Louise Penny - The Beautiful Mystery

“Eventually. As I rushed back he came out with it. He’d gone to get the doctor first and then me. By then they knew it was fatal.”

“But did he tell you any more?”

“That Mathieu had been killed?”

“That he’d been murdered.”

“The doctor did. When I arrived here the doctor was standing at the door waiting. He tried to stop me from going closer, and said Mathieu wasn’t just dead, but that it looked as though someone had killed him.”

“And what did you say?”

“I can’t remember what I said, but I suspect it was something not taught at the seminary.”

Dom Philippe cast his mind back. He’d shoved by the doctor and run, stumbling, to the far end. To what looked like a mound of dark earth. But wasn’t. As he saw it in his memory he described it to the large, quiet Sûreté officer beside him.

“And then I dropped to my knees beside him,” said Dom Philippe.

“Did you touch him?”

“Yes. I touched his face, and his robe. I think I straightened it. I don’t know why. Who would do such a thing?”

Again, Gamache ignored the question. Time enough for the answer.

“What was Frère Mathieu doing here? In your garden?”

“I have no idea. It wasn’t to see me. I’m always out at that time. It’s when I do my rounds.”

“And he’d know that?”

“He was my prior. He knew it better than most.”

“What did you do after you’d seen his body?” Gamache asked.

The abbot thought about that. “We prayed first. And then I called the police. We have only one phone. It’s a satellite thing. Doesn’t always work, but it did this morning.”

“Did you consider not calling?”

The question surprised the abbot and he studied this quiet stranger with new appreciation. “I’m ashamed to admit it was my first thought. To keep it to ourselves. We’re used to being self-sufficient.”

“Then why did you call?”

“Not for Mathieu, I’m afraid, but for the others.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mathieu is gone now. He’s with God.”

Gamache hoped that was true. For Frère Mathieu there were no more mysteries. He knew who took his life. And he now knew if there was a God. And a Heaven. And angels. And even a celestial choir.

It didn’t bear thinking about what happened to the celestial choir when yet another director showed up.

“But the rest of us are here,” Dom Philippe continued. “I didn’t call you in for vengeance or to punish whoever did this. The deed is done. Mathieu is safe. We, on the other hand, are not.”

It was, Gamache knew, the simple truth. It was also the reaction of a father. To protect. Or a shepherd, to keep the flock safe from a predator.

Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups. Saint Gilbert among the wolves. It was a curious name for a monastery.

The abbot knew there was a wolf in the fold. In a black robe, and shaved head, and whispering soft prayers. Dom Philippe had called in hunters to find him.

Beauvoir and the doctor had returned with the stretcher and had placed it beside Frère Mathieu. Gamache stood and gave a silent signal. The body was lifted onto the stretcher and Frère Mathieu left the garden for the last time.

The abbot led the small procession, followed by Frères Simon and Charles. Then Captain Charbonneau at the head of the stretcher and Beauvoir behind.

Gamache was the last to leave the abbot’s garden, closing the bookcase behind him.

They walked into the rainbow corridor. The joyful colors played on the body, and the mourners. As they arrived at the church, the rest of the community stood and filed from the benches. Joining them. Walking behind Gamache.

The abbot, Dom Philippe, began to recite a prayer. Not the rosary. Something else. And then Gamache realized the abbot wasn’t speaking. He was singing. And it wasn’t simply a prayer. It was a chant.

A Gregorian chant.

Slowly the other monks joined in and the singing swelled to fill the corridor, and join with the light. It would have been beautiful, if not for the certainty that one of the men singing the words of God, in the voice of God, was a killer.

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.