‘I’m at the police station in Gaspé,’ Joaquin replied.
‘On your own?’
Joaquin responded with a puzzled silence before he answered the question. ‘Pretty much. I’ve just pulled up out front in my car. Did you sleep all right? I tried to call you back last night, but you didn’t pick up. I didn’t leave a message. Your voicemail was full.’
That was true. After she’d heard from Renaud Boissonneau that Sébastien was on the Gaspé Peninsula, Maude had bombarded him with phone calls and text messages. At first he’d tried to ignore her, but she’d been so insistent he had turned his phone off.
‘I went to bed early. Are you going to be there long?’
‘I don’t know, but why don’t you come and join me?’
Sébastien let that sink in for a moment. He was still thinking he might turn around and go back to Montreal, even if his life there was crumbling to pieces. The previous morning, he had called his boss to arrange two weeks of holiday. His boss had always prided himself on treating his employees like gold, or so he said. But Sébastien’s request had been met with a frosty silence.
‘My father’s sick. He’s all alone in the Gaspé, so I’m at his bedside.’ A nervous Sébastien had blurted out this curious choice of untruth with all the ease of a teenager called to the headmaster’s office.
‘Right. And my grandma’s on her death bed. If you’re not here by noon, Moralès, you’re fired.’
His boss had promptly hung up and Sébastien’s cheeks had flushed with shame. He didn’t really care that he’d been shown the door. The decent restaurants in the city were always looking for chefs, and this one wasn’t the greatest place to work. But why had he lied?
‘I’ll give it some thought,’ he told his father. ‘If I leave Caplan now, Renaud Boissonneau might send out a search party. He’s desperate for another dance class.’
‘Forget about that and come here, OK? I’m staying at Corine’s … er … Auberge Le Noroît in Rivière-au-Renard.’
‘It won’t be easy to leave this comfy new mattress behind, you know.’
Joaquin Moralès cleared his throat. ‘Chiquito … I have a favour to ask you.’
Sébastien couldn’t remember his father ever asking him anything so bashfully. ‘All right, what is it?’
‘I’d like you to go to my telescope, look out at the sea, and write down what you see.’
‘The boats?’
‘Everything.’
‘OK.’
‘Then, I want you to go and … er … see someone.’
‘OK…’
‘Go down to the café by the wharf. Leave your car there and walk up the dirt track that goes under the railway bridge.’
Moralès junior realised he was holding his breath. Was his father sending him to see his mistress?
‘At the end, you’ll see the cemetery on the right and a house on the left. Under a window, beside a woodpile, there’s a short stepladder. Climb that and duck inside the window.’
‘Listen, Dad, I’m not sure I…’
Joaquin pretended not to hear. He carried on as smoothly as a gynaecologist slips on a pair of gloves.
‘You’ll find yourself in Cyrille Bernard’s bedroom.’
‘Cyrille? That’s a man’s name?’ Now Sébastien didn’t know what to think.
Joaquin thought it was a strange thing for his son to say. ‘Yes. A fisherman. A friend who’s sick. Why do you ask?’
‘No reason. Wait a sec, let me jot that down.’
Sébastien went to find something to write with.
‘Tell him the name of the woman whose disappearance I’m investigating is Angel Roberts, and she went missing from a lobster trawler around Rivière-au-Renard. Got that?’
‘Yep.’ Sébastien found it a bit ridiculous for his father to be sending him to see a fisherman as part of his investigation.
‘He might know her, so be diplomatic. Then, tell him what you saw on the sea this morning. Or the other way around. Yes, tell him about the sea first. Understand? Do that first.’
Sébastien agreed.
‘Tell him everything. Even the stuff you don’t think is important.’
‘Got it.’
‘He’s a sick man.’
‘I understand. You get back to your investigation. I’ll go see this friend of yours.’
‘Thanks, chiquito.’
‘Talk to you soon.’
When he’d driven around the waterfront, Moralès had been surprised to see that the Close Call II had disappeared. He had stopped at the wharf to ask people there if they’d noticed anything, but no one had even seen the lobster trawler leaving the port, let alone who had made off with it. At the coast-guard office, three men sitting comfortably in front of a big flat-screen TV lackadaisically replied they weren’t paid to keep watch over the waterfront.
When Moralès walked into the station in Gaspé and approached the bulletproof glass at the front desk, the receptionist’s fingers were flying across her computer keyboard at a dizzying pace.
‘Good morning, Ms Roch. I’m here to see Constable Lefebvre again.’
The recalcitrant receptionist gave no indication that she’d heard or seen him. Moralès knocked gently on the glass and spoke a bit louder, this time saying ‘please’.
Thérèse Roch quickly tapped a code into the phone.
‘Officer Moral-less to see you.’
She hung up without waiting for an answer. With a manner like that, she should be working airport security, Moralès thought. A second later, Érik Lefebvre opened the door and blew the receptionist a kiss, which she dismissed with a shrug. How she saw him do it was a mystery, because she didn’t look up.
‘Simone and I are reassessing the search area. Want to join us?’
Moralès followed Lefebvre into the depths of the building. ‘No. I trust you to do your job. And I don’t know the area. You’re better off with Officer Lord. The boat has disappeared, though.’
Lefebvre stopped and frowned. ‘Angel’s boat?’
‘Yes. It’s not at the wharf in Rivière-au-Renard anymore.’
Lefebvre led the way to his office.
Moralès paused when they passed the meeting room, where Simone Lord and two other people were scrutinising a map of the Gulf of St Lawrence. ‘Officer Lord, I need you for a second.’
She looked up disapprovingly, but fell into step.
The three of them went into Lefebvre’s office, which was somehow filled with even more stuff than the day before. Even the little school desk he had cleared was now buried under piles of who-knows-what that seemed to be growing by themselves.
Moralès turned to Simone Lord. ‘The Close Call II isn’t at the wharf anymore. Besides the deckhands, who else would have a key to the boat?’
‘Angel’s brother who brought it back yesterday. Jimmy Roberts. He probably kept the key. And the husband.’
Lefebvre rubbed his chin, grabbed one of several half-empty mugs of coffee, took a sip, winced, pushed it away and picked another one instead. ‘Why would they take off with the boat? Should we assume they’ve stolen it?’
Simone Lord shook her head. ‘No. The guys must have taken it back to its home port to get it ready for winter. Didn’t you seal it off?’
‘No. I thought the tape the forensics team put up would be enough to stop anyone going aboard, let alone take it to sea.’
Simone Lord smirked condescendingly. ‘Do you really think a scrap of yellow tape is going to intimidate a fisherman?’
Moralès had worked in the big city on cases far more dangerous than this, so he wasn’t going to let a fisheries officer lecture him about intimidation. ‘How are the search parties on land doing?’ he asked, turning to Lefebvre.