‘Not any more. Your wife was insured for hundreds of thousands of dollars.’

Something bad just happened, and now Lyon deeply regretted telling the truth. What would President Roosevelt do? Captain Picard? CC?

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Lie.

‘Your signature’s on the policy. We have the documents.’

Something very bad indeed was happening.

‘You’re an engineer by training, and an inventor. You could easily hook up the booster cables that electrocuted your wife. You’d know that she’d need to be standing in water and have bare hands. You could have slipped her the niacin over breakfast. You knew her well enough to know she’d take the best seat under the heat lamp.’ Now Gamache’s voice, which had been so reasonable it somehow added to the nightmare, grew very quiet. He reached into the satchel and brought out a photograph. ‘What’s troubled me from the very start was how the murderer knew CC would grab the chair in front of her. It’s not the sort of thing people do. Now I know. This is how.’

He showed Richard Lyon the picture. Richard saw his wife in the minute or so before she died. Beside her Kaye was saying something, but CC’s attention was riveted on the chair in front.

Richard Lyon blanched.

‘You, sir, would know too.’

‘I didn’t do it.’ His voice was tiny and reedy. Even the voices in his head had fled, leaving him alone now. All alone.

‘He didn’t do it,’ said Myrna twenty minutes later.

‘How d’you know?’ Gamache asked, settling into the rocking chair. He stretched his long legs out in front of the woodstove, which was radiating heat. Myrna had stirred up a hot rum toddy for him and it sat on a stack of New York Review of Books on the blanket box between them. Gamache was thawing out.

‘He sat beside me on the bleachers the whole time.’

‘I remember you told me that, but is it possible he left for a few minutes without you noticing?’

‘As you were walking here from the old Hadley house would you have noticed if your coat had fallen off, just for a few minutes?’ She had a twinkle in her eye as she asked.

‘Maybe.’ He knew what she was getting at, and didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear that his perfect suspect, his only perfect suspect, couldn’t have done it because Myrna here would have noticed the sudden absence of Lyon’s body heat, if not his personality.