The Brutal Telling (60 page)

Olivier nodded and hung his head.

Gabri turned to Chief Inspector Gamache. “He’d never have done it if he’d actually killed the man. You wouldn’t, would you? You’d want to hide the murder, not advertise it.”

“Then what happened?” Gamache asked. Not ignoring Gabri but not wanting to be sidetracked either.

“I took the wheelbarrow back, picked up those two things and left.”

They looked at the table. The most damning items. And the most precious. The murder weapon and the sack.

“I brought them back here and hid them in the space behind the fireplace.”

“You didn’t look in the bag?” Gamache asked again.

“I thought I’d have plenty of time, when all the attention was on the Gilbert place. But then when Myrna found the body here the next morning I almost died. I couldn’t very well dig the things out. So I lit the fires, to make sure you wouldn’t look in there. For days after there was too much attention on the bistro. And by then I just wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. That none of this had happened.”

Silence met the story.

Gamache leaned back and watched Olivier for a moment. “Tell me the rest of the story, the one the Hermit told in his carvings.”

“I don’t know the rest. I won’t know until we open that.” Olivier’s eyes were barely able to look away from the sack.

“I don’t think we need to just yet.” Gamache sat forward. “Tell me the story.”

Olivier looked at Gamache, flabbergasted. “I’ve told you all I know. He told me up to the part where the army found the villagers.”

“And the Horror was approaching, I remember. Now I want to hear the end.”

“But I don’t know how it ends.”

“Olivier?” Gabri looked closely at his partner.

Olivier held Gabri’s gaze then looked over at Gamache. “You know?”

“I know,” said Gamache.

“What do you know?” asked Gabri, his eyes moving from the Chief Inspector to Olivier. “Tell me.”

“The Hermit wasn’t the one telling the story,” said Gamache.

Gabri stared at Gamache, uncomprehending, then over at Olivier. Who nodded.

“You?” Gabri whispered.

Olivier closed his eyes and the bistro faded. He heard the mumbling of the Hermit’s fire. Smelled the wood of the log cabin, the sweet maple wood from the smoke. He felt the warm tea mug in his hands, as he had hundreds of times. Saw the violin, gleaming in the firelight. Across from him sat the shabby man, in clean and mended old clothing surrounded by treasure. The Hermit was leaning forward, his eyes glowing and filled with fear. As he listened. And Olivier spoke.

Olivier opened his eyes and was back in the bistro. “The Hermit was afraid of something, I knew that the first time I met him in this very room. He became more and more reclusive as the years passed until he’d hardly leave his cabin to go into town. He’d ask me for news of the outside world. So I’d tell him about the politics and the wars, and some of the things happening locally. Once I told him about a concert at the church here. You were singing,” he looked at Gabri, “and he wanted to go.”

There he was, at the point of no return. Once spoken, these words could never be taken back.

“I couldn’t let that happen. I didn’t want anyone else to meet him, to maybe make friends with him. So I told the Hermit the concert had been canceled. He wanted to know why. I don’t know what came over me, but I started making up this story about the Mountain and the villagers and the boy stealing from it, and running away and hiding.”

Olivier stared down at the edge of the table, focusing on it. He could see the grain of the wood where it had been worn smooth. By hands touching it, rubbing it, resting on it, for generations. As his did now.

“The Hermit was scared of something, and the stories made him more afraid. He’d become unhinged, impressionable. I knew if I told him about terrible things happening outside the forest he’d believe me.”

Gabri leaned away, to get the full picture of his partner. “You did that on purpose? You made him so afraid of the outside world he wouldn’t leave? Olivier.”

The last word was exhaled, as though it stank.

“But there was more to it than that,” said Gamache, quietly. “Your stories not only kept the Hermit prisoner, and his treasure safe from anyone else, but they also inspired the carvings. I wonder what you thought when you saw the first.”

“I did almost throw it away, when he gave it to me. But then I convinced myself it was a good thing. The stories were inspiring him. Helping him create.”

“Carvings with walking mountains, and monsters and armies marching his way? You must have given the poor man nightmares,” said Gabri.

“What did Woo mean?” Gamache asked.

“I don’t know, not really. But sometimes when I told the story he’d whisper it. At first I thought it was just an exhale, but then I realized he was saying a word. Woo.”

Olivier imitated the Hermit saying the word, under his breath. Woo.

“So you made the spider’s web with the word in it, to mimic
Charlotte’s Web
, a book he’d asked you to find.”

“No. How could I do that? I wouldn’t even know how to start.”

“And yet Gabri told us you’d made your own clothes as a kid. If you wanted to, you could figure it out.”

“No,” Olivier insisted.

“And you admitted the Hermit taught you how to whittle, how to carve.”

