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“I left, so I don’t know. I hope so, but there comes a point where the guards and workers are as deranged as the prisoners. Rational decisions are few and far between. It’s brutal.”

Gamache got up. “I’m asking a few people over to the Old Train Station—”

“Your Incident Room.”

“Oui. I need some help with the painting.”

“To move it?”

“No. To decode it.”

CHAPTER 28

It looked farcical.

The villagers stood in front of The Paston Treasure, each of them holding a magnifying device to their face.

After inviting them over, Armand had gone into Monsieur Béliveau’s shop. It was a true “general store,” selling everything from fish and oranges to rubber boots and … magnifying glasses.

Clara held her grandmother’s blue enamel opera glasses. Myrna and Billy had their own glasses. Ruth peered through binoculars. No one had the courage, or the will, to ask what she used them for.

Olivier, Gabri, Robert and Sylvie Mongeau, and Reine-Marie each accepted magnifying glasses from Armand.

They were examining something none had noticed before. The small markings that the art conservator had found.

Reine-Marie was the first to lower her magnifier. “They’re everywhere.”

“It’s so strange,” said Gabri. “What do they mean?”

“Don’t you think if he knew,” snapped Ruth, shoving Rosa toward Gamache, “he wouldn’t need us?”

The duck nodded.

Now that they could see them, it seemed, like the roofline and the hidden room, so obvious. These weren’t marks to simulate texture, these were symbols.

“Lots of paintings have hidden messages,” said Clara. “Even the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted an angel essentially giving the pope the finger.”

“And writers do it all the time,” agreed Reine-Marie. “They’re only just now decoding Dickens’s Tavistock letter.”

It was the letter Jérôme Brunel was working on as part of his hobby. Armand still hadn’t heard back from the retired doctor and made a mental note to follow up.

“You know the Voynich manuscript?” Myrna asked Reine-Marie.

“Is that the Jesuit one?” she asked. She had a vague memory of reading about it.

“Right. Voynich was an antiquarian bookseller. In 1912 he bought a collection of books from some Jesuit college, and among them was a manuscript from the 1400s. It’s more than two hundred pages all written in this unknown language, with illustrations and graphs. No one knows who did it, or why. Or what it means.”

“It’s strange that the marks would be put on the elephant,” said Olivier.

“Elephant?” asked Sylvie. “There’s no elephant in the painting, is there?”

“No, I mean the bronze statue. A guest took it from the B&B,” said Gabri. “It was in the attic too, with the same markings etched in. I tried to track down Madame Mountweazel but couldn’t find her.”

“Mountweazel?” said Reine-Marie. “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel?”

They turned to her, amazed.

“Oui,” said Gabri. “You know her? You weren’t even here when she was.”