Cruelest Month

Hanging up, Gamache felt relief. For a few months now, maybe longer, he’d sensed a change in his friend, as though a film had descended, come between them. Something had obscured the intimacy they’d always had. It was nothing obvious, and Gamache had even wondered if he was imagining it, had asked Reine-Marie about it after a dinner with the Brébeufs.

‘It’s nothing I can put my finger on,’ he’d struggled to explain. ‘Just a—’

‘Feeling?’ she’d smiled. She trusted his feelings.

‘Perhaps slightly more than that. His tone is different, his eyes seem harder. And sometimes he says things that seem intentionally insulting.’

‘Like that comment about Quebecers who move to Paris, thinking they’re better than others.’

‘You heard that too. He knows Daniel’s moved there. Was that a dig?’ If so, it was just one of many from Michel lately. Why?

He’d searched his memory and couldn’t come up with any reason Michel might have for hurting him. He couldn’t remember doing anything to bring this on.

‘He loves you, Armand. Just give him space. Catherine says they’re worried about their son’s marriage. They’ve separated.’

‘Michel didn’t tell me,’ said Gamache, surprised that that hurt. He thought they told each other everything. He wondered whether maybe he should be more circumspect himself, but caught that instinct. How easy it is, he thought, to retaliate. He’d give Michel as much space and time as he needed, and let him take out some of his frustration on him. It was natural to lash out at people close by.

Michel was worried about his son. Of course it would be something like that. It couldn’t possibly be about him, about their friendship.

But now, hanging up the phone, Gamache smiled. Michel had sounded like his old self. His old buoyancy was back. Whatever had come between them was gone.

Michel Brébeuf hung up the phone and stared at the wall, smiling.

There it was. Brébeuf had the answer to the question that had tormented him for months. How? How was he supposed to bring down a contented man?

Now Michel Brébeuf knew.

   SEVENTEEN

Agent Yvette Nichol woke up early the next morning, too excited to sleep. Finally, it was here. The day she’d longed for. When Gamache would finally see what she was made of.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Short, reddish hair, brown eyes, skin with purple marks where she’d picked at it. Though she was slim her face always seemed a little pudgy, like a balloon with hair.

She sucked in her cheeks, biting them between her molars. Better, though she couldn’t go through life like that.

She’d gotten her father’s features and her mother’s personality. She’d always been told that, though she’d never much liked her mother and wondered whether her aunts and uncles said it to annoy her. Her mother had died suddenly, one day there and gone the next.

Her mother had always been an outsider. Tolerated by her father’s extended family of babbling aunts and uncles, but never loved. Or respected. Or accepted. She’d tried, Nichol knew. Taking on the petty prejudices and opinions of the Nickolevs. But they’d only laughed at her, and changed their opinions.

She was pathetic. Always striving to fit in, to get the affection of people who’d never, ever give it, and despised her for trying.

‘You’re just like your mother.’ The heavily accented words lay leaden in Yvette Nichol’s head. It was, perhaps, the only French her aunts and uncles spoke. Memorized as one might memorize a swear word. Fuck. Shit. You’re just like your mother. Hell.

No, it was her father she loved. And he loved her. And protected her from the swarm of accents and smells and insults in her own home.

‘Don’t put any make-up on.’ His voice penetrated the bathroom door. She smiled. He clearly felt she was beautiful enough.

‘You’ll look younger without it. More vulnerable.’

‘Dad, I’m a Sûreté officer. With homicide. I don’t want to look vulnerable.’

He was forever trying to get her to use tricks so people would like her. But she knew tricks were useless. People wouldn’t like her. They never did.

Her boss had called yesterday, interrupting Easter lunch with the relatives. All going on about how it was better in Romania or Yugoslavia or the Czech Republic. Speaking in their own languages then making a to-do when she didn’t understand. But she did understand, enough to know they asked her father every year why she never painted eggs or baked the special bread. Always finding fault. No one had commented on her new haircut or new clothes or asked about her job. She was an agent with the Sûreté du Québec, for God’s sake. The only successful one in the entire pathetic family. And could they ask about that? No. Had she been a goddamned painted egg they’d have shown more interest.

She’d run down the hallway with the phone and ducked into her bedroom, so her boss wouldn’t hear the hilarity at her expense, the cackling that passed as laughter.

‘Do you remember what we talked about a few months ago?’

‘About the Arnot case?’

‘Yes, but you must never mention that name again. Understand?’