Page 176 of The Grey Wolf
“I hired him to do some investigating, figuring no one would suspect him. I was wrong.”
Gamache turned to the Abbot, who was watching this with wide eyes.
“And you? How did you get involved?”
“Does it matter, Armand? Please, time’s short—”
“How?” Gamache all but shouted.
“My prior.” Philippe took another step away from Gamache. “He wrote and asked me to go to Grande Chartreuse. There was some crisis. We had to meet in secret.”
“And you went? All that way? He just had to ask?”
“Would this young man”—the Abbot pointed to Beauvoir—“have to ask twice? When I got there, one of the monks, a Brother Robert, told me what he’d heard in a confessional.”
“And what was that?”
“That Montréal’s water was going to be poisoned.”
“That’s all? No more?”
“No. And he had no proof. But he was terrified, Armand. Panicked.”
“Who told him that?” demanded Beauvoir.
“I asked, but he didn’t know. At least, I think he did know but wouldn’t say. He begged me not to tell Sébastien, my prior, or his friend Sister Irene. He didn’t want to put them in danger. I lied to them and said he hadn’t told me anything.”
“What did Brother Robert give you?” Gamache asked.
“You mean evidence? Nothing, I told you, he had nothing to prove any of it.” The Abbot stared at Gamache, who just waited.We wait. We wait.And finally Dom Philippe understood. “I asked him to write out a page of the Chartreuse recipe, and to give me a bottle.”
“Why?” Beauvoir seemed mesmerized by this soft-spoken man.
“If anything happened to me, I wanted those found in my possession so that whoever investigated would know I’d been to Grande Chartreuse. I’m pretty sure Brother Robert has more to say, but I couldn’t get it out of him. We said a prayer together, then I left.”
“You left them here for me,” said Gamache. “Why?”
“I knew I couldn’t stop whatever was going to happen. And neithercould Jeanne. We didn’t have proof. And I had to be careful. But you’d figure out who’d left them and go there. And get more out of him. You could stop it.”
“Some malady,” said Armand.
The Abbot nodded. “You obviously found them, but you’re here, not there. You didn’t understand.”
Beauvoir was about to say that Lacoste was there, talking to Brother Robert, but some instinct told him not to.
Gamache’s mind was working quickly, picking up the various shards of evidence and conjecture, examining them, then moving to the next. What the Abbot said fitted with what they’d discovered.
“You said Brother Robert told you he wanted to protect his friends—”
“Oui.”
“Think carefully. Did he actually say that, or was that your conclusion?”
The Abbot’s eyes narrowed as he cast his mind back to that great reckoning in the small cell. Brother Robert’s moment of truth.
“No. He didn’t actually say that, but why else would he ask me not to tell them anything?”
Isabelle Lacoste was not afraid of heights, but still, it was difficult not to succumb to the terrible, the traitorous temptation to let herself be dragged right over the edge in a sort of hypnotic state.