“But I wasn’t any good at it,” said Olivier, pleading. He could see the disbelief in their faces.

“It wasn’t very well made. You carved Woo.” Gamache forged forward. “Years ago. You didn’t have to know what it meant, only that it meant something to the Hermit. Something horrible. And you kept that word, to be used one day. As countries warehouse the worst of weapons, against the day it might be needed. That word carved in wood was your final weapon. Your Nagasaki. The last bomb to drop on a weary and frightened and demented man.

“You played on his sense of guilt, magnified by isolation. You guessed he’d stolen those things so you made up the story of the boy and the Mountain. And it worked. It kept him there. But it also inspired him to produce those carvings, which ironically turned out to be his greatest treasure.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“You just kept him prisoner. How could you?” said Gabri.

“I didn’t say anything he wasn’t willing to believe.”

“You don’t really think that?” said Gabri.

Gamache glanced at the items on the table. The menorah, used to murder. And the small sack. The reason for murder. He couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time for his own brutal telling. He stood.

“Olivier Brulé,” said Chief Inspector Gamache, his voice weary and his face grim, “I’m arresting you on a charge of murder.”

The frost was thick on the ground when Armand Gamache next appeared in Three Pines. He parked his car by the old Hadley house and took the path deeper and deeper into the woods. The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.

He paused now and then, not to get his bearings because he knew where he was going and how to get there, but to appreciate his surroundings. The quiet. The soft light now allowed through the trees and hitting ground that rarely saw the sun. The woods smelled musky and rich and sweet. He walked slowly, in no rush, and after half an hour came to the cabin. He paused on the porch, noticing again with a smile the brass number above the door.

Then he entered.

He hadn’t seen the cabin since all the treasures had been photographed, fingerprinted, catalogued and taken away.

He paused at the deep burgundy stain on the plank floor.

Then he walked round the simple room. He could call this place home, he knew, if it had only one precious thing. Reine-Marie.

Two chairs for friendship.

As he stood quietly, the cabin slowly filled with glittering antiques and antiquities and first editions. And with a haunting Celtic melody. The Chief Inspector again saw young Morin turn the violin into a fiddle, his loose limbs taut, made for this purpose.

Then he saw the Hermit Jakob, alone, whittling by the fire. Thoreau on the inlaid table. The violin leaning against the river rock of the
hearth. This man who was his own age, but appeared so much older. Worn down by dread. And something else. The thing that even the Mountain feared.

He remembered the two carvings hidden by the Hermit. Somehow different from the rest. Distinguished by the mysterious code beneath. He’d really thought the key to breaking the Caesar’s Shift had been Charlotte. Then he’d been sure the key was seventeen. That would explain those odd numbers over the door.

But the Caesar’s Shift remained unbroken. A mystery.

Gamache paused in his thinking. Caesar’s Shift. How had Jérôme Brunel explained it? What had Julius Caesar done with his very first code? He hadn’t used a key word, but a number. He’d shifted the alphabet over by three letters.

Gamache walked to the mantelpiece and reaching into his breast pocket he withdrew a notebook and pen. Then he wrote. First the alphabet, then beneath it he counted spaces. That was the key. Not the word sixteen but the number. 16.

A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J

Carefully, not wanting to make a mistake in haste, he checked the letters. The Hermit had printed MRKBVYDDO under the carving of the people on the shore. C, H, A, R . . . Gamache concentrated even harder, forcing himself to slow down. L, O, T, T, E.

A long sigh escaped, and with it the word. Charlotte.

He then worked on the code written under the hopeful people on the boat. OWSVI.

Within moments he had that too.

Emily.

Smiling he remembered flying over the mountains covered in mist and legend. Spirits and ghosts. He remembered the place forgotten by time, and John the Watchman, who could never forget. And the totems, captured forever by a frumpy painter.

What message was Jakob the Hermit sending? Did he know he was in danger and wanted to pass on this message, this clue? Or was it, as Gamache suspected, something much more personal? Something comforting, even?

This man had kept these two carvings for a reason. He’d written under them for a reason. He’d written Charlotte and Emily. And he’d made them out of red cedar, from the Queen Charlotte Islands, for a reason.

What does a man alone need? He had everything else. Food, water, books, music. His hobbies and art. A lovely garden. But what was missing?

Company. Community. To be within the pale. Two chairs for friendship. These carvings kept him company.

He might never be able to prove it, but Gamache knew without doubt the Hermit had been on the Queen Charlotte Islands, almost certainly when he’d first arrived in Canada. And there he’d learned to carve, and learned to build log cabins. And there he’d found his first taste of peace, before having it disrupted by the protests. Like a first love, the place where peace is first found is never, ever forgotten.