A Rule Against Murder

The next day is Canada Day. As Gamache updates Irene on the investigation, she grows increasingly rude, and he becomes more gracious in return. They talk about her children and whether they love each other. Irene brings up Honoré, insulting him to provoke Gamache, but he responds with equanimity, knowing that she is lashing out in pain. She claims that David Martin had kept Julia away from the family and poisoned her against them.

Later, as Gamache is walking down to the dock, Bean runs by him. Bert is once again sitting on the dock, and they talk about Charles Morrow and his relationship with the children. As Charles’s best friend and business partner before he was Irene’s husband, Bert has insight into the children after a lifetime of observation.

Bert tells Gamache that he is like his father, and Gamache asks what Honoré was like. Bert explains that he was a coward, but he was also extraordinary because he changed his mind, something that not many people are able to do. Gamache then tells Bert that they have discovered that Bert was a prisoner of war, captured in Burma when the Japanese invaded. He tells Gamache that they are getting closer but haven’t figured everything out yet.

At breakfast, Beauvoir shares what he has learned about bees. He wonders at his own adoration of Veronique, and Gamache warns him not to become biased in the investigation. Beauvoir leaves, upset, and Gamache drives with Peter and Clara to Three Pines for their Canada Day celebration. It is also Gamache and Reine-Marie’s wedding anniversary, and she greets them as they arrive.

Clara and Reine-Marie go to the Morrows’ house to see Clara’s painting, and Gamache and Peter are left alone together. Gamache asks Peter which bathroom stall the message about Julia was written in, and Peter confesses that he had written the message. He feels that he has been waiting, all these years, to be discovered. Gamache suggests that Peter killed Julia to prevent her from telling Irene. When Peter protests that Irene has no hold on him, that he had refused the inheritance, Gamache suggests that this is the very reason he is more obsessed with the money than his siblings. Peter retaliates by being cruel about Honoré, and Gamache tells him the rest of his father’s story.

After his protests, Honoré had joined the ambulance corps and, at the end of the war, had gone into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. When he saw the devastation of the people there, he realized that he had been wrong to protest. He came home and apologized, which is part of the story that is never told. Peter is shocked to hear that Honoré spent the remaining years of his life speaking on the war and raising money for refugees. He admits then that he wrote the message about Julia because he was jealous of her; now, he can’t believe that he had destroyed his family for something so small.

They return to the village green and sit with the villagers at the barbeque. While staring at ants surrounding a puddle of spilled soda, Gamache finally understands how the statue of Charles Morrow had come off its pedestal and who the killer might be.

At the end of the barbeque, Gamache, Peter, and Clara return to Manoir Bellechasse. Before they leave, Reine-Marie tells Gamache that she recognized Chef Veronique. Although he is surprised when she tells him, the talented chef’s isolation suddenly makes sense. Upon approaching the lodge, they find the road filled with emergency vehicles, and Beauvoir tells them that Elliot, the waiter, has disappeared. Although it is dark and raining, they are forming search parties.

Gamache asks Madame Dubois for Elliot’s employment records, then gives her a list of phone numbers to call. He then goes in search of Colleen and asks about the ants and bees on the marble cube the day before the statue arrived. He also asks her why, throughout the investigation, she has protested that it wasn’t her fault. She tells him that Elliot and Julia had been flirting on the other side of the statue, and she had been working. She stood up and put her hand on the statue, and it moved a little bit.

Gamache keeps Colleen with him as he calls the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Royal Academy, and a cemetery in Montreal. Then he calls David Martin and gets a list of his investors. When he hangs up, Irene and Madame Dubois arrive to tell him that Bean is missing. Gamache realizes that he had not found the truth soon enough, but he is not sure why the killer would involve Bean.

He directs Colleen to block the lodge’s driveway and goes himself to block the service entrance, knowing that the killer will try to escape. The killer pulls up behind him and, finding the exit blocked, runs back toward the lodge. Gamache follows the murderer, who has left a wet trail up to the attic. Although terrified of heights, he climbs out onto the roof where the killer is holding Bean—still clutching their myth book—hostage.

The killer, Pierre Patenaude, is willing to talk to Gamache but panics when Beauvoir starts to climb out onto the roof as well. He threatens to throw Bean off the roof, and so Beauvoir disappears again. He is now dangling Bean off the roof. The myth book falls from Bean’s hands down to the lawn below, and Gamache believes that Pierre will drop the child.

He calms Bean down by talking about Pegasus and looks over the edge of the roof at the chaos below. Bert Finney is standing below them, arms outstretched to catch the child, and one by one everyone else raises their arms as well. Bean kicks Pierre, who releases the child, and Gamache leaps forward to catch them.

