by Louise Penny
* * *
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.
“I think so.” The abbot leaned forward, squinting.
Gamache put on his half-moon reading glasses and also bent toward the paper. “It looks like a page from an old manuscript,” he finally said, stepping back.
The abbot looked perplexed. “It’s not paper, it’s vellum. Sheepskin. You can tell by the texture.”
“Sheepskin?” asked Beauvoir. “Is that what you use for paper?”
“Not for hundreds of years.” The abbot continued to stare at the page in the Inspector’s hand. “The text doesn’t seem to make sense. It might be Latin, but not from any psalm or Book of Hours or religious text I know. I can only make out two words.”
“What are they?” asked the Chief.
“Here,” the abbot pointed. “That looks like ‘Dies irae.’”
The doctor made a small noise that might have been a guffaw. They looked at him, but he fell completely silent.
“What does that mean?” asked Beauvoir.
“It’s from the Requiem Mass,” said the abbot.
“It means ‘day of wrath,’” said Gamache. “Dies irae,” he quoted, “dies illa. Day of wrath. Day of mourning.”
“That’s right,” said the abbot. “In the Requiem Mass the two are said together. But here, there is no dies illa.”
“What does that tell you, Dom Philippe?” asked the Chief.
The abbot was quiet for a moment, considering. “It tells me this isn’t the Requiem Mass.”
“Does it make any sense to you, Frère Charles?” Gamache asked.
The doctor’s brow was creased in concentration as he stared at the vellum in Beauvoir’s hand. Then he shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
“Neither of you have seen this before?” Gamache pressed.
The doctor glanced at the abbot. Dom Philippe continued to stare at the words and finally shook his head.
There was a pause then Beauvoir pointed to the page. “What’re those?”
Once again the men leaned forward.
Above each word there were tiny squiggles of ink. Like little waves. Or wings.
“I think they’re neumes,” said the abbot, at last.
“Neumes?” asked Gamache. “What’s that?”
Now the abbot was clearly bewildered. “They’re a musical notation.”
“I’ve never seen it before,” said Beauvoir.
“You wouldn’t.” The abbot stepped away from the page. “They haven’t been used for a thousand years.”
“I don’t understand,” said Gamache. “Is this page a thousand years old?”
“It might be,” said Dom Philippe. “And that might explain the text. It might be plainchant using an old form of Latin.”
But he didn’t seem convinced.
“By ‘plainchant’ do you mean Gregorian chant?” asked the Chief.
The abbot nodded.
“Could this be,” the Chief pointed to the page, “a Gregorian chant?”
The abbot looked again at the page and shook his head, “I don’t know. It’s the words. They’re Latin, but they’re nonsense. Gregorian chants follow very old and prescribed rules and are almost always from the psalms. This isn’t.”
Dom Philippe lapsed into his habitual silence.
There seemed no more to be learned from the paper at the moment. Gamache turned to the doctor.
“Please continue.”
Over the next twenty minutes Frère Charles stripped Brother Mathieu, ta
king off the layers of clothing. Struggling with the rigor.
Until lying before them on the examination table was the naked man.
“How old was Frère Mathieu?” Gamache asked.
“I can show you his file,” said the doctor, “but I believe he was sixty-two.”
“In good health?”
“Yes. A slightly enlarged prostate, a slightly elevated PSA but we were monitoring that. He was about thirty pounds overweight, as you can see. Around the middle. But he wasn’t obese and I’d suggested he take more exercise.”
“How?” asked Beauvoir. “He could hardly join a gym. Did he pray harder?”
“If he did,” said the doctor, “he’d hardly be the first person to decide they could pray themselves thin. But, as it happens, we put together a couple of hockey teams in the winter. Not NHL caliber, but we’re surprisingly good. And quite competitive.”
Beauvoir stared at Brother Charles as though he’d just spoken Latin. It was almost indecipherable. Monks playing competitive hockey? He could see them on a rink on the frozen lake. Cassocks flying. Barreling into each other.
