was. It held the answer. It lay in what wasn’t there. In the tiny space between letters.’

‘Like those wild flowers in the land God gave to Cain,’ said Em. ‘You have to look hard to see it.’

‘I didn’t think it was a deliberate space. I thought that was where the C went,’ Gamache admitted.

‘The C?’

‘Open the box.’

Em did and stared for a very long time. She reached into the box and brought out a tiny letter. Balancing it on her finger she showed it to Gamache. A C.

‘She put her daughter into the box too,’ said Em. ‘This is what love looks like.’

‘What happened?’

Em cast her mind back again, to the days when the world was new. ‘El was a pilgrim soul. While the rest of us settled down, El grew more restless. She seemed frail, fragile. Sensitive. We kept pleading with her to be calm.’

‘You even called your curling team Be Calm,’ said Gamache. ‘That was another clue. You only ever spoke of three members of the original team, but a curling team has four. Someone was missing. When I saw Clara Morrow’s picture of the three of you as the Graces there seemed to be someone missing. There was a hole in the composition.’

‘But Clara never met El,’ said Émilie. ‘Never even heard of her as far as I know.’

‘That’s true, but as you said, Clara sees things others don’t. She created the work with the three of you forming a sort of vase, a vessel she called it. Only there’s a piece missing, a crack. Where El would be.

‘What an extraordinary poem. Ruth Zardo?’

‘Leonard Cohen. Clara used it in her piece. She wrote it on the wall behind the three of you, like graffiti.’

‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,’ said Émilie.

‘What happened to El?’ He remembered the autopsy photographs. A filthy, emaciated, pathetic old drunk on the slab. A world away from the shining young woman Em had described.

‘She wanted to go to India. She thought maybe there her mind would still and she’d find peace. The rest of us drew straws and it was decided Mother would go with her. It’s ironic that El didn’t much like India but Mother found the answers to questions she didn’t even know she had.’

‘Mother,’ said Gamache. ‘Beatrice Mayer. Very clever as well. I asked Clara why everyone calls Bea Mother and she suggested I figure it out for myself.’

‘And you did.’

‘Took me a long while. It wasn’t until I was watching The Lion in Winter that I got it.’

‘How so?’

‘It was made by MGM. Metro, Goldwyn, Mayer. Mayer. It’s pronounced the same way as mère. French for mother. Beatrice Mayer became Mother Bea. I knew then I was in the company of people who loved not only books, but words. Spoken, written, the power of words.’

‘When Kaye asked why her father and the other boys would have screamed “Fuck the Pope” as they ran to their deaths you said maybe it was because they knew that words could kill. Kaye dismissed it, but I think you were right. I know words can kill. I saw it on Christmas Eve. You might consider it melodramatic, Chief Inspector, but I saw CC murder her daughter with words.’

‘What happened to El?’ he asked again.

Beauvoir brought the car to a halt and sat for a moment. The heater was on and the car seats had warmed. On the stereo Beau Dommage was singing ‘La complainte du phoque en Alaska’. He’d necked to that at school dances. It was always the last song and always brought the girls to tears.

He didn’t want to leave. Not just because the car was so comfortable, filled with warm and sticky memories, but because of what awaited him. The meditation center sat bathed in sharp morning sun.

‘Bonjour, Inspecteur.’ Mother smiled, opening the door before he knocked. But the smile didn’t extend to her eyes. It barely left her lips, which were tight and white. He could sense her tension and felt himself relax. He had the advantage now and knew it.

‘May I come in?’ He was damned if he was going to ask, ‘Mother, may I?’ He was also damned if he was going to ask why everyone called her Mother, though he was dying to know.

‘I was under the impression this wasn’t your favorite place,’ she said, regaining some ground on him. Beauvoir didn’t know what it was with this woman. She was squat and unattractive. She wobbled instead of walked and her hair stuck out in all directions. And she wore sheets, or perhaps curtains, or maybe they were slipcovers. By all standards she was ludicrous. And yet there was something about her.

