The Cruelest Month

‘Please say yes.’



And she had.



She suspected Chief Inspector Gamache knew that at each and every homicide scene, when the activity subsided, the teams had gone home and the air had closed back in around the place, Isabelle Lacoste was still there.



Speaking to the dead. Reassuring them Chief Inspector Gamache and his team were on the case. They would not be forgotten.



Now, standing in the fresh, gentle light, holding Myrna’s rough hands and looking into Clara’s warm blue eyes, she let her guard down.



‘I think Madeleine Favreau’s spirit is still there.’ She looked over to the desolate house on the hill. ‘Waiting for us to free it. I want her to know we’re trying and we won’t forget her.’



‘It’s a sacred thing you do,’ said Myrna, squeezing her hands. ‘Thank you for asking us to help.’



Isabelle Lacoste wondered if they’d be thanking her in a few minutes. Finally the three women stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the old Hadley house.



‘Come on,’ said Clara. ‘It’s not going to get easier.’



She plunged down the uneven walkway to the front door and tried the knob.



‘It’s locked,’ she said, images of returning to Myrna’s and feasting on maple-cured bacon and eggs over easy and warm toast and homemade marmalade rising in her mind. They’d tried, they’d done their best, no one could –



‘I have the key,’ said Lacoste.



Damn.



At that same moment Armand Gamache and Jean Guy Beauvoir were entering the Cowansville Hospital. A few people were lounging outside having cigarettes, one dragging an oxygen tank behind her. The two men gave her a wide berth.



‘What took you so long?’



Agent Yvette Nichol stood in the doorway of the gift boutique, her ill-fitting blue pant suit dirty at the cuffs from mud, her hair cut in a pageboy, out of fashion since the 1600s, and wearing lipstick that looked as though someone had taken a potato peeler to her lips.



‘Agent Nichol.’ Beauvoir nodded. That sullen, sulky face turned his stomach. He knew, just knew, Gamache had made a horrible mistake inviting her on the team. He was damned if he knew why the chief had done it.



But he could guess. It was Gamache’s personal mission to help every failing, falling, flawed creature. And not just help, like with a nice letter of recommendation, but actually put them on his team. He’d pick them up and put them on homicide, the most prestigious unit in the Sûreté, working for the most famous detective in Quebec.



Beauvoir himself had been the first.



He’d been so disliked at his detachment in Trois-Rivières, he’d been permanently assigned to the evidence cage. Literally a cage. The only reason he hadn’t quit was because he knew his very presence pissed off the bosses. He was full of rage. A cage was probably where he belonged.



Then the Chief Inspector had found him, taken him onto homicide and a few years later promoted him to inspector and his second in command. But Jean Guy Beauvoir never totally left the cage. Instead it had moved inside and in it he kept the worst of his rage, where it couldn’t cause damage. And beside that cage sat another, quieter cage. In it, curled up in a corner, was something that frightened him far more than his fury. Beauvoir lived in terror that one day the creature in there would escape.



In that cage he kept his love. And if it ever got out it would go straight to Armand Gamache.



Jean Guy Beauvoir looked over at Agent Nichol and wondered what she kept in her cage. Whatever it was, he hoped it was well locked. The stuff she allowed out was malevolent enough.



They descended to the lowest level of the hospital, into a room that held nothing natural. Not light, not air, which smelled of chemicals, not the furniture, which was aluminum. And not death.



A middle-aged technician matter-of-factly slid Madeleine Favreau from a drawer. He casually unzipped the bag then reeled back.



‘Oh, shit,’ he shrieked. ‘What happened to her?’



Even though they were prepared it still took a moment for the hardened homicide investigators to climb back into their bodies. Gamache was the first to recover, and speak.



‘What does it look like to you?’



The technician inched forward, craning his head to the limits of his neck, then peeked inside the bag again.



‘Fuck me,’ he exhaled. ‘I don’t know, but I sure don’t want to go that way.’ He turned to Gamache. ‘Murder?’



‘Scared to death,’ said Nichol, entranced. She couldn’t stop staring at that face.



Madeleine Favreau was stuck in a scream. Her eyes bulging, her lips stretched across her teeth, her mouth wide and silent. It was hideous.