‘OK, here we go.’ Clara sat down and hit the play button.

A barge was approaching the dreary shore. Katharine Hepburn, as an aging Eleanor, was wrapped in shawls, splendid and brittle. There was no dialogue, just a long, pastoral shot of the boat, the oarsmen and the queen arriving.

The barge was almost at the shore, and the tape went strange. Just for a moment. It squirmed.

‘There.’ Clara hit pause. ‘Here, let me show you again.’

Twice more she rewound and hit play and twice more Eleanor arrived for her devastating Christmas with her family.

Clara paused the picture at the very moment it went squiggly. The prow of the barge almost filled the screen. No faces were visible. No actors at all. Just leafless, lifeless trees, a near dead landscape, gray water and the bow of the boat. Nothing. Lemieux might be right, thought Gamache.

He leaned back on the sofa and stared. Eventually the pause released itself and Clara had to rewind, play and pause again.

The minutes went by.

‘What do you see?’ he asked everyone in the room.

‘The boat,’ said Clara.

‘Trees,’ said Peter.

‘Some water,’ said Beauvoir, anxious to say something before everything was taken.

Lemieux could have kicked himself. There was nothing left to say. He caught Gamache looking at him with amusement, and something else. Approval. Better to say nothing than say something just for the sake of speaking. Lemieux smiled back and relaxed.

Gamache turned back to the screen. Boat, trees, water. Was it just a coincidence CC had stopped the movie here? Was he trying to read way too much into this? Had she stopped just to get a drink or go to the washroom? But the tape wouldn’t stretch from just one pause; she’d have to have stopped it here many times to cause the damage.

He got up and stretched his legs.

‘No need to keep staring. There’s nothing there. You were right, and I was wrong. My apologies,’ he said to Lemieux, who was so stunned he didn’t know what to do.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Clara, walking with them back to the mudroom. ‘I thought I was on to something.’

‘And you might have been. You have an instinct for crime, madame.’

‘You flatter me, monsieur.’

Had Peter been a dog his hackles would have risen. Try as he might he couldn’t quite get over his jealousy of Gamache and his easy relationship with Clara. In the mudroom Gamache pulled a book from his coat and presented it gently to Clara. After speaking to Myrna he had an inkling of what he was about to do, and wished he didn’t have to.

‘How kind, but I already have Ruth’s latest book.’

‘But not this one,’ he said almost in a whisper. Peter strained to hear the words, as did the others.