A Fatal Grace

Gamache put on his half-moon reading glasses and spent the next ten minutes going over the report, finally putting it down and taking a contemplative sip of Dubonnet.

‘Niacin,’ he said.

‘Niacin,’ she agreed.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Besides the niacin she was a healthy, though perhaps underweight, forty-eight-year-old woman. She’d given birth. She was pre-menopausal. All very natural and normal. Her feet were charred from the shock and her hands were blistered, in the same pattern as the tubing of the chair. There was a tiny cut underneath that but it was old and healing. It’s all consistent with electrocution except for one thing. The niacin.’

Gamache leaned forward, taking his glasses from his face and tapping them gently on the manila folder. ‘What is it?’

‘A vitamin. One of the B complex.’ She leaned forward so that they were both talking over the table. ‘It’s prescribed for high cholesterol and some people take it thinking it can increase brain power.’

‘Can it?’

‘No evidence.’

‘Then why do they think that?’

‘Well, what it does produce is a facial flush, and I guess someone thought that meant blood was rushing to the brain and you know what that can only mean.’

‘More brain power.’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ She shook her head in disdain. ‘Fitting that people with so little brain power would come to that conclusion. A normal dose is five milligrams. It’s enough to slightly raise the heart rate and the blood pressure. As I said, it’s often prescribed by doctors, but it’s also available over the counter. I don’t think you can overdose on it. In fact, it’s even put into some breakfast cereals. Niacin and thiamin.’

‘So if the normal dose is five, what did CC have in her?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Phew. That’s a lot of cereal.’

‘Captain Crunch a suspect?’

Gamache laughed, the wrinkles round his eyes falling into familiar folds.

‘What would twenty milligrams have done to her?’ he asked.

‘Produced quite a flush. A classic hot flash. Sweating, discoloration of her face.’ Dr Harris thought some more. ‘I’m not all that familiar with it so I looked it up in the pharmacopoeia guide. There’s nothing dangerous about niacin. Uncomfortable, yes, but not dangerous. If the person was hoping to kill her, he got it wrong.’

‘No, I think he got it just right. He did kill her, and niacin was an accomplice. CC de Poitiers was electrocuted, right?’

Dr Harris nodded.

‘And you more than anyone knows how hard that is.’

Again she nodded.

‘Especially in the middle of winter. She had to not just touch a power source, but she had to be standing in a puddle with metal boots and…’

He left it dangling. Dr Harris thought about it for a moment. Tried to see the scene in her mind. The woman standing in a puddle at the chair, reaching out – ‘Bare hands. She had to have bare hands. That’s how he did it. And I thought you’d asked for the extensive blood work in case of poisoning.’

‘The gloves. I kept asking myself, why did she take off her gloves? Why would anyone?’

‘Because she was hot,’ said Dr Harris. She loved her job but she envied Gamache and Beauvoir the ability to put all the pieces together.

‘Someone at the community breakfast slipped her enough niacin to produce a flush. How long would it take?’ Gamache asked.

‘About twenty minutes.’

‘Enough time for her to be at the curling when it came on. At some point she began to get flushed and removed her gloves and probably her hat. We’ll see in the pictures tomorrow.’

‘What pictures?’

‘There was a photographer there. CC hired him to take publicity shots of her mingling with the common folk. His film gets to the lab tomorrow.’

‘Now why would she do that?’

‘She was a designer, a kind of minor Martha Stewart. Just came out with a book and was considering a magazine. The pictures would have been for that.’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘Most people hadn’t. But she seemed to have this image of herself as a successful and dynamic motivator. Like Martha, her business went beyond what colors the walls should be – white, by the way – into a personal philosophy of life.’

‘Sounds odious.’

‘I can’t get a grasp of it,’ admitted Gamache, leaning back comfortably. ‘I don’t know whether she was completely delusional or whether there was something almost noble about her. She had a dream and she pursued it, and damn the doubters.’