Young Émilie Longpré had known then that they’d lose her. Had known then their luminous friend couldn’t survive in the real world. And now the Li Bien ball had returned to Three Pines, but without its creator.

‘May I hold it?’

Gamache placed it in her hands as he had the box and again she held it, but this time in hands closed tightly round it, as though hugging and protecting something precious.

He reached into his satchel for the last time and withdrew a long leather cord, stained with dirt and oils and blood. And dangling from it was an eagle’s head.

‘I need the whole truth, madame.’

Beauvoir was sitting next to Mother now, listening intently as he had when as a child his own mother had read stories of adventure and tragedy.

‘When CC first came here,’ Mother explained, ‘she showed an almost unnatural interest in us.’

Beauvoir knew instinctively that by ‘us’ she meant Émilie, Kaye and herself.

‘She’d drop in and seem to interrogate us. It wasn’t a normal sort of social call even for someone as maladroit as CC.’

‘When did you realize she was El’s daughter?’

Mother hesitated. Beauvoir had the impression it wasn’t to think up a lie, but rather to cast her mind back.

‘It was a cascade. What put it beyond doubt for me was the reference to Ramen Das in her book.’ Mother nodded to the small altar by the wall with its sticks of stinky incense sitting in holders on a brightly colored and mirrored piece of cloth. Stuck to the wall above it was a poster, and below that a framed photograph. Beauvoir got up and looked at them. The poster showed an emaciated Indian man in a diaper standing by a stone wall gripping a long cane and smiling. He looked like Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, but then all elderly Indians did to Beauvoir. It was the same poster he’d disappeared into during his last visit. In the smaller photograph the same man was sitting with two young western women, slim and also smiling, and wearing billowy nightgowns. Or maybe they were curtains. Or sofa covers. Astonished, he turned to Mother. Wild-haired, pear-shaped, exhausted Mother.

‘That’s you?’ He pointed to one of the women. Mother joined him and smiled at his amazement and inability to conceal it. She wasn’t insulted. It often amazed her too.

‘And that’s El.’ She pointed to the other woman. While both the guru and Mother were smiling, the other woman seemed to radiate. Beauvoir could barely take his eyes off her. Then he thought of the autopsy pictures Gamache had shown him. True, Mother had changed, but in ways recognizable and natural, if not attractive. The other woman had disappeared. The glow gone, the radiance dimmed and dulled and finally extinguished beneath layers of filth and despair.