‘I came down with the flu when I was last here. I’m sorry if I behaved badly.’ Although it caught in his throat to apologize Gamache had pointed out that it actually gave him an advantage. And he’d noticed, over the years, that it was true. People felt a certain superiority if they thought they had something on you. But as soon as you apologized they had nothing. Pissed them off.

Now Beauvoir felt equal to Madame Mayer.

‘Namaste,’ she said, putting her hands together in prayer and bowing.

Damn her. He felt off balance again. He knew he was meant to ask, but didn’t. Taking his boots off he strode through to the large meditation room with its soothing aqua walls and warm green-carpeted floor.

‘I have some questions for you.’ He turned to watch Madame Mayer waddle toward him. ‘What did you think of CC de Poitiers?’

‘I’ve already told the Chief Inspector about that. In fact, you were here, though I suppose you might have been too ill to listen.’

She was exhausted. Her compassion was spent. She didn’t care any more. She knew she couldn’t keep this up much longer, and now she yearned for the end. She no longer woke in the middle of the night and worried. Now she simply didn’t go to sleep.

Mother was dead tired.

‘CC was delusional. Her entire philosophy was crap. She’d taken a bunch of teachings and mashed them together and come up with this poisonous idea that people shouldn’t show emotions. That’s ridiculous. We are emotion. That’s what makes us who we are. Her idea that truly evolved people feel no emotions is ridiculous. Yes, we want to be in balance, but that doesn’t mean not feeling or showing things. It means the opposite. It means,’ now Mother was getting worked up, too exhausted to contain herself any longer, ‘it means feeling things fully, passionately. It means embracing life. And then letting go.

‘She thought she was so great, coming here and lording it over us. Li Bien this, Be Calm that. All her tasteful white clothes and furnishings and bedding linens and stupid aura pillows and calming baby blankets and God knows what other crap. She was sick. Her emotions were denied and stunted and twisted and made into something grotesque. She claimed to be so balanced, so grounded. Well, she was so grounded it killed her. Karma.’

Beauvoir wondered whether karma was an Indian word for irony.

Mother radiated anger. It was how he liked his suspects. Out of control, liable to say and do anything.

‘And yet you and CC both called your places Be Calm. Doesn’t calm mean placid? Showing nothing?’

‘There’s a difference between flat and calm.’

‘I think you’re just playing word games. Like you did with that.’ He pointed to the wall where the quote was stenciled. Then he walked over to it.

‘Be calm, and know that I am God. You told Chief Inspector Gamache it came from Isaiah, but doesn’t it actually come from Psalms?’

He loved this part of the job. He could see her deflate in front of him, surprised she didn’t make a little squealing sound. Slowly he brought out his notebook.

‘Psalm 46 verse 10. Be still, and know that I am God. You lied and you intentionally put a misquote on your wall. Why? What does Be Calm really mean?’

They were both still then. Beauvoir could hear her breathing.

Then something happened. He saw what he’d just done. He’d broken an elderly woman. Something shifted and he saw before him a beaten old lady, with wild hair and a plump sagging body. Her face was very white and wrinkled and soft and her hands were veined and bony and trembling.

Her head was bowed.

He’d done this. He’d done it on purpose and he’d done it gleefully.

‘Eleanor and Mother stayed at the commune for six months,’ Em told Gamache, her hands suddenly restless, playing with the handle of her espresso cup. ‘Mother was getting deeper and deeper into it but El started to get agitated again. Eventually she left, came back to Canada, but not back home. We lost track of her for a while.’

‘When did you realize she was unstable?’ Gamache asked.

‘We’d always known that. Her mind would race. She couldn’t concentrate on any one thing, but hopped about from project to project, brilliant at them all. But, to be fair, if she found something she liked she’d become possessed by it. She’d bring all her talents, all her energies, to bear. And when she did that she was formidable.’

‘Like Li Bien?’ Gamache brought a cardboard box from his satchel.

‘What else have you got in there?’ Em leaned around the table to look at his leather satchel. ‘The Montreal Canadians?’

