Cruelest Month

‘Why’d you take it? What interests you about it?’ Gamache was leaning forward, watching Nichol intently.

‘It’s the face. It says it all.’

Nichol waited to see whether the others would get it. Would they see that Madeleine Favreau, so pretty and smiling and attentive, was a fake? No one was really that happy. She had to be pretending.

‘You’re right,’ said Gamache, turning to Beauvoir. ‘Do you see? Her?’ Gamache put his large finger close to the photo.

Beauvoir leaned in and studied the picture then his eyes opened wide.

‘That’s Sophie. That girl taking a bite of cake. It’s Sophie.’

‘Heavier,’ Gamache nodded.

He turned the photograph over. Across the back was written the date the picture was taken. Two years ago.

In only two years Sophie Smyth had dropped twenty, thirty pounds?

Gamache’s phone rang just as the meeting was breaking up.

‘Chief, it’s me,’ said Agent Lacoste. ‘I finally have the report on the fingerprints. We know who broke into the room at the old Hadley house.’

Hazel Smyth seemed to have trouble functioning now. Like a toy whose connections were faulty, she lurched from full speed to stop, then top speed again.

‘We have some questions, Madame Smyth,’ said Beauvoir. ‘And we’ll need to do a thorough search. A few officers from the Cowansville detachment will be here soon. We have a warrant.’

He reached into his pocket but she whizzed off, saying, ‘No need, Inspector. Sophie! Sooophieee.’

‘What is it?’ came the petulant reply.

‘Visitors. It’s the police again.’ She seemed to sing-song it.

Sophie appeared, clunking down the stairs with her crutches, her leg wrapped tightly now in a tenser bandage. The injury seemed to be getting worse, judging by her winces. Beauvoir wondered whether maybe she wasn’t injured after all.

He took out the picture and showed it to both women.

‘That’s from the fridge,’ said Hazel, looking toward the appliance. Her energy had ebbed again and now she seemed barely able to speak. Her head was bowed as though too heavy and when she breathed it lifted slightly then drooped again.

‘When was it taken?’ Beauvoir asked.

‘Oh, ages ago,’ said Sophie, reaching for it. He moved it away from her. ‘Five or six years at least.’

‘Couldn’t have been, dear,’ said Hazel as though each word cost her an effort. ‘Madeleine’s hair is long. All grown back. It was just a couple of years ago.’

‘Is this you?’ He pointed to the pudgy girl.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Sophie.

‘Let me see,’ said Hazel.

‘No, Ma, no need. My ankle hurts really badly. I think I knocked it on the stairs coming down.’

‘Poor one.’ Hazel’s energy bopped back up. She rushed to a cupboard in the kitchen. Beauvoir could see a variety of medicine bottles. He followed her there and watched as she shoved past the first rank of pills, digging deeper. Then he stopped her hand.

‘May I?’

‘But Sophie needs an aspirin.’

He took a bottle off the shelf. Low dose aspirin. He glanced at Hazel who was looking at him anxiously. She knows, he thought. She knows her daughter fakes her injuries and she bought the low dose on purpose. He handed a tablet to Hazel then put on his gloves, thin like membranes. Something told him there was more than aspirin in this jumble of pills. He’d decided if he was born with a caul he needed to start trusting his instincts.

Ten minutes later he was surrounded by pill bottles. Pills for headaches, pills for backaches, pills for menstrual cramps, pills for yeast infections. Vitamins. And even a bottle of jelly beans.

‘Pills for visiting kids,’ Hazel explained.

Just about the only pill ever manufactured not in the cupboard was ephedra.

The team from the local office of the Sûreté had shown up and were well into the search of the Smyth place. Unfortunately it would probably take ten times their number to do the dump justice. It was worse than Beauvoir had thought, and he was an expert at thinking the worst.

Two hours had gone by and the only significant thing to happen was they seemed to have lost two of their men. They were discovered wandering in the basement. Beauvoir took a break and sat on a sofa in the dining room, jammed against a breakfront which was jammed against another sofa. As soon as he landed on it the sofa threw him back. It expulsed him. He tried again, landing with less force. Now he felt the hard coils and had the impression they were recoiling, to toss him out again. He’d become a circus act.

An agent called him upstairs and when he arrived he saw the officer holding a medicine bottle.

‘Where’d you find it?’ Beauvoir asked.

‘In the make-up case.’

The agent pointed to Sophie’s room. Behind him he heard Sophie clunking quickly up the stairs, then the clunking stopped and he heard nimble feet taking the stairs two at a time.

‘What is it?’ came Hazel’s voice from the other direction.

Beauvoir showed the bottle to the two women.

‘Ephedra,’ Hazel read on the label. ‘Sophie, you promised.’

‘Shut up, Mom. That’s not mine.’

‘It was found in your case,’ said Beauvoir.

‘I don’t know where it came from. It’s not mine.’