Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1) Page 94

‘His mother’s still alive?’ Gamache asked, trying to do some quick calculations.

‘Ninety-two,’ said Lacoste. ‘Pickled, by all accounts, but breathing. An old tartar. Probably outlive them all. Family lore has it she found her husband next to her one morning, dead, and she rolled over and went back to sleep. Why be inconvenienced?’

‘We only have Mrs Morrow’s word for it that they didn’t know what was in the will,’ said Beauvoir. ‘Miss Neal might have told them they’d inherit, n’est-ce pas?’

‘If they needed money, wouldn’t they have gone to Miss Neal for a loan instead of murdering her?’ Gamache asked.

‘Maybe they did,’ said Beauvoir. ‘And she said no. And, they had the best chance of luring her to the woods. If either Clara or Peter had called her at 6.30 in the morning and asked to see her without the dog, she’d have gone. No questions asked.’

Gamache had to agree.

‘And’, Beauvoir was on a roll, ‘Peter Morrow’s an accomplished archer. His specialty is the old wooden recurve. He says he only target shoots, but who knows? Besides, as you found out, it’s easy enough to replace the snub-nosed tip with the killer tip. He could have gotten them from the clubhouse, killed her, cleaned the equipment and returned it. And even if we found his prints or fibers, it’d mean nothing. He used the equipment all the time anyway.’

‘He was on the jury that chose her art work,’ Lacoste was warming to the possibility, ‘suppose he was jealous of her, saw her potential and, I don’t know, flipped out or something.’ She sputtered to a stop. None of them could see Peter Morrow ‘flipping out’. But Gamache knew the human psyche was complex. Sometimes people reacted to things without knowing why. And often that reaction was violent, physically or emotionally. It was just possible Peter Morrow, having struggled with his art and his family’s approval all his life, saw brilliance in Jane Neal’s work and couldn’t take it. Was consumed with jealousy. It was possible, not probable, but just possible.

‘Who else?’ asked Gamache.

‘Ben Hadley,’ said Lacoste. ‘He’s also a good archer, with access to the weapons. And trusted by Miss Neal.’

‘But without a motive,’ said Gamache.

‘Well, not money, anyway,’ admitted Lacoste. ‘He’s worth millions. All inherited from his mother. Before that he was on a generous allowance.’

Nichol snorted. She hated these ‘trust fund’ kids who did nothing with their lives except wait for Mommy and Daddy to die.

Beauvoir chose to ignore the snort. ‘Could he have had another motive besides money? Lacoste, anything in the papers you found in Jane Neal’s home?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No diary?’

‘Except the diary where she made a list of people who wanted to kill her.’

‘Well, you might have mentioned it.’ Beauvoir smiled.

Gamache looked at the list of suspects. Yolande and André, Peter and Clara and Ben Hadley.

‘Anyone else?’ Beauvoir was closing his notebook.

‘Ruth Zardo,’ said Gamache. He explained his thinking.

‘So her motive’, said Lacoste, ‘would be to stop Jane from telling everyone what she’d done. Wouldn’t it’ve been easier to just kill Timmer to shut her up?’

‘Actually, yes, and that’s been bothering me. We don’t know that Ruth Zardo didn’t kill Timmer Hadley.’

‘And Jane found out about it?’ asked Lacoste.

‘Or suspected. She was the type, I think, who would’ve gone directly to Ruth and asked her about her suspicions. She probably thought it was a mercy killing, one friend relieving another of pain.’

‘But Ruth Zardo couldn’t have actually fired the arrow,’ said Beauvoir.

‘True. But she might have enlisted the aid of someone who could, and would do anything. For a fee.’

‘Malenfant,’ said Beauvoir with a certain glum glee.

Clara sat in her studio with her morning coffee, staring at the box. It was still there, only now it stood on four legs, made of tree branches. Initially she’d seen it on a single leg, like the trunk of a tree. Like the blind. That’s the image that had come to her in the woods during the ritual, when she’d looked over and seen the blind. It was such a perfect and appropriate image. Of being blind. Of the people who use the blind not seeing the cruelty of what they did, not seeing the beauty of what they were about to kill. It was, after all, a perfect word for that perch. A blind. And it was how Clara felt these days. Jane’s killer was among them, that much was obvious. But who? What wasn’t she seeing?