“You lived in old Quebec City, at number sixteen rue des Ramparts?”
Mundin stared.
“And your mother used to read Charlotte’s Web to you and your sister, as children?” Beauvoir persisted. He didn’t move from his seat, but it felt as though with each question he was approaching Mundin, getting closer and closer.
And Mundin, baffled, seemed to sense that something was approaching. Something even worse than what had already happened.
The lights flickered as the blizzard threw itself against the village, against the bistro.
“Where did you get your name?” Beauvoir asked, staring at Old Mundin across the table.
“What name?”
“Old. Who gave you that name? Your real name is Patrick. So where did Old come from?”
“Where everything I am came from. My father. He’d call me old son. ‘Come along, old son,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll teach you about wood.’ And I’d go. After a while everyone just called me Old.”
Beauvoir nodded. “Old. Old son.”
Old Mundin stared at Beauvoir, his face blank then his eyes narrowed as something appeared on the horizon, very far off. A gathering. Terror, the Furies. Loneliness and Sorrow. And something else. Something worse. The worst thing imaginable.
“Old son,” Beauvoir whispered again. “The Hermit used that expression. Called Olivier that. ‘Chaos is coming, old son.’ Those were his words to Olivier. And now I say it to you.”
The building shuddered and cold drafts stole through the room.
“Chaos is coming, Old son,” Beauvoir said quietly. “The man you killed was your father.”
“He killed his own father?” Clara whispered. “Oh, dear God. Oh my God.”
It was over.
“Mundin’s father faked his death,” said Beauvoir. “Before that he’d built the cabin and moved the treasures. Then he returned to Quebec City and waited for spring, and a stormy day to cover his tracks. When the perfect conditions came he put his coat by the shore and disappeared, everyone assumed into the St. Lawrence River. But in fact, into the forest.”
There was silence then, and in that silence they imagined the rest. Imagined the worst.
“Conscience,” said Myrna, at last. “Imagine being pursued by your own conscience.”
And for a terrible moment they did. A mountain of a conscience. Throwing a lengthening shadow. Growing. Darkening.
“He had his treasure,” said Clara, “but finally all he wanted was his family.”
“And peace,” said Myrna. “A clear and quiet conscience.”
“He surrounded himself with things that reminded him of his wife and kids. Books, the violin. He even carved an image of what Old might look like as a young man, listening. It became his treasure, the one thing he could never part with. He carved it, and scratched ‘Woo’ under it. It kept him company and eased his conscience. A bit. When we first found it we thought the Hermit had made a carving of Olivier. But we were wrong. It was of his son.”
“How’s Old?” Clara asked.
“Not good.”
Beauvoir remembered the look of rage on the young man’s face when the Inspector had told him the Hermit was in fact his father. He’d murdered the very man he meant to avenge. The only man he wished was alive, he killed.
And after the rage, came disbelief. Then horror.
Conscience. Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew it would keep Old Mundin company in prison for decades to come.
Gabri held his head in his hands. Muffled sobs came from the man. Not great dramatic whoops of sorrow, but tired tears. Happy, confused, turbulent tears.
But mostly tears of relief.
Why had Olivier moved the body?
Why had Olivier moved the body?
Why had Olivier moved the body?
And now, finally, they knew. He’d moved the body because he hadn’t killed the Hermit, only found him already dead. It was a revolting thing to do, disgraceful, petty, shameful. But it wasn’t murder.
“Would you like to stay for dinner? You look exhausted,” Beauvoir heard Clara say to Gabri. Then he felt a soft touch on his arm and looked up.
Clara was talking to him.
“It’ll be simple, just soup and a sandwich, and we’ll get you home early.”
Home.
Perhaps it was the fatigue, perhaps it was the stress. But he felt his eyes burning at the word.
He longed to go home.
But not to Montreal.
Here. This was home. He longed to crawl under the duvet at the B and B, to hear the blizzard howl outside and do its worst and to know he was warm, and safe.