‘Are you feeling better?’ the nurse asked. ‘The doctor’s on her way.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly eight o’clock. The doctor gave you a sedative earlier. Your wife is here. She wanted to be with you when you woke up, but I think she’s gone to powder her nose.’
His wife? Moralès struggled to sit up. Had Sarah come all the way here? He tried to calculate how many hours had passed, but it hurt just to think about it. Still, he realised Sarah couldn’t have driven here in such a short time. She must have flown.
The nurse took his pulse. ‘I’ll leave you to rest for a moment,’ she said.
He closed his eyes. He had walked right into Ti-Guy Babin. That much he remembered. He moved a little. That wasn’t too bad. Pain was something you got used to. He felt like he had a migraine. Everything was fuzzy. Had Sarah somehow found out that he had asked his ex-colleague to tail her. Who would have told her? Surely not Doiron himself. He was the colleague Moralès had always trusted the most, back in Montreal. His friend. He should invite him out here fishing sometime. He must have hit his head. Nothing was clear. How did he get here? He opened his eyes again. The nurse finished writing her notes on his chart and was just about to walk out the door. He could ask her to stay, but he didn’t feel like asking a stranger all these questions. She left the room. He heard her run into someone in the corridor.
‘Go ahead, he’s just woken up.’
Moralès forced a smile. He would rather discuss his marriage issues elsewhere, and above all, in different circumstances. The door swished open and a woman stepped in. But it wasn’t Sarah.
‘Ah, we meet at last!’
He blinked, disoriented. A tall redhead with short, tight curls was standing at the end of the bed, peering at him. He felt a surge of panic and tried to sit up straight.
‘Don’t worry. I don’t mean you any harm! But you must listen to me, detective. I’ve tried no end of times to get in touch with you. I’ve been to the police station, I’ve left my details at the front desk, but you haven’t made time to see me or pick up the phone.’
Moralès sighed with discouragement and pain and flopped back onto his pillow.
‘My name is Dotrice Percy, Detective Moral-less. I hope you don’t mind me passing myself off as your wife, because I have some important revelations for you.’
She pulled a big hospital armchair closer to the bed and perched herself on the edge of the seat to make sure the detective could see her clearly. She was wearing a loose dress with the loudest of patterns. Moralès closed his eyes. Was this a nightmare, or were the drugs giving him hallucinations? Either way, it was an acutely unpleasant experience.
‘I see things, Mr Moral-less.’
He thought about Lefebvre’s idiotic utterance – ‘I saw the seer who saw me’ – and consoled himself with the thought that the painkillers would take the edge off the insufferable interlude he knew was coming.
‘I know you can hear me. You’re a sceptic; I can sense it. Your eyes are closed, but you can hear me. That’s the way most people live. My eyes are wide open. The eyes in my body, and the eyes of my mind. That’s how I see things other people don’t. With the eyes of the soul.’
There were worse things than getting beaten up by Ti-Guy Babin, Moralès thought.
‘Like every true seer, I adhere strictly to certain rituals, such as those devoted to the passing of the seasons. These are special moments, when one can make contact with the forces of the ascendant and transcendent universes. I know these realities escape you, but when the equinox comes, the air is charged with a raw vibration that must not be wasted. Especially in a time of lunar growth. The stars, Mr Moral-less, speak to us in a language all their own, through waves that sound, to the uninitiated, like whispers.’
She took a deep breath. Audibly, as if she were trying to suck the dust from every corner of the room. ‘It’s not easy for me to be in this place. It reeks of cancer and sick energy. This hospital is hurling silent screams. Within these walls, it’s a world of suffering that’s crying out to us.’
Moralès opened his eyes and stared at her without a word. If he ruffled her feathers, she would surely tell him he had the rancid energy of the lungs of a subhuman smoker. Or some other sort of nonsense. He hoped that a glare of hardened steel would be enough to make her spit out whatever she had to say. She took another deep breath and raised her arms to the sky like two halves of a circle and brought them down again, interlacing her fingers at her navel in a gesture of receiving.
‘The night of the equinox, I was there.’
‘When do you mean? Where?’
‘The night when Angel Roberts went missing, I was meditating on the land of our red ancestors. Like a good sister-daughter of the moon, I was practising an ancient meditative custom where the all-powerful breath