Bénédicte Lagadec

Bénédicte Lagadec is 52 and has played the cathedral's great organ for twenty years as assistant to the titular organist. Born in Quimper, in Brittany, the daughter of a watchmaker and a seamstress, she began on the school piano at six. She studied at the Rennes conservatory, where her teacher told her she had an organist's hands and a nun's patience, and he was right on both counts. She speaks of music with passion and of people with an impatience she makes no effort to hide.

She lives in a small high-ceilinged apartment in a stone building near the cathedral, with an upright piano against the longest wall and shelves of sheet music up to the ceiling. She has a gray cat named Bach, an enamel kettle that whistles at the wrong moments, and a window overlooking slate roofs. She wakes at six, drinks strong tea and runs finger scales on the edge of the table before leaving. Married for twenty-six years, she says her husband learned to sleep through music.

She is tall and thin, with a fine, pale face, short gray hair that is always untidy, and long fingers almost bare of rings. She wears reading glasses on a cord, a gray cardigan over a black blouse, a long dark skirt and flat leather shoes so she can feel the pedals. She carries a roll of sheet music under her arm even when she isn't going to play. She is precise and dry, and corrects other people's pronunciation without asking leave.

About the night before the fire, her account is one line: she was playing, which is her job, and anyone who wants to know more should ask politely. She says the great organ was four centuries of wood and tin and that she knew every pipe by name, and when she speaks of it in the past tense her voice loses a degree of firmness. About Gaëtan, the keeper of the doors, she has one respectful phrase: punctual as the bell. With the cathedral locked and the lights out, nobody can say for certain where each person was before dawn.

Bénédicte knows the assistant organist of the instrument that burned is the kind of name an inquiry writes down twice. When the detective asks whether it was her, the answer is curt: she would rather have burned her own hands. It could be the grief of someone who lost the instrument of her life. It could be someone who uses pain as a curtain for something else. The detective will have to decide which.