Moralès greeted the man, closed the door behind him and the two of them sat down. Érik Lefebvre was already sitting behind the two-way mirror. Not that Cyr was paying attention, but Moralès read him his rights and stated his name and rank for the benefit of the recording. He had spent the night drifting between his bedroom and the kitchenette. Between his guilt and his wife’s resentment.
‘I’m listening,’ Moralès began.
Clément Cyr was staring at the table. He didn’t know where to start. The words seeped out one by one. ‘I feel guilty. I can’t live with myself anymore.’
His voice faded to a whisper.
‘I killed my wife.’
The detective frowned. Clément Cyr had only been away for about an hour and a half that night. Moralès couldn’t see how the man could have killed his wife, taken her out to sea aboard the Close Call II and dumped her overboard, let alone getting off the boat, swimming for kilometres, going home to change and getting back to the auberge in such a short time. And why would he have left the boat drifting? If the man had wanted to get rid of his wife, surely he would have just thrown her overboard and taken the boat back to the wharf.
‘Can you tell me how it happened?’ the detective asked.
Clément Cyr’s eyes were crazed with fatigue. He could barely focus. His hands were clammy and trembling.
‘Let’s run through things in order, shall we? Tell me what happened when the two of you got home.’
The fisherman nodded, still staring at the table, but seeing right through it.
The road, La Radoune, slowly comes into focus in the twin beams of the headlights. White and yellow lines mark the way, ditches lie on either side for those who stray.
‘Angel said she was feeling dizzy.’
Her hair is a little tousled, and she looks pale in that pretty white dress of hers that still fits after all these years.
‘When we got home, she drank a glass of water. She was sitting in the kitchen. She was feeling queasy too. I just thought she’d had too much wine. I waited a while, not long, then I said I wanted to go back into the village.’
She looks at him with more than a shadow of doubt. Seriously? It’s our tenth wedding anniversary, I’m not feeling well and you’ve got somewhere better to be?
‘It was the end of my season too, and I wanted to let my hair down with the others. Plus, it’s the done thing for the skippers to buy the rounds for their crew. I didn’t want to look cheap.’
Angel stands and totters to the bathroom in her pretty dress with a heavy head and eyes filled with disappointment. He tries to follow her, but she shuts the door and locks herself in with her hurt feelings. He’s talking to her, trying to argue his case.
‘When you’re an adult and you’re feeling sick, you throw up and go to bed and ride it out. I told her she was grown-up enough to look after herself. There’s never anyone there to hold my hand when I throw up.’
There’s no answer on the other side of the door. He can hear some sounds, though. She’s opening the medicine cabinet, popping the lid off a bottle, maybe an antinausea pill. He figures that will help her to sleep. She fills a glass with water. He keeps talking, but she refuses to break her silence.
‘But Angel got in a huff.’
Eventually, she emerges from the bathroom and breezes right past him, doing her best to make him feel pathetic, him and his stubborn determination to go back for a drink with the boys. It works. He feels ashamed, but he’s entitled to go back to the bar if he damn well wants to. Except he’d rather he had his wife’s blessing. He wishes she would just say ‘It’s all right, go have fun. I’m going straight to sleep anyway’. Because she loves him and she wants him to be happy, that’s what she always tells him. Because they do love each other, don’t they?
‘So I got changed, because I wasn’t going to spend a night on the tiles with the boys in my fancy suit, was I?’
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say it’s all right. She doesn’t say I love you, I’m going to sleep and have a fun night, sweetheart. She’s sulking. And that rubs him the wrong way. He feels hurt and humiliated. He tears off his suit angrily. He tells her it’s over. That’s the last time he’s going to dress up in that fake wedding suit and play this stupid masquerade every bloody anniversary. Do any of their friends do that? No, they don’t.
‘But we had a fight. Every couple has rows, don’t they? I’m sure you’ve had plenty.’
As well as feeling nauseous, she’s angry because he’s showered her with hurtful words. So she replies with a sharp tongue, and the vein pulses at her temple like it always does when she loses her temper. But he’s not going to be a pushover. She always gets the last word, and he’s not going to let her steamroll him again. Because that’s always the way it goes, isn’t it? No it isn’t, she protests. Everything’s fair and equal in their relationship. That’s not true, he hurls. He tells her she’s being petty. Selfish. A spoilt child.
‘Then I left.’
He’s taking out his anger on the road, yanking the wheel, putting his foot down too hard. He’s a free man. He loves Angel, but she has no right to control him. He can’t say he’s spent the last ten years of his life obeying her, that wouldn’t be true, but they certainly do what she wants more often than not. He’s sure of it. She makes a lot of their decisions. Usually that’s all fine by Clément, but not all the time.
‘I went back to the auberge.’
Clément Cyr couldn’t hide the shame in his eyes as he looked across to Moralès again. ‘Listen, detective, I’m not proud of what I did. But I hate being talked to like a naughty child and told I’m not allowed to go out.’
‘What happened?’
‘When I got back to the auberge, I hit the bottle. Hard.’
Moralès frowned in puzzlement.
‘And I turned my phone off. I didn’t want her ruining the rest of the night by calling me all the time. I just thought, if I didn’t pick up, she’d be angry, but at least she’d sleep on it and we’d smooth things over the next day. She knows how religious I am about paying for my crew’s rounds. Not every skipper still does it religiously, but my old man always did and I’ve kept the tradition going. I’m a man of my word when it comes to that sort of thing.’
He rubbed his clammy hands together.
‘I got myself hammered and I slept it off at the auberge. But now I can’t stop thinking that my wife wasn’t well and I left her. I should never have done that to her, you understand? While I was out getting bladdered with my crew, Angel, she was…’
The giant of a man let his words sink into silence.
Moralès understood. Clément Cyr had been playing the scenes from that night over and over again in his suffering, grieving mind. One never-ending loop of the events he had experienced and the parallel events he imagined had unfolded in his absence. The fisherman was drinking and laughing with his workmates, reminiscing about the season they’d had and getting so drunk he could barely walk and had to be helped to bed in the auberge, in the nearest room, of course, since he was such a heavyweight. He had passed out fully clothed, sleeping off the drink while the few still standing at the bar joked about him. Meanwhile, Angel, his wife, was unwell. She was wearing her wedding dress, because she’d just celebrated ten years of marriage with the man she loved, but he’d left her to hold her own hair back over the toilet bowl. She was exhausted from the season that just ended, confused, perhaps depressed. She felt bitter and alone. So she decided she’d had enough. Of fishing, of her husband, of the ridiculous choice he’d made that night. She felt humiliated because the others at the bar would obviously have seen that her husband would rather abandon her, the woman skipper they all poked fun at behind her back, for them.