It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. It started as a vague sense that something was different. Not wrong, not threatening, just a little different.

Brian wouldn’t have noticed. His back was to the set and his eyes were closed. But Armand sensed it, then saw it.

There were more items on the set. The tatty furniture was the same, but there were more books on the shelves, and little ornaments filled some of the empty spaces.

Armand cocked his head to one side, looking at the items. They were too far away to see clearly, though one caught his eye. He stared at it, and then stood up.

Walking to the wings, he climbed the few steps to the stage and into the floodlights. Brian, hearing the footsteps, opened his eyes.

“Leaving?” he asked, with more than a little hope in his voice.

“Not yet,” said Armand, distracted, staring at the items on the bookshelf. Then he took a step to his left and bent down, reading the spines of the books. Some were dusty old volumes that had been there before, no doubt bought in bulk at a rummage sale and used for props in many productions. But there were a few others, including—he bent closer and put on his reading glasses—Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, Barrier Trajectories and one called Applied Physics, Theory and Design.

Straightening up, his eyes moved swiftly over the bookshelf, the desk, the chest of drawers, all meant to convey the living room of a boardinghouse in the Fleming play.

And then his eyes stopped. There, at the back of the desk behind a pen set, was a small photograph in a silver frame of a smiling man with a little girl in pigtails leaning against his knee.

Gamache brought out the photo of the three scientists and compared the faces. Both smiling. Both slightly disheveled. Both Guillaume Couture.

And the girl was almost certainly Antoinette Lemaitre, when she really was a girl and not a woman-child.

He reached for his cell phone and called Isabelle Lacoste.

“Antoinette brought her uncle’s things to the theater,” he said. “They’re scattered around the set on the stage.”

“Are the plans there?” she asked immediately. “The firing mechanism?”

“I don’t know yet, I just discovered it.”

Brian had come over and was standing next to Gamache. He reached out for the framed photograph but Gamache stopped his hand.

“We’ll be over right away,” said Lacoste. “Don’t touch anything.”

It was out before she realized what she’d said.

“We’ll try not to,” said Gamache, eyeing Brian.

“I’m sorry, patron,” said Lacoste. “Of course you won’t.”

After he’d hung up, Gamache asked Brian if he could point out which props had been there for a while and which ones might be new.

Brian took his time, pointing to, but not touching, the pen set, the photo, some books, some bric-a-brac.