The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #8)

The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #8) Page 21

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, taking 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.