Page 59 of The Grey Wolf
“Do you still have the clipping?”
“No. After a couple of sips, and when even Ruth gagged, I threw it into the fire.”
That, thought Armand, was a shame. He’d have liked to see it.
Armand turned his phone around. Olivier saw the photograph of a page fromLe Journal de Montréal. On it was the picture of a drink andthe recipe for the Last Word. Across the top of the photo was neatly printed,Chief Inspector Gamache. This might interest you.
“Yup, that’s it.”
Armand clicked off his phone and put it on the kitchen island. “When was the last time you heard of this cocktail?”
“Never. Never heard of it. And no one’s ever asked for one. And I can’t remember the last time I was asked for anything with Chartreuse in it.”
“It had Chartreuse?” Armand hadn’t actually read the recipe—why would he? It had seemed unimportant. But now he opened his phone again and enlarged the newspaper article. Sure enough, the green liqueur was the main ingredient.
Now another presence stirred the air. One a lot less friendly than the first. And still, Armand could not quite grasp it.
“Oui.”
“What was he like?”
“Older. I’d say in his early seventies. Slender. But his clothes…”
“Yes?” Even in his brief glimpse of the man on the village green, his clothing had struck Armand. And his hat. It was like something he saw in old photos of his father. No one wore hats like that anymore.
“They were in good condition,” said Olivier. “But out of date by about fifty years. Wide lapels. Fat tie. And his slacks and jacket didn’t quite fit him.”
Armand had noticed that too.
“It was like he got them from a secondhand store or the Salvation Army,” said Olivier.
Or, thought Armand, from the back room of a mission for the homeless. Or maybe from a prison locker, left there when convicted and picked up decades later when released.
Was Monsieur Gilbert someone he’d arrested for murder? But it could not have been fifty years ago. Armand would have been a boy. Precocious, for sure, but not to that extent.
“And his personality?”
Olivier dragged a stool around and sat across from Armand. He took a sip of his cappuccino and considered.
“Very polite. Soft-spoken. But he had a presence. A nice one. Calming. He asked questions and actually listened to the answers.”
“What sort of questions?”
“Oh, just about the village. How old it was. Why we chose to live here. He’d been up to St. Thomas’s. Called it a sanctuary.”
Armand smiled. It was the word that came to his mind too, when thinking of the tiny chapel.
It overlooked the village and smelled of the balance of time. Of weddings and baptisms and funerals. Of gatherings in the basement, where villagers brought deviled eggs and cucumber sandwiches without crusts, and brownies with marshmallows on top. Mostly they brought companionship, in celebrations and in grief.
But the overpowering presence in St. Thomas’s was that of three brothers, boys really, depicted in the stained-glass window. Marching to their fate in the Great War. Never to return home. And yet always there.
There was, in the little chapel, the stench of shame and the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable.
“Did you find out anything about him?”
“Monsieur Gilbert? I asked what he did, but he was vague. I can’t actually remember what he said.”
Which probably meant, Armand thought, that Olivier wasn’t interested in the answer.