Gamache catches Bean’s shirt with one hand and the copper ridge at the peak of the roof with the other but can feel his grip slipping. They begin to slide down the roof, but Pierre catches his hand and pulls them up. Later, Gamache, Beauvoir, Pierre, Madame Dubois, and Chef Veronique sit in the kitchen, recovering with cups of tea. Madame Dubois remembers that when Pierre had first come to the lodge as a young man, he had been very angry. She always wondered what had brought him to the isolated lodge.

Pierre confesses that his father had at one time been David Martin’s boss. He had invested with David early in his career and been bankrupted. Pierre had watched David grow richer as his father struggled and became increasingly bitter. When Gamache questions why he killed Julia, who had nothing to do with David’s investments, he says that, as the family’s visit had gone on, he had become angrier about everything that the family had that his parents did not.

Gamache’s team finds Elliot at the nearest bus station—Pierre had told him that he was suspected in the murder and to run, in order to frame him. After their conversation, the local Sûreté officers lead Pierre out of the lodge. Before he leaves the kitchen, Beauvoir reminds Madame Dubois and Chef Veronique that Pierre could have let Gamache and Bean fall but had instead caught them, giving them both a measure of peace.

With all interested parties present, Gamache reveals the final results of his investigation. He begins with his impressions of the family: He had realized immediately that their perspectives on themselves and each other were twisted. The children who were most successful were seen as mediocre, and vice versa. Julia had been forced out of the family and yet was seen as a deserter.

Thomas, Marianna, and Peter begin to argue among themselves until Bert interrupts to say that their father knew who they were and loved them for it. He believes that this was the secret that Julia wanted to tell them. Further, Bert tells them that Charles knew that Peter wrote the bathroom message and had still loved him. Peter, rethinking his message from Charles, thinks now that maybe it was just a clumsy expression of love and he had misinterpreted everything.

Gamache remembered when Bean was stung by a bee near the pedestal. Later, in Three Pines, when he saw the ants in the soda, he remembered the ants on the pedestal and realized how the statue had been moved. Spilling sugar from a bowl on the table, he slides the bowl across it, explaining that it is an old trick that was used to place statues. The statue is placed on a thick bed of sugar, which allows it to be positioned easily.

When they had all first arrived, the lodge was short of sugar because Pierre had laid a thick layer of it on the pedestal. The bees and ants were attracted to the sugar, but it was not otherwise noticeable. Later, the evidence easily washed away in the rain. Finally, Gamache reveals Pierre’s motive: his father’s bankruptcy at David Martin’s hands.

Beauvoir, who has been watching Chef Veronique throughout, suddenly knows from where he recognizes her. When he was a child, she had been a famous television chef. He remembered staying home sick and watching the show—it had been immensely popular throughout Canada. He also remembers that Veronique, then a nun known as Soeur Marie Angèle, had left television, and the order, very suddenly, and no one had known why.

Lacoste and Beauvoir are both still bothered by the position in which Julia was found, but Gamache cannot solve that mystery for them. He believes that perhaps it was the sight of her father, coming toward her, a sort of reconciliation for which she opened her arms.

Everyone begins packing to leave for home. Bean decides to leave the alarm clocks behind, trusting now that Marianna will wake them up. They join Reine-Marie, Clara, and Peter on the lawn, and Reine-Marie gives Bean another copy of the myth book, which she had found in Three Pines.

Gamache joins Bert one last time on the dock. He asks why Bert lied that he hadn’t been a prisoner of war. Bert replies that he never believed himself to be a prisoner, and so he had always been free. He counsels Gamache that he may, in some way, still be doing penance for his father’s mistake and reminds him that Honoré had changed his mind. He also mentions that Marianna is named after the islands from where the Americans had come to liberate Burma.

Reine-Marie tells Bean the story of Pandora. Peter wants to leave, remembering his mother directing the story to Peter as a child. However, Reine-Marie surprises him, revealing an ending to the story that he had never known, because his mother had never shared it: After all the evil was released from Pandora’s box, one thing had remained—hope.

Thomas and Sandra leave, and Peter takes Irene’s bags to her car. Bert had pleaded with her to tell her children about the neuralgia, the reason that she never touched them, but in the end she cannot. Peter reflects that he now believes that his father loved him, but he still can’t quite believe it of his mother.

Gamache calls his son, Daniel, to give his approval, if their baby is a boy, to name him Honoré. Daniel, however, tells him that they found out that the baby is a girl, and they will name her Zora in honor of the woman who took care of Gamache after his parents died—a refugee whom Honoré had brought back from the war. Gamache and Reine-Marie take their time to count their blessings.