Leeroy Roberts was ready to carry on. ‘I think my dear son-in-law, Clément Cyr, had a bit of a late night on Saturday,’ Leeroy said, with more than a hint of sarcasm. ‘He spent the night at the auberge, and his wife wasn’t home when he came back the next morning. He must’ve gone down to the wharf and thought it was strange the boat wasn’t there, then called Jean-Paul Babin to see if he knew where Angel was. He must’ve known Jimmy would get wind of it. And us too.’
‘Why wouldn’t he have called you directly?’
Leeroy pursed his lips in contempt. ‘Just because we’re Gaspesians, it doesn’t make us friends. And just because he married my daughter, it doesn’t mean we like each other.’
‘Does your daughter often go out to sea alone?’
‘Yes, and it’s something she enjoys.’
‘So what was it that worried you?’
‘It was Jimmy who had me worried. We don’t call each other often. Then the phone rings out of the blue and he tells me his sister’s gone off with the boat. That was a strange thing for him to be phoning me about. I mean, she’s a fisherwoman, so there’s nothing unusual about her taking her boat out. So anyway, I tried Angel’s mobile. No answer. Then I asked my Bruce to call her on the marine radio.’
‘She didn’t answer,’ the older of the Roberts brothers said flatly, still leaning against the door. This man had the kind of lean, tough strength that only came from working outdoors. His arms were covered with boats and mermaids tattooed in shades of black and blue. He wasn’t a talkative man, but that didn’t make him distant. He was the kind of skipper who wouldn’t hesitate to go out on deck in a raging storm.
Angel’s father picked up the conversation. Slowly. ‘Do you have children, detective?’
Moralès nodded. ‘Two grown-up sons.’
That seemed to buoy Leeroy’s confidence. ‘You know how they are. They’re not kids anymore, but you still worry about them all the time. And these bloody phones! We’re so used to people picking up right away, when they don’t answer, we don’t know what to think. So anyway, I was umming and ah-ing for a bit, then I thought I should get Bruce to call Clément back and ask him how long it had been since he’d heard from Angel. And when that son-in-law of mine told me he hadn’t heard a word from her since the night before, and that she still had her wedding dress on…’ Suddenly, the words were hard to find. ‘That gave me the shivers. Like in the films, when they set things up so you know something bad’s going to happen. So I said to Bruce, “Let’s go out and have a look.” And off we went.’
‘What time was that?’
‘We hadn’t eaten, so probably about four o’clock.’
‘Who was on board when you went out?’
‘Bruce and me. We came down to the wharf, and when we got here we saw Jimmy as well. He twisted my arm to let him and Ti-Guy Babin come aboard too. Angel’s his sister. I couldn’t exactly say no. He said if we found the boat, we’d need help bringing it back, and that convinced me.’
Simone Lord and Érik Lefebvre raced back up the stairs.
‘It’s the first time I’ve seen a boat anything like this. I can’t believe all the berths you’ve got down there. They must be practical.’
No one turned to look at Lefebvre, so he felt awkward. He shuffled over to the long grey bench, sat down and casually crossed his legs, showing a flash of his cowboy boots.
‘Listen, I don’t know where you’re at, but I need to know how these guys went about finding the boat,’ Simone cut in rudely.
‘We’re getting there,’ Moralès said softly.
Leeroy carried on telling his story. He was looking at her, that fisheries woman, because she knew the sea, but the detective from Caplan was the one he was talking to, because he had children of his own.
‘We went to the end of Forillon Point and looked all around the mouth of Gaspé Bay, but we couldn’t see anything. So we started calculating.’
Simone Lord’s eyes widened. ‘Calculating what?’
It was the son who answered. ‘The wind and the tide in the last twelve hours.’
‘And that led you to the boat?’
Bruce Roberts shook his head firmly. ‘Nope. You know as well as I do, twelve hours is far too long a time for anyone to calculate exactly where a boat will have drifted.’
A suspicious smile crept across Simone’s lips. ‘So what did you calculate?’
Bruce Roberts chose to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t like the fisheries officer’s sarcasm. Instead Leeroy turned to Moralès and gestured to his eldest son.
‘My Bruce knows his navigation. He’s better at it than I am. He said we should head south to follow the Labrador Current. If we went in the right direction, but faster than a boat would drift, we might find it, he reckoned. That made sense to me. So we went out that way and kept our eyes peeled the best we could.’
He hesitated before saying more. He knew what they’d done sounded fishy. Even he thought Bruce seemed a bit too confident about where they should be looking, but he’d defend his son if he had to.
‘By a stroke of luck, this morning Jimmy saw something reflecting the sun on the horizon. “That’s it,” I said. So we went for a look-see, and that was it.’
Leeroy Roberts seemed to drift away. He let his gaze wander to the stairs, as if his daughter might be down there.
‘When you got there, what did you see?’ asked Moralès.
The old fisherman looked up and frowned, not grasping what the detective meant. ‘Well, the boat, of course.’
He had felt a sharp pain in his chest when they pulled up alongside it.
‘What kind of condition was it in?’
This time, it was Bruce who answered. ‘It was in good shape. We didn’t go aboard, us two. Jimmy took charge of everything. The engine was off, but there was fuel in the tank. When he turned it on, we saw the boat was all right.’
He was going to say something else but stopped himself and clenched his jaw.
Moralès pressed him. ‘Is that all?’
Bruce Roberts shrugged.
Simone chimed in. ‘What did your brother say, exactly?’
‘Jimmy said, “Well, it’s a nice surprise all the same.”’
Leeroy looked at Moralès, wondering if he knew what it was like to have children who said stupid things sometimes. Children who, even as adults, said things that could break your heart. Children you might even be a little ashamed of sometimes. Moralès met the man’s gaze and nodded. Maybe it was human nature to pass the worst of our indiscretions on to our children.
‘Did you notice anything else?’
Bruce Roberts drew a breath. ‘The deck was open.’
Moralès didn’t understand, but had the feeling this might be something important. Bruce noticed the question mark hanging in the air.
‘Come look at the other lobster trawlers,’ he explained, walking over to the portside window and pointing to the only two still in the water this late in the year. They were moored near the processing plant. Moralès joined him at the window.
‘See how the deck is closed at the stern? In Nova Scotia, where the conditions are harsh and the boats go fishing for lobster way offshore, the shipyards started building boats with open transoms. The fishermen string their lobster pots together by the dozen. Each one of those they call a line of traps. Then when they pull up a line, they bring it over the side of the boat. They empty the traps, bait them and stack them up on the deck so when they go back out again, they just have to pitch the first one overboard and all the others will slide right off the stern, one at a time.’ Bruce Roberts was still looking out at the water as he spoke. ‘My sister doesn’t like to strain her crew, so she wanted to make it easy for them to send the traps out the back, like the guys in Nova Scotia do. But because her boat isn’t too big and she likes taking her friends out for a spin, she didn’t want to have a transom that was open all the time. So she put a tailgate in the back instead, like a pickup truck. She opens it when her deckhands are dropping the lines of traps. And when she takes the boat out for pleasure, she keeps the transom closed to make sure no one falls overboard.’