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“Mable,” said Billy, as rain pounded the roof overhead and cascaded down, creating a wall of water between them and the tree.

“Mable?” said Gamache and Godin together.

“Mable the maple,” said Billy. “It’s what my grandmother called her. We used to climb all over her. Fell out of her more than once. She was old in my day.” He shook his head and smiled. Then he remembered what had happened, and his smile fell from his face.

“So do our grandchildren,” said Monsieur Godin. “That’s why our son and daughter didn’t want it cut down. But they didn’t see…”

No, thought Armand. They didn’t.

Armand understood now why Billy had asked the question.

He turned to Monsieur Godin. “If she did want to hang herself, would your wife have chosen this tree?”

Godin, still staring at it, shook his head. “No. Never. She wouldn’t do that to the kids. To me. To the tree.”

The three men stared at Mable. Gamache believed him. Which meant, if Madame Godin did not take her own life, someone else did.

And it almost certainly had something to do with the letter. The one in his breast pocket.

“We need to talk, but first I need to make a call.”

Jean-Guy Beauvoir was sitting at his desk at Sûreté headquarters in Montréal when the call came through. It was mid-afternoon, and he was going over reports on the various investigations under way.

“Chief? Everything okay?”

“I think I’ve discovered a homicide,” said Gamache.

“Where?” said Jean-Guy, sitting forward and grabbing a pen.

“Just outside Cowansville. I need you to look up the file on a Patricia Godin. She died on April twenty-first of this year.” He gave the address. “It was ruled a suicide.”

“But you think it was murder?”

“I’m almost sure it was. She was cremated, so we can’t exhume her body, but I want the autopsy report and anything you can find from the local Sûreté.”

“They missed it?”

“Yes. They put it down to depression caused by a hysterectomy.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Oh, Jesus” was right, thought Gamache. He’d hoped they were well beyond the days when women went to a doctor with pain and it was dismissed as hysteria. When “that time of the month” became a euphemism for derangement, and menopause became an illness.

He would have words with the station commander, but first things first.

“How did you discover it?” Beauvoir asked.

When Gamache told him about the letter and the hidden room, Beauvoir was silent for a moment, then asked, “So you think someone killed her to stop her from reading the letter?”

“Maybe,” said Gamache. “But it was too late. The letter had already arrived, and she’d forwarded it.”

“So why kill her? Because she’d read it? Then why not kill Billy? Why not try to get the letter back? Presumably the murderer would have found out from Madame Godin where she sent it.”

“True. Before we go too far, we need to make sure it was murder.”

“I’ll get you the information and come down.”

Rejoining Monsieur Godin and Billy in front of the fire, he brought out the Stone letter.