Yvette Nichol began wandering around the kitchen. She couldn’t stand the talking any more. On and on the woman went. At first Hazel had sat with her at the Formica table but eventually she got up to check the cookies and put the cool ones into a cookie tin.
‘For Madame Bremmer.’ As though Nichol cared. While Hazel talked and worked Nichol wandered the room, looking at the cookbooks, the collection of blue and white dishes. She moved to the photo-laden fridge, covered with pictures, mainly of two women. Hazel and another. Madeleine, Nichol decided, though the smiling, attractive woman and the shrieking thing in the morgue looked not at all alike. Picture after picture. In front of the Christmas tree, at a lake, cross-country skiing, gardening in the summer, hiking. In each one Madeleine Favreau was smiling.
Yvette Nichol knew something then, something she knew no one else would see. Madeleine Favreau was a fake, a fiction, an act. Because Nichol knew no one could possibly be that happy.
She stared at one showing a birthday celebration. Hazel Smyth was fixated on something outside the frame and wearing a funny baby blue hat with sparklers; Madeleine Favreau was in profile, listening, her head resting on one hand. She was looking at Hazel with unmasked adoration. A fat young woman sat beside Madeleine, stuffing cake into her face.
Nichol’s cell phone vibrated and thrusting the photograph into her pocket she walked into the stuffed living room, kicking a sofa leg as she went.
‘Merde. Oui, allô?’
‘Did you just swear at me?’
‘No.’ She reacted rapidly, habitually, to the rebuke.
‘Can you talk?’
‘A little. We’re at a suspect’s house.’
‘How’s the investigation going?’
‘Slowly. You know Gamache. He plods along.’
‘But you’re back with him now. That’s good. Don’t lose track of him. There’s too much at stake.’
Nichol hated these calls, hated herself for answering the phone. Hated even more the excitement she felt when the phone rang. And then the inevitable letdown. Treated like a child yet again. There was no way she could admit she was really with Beauvoir. She was supposed to be with the Chief Inspector then at the last minute the two had gone into the tiny office off the Incident Room and when they’d come out Beauvoir had stridden to the door calling for her to join him.