The Beautiful Mystery

SIX

Four men gathered around the gleaming examination table.

Armand Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir stood on one side, the doctor across from them and the abbot off to the side. Frère Mathieu lay on the stainless steel table, terrified face to the ceiling.

The other monks had gone off to do what monks did at a time like this. Gamache wondered what that might be.

Most people, in Gamache’s experience, groped and stumbled, barking their shins against familiar scents and sights and sounds. As though struck with vertigo, falling over the edge of their known world.

Captain Charbonneau had been detailed to search for the murder weapon. It was, Gamache believed, a long shot, but one that needed to be taken. It appeared the prior had been killed by a rock. If so, it had almost certainly been tossed over the wall, to be lost in the old-growth forest.

The Chief Inspector glanced around. He’d expected the infirmary to be old, ancient even. He’d privately prepared himself to see something out of the Dark Ages. Operating tables made of stone slabs, with open gutters for the fluids. Wooden shelves with dried and powdered herbs from the garden. Hacksaws for surgery.

Instead, this room was brand-spanking-new, with shining equipment, orderly cabinets filled with gauze and bandages, pills and tongue depressors.

“The coroner will do the autopsy,” said Gamache to the doctor. “We don’t want you doing any medical procedures on the prior. All I need is for his clothes to be removed so we can properly search them. And I need to see his body.”

“Why?”

“In case there are other wounds or marks. Anything else we should see. The faster we can collect the facts the sooner we can get at the truth.”

“But there’s a difference between fact and truth, Chief Inspector,” said the abbot.

“And one day you and I can sit in that lovely garden of yours and discuss it,” said Gamache. “But not now.”

He turned his back on the abbot and nodded to the doctor, who got to work.

The dead man was no longer curled in the fetal position. Though rigor mortis was setting in, they had managed to lay him flat on his back. The prior’s hands, Gamache noted, were still buried up the long black sleeves of his cassock, and wrapped around his midsection, as though gripping in pain.

After untying the cord around the prior’s middle, the doctor pried the dead man’s hands from his sleeves. Both Gamache and Beauvoir leaned forward, to see if they had hold of anything. Was there anything under his nails? Anything in those balled-up fists?

But they were empty. The nails clean and tidy.

The doctor carefully placed Frère Mathieu’s arms at his side. But the left arm slipped off the metal table and dangled. Something dropped from the sleeve and drifted to the floor.

The doctor stooped to pick it up.

“Don’t touch that,” Beauvoir ordered, and the doctor stopped.

Putting on a pair of gloves from the Scene of Crime kit, Beauvoir bent and picked a piece of paper off the stone floor.

“What is it?” The abbot stepped forward. The doctor leaned across the examination table, the body forgotten in favor of what Inspector Beauvoir held.

“I don’t know,” said Beauvoir.

The doctor came around the table and the four men stood in a circle, staring at the page.

It was yellowed and irregular. Not store-bought. Thicker than commercial-grade paper.

On it, in intricate script, were words. The black letters calligraphied. Not ornately, but in a simple style.

“I can’t read it. Is it Latin?” asked Beauvoir.

“I think so.” The abbot leaned forward, squinting.

Gamache put on his half-moon reading glasses and also bent toward the paper. “It looks like a page from an old manuscript,” he finally said, stepping back.

The abbot looked perplexed. “It’s not paper, it’s vellum. Sheepskin. You can tell by the texture.”

“Sheepskin?” asked Beauvoir. “Is that what you use for paper?”

“Not for hundreds of years.” The abbot continued to stare at the page in the Inspector’s hand. “The text doesn’t seem to make sense. It might be Latin, but not from any psalm or Book of Hours or religious text I know. I can only make out two words.”

“What are they?” asked the Chief.

“Here,” the abbot pointed. “That looks like ‘Dies irae.’”

The doctor made a small noise that might have been a guffaw. They looked at him, but he fell completely silent.

“What does that mean?” asked Beauvoir.

“It’s from the Requiem Mass,” said the abbot.

“It means ‘day of wrath,’” said Gamache. “Dies irae,” he quoted, “dies illa. Day of wrath. Day of mourning.”

“That’s right,” said the abbot. “In the Requiem Mass the two are said together. But here, there is no dies illa.”

“What does that tell you, Dom Philippe?” asked the Chief.

The abbot was quiet for a moment, considering. “It tells me this isn’t the Requiem Mass.”