‘Hope not. They’re playing tonight.’ Em stared at his huge, careful hands as they peeled back the wrap, slowly revealing the object below. It stood on the table next to the wooden box, and for a golden moment Émilie Longpré was in her young body, staring at the Li Bien ball for the first time. It was luminous and somehow unreal, its beauty imprisoned beneath the layer of invisible glass. It was both lovely and horrible.

It was Eleanor Allaire.

Young Émilie Longpré had known then that they’d lose her. Had known then their luminous friend couldn’t survive in the real world. And now the Li Bien ball had returned to Three Pines, but without its creator.

‘May I hold it?’

Gamache placed it in her hands as he had the box and again she held it, but this time in hands closed tightly round it, as though hugging and protecting something precious.

He reached into his satchel for the last time and withdrew a long leather cord, stained with dirt and oils and blood. And dangling from it was an eagle’s head.

‘I need the whole truth, madame.’

Beauvoir was sitting next to Mother now, listening intently as he had when as a child his own mother had read stories of adventure and tragedy.

‘When CC first came here,’ Mother explained, ‘she showed an almost unnatural interest in us.’

Beauvoir knew instinctively that by ‘us’ she meant Émilie, Kaye and herself.

‘She’d drop in and seem to interrogate us. It wasn’t a normal sort of social call even for someone as maladroit as CC.’

‘When did you realize she was El’s daughter?’

Mother hesitated. Beauvoir had the impression it wasn’t to think up a lie, but rather to cast her mind back.

‘It was a cascade. What put it beyond doubt for me was the reference to Ramen Das in her book.’ Mother nodded to the small altar by the wall with its sticks of stinky incense sitting in holders on a brightly colored and mirrored piece of cloth. Stuck to the wall above it was a poster, and below that a framed photograph. Beauvoir got up and looked at them. The poster showed an emaciated Indian man in a diaper standing by a stone wall gripping a long cane and smiling. He looked like Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, but then all elderly Indians did to Beauvoir. It was the same poster he’d disappeared into during his last visit. In the smaller photograph the same man was sitting with two young western women, slim and also smiling, and wearing billowy nightgowns. Or maybe they were curtains. Or sofa covers. Astonished, he turned to Mother. Wild-haired, pear-shaped, exhausted Mother.

‘That’s you?’ He pointed to one of the women. Mother joined him and smiled at his amazement and inability to conceal it. She wasn’t insulted. It often amazed her too.

‘And that’s El.’ She pointed to the other woman. While both the guru and Mother were smiling, the other woman seemed to radiate. Beauvoir could barely take his eyes off her. Then he thought of the autopsy pictures Gamache had shown him. True, Mother had changed, but in ways recognizable and natural, if not attractive. The other woman had disappeared. The glow gone, the radiance dimmed and dulled and finally extinguished beneath layers of filth and despair.

‘Not many people know about Ramen Das. There was more, of course.’ Mother plopped into a seat. ‘CC called her philosophy Li Bien. I’d lived for over seventy years and only ever heard that phrase from one other person. El. CC called her business and her book Be Calm. And she used a logo only we knew about.’

‘The eagle?’

‘The symbol of Eleanor of Aquitaine.’

‘Explain that to me, Mother.’ Beauvoir couldn’t believe he’d just called her Mother, but he had, and it felt natural. He hoped he wouldn’t be suckling soon.

‘We studied British and French history in school,’ said Mother. ‘Canada apparently had no history. Anyway, when we got to the section on Eleanor of Aquitaine El became obsessed. She decided she was Eleanor of Aquitaine. Don’t look so smug, Inspector. You can’t tell me you didn’t run around playing cowboys and Indians or pretending to be Superman or Batman.’

Beauvoir snorted. He’d done nothing of the sort. That’d be crazy. He’d been Jean-Claude Killy, the world’s greatest Olympic skier. He’d even told his mother she had to call him Jean-Claude. She’d refused. Still, he’d skied astonishing races in his bedroom, winning Olympic gold, often outrunning catastrophic avalanches, saving nuns and grateful millionaires along the way.