Muscular Christianity.
Maybe these men weren’t quite the oddities he’d presumed.
Or perhaps that made them all the odder.
“Did he?” asked the Chief.
“Did he what?” asked the doctor.
“Did Frère Mathieu get more exercise?”
Brother Charles looked down at the body on his table and shook his head, then met Gamache’s eyes. Once again the monk’s eyes were tinged with amusement, though his voice was solemn.
“The prior was not a man to take suggestions easily.”
Gamache continued to hold the doctor’s eyes, until Brother Charles dropped his and spoke again. “Beyond that, he was in good health.”
The Chief nodded and looked down at the naked man on the table. He’d been anxious to see if there was indeed a wound to Brother Mathieu’s abdomen.
But there was nothing there. Just flabby, graying skin. His body, except for the crushed skull, was without a mark.
Gamache couldn’t yet see the blows that led up to the final, catastrophic crushing of this man’s skull. But he’d find them. This sort of thing never came out of the blue. There’d be a trail of smaller wounds, bruises, hurt feelings. Insults and exclusions.
The Chief Inspector would follow those. And they would lead, inevitably, to the man who’d made this corpse.
Chief Inspector Gamache looked over to the desk and the yellowing sheet of thick paper. With its squiggles of, what was that word?
Neumes.
And its nearly unintelligible text.
Except for two words.
“Dies irae.”
Day of wrath. From the mass for the dead.
What had the prior been trying to do, at the hour of his death? When he could do only one more thing in this life, what had he done? Not written in the soft earth the name of his killer.
No, Frère Mathieu had shoved that sheet of paper up his sleeve and curled himself around it.
What did this jumble of nonsense and neumes tell them? Not much, yet. Except that Frère Mathieu had died trying to protect it.
SEVEN
The chair beside Dom Philippe was empty.
It had been years, decades, since the abbot had looked to his right in the Chapter House and not seen Mathieu.
Now he didn’t look to his right. Instead, the abbot kept his steady eyes straight ahead. Looking into the faces of the community of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.
And they looked back at him.
Expecting answers.
Expecting information.
Expecting comfort.
Expecting him to say something. Anything.
To stand between them and their terror.
And still he stared. At a loss for words. He’d stored up so many, over the years. A warehouse full of thoughts and impressions, of emotions. Of things unsaid.
But now that he needed words, the warehouse was empty. Dark and cold.
Nothing left to say.
* * *
Chief Inspector Gamache leaned forward, his elbows on the worn wood desk. His hands casually holding each other.
He looked across at Beauvoir and Captain Charbonneau. Both men had their notebooks out and open and were ready to report to the Chief.
After the medical examination, Beauvoir and Charbonneau had interviewed the monks, fingerprinting them, getting initial statements. Reactions. Impressions. An idea of their movements.
While they did that, Chief Inspector Gamache had searched the dead man’s cell. It was almost exactly the same as the abbot’s. Same narrow bed. Same chest of drawers, only his altar was to a Saint Cecilia. Gamache had not heard of her, but he determined to look her up.
There was a change of robes, of underwear, of shoes. A nightshirt. Books of prayers and the psalms. And nothing else. Not a single personal item. No photographs, no letters. No parents, no siblings. But then, perhaps God was his Father, and Mary his mother. And the monks his brothers. It was, after all, a large family.
But the office, the prior’s office, was a gold mine. Not, sadly, of clues to the case. There was no bloody stone. No threatening, signed letter. No murderer waiting to confess.
What Gamache did find in the prior’s desk were used quill pens and a bottle of open ink. He’d bagged and put them in the satchel along with the other evidence they’d collected.
It had seemed a major find. After all, that sheet of old paper that had fallen from the prior’s robes had been written with quill pen and ink. But the more the Chief thought about it the less certain he was that this would prove significant.