“Does it make any sense to you, Frère Charles?” Gamache asked.

The doctor’s brow was creased in concentration as he stared at the vellum in Beauvoir’s hand. Then he shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“Neither of you have seen this before?” Gamache pressed.

The doctor glanced at the abbot. Dom Philippe continued to stare at the words and finally shook his head.

There was a pause then Beauvoir pointed to the page. “What’re those?”

Once again the men leaned forward.

Above each word there were tiny squiggles of ink. Like little waves. Or wings.

“I think they’re neumes,” said the abbot, at last.

“Neumes?” asked Gamache. “What’s that?”

Now the abbot was clearly bewildered. “They’re a musical notation.”

“I’ve never seen it before,” said Beauvoir.

“You wouldn’t.” The abbot stepped away from the page. “They haven’t been used for a thousand years.”

“I don’t understand,” said Gamache. “Is this page a thousand years old?”

“It might be,” said Dom Philippe. “And that might explain the text. It might be plainchant using an old form of Latin.”

But he didn’t seem convinced.

“By ‘plainchant’ do you mean Gregorian chant?” asked the Chief.

The abbot nodded.

“Could this be,” the Chief pointed to the page, “a Gregorian chant?”

The abbot looked again at the page and shook his head, “I don’t know. It’s the words. They’re Latin, but they’re nonsense. Gregorian chants follow very old and prescribed rules and are almost always from the psalms. This isn’t.”

Dom Philippe lapsed into his habitual silence.

There seemed no more to be learned from the paper at the moment. Gamache turned to the doctor.

“Please continue.”

Over the next twenty minutes Frère Charles stripped Brother Mathieu, taking off the layers of clothing. Struggling with the rigor.

Until lying before them on the examination table was the naked man.

“How old was Frère Mathieu?” Gamache asked.

“I can show you his file,” said the doctor, “but I believe he was sixty-two.”

“In good health?”

“Yes. A slightly enlarged prostate, a slightly elevated PSA but we were monitoring that. He was about thirty pounds overweight, as you can see. Around the middle. But he wasn’t obese and I’d suggested he take more exercise.”

“How?” asked Beauvoir. “He could hardly join a gym. Did he pray harder?”

“If he did,” said the doctor, “he’d hardly be the first person to decide they could pray themselves thin. But, as it happens, we put together a couple of hockey teams in the winter. Not NHL caliber, but we’re surprisingly good. And quite competitive.”

Beauvoir stared at Brother Charles as though he’d just spoken Latin. It was almost indecipherable. Monks playing competitive hockey? He could see them on a rink on the frozen lake. Cassocks flying. Barreling into each other.

Muscular Christianity.

Maybe these men weren’t quite the oddities he’d presumed.

Or perhaps that made them all the odder.

“Did he?” asked the Chief.

“Did he what?” asked the doctor.

“Did Frère Mathieu get more exercise?”

Brother Charles looked down at the body on his table and shook his head, then met Gamache’s eyes. Once again the monk’s eyes were tinged with amusement, though his voice was solemn.

“The prior was not a man to take suggestions easily.”

Gamache continued to hold the doctor’s eyes, until Brother Charles dropped his and spoke again. “Beyond that, he was in good health.”

The Chief nodded and looked down at the naked man on the table. He’d been anxious to see if there was indeed a wound to Brother Mathieu’s abdomen.

But there was nothing there. Just flabby, graying skin. His body, except for the crushed skull, was without a mark.

Gamache couldn’t yet see the blows that led up to the final, catastrophic crushing of this man’s skull. But he’d find them. This sort of thing never came out of the blue. There’d be a trail of smaller wounds, bruises, hurt feelings. Insults and exclusions.

The Chief Inspector would follow those. And they would lead, inevitably, to the man who’d made this corpse.

Chief Inspector Gamache looked over to the desk and the yellowing sheet of thick paper. With its squiggles of, what was that word?

Neumes.

And its nearly unintelligible text.

Except for two words.

“Dies irae.”

Day of wrath. From the mass for the dead.

What had the prior been trying to do, at the hour of his death? When he could do only one more thing in this life, what had he done? Not written in the soft earth the name of his killer.

No, Frère Mathieu had shoved that sheet of paper up his sleeve and curled himself around it.

What did this jumble of nonsense and neumes tell them? Not much, yet. Except that Frère Mathieu had died trying to protect it.