The Brutal Telling

“What were the code letters?” asked Gamache, in a hurry now. Anxious to get there.

Beauvoir scrambled in his pocket and brought out his notebook.

“MRKBVYDDO under the people on the shore. And OWSVI under the ship.”

He watched as Gamache worked to decode the Hermit’s messages.

A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

S  I  X  T  E  E  N  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S

Gamache read the letters out as he found them. “T, Y, R, I, something . . .”

“Tyri,” Beauvoir mumbled. “Tyri . . .”

“Something, K, K, V.” He looked up at Beauvoir.

“What does it mean? Is it a name? Maybe a Czech name?”

“Maybe it’s an anagram,” said Gamache. “We have to rearrange the letters.”

They tried that for a few minutes, taking bites of their dinner as they worked. Finally Gamache put his pen down and shook his head. “I thought I had it.”

“Maybe it’s right,” said Beauvoir, not ready to let go yet. He jotted more letters, tried the other code. Rearranged letters and finally staggered to the same conclusion.

The key wasn’t “seventeen.”

“Still,” said Beauvoir, dipping a crusty baguette into his gravy, “I wonder why that number’s up there.”

“Maybe some things don’t need a purpose,” said Gamache. “Maybe that’s their purpose.”

But that was too esoteric for Beauvoir. As was the Chief Inspector’s reasoning about the Queen Charlotte Islands. In fact, Beauvoir wouldn’t call it reasoning at all. At best it was intuition on the Chief’s part, at worst it was a wild guess, maybe even manipulated by the murderer.

The only image Beauvoir had of the moody archipelago at the very end of the country was of thick forests and mountains and endless gray water. But mostly it was mist.

And into that mist Armand Gamache was going, alone.

“I almost forgot, Ruth Zardo gave me this.” Gamache handed him the slip of paper. Beauvoir unfolded it and read out loud.

“and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck

and caress you into darkness and paradise.”

There was, at least, a full stop after “paradise.” Was this, finally, the end?

THIRTY-TWO

Armand Gamache arrived in the late afternoon on the brooding islands after taking increasingly smaller planes until it seemed the last was nothing more than fuselage wrapped round his body and thrust off the end of the Prince Rupert runway.

As the tiny float plane flew over the archipelago off the coast of northern British Columbia Gamache looked down on a landscape of mountains and thick ancient forests. It had been hidden for millennia behind mists almost as impenetrable as the trees. It had remained isolated. But not alone. It was a cauldron of life that had produced both the largest black bears in the world and the smallest owls. It was teeming with life. Indeed, the first men were discovered in a giant clam shell by a raven off the tip of one of the islands. That, according to their creation stories, was how the Haida came to live there. More recently loggers had also been found on the islands. That wasn’t part of creation. They’d looked beyond the thick mists and seen money. They’d arrived on the Charlottes a century ago, blind to the crucible they’d stumbled upon and seeing only treasure. The ancient forests of red cedar. Trees prized for their durability, having been tall and straight long before Queen Charlotte was born and married her mad monarch. But now they fell to the saw, to be made into shingles and decks and siding. And ten small carvings.

After landing smoothly on the water the young bush pilot helped extricate the large man from her small plane.

“Welcome to Haida Gwaii,” she said.

When Gamache had woken early that morning in Three Pines and found a groggy Gabri in the kitchen making a small picnic for the drive to the Montreal airport, he knew nothing about these islands half a world away. But on the long flights from Montreal to Vancouver, to Prince Rupert and into the village of Queen Charlotte, he’d read about the islands and he knew that phrase.

“Thank you for bringing me to your homeland.”

The pilot’s deep brown eyes were suspicious, as well they would be, thought Gamache. The arrival of yet another middle-aged white man in a suit was never a good sign. You didn’t have to be Haida to know that.