The dead leave everything behind them. Especially the living. Angel’s death was a tremor, and a shock wave of suffering was now spreading onshore. Her husband was beside himself, her brother looked like he’d been punched in the face and her father was hanging his head. The sun was beating down on the wharf mercilessly, almost too viciously.
Moralès watched the father and son weave their way through the crowd of onlookers, get into their pickup truck and leave the wharf. He looked over at his own son and saw that Sébastien was clenching his jaw. Moralès went to stand by his side. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have come.’
‘It’s all right.’
The detective’s mobile rang. It was Lefebvre.
‘Now you’re investigating a suspicious death, Detective Sergeant Moralès.’
‘It’s time for you to poke your nose out of your office, Constable Lefebvre. Come pick me up at the Sandy Beach wharf, and bring the whole case file with you … in duplicate.’
Sébastien was mentally going around in circles. He had no desire to go down to the kitchen and see Corine, answer her questions and make small talk.
He picked up his phone. In the hurry that morning, he had forgotten to take it with him. A stack of text messages and missed calls greeted him. Maude. He was suffocating. Seeing the dead woman’s husband that morning, Sébastien had pondered the meaning of love. He threw the phone onto the bed, grabbed his windbreaker and left the room. He nodded to his father and Lefebvre, who were getting down to work in the kitchenette, then went downstairs and out the door to let the fresh air wash over him.
He walked east for a while, then turned on to the Rue du Quai. He wanted space to breathe, to let everything spinning around his head to percolate through his mind, but he couldn’t even put words to what he was feeling. All he could think of was his father leaning over the dead woman and uttering those three words, en la madre.
He walked down the side of the coast-guard building and made his way to the water. There were five boats moored in the port: the coast-guard launch, which the crewmen were busy cleaning; three small trawlers; and a shrimp trawler at the big wharf around the corner. He kept on walking in that direction.
When he and his brother were younger, their mother had a habit of saying, whenever their father came up with a crazy idea, that it was the Mexican blood boiling over in his mind. They used to laugh about it. But did their father used to laugh too? Sébastien couldn’t remember.
To his right, dozens of boats – a few massive shrimp trawlers, but mostly fixed gears, lobster trawlers and sailboats – were lined up on a patch of wasteland, resting in their winter cradles. Most of the fishing boats had a pickup truck parked beside them, a sign that men were at work.
Was there a chance he could be wrong about his father? What if he wasn’t the cowardly, submissive man he had come here to confront?
He walked past the boat ramp and fish market, and continued along the paved road towards the big wharf. To the north was a low, wide cement wall, on the other side of which an army of concrete tetrapods formed a solid breakwater to deflect the energy of the waves. Vehicles were parked here and there along the big wharf.
A dozen souls were standing on the wall casting their lines into the water. Sébastien kept churning his and his father’s stories over in his mind. All the things they’d said and all the things they hadn’t were tumbling together in one big nauseating knot of deceit.
People nodded to him in greeting and resumed their fishing in silence. The lines caught the sun as their bait arced through the air, their lures breaking the surface with some of the few tepid sounds there were to be heard in the late afternoon.
The fishermen reeled in their hooks with an unhurried rhythmic cadence, slowing, delivering their coups de grâce, doing it all again. But the fish weren’t biting. Time enveloped the fishermen’s movements in its mechanical cycle, suspending them in its eternal waiting room. Sébastien stood and watched.
Lefebvre was impressed. Moralès had turned the kitchenette of his holiday apartment into an active incident room. Laid out in meticulous order across the large table were all the documents typical of a criminal investigation: timelines for the day and night prior to the disappearance, and the search efforts; names of people, grouped by family and boat crew, with the names of the boats as well; descriptions of places and the distances between various points on land and at sea. A map of the Gaspé Peninsula, complete with handwritten notes, was taped to the wall. A list of questions was poking out from under another page.
Lefebvre gave his superior officer a look of admiration. This was how a real detective did things. The constable tidied some papers to make room at the table for himself and Simone Lord, who was yet to arrive. Moralès reached into the fridge for three cans of ginger ale, then sat down. Lefebvre hadn’t seen him take any notes at all, and had started to think the detective was disorganised and, quite frankly, a bit of an amateur. Now he stood corrected. This was where it was all happening. He took a seat at the corner of the table.
Moralès passed him a large notepad and pen. Lefebvre was thrilled; he had left his in the office. He opened the pad to a blank page.
‘I want us to run through the list of people Angel saw last Saturday,’ Moralès began.
He wasn’t waiting for Simone Lord. He wasn’t sure if she was even going to be there. He had to admit, he had admired her work that morning. When he had seen how the captain of the coast-guard launch treated her, he had realised what a bunch of macho men she must have had to work with, and figured that might explain her vehement determination. Then, she had bravely thrown herself overboard. Moralès had tried to imagine what she must have felt: the chill of the water against her diving suit, the contrast between the white of the dress and the darkness of the water, the suffocating sense of being confined by the diving gear, the waves and the proximity of the body of a young woman who could almost be her daughter. He didn’t know if Simone had children. He knew nothing about her. Cyrille Bernard had given him grief before for being obsessed with death and not taking enough interest in life.
‘Four days before their tenth wedding anniversary, Angel Roberts and Clément Cyr went to dinner at her father, Leeroy Roberts’ place,’ Lefebvre summarised.
The door opened discreetly. Simone Lord came in and sat at the other side of the table, opposite Moralès. The detective felt strangely relieved by her arrival, as if he had been holding his breath while waiting for her. She pulled a clipboard out of her bag, flipped to a blank page and picked up a pen. Lefebvre said hello to her and turned to Moralès.
‘Just before that, they stopped in to see Clément’s mother for an apéritif.’
Moralès frowned. ‘I didn’t know that.’
Simone Lord gave a sarcastic little laugh. Moralès tensed. He understood very well what that laugh meant: he didn’t know anything about Angel Roberts. Come to think of it, what had he learned about her? That she liked to go camping with her husband, that she tended a vegetable garden with her best friend, that she worked with her uncle at dawn? Not very much. What Simone Lord didn’t know, was that Moralès was most interested in the way other people saw Angel Roberts. Who might have imagined a scenario that led the fisherwoman to her death, and why?
Lefebvre opened his can of ginger ale. ‘They went there at the end of the afternoon,’ he continued. ‘Clément’s mother’s name is Gaétane Cloutier. She lives around Penouille – not far from Cap-aux-Os, with her partner, Fernand Cyr.’