What were the chances the prior, the choirmaster, a world authority on Gregorian chant, would write something almost unintelligible? The abbot and the doctor had both been baffled by the Latin, and those neume things.
It seemed more the work of some unschooled, untrained amateur.
And it was written on very old paper. Vellum. Sheepskin. Stretched and dried, perhaps hundreds of years ago. There was plenty of paper, but no vellum in the prior’s desk.
Still, Gamache had been careful to bag and label the quills and ink. In case.
He also found scores. Sheets and sheets of sheet music.
Books filled with music, and histories of music. Learned papers on music. But while Frère Mathieu was Catholic in his belief, he was not small “c” catholic in his taste.
Only one thing interested him. Gregorian chant.
There was a simple cross on the wall, with the crucified Christ in agony. And below and surrounding that crucifix was a sea of music.
That was the passion of Brother Mathieu. Not Christ, but the chants he floated above. Christ might have called Frère Mathieu, but it was to the tune of a Gregorian chant.
Gamache had had no idea so much had been, or could be, written about plainchant. Though, to be fair, he’d given it no thought. Until now. The Chief had settled in behind the desk and while waiting for Beauvoir and Charbonneau to return, he’d begun reading.
Unlike the cell, which smelled of cleaning fluid, the office smelled of old socks and smelly shoes and dusty documents. It smelled human. The prior slept in his cell, but he lived here. And Armand Gamache began to see Frère Mathieu as simply Mathieu. A monk. A music director. Perhaps a genius. But mostly a man.
Charbonneau and Beauvoir eventually returned and the Chief turned his attention to them.
“What did you find?” Gamache looked at Charbonneau first.
“Nothing, patron. At least, I didn’t find the murder weapon.”
“I’m not surprised,” said the Chief, “but we had to try. When we get the coroner’s report we’ll know if it was a stone or something else. What about the monks?”
“All fingerprinted,” said Beauvoir. “And we did the initial interviews. After the seven thirty service they go to their chores. Now,” Beauvoir consulted his notes, “there’re four main areas of work at the m
onastery. The vegetable garden, the animals, the physical repairs to the monastery, which are endless, and the cooking. The monks have an area of expertise, but they also rotate. We found out who was doing what at the crucial time.”
At least, thought Gamache, listening to the report, the time of death was fairly clear. Not before Lauds finished at quarter past eight, and not after twenty to nine, when Frère Simon found the body.
Twenty-five minutes.
“Anything suspicious?” he asked.
Both men shook their heads. “They were all at their work,” said Charbonneau. “With witnesses.”
“But that’s not possible,” said Gamache, calmly. “Frère Mathieu didn’t kill himself. One of the brothers wasn’t doing what he was assigned to do. At least, I hope it wasn’t an assignment.”
Beauvoir raised a brow. He presumed the Chief was joking, but perhaps it was worth considering.
“Let’s try to get at this another way,” suggested the Chief. “Did any of the monks tell you about a conflict? Was anyone fighting with the prior?”
“No one, patron,” said Captain Charbonneau. “At least no one admitted there was conflict. They all seemed genuinely shocked. ‘Unbelievable’ was the word that kept coming up. ‘Incroyable.’”
Inspector Beauvoir shook his head. “They believe in a virgin birth, a resurrection, walking on water and some old guy with a white beard floating in the sky and running the world, but this they find unbelievable?”
Gamache was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “It is interesting,” he agreed, “what people choose to believe.”
And what they’d do in the name of that faith.
How did the monk who’d done this reconcile the murder with his faith? What, in his quiet moments, did the murderer say to the old man with the white beard floating in the sky?
Not for the first time that day, the Chief Inspector wondered why this monastery had been built so far from civilization. And why it had such thick walls. And such high walls. And locked doors.
Was it to keep the sins of the world out? Or to keep something worse in?
“So,” he said, “according to the monks, there were no conflicts at all.”
