Dead Cold (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2)(80)

Lemieux could have kicked himself. There was nothing left to say. He caught Gamache looking at him with amusement, and something else. Approval. Better to say nothing than say something just for the sake of speaking. Lemieux smiled back and relaxed.

Gamache turned back to the screen. Boat, trees, water. Was it just a coincidence CC had stopped the movie here? Was he trying to read way too much into this? Had she stopped just to get a drink or go to the washroom? But the tape wouldn’t stretch from just one pause; she’d have to have stopped it here many times to cause the damage.

He got up and stretched his legs.

‘No need to keep staring. There’s nothing there. You were right, and I was wrong. My apologies,’ he said to Lemieux, who was so stunned he didn’t know what to do.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Clara, walking with them back to the mudroom. ‘I thought I was on to something.’

‘And you might have been. You have an instinct for crime, madame.’

‘You flatter me, monsieur.’

Had Peter been a dog his hackles would have risen. Try as he might he couldn’t quite get over his jealousy of Gamache and his easy relationship with Clara. In the mudroom Gamache pulled a book from his coat and presented it gently to Clara. After speaking to Myrna he had an inkling of what he was about to do, and wished he didn’t have to.

‘How kind, but I already have Ruth’s latest book.’

‘But not this one,’ he said almost in a whisper. Peter strained to hear the words, as did the others.

Clara opened the book and smiled broadly. ‘You stink, love Ruth. You found it. The one I lost. Did I drop it on the road, or at the bistro?’

‘No, you dropped it in Montreal.’

Clara looked at Gamache, puzzled. ‘And you found it? But that’s not possible.’

‘It was found on the body of a dead woman.’ He said the words slowly and carefully, giving her every chance to hear them and to understand. ‘She was found outside Ogilvy’s, just before Christmas.’ Gamache was staring at Clara, examining her face, her reactions. Still she looked puzzled, amazed. Nothing more.

‘She was a vagrant, a bag lady.’

And now he could see the light go on. Her eyes opened slightly wider and she brought her head up and away from him, as though repulsed by his words.

‘No,’ Clara whispered and went very white. She breathed into the silence a couple of times. ‘The old woman, the bum on the street?’

The silence stretched on, all eyes watching Clara as she struggled with this news. Clara felt herself falling, not to the floor, but way below it, into the abyss filled with crushed dreams.

I’ve always loved your art, Clara.

No. That means the vagrant wasn’t God after all. Just a pathetic old woman. As delusional as Clara. They both thought her art was good. And they were wrong. CC and Fortin were right.

Your art is amateurish and banal. You’re a failure. You have no voice, no vision, no worth. You’ve wasted your life.

The words ground into Clara, weighing her down and dragging her over the edge.

‘Oh, my God,’ was all she could think to say.

‘Peter, could you make a cup of tea, please? Hot and sweet?’ Gamache asked and Peter was both annoyed Gamache had thought of it and grateful for something to do.

‘Go back to the Incident Room and see what progress Agent Lacoste has made,’ Gamache whispered to Beauvoir quickly, then he turned back and led Clara into the living room, kicking himself once there because he hadn’t given Beauvoir the video to take back. He hoped he wouldn’t forget it.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said to Clara once he had her seated by the warm fire.

‘I stepped right over her on my way into Ogilvy’s. It was the night of Ruth’s book launch. I felt badly about that, all my good fortune and all.’ She left the sentence hanging, knowing Gamache would understand. Once again she saw the scene. Leaving the launch, buying the food, getting on the fateful escalator. Passing CC.

Your art is amateurish and banal.

Walking in a daze into the cold night and wanting to take off down the street, howling and crying and shoving all the revelers aside. But instead bending over the vagrant, the heap of stinking shit and despair, and meeting those rheumy eyes.

‘I’ve always loved your art, Clara.’

‘She said that?’ Gamache asked.

Clara nodded.

‘Did you know her?’

‘Never saw her before.’

‘But you must have,’ said Agent Lemieux, speaking for the first time in an interrogation, the words jumping unbidden from his mouth. He clamped his mouth shut and looked at Gamache, waiting for the reprimand. Instead Gamache was looking at him with interest. Then he turned back.

Relieved, Lemieux listened, but wanted to squirm in his seat. He found this whole exchange deeply unsettling.

‘How do you explain it?’ Gamache asked, watching Clara closely.

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes you can,’ Gamache encouraged her, exploring, probing, asking her to let him in. ‘Tell me.’

‘I think she was God. Thought she was God.’ Clara struggled to compose herself, clamping her throat against the tears.

Gamache sat quietly, waiting. He looked away, giving her the semblance of privacy. Staring at the television he saw in his mind’s eye the frozen image of the barge. No. Not the barge, just the prow. With a design. A sea serpent. A snake. No. A bird.