‘El was searching even then, knowing something wasn’t right, as though she didn’t belong in her own skin. She found comfort in thinking she was Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Em even made her a necklace with Eleanor’s heraldic symbol. The eagle. A particularly aggressive eagle.’

‘So you put it all together and when CC moved here you realized she was El’s daughter.’

‘That’s right. We knew she’d had a child. El had disappeared for a few years, then we suddenly got a card from Toronto. She’d gotten into a relationship with some guy who quickly disappeared, but not before getting El pregnant. She wasn’t married and at the time, in the late fifties, that was a scandal. I’d known when she left India that she wasn’t well emotionally. Her mind was brilliant and delicate and unbalanced. Poor CC, being raised in a home like that. No wonder the idea of balance was so important to her.’ Mother looked at Beauvoir, stunned. It had just occurred to her. ‘I felt no sympathy for CC, no compassion. At first, when we realized she was our beloved El’s daughter we tried to invite her into our lives. I can’t say we ever warmed to her. She was unlikable in the extreme. El was like sunshine, bright and loving and kind. But she gave birth to darkness. CC didn’t live in her mother’s shadow, she was her mother’s shadow.’

‘This was found in El’s hand.’ Gamache tried to say it gently, but knew there was no hiding the horror of it. ‘El’s mind might have been unbalanced, but her heart was steady. She knew what was important. Through all the years on the street she held on to these two things.’ He touched the box and nodded to the necklace. ‘The three of you. She surrounded herself with her friends.’

‘We tried to follow her but she was in and out of hospitals and then finally put onto the streets. We couldn’t imagine our El living on the streets. We tried to get her into shelters but she always left. We had to learn to respect her wishes.’

‘When was CC taken from her?’ Gamache asked.

‘I don’t know exactly. I think she was about ten when El was put into hospital.’

They were silent for a moment, each imagining the little girl taken from the only home she knew. Filthy, unhealthy place, but home nevertheless.

‘When did you see El again?’

‘Mother and Kaye and I often take the bus into Montreal and a couple of years ago we saw El at the station. It was a shock, seeing her like that, but we eventually got used to it.’

‘And you showed her some of Clara’s art?’

‘Clara? Why would we do that?’ Em was obviously confused. ‘We never had long with her, just a few minutes, so we’d give her clothes and blankets and food and some money. But we never showed her Clara’s art. Why would we?’

‘Did you ever show her a picture of Clara?’

‘No.’ Again Em seemed baffled by the question.

Why indeed, thought Gamache.

I’ve always loved your art, Clara, El had said when Clara was down and distressed.

I’ve always loved your art.

Gamache felt the warmth of the fire on his face. He wondered whether El had ever had a cod quota or worked construction.

‘How did you know El had been killed?’ There was no cushioning that question.

Em had clearly been bracing for it and hardly reacted at all.

‘We went back to Montreal on December twenty-third to give her a Christmas gift.’

‘Why go back? Why not give her the present after Ruth’s book launch?’

‘El was a creature of habit. Anything outside her routine upset her. A few years ago we tried to give her a gift early and she didn’t react well, so we learned. It had to be the twenty-third. You look puzzled.’

And he did. He couldn’t believe a woman living on the streets followed a Day Timer. How’d she even know what day it was?

‘Henri knows dinner time and when it’s time for his promenade,’ said Em after Gamache had told her what was bothering him. ‘I don’t want to compare El to my puppy, but in the end she was like that. Almost all instinct. El lived on the streets; she was crazy, covered in her own excrement, obsessive and drunk. But she was still the purest soul I’ve ever met. We looked for her outside Ogilvy’s, then the bus station. We eventually called the police. That’s when we found out she’d been killed.’

Em broke eye contact, her self-possession slipping. But still Gamache knew she’d have to endure one more question.

‘When did you know it was her daughter who killed her?’

Émilie’s eyes widened. ‘Sacré,’ she whispered.