The Cruelest Month

Ten minutes later he was surrounded by pill bottles. Pills for headaches, pills for backaches, pills for menstrual cramps, pills for yeast infections. Vitamins. And even a bottle of jelly beans.



‘Pills for visiting kids,’ Hazel explained.



Just about the only pill ever manufactured not in the cupboard was ephedra.



The team from the local office of the Sûreté had shown up and were well into the search of the Smyth place. Unfortunately it would probably take ten times their number to do the dump justice. It was worse than Beauvoir had thought, and he was an expert at thinking the worst.



Two hours had gone by and the only significant thing to happen was they seemed to have lost two of their men. They were discovered wandering in the basement. Beauvoir took a break and sat on a sofa in the dining room, jammed against a breakfront which was jammed against another sofa. As soon as he landed on it the sofa threw him back. It expulsed him. He tried again, landing with less force. Now he felt the hard coils and had the impression they were recoiling, to toss him out again. He’d become a circus act.



An agent called him upstairs and when he arrived he saw the officer holding a medicine bottle.



‘Where’d you find it?’ Beauvoir asked.



‘In the make-up case.’



The agent pointed to Sophie’s room. Behind him he heard Sophie clunking quickly up the stairs, then the clunking stopped and he heard nimble feet taking the stairs two at a time.



‘What is it?’ came Hazel’s voice from the other direction.



Beauvoir showed the bottle to the two women.



‘Ephedra,’ Hazel read on the label. ‘Sophie, you promised.’



‘Shut up, Mom. That’s not mine.’



‘It was found in your case,’ said Beauvoir.



‘I don’t know where it came from. It’s not mine.’



She was scared, he could tell. But was she telling the truth?



As Gamache walked into the house he smelled toast and coffee. It felt very still and comfortable. The wide-plank wood floors were a deep amber. There was no fire in the grate, but Gamache saw ashes and a mostly consumed log. The room was cheerful and bright, even in the dull day, with large windows and French doors leading to a back garden. The furniture was old and comfortable and on the walls were landscapes from the area and a few portraits. Where there were no pictures there were bookshelves.



Gamache would have loved to spend time in this room, under other circumstances.



‘The room where Madeleine was killed was broken into two nights ago,’ said Gamache. ‘We know you did it.’



‘You’re right. It was me.’



‘Why?’



‘I wanted the house to take me too,’ said Monsieur Béliveau.



He told his story clearly, his dry hands rubbing each other as though needing human contact.



‘It was the day after Madeleine died. I don’t know if you’ve ever lost someone you love, Chief Inspector, but it’s as though everything familiar has changed. Food tastes different, home isn’t home any more, even friends have changed. Much as they might want to, they can’t follow you down that road. Everything seemed so far away, muffled. I couldn’t even understand what people were saying.’ He smiled unexpectedly. ‘Poor Peter and Clara. They had me over for dinner. I think they were worried about me and I don’t think I did anything to ease their minds. They wanted me to know I wasn’t alone, but I was.’



His hands stopped their rubbing and now one hand held the other.



‘About halfway through dinner I knew I had to die. It hurt too much. As Peter and Clara talked about gardening and cooking and the day’s events I cataloged ways to kill myself. Then it came to me. I would go back up there and sit in that room by myself and wait.’



Nothing stirred. Even the mariner’s clock on the mantelpiece seemed silent, as though time was standing still.



‘I knew if I waited in the dark long enough whatever is in that house would find me. And it did.’



‘What happened?’ Gamache asked.



‘The thing that killed Madeleine arrived.’ He said this without apology, without embarrassment. Just a fact. Something from another world arrived in his, and had come to drag him away. ‘It came down the hall. I could hear it, clawing and scraping. It was pitch black and I had my back to the door, but I knew it was there. Then it screamed, as it did that night. Shrieked right in my ear. I reached up to fight it off.’



He waved his thin arms in their gray wool sweater about his head, as though he imagined himself back in that room.



‘And then I ran away. I ran screaming from that room.’