The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #5)

The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #5) Page 61

“It was dark, of course, so I turned on a light and went closer. I thought it might be a drunk who’d staggered up the hill from the bistro, saw our place and just made himself comfortable.”

He was right, it did sound ridiculous. Still the Chief said nothing.

“I was going to call for help but I didn’t want to upset Dominique or my mother, so I crept closer to the guy. Then I saw his head.”

“And you knew he’d been murdered,” said Beauvoir, not believing a word of this.

“That’s it.” Marc turned grateful eyes to the Inspector, until he saw the sneer, then he turned back to Gamache. “I couldn’t believe it.”

“So a murdered man shows up in your house in the middle of the night. Didn’t you lock the door?” asked Beauvoir.

“We do, but we’re getting a lot of deliveries and since we never use that door ourselves I guess we forgot.”

“What did you do, Monsieur Gilbert?” Gamache asked, his voice soothing, reasonable.

Marc opened his mouth, shut it and looked down at his hands. He’d promised himself when it got to this part he wouldn’t look away, or down. Wouldn’t flinch. But now he did all three.

“I thought about it for a while, then I picked the guy up and carried him down into the village. To the bistro.”

There it was.

“Why?” Gamache asked.

“I was going to call the police, actually had the phone in my hand,” he held out his empty hand to them as though that was proof, “but then I got to thinking. About all the work we’d put into the place. And we’re so close, so close. We’re going to open in just over a month, you know. And I realized it would be all over the papers. Who’d want to relax in an inn and spa where someone had just been killed?”

Beauvoir hated to say it, but he had to agree. Especially at those prices.

“So you dumped him in the bistro?” he asked. “Why?”

Now Gilbert turned to him. “Because I didn’t want to put him into someone else’s home to be found. And I knew Olivier kept the key under a planter by the front door.” He could see their skepticism, but plowed ahead anyway. “I took the dead guy down, left him on the floor of the bistro and came home. I moved a rug up from the spa area to cover where the guy had been. I knew no one would miss it downstairs. Too much else going on.”

“This is a dangerous time,” said Gamache, staring at Marc. “We could charge you with obstruction, with indignities to a body, with hampering the investigation.”

“With murder,” said Beauvoir.

“We need the full truth. Why did you take the body to the bistro? You could have left him in the woods.”

Marc sighed. He didn’t think they’d press this point. “I thought about it, but there were lots of kids in Three Pines for the long weekend and I didn’t want any of them finding him.”

“Noble,” said Gamache, with equilibrium. “But that wasn’t likely to happen, was it? How often do kids play in the woods around your place?”

“It happens. Would you run that risk?”

“I would call the police.”

The Chief let that sentence do its job. It stripped Marc Gilbert of any pretension to higher ground. And left him exposed before them. For a man who, at best, did something unconscionable. At worst he murdered a man.

“The truth,” said Gamache, almost in a whisper.

“I took the body to the bistro so that people would think he’d been killed there. Olivier’s treated us like shit since we arrived.”

“So you paid him back by putting a body there?” asked Beauvoir. He could think of a few people he’d like to dump bodies on. But never would. This man did. That spoke of his hatred of Olivier. A rare, and surprising, degree of hatred. And his resolve.

Marc Gilbert looked at his hands, looked out the window, moved his gaze around the walls of the old railway station. And finally he rested on the large man across from him.

“That’s what I did. I shouldn’t have done it, I know.” He shook his head in wonderment at his own stupidity. Then he looked up suddenly as the silence grew. His eyes were sharp and bright. “Wait a minute. You don’t think I killed the man, do you?”

They said nothing.

Gilbert looked from one to the other. He even looked at the idiot agent with the poised pen.

“Why would I do that? I don’t even know who he is.”

Still they said nothing.

“Really. I’d never seen him before.”