“So you killed him and stole it.”
That was the Crown’s case. Olivier had killed the demented old man for his treasure, the one he kept hidden, the one found in Olivier’s bistro along with the murder weapon.
“No.” Olivier leaned forward suddenly, as though charging Beauvoir. “I went back for it, I admit that, but he was already dead.”
“And what did you see?” Beauvoir asked the question quickly, hoping to trip him up in the rush.
“The cabin door was open and I saw him lying on the floor. There was blood. I thought he’d just hit his head, but when I got closer I could see he was dead. There was a piece of wood I’d never seen before by his hand. I picked it up.”
“Why?” The word was snapped out.
“Because I wanted to see.”
“See what?”
“What it was.”
“Why?”
“In case it was important.”
“Important. Explain.”
Now it was Beauvoir who was leaning forward, almost crawling across the metal table. Olivier didn’t lean back. The two men were in each other’s faces, almost shouting.
“In case it was valuable.”
“Explain.”
“In case it was another one of his carvings, okay?” Olivier almost screamed, then threw himself back into his chair. “Okay? There. I thought it might be one of his carvings and I could sell it.”
This hadn’t come out in court. Olivier had admitted he’d picked up the wood carving, but said he’d dropped it as soon as he’d seen blood on it.
“Why’d you drop it?”
“Because it was a worthless piece of junk. Something a kid would do. I only noticed the blood later.”
“Why did you move the body?”
It was the question that hounded Gamache. The question that had brought Beauvoir back to this case. Why, if he’d killed the man, would Olivier put him into a wheelbarrow and take him like so much compost through the woods? And dump him in the front hall of the new inn and spa.
“Because I wanted to screw Marc Gilbert. Not literally.”
“Seems pretty literal to me,” said Beauvoir.
“I wanted to ruin his fancy inn. Who’d pay a fortune to stay in a place where someone had just been murdered?”
Beauvoir leaned back, examining Olivier for a long moment.
“The Chief Inspector believes you.”
Olivier closed his eyes and exhaled.
Beauvoir held up his hand. “He thinks you did do it to ruin Gilbert. But in ruining Gilbert you’d also have stopped the horse trails and if you stopped Parra from opening the paths, no one would find the cabin.”
“All that’s true. But if I killed him, why would I let everyone know there’d been a murder?”
“Because the paths were close. The cabin, and the murder, would have been discovered within days anyway. Your only hope was to stop the trails. Stop the discovery of the cabin.”
“By putting the dead man on display? There was nothing left to hide then.”
“There was the treasure.”
They stared at each other.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir sat in his car mulling over the interview. Nothing really new had come out of it but Gamache had advised him to believe Olivier this time, take him at his word.
Beauvoir couldn’t bring himself to do it. He could pretend to, could go through the motions. He could even try to convince himself that Olivier was indeed telling the truth, but he’d be lying to himself.
He pulled the car out of the parking lot and headed toward rue Notre-Dame and the Temps Perdu. Lost time. Perfect. Because that’s what this is, he thought as he negotiated the light Sunday afternoon traffic in Montreal. A waste of time.
As he drove he went back over the case. Only Olivier’s fingerprints were found in the cabin. No one else even knew the Hermit existed.
The Hermit. It was what Olivier called him, always called him.
Beauvoir parked across the street from the antique shop. It was still there, cheek by jowl with other antique shops up and down rue Notre-Dame, some high end, some little more than junk shops.
Temps Perdu looked pretty high end.
Beauvoir reached for the car door handle, then paused, staring into space for a moment, whipping through the interview. Looking for a word, a single, short, word. Then he flipped through his notes.
Not there either. He closed his notebook and getting out of the car he crossed the street and entered the shop. There was only one window, at the front. As he made his way further back, past the pine and oak furniture, past the chipped and cracked paintings on the walls, past the ornaments, the blue and white plates, past the vases and umbrella stands, it got darker. Like going into a well-furnished cave.