Gamache, who’d read CC de Poitiers’s book, was interested to see that Mother, while strictly accurate, had left some crucial pieces out. Like the Li Bien ball. The basis of CC de Poitiers’s teachings and the one thing passed on to her from a long dead mother. She talked about it in some detail in the book and it had struck Gamache as the only part of her story that was actually meaningful to her. It was as though CC had indeed been given this gift from her mother and knew it to be precious, but didn’t know how or why. And so she’d manufactured an entire belief system around it.

She made the Li Bien ball into something holy. And now it was nowhere to be found. He’d had agents search her home in the Notre Dame de Grace quartier of Montreal. They’d come up with nothing, except a desire to leave its antiseptic atmosphere. Agents had again searched the old Hadley house, and found nothing.

Of course, it was possible he was wrong and the Li Bien ball never existed. Maybe Mother was right and she’d made that up too.

‘Wasn’t there something about light too?’ he asked, wondering what Mother would say to that.

‘Well, yes, but that was even more convoluted. She seemed to think anything light or white was spiritual and colors, like red or blue, were evil. She even went so far as to assign each color an emotion. Red was anger, blue was depression, yellow was cowardice or fear, something like that. I can’t remember, except that it was pretty weird. I don’t know if she believed it herself, but the message she was peddling was that the lighter and whiter you were the better.’

‘Was she a racist?’

Mother hesitated. It seemed to Gamache she was longing to paint CC in as bad a light as possible, and racist was pretty bad. But, to give her credit, she didn’t.

‘I don’t think so. I think she was talking about interior stuff. Emotions and feelings. Her idea was that if all our emotions are kept inside, and if they’re in alignment, then we’re balanced.’

‘What did she mean by alignment?’

‘You must remember science class? This is where CC was actually quite clever, and very dangerous in my opinion. She’d take something that had a bit of truth or fact and then stretch it beyond recognition. In science we learn that white is the presence of all colors. If you combine them all you get white, whereas black is the absence of color. So, according to CC, if emotions are colors and you’re emotional, angry, sad, jealous, whatever, then one color is dominant and you’re out of balance. The idea is to achieve white. All colors, all emotions, in alignment.’