‘I have no idea.’ Now Mother looked genuinely puzzled. It was, Beauvoir thought, the first real thing about her. ‘I came in and she was standing over there, straightening the pictures.’ Mother indicated some framed photographs on the wall and a couple on what looked like a small shrine. ‘She had her fingers on everything in the room. Everything had been moved.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, kind of lined up. When the classes are over the students just toss the pillows into the corners, as you can see. I like it like that. It’s God’s will where the pillows land. I don’t like imposing myself too much.’

Another wave of nausea washed over Beauvoir.

‘But CC didn’t seem to be able to enter a room without touching and straightening everything. Very unevolved. No room for the spirit if you need to do that. All the cushions were neatly stacked and lined up with the wall, all the pictures in perfect alignment, everything just so.’

‘Why did she come here?’ Gamache asked.

‘I don’t really know. When she saw me she looked surprised, as though I’d caught her doing something wrong. After she left I looked around to see if anything was missing, she’d looked so guilty. She tried to cover it up by being aggressive. Very typical.’

‘Of what?’ Gamache asked.

The question seemed to stump Mother and Beauvoir wondered whether she wasn’t used to being questioned.

‘Well, of unhappy people, of course,’ she snipped after a moment. ‘I had the impression she was looking for something, and I don’t mean enlightenment. I think she was so deluded she actually thought she had that. But a less enlightened person would be hard to find.’

‘Very discerning of you,’ said Gamache. Mother looked closely for signs of sarcasm. ‘What makes you think she thought she was enlightened?’

‘Have you read her book? It’s smug and self-satisfied. She had no center, no real beliefs. She grabbed whatever philosophy floated by. A bit of this, a bit of that. She’d cobbled together a bumpy, pitted, muddy spiritual path. It reminded me of Frankenstein. She’d cannibalized all sorts of faiths and beliefs and came up with that Li Bien.’

The word ‘crap’ was implied.

‘She wasn’t balanced.’ Mother lifted her arms and spread them out in what looked like an embrace, the folds of her purple caftan dripping down so that she resembled something out of a Renaissance painting, by a not very good artist.

‘Tell me about Li Bien,’ Gamache said.

‘It has something to do with holding emotions inside. She seemed to think emotions were at the root of all our problems, so the trick was to not show them and best of all not feel them.’

‘And Li Bien itself, is that an ancient teaching, like Zen?’

‘Li Bien? Never heard of it. As far as I know, she made it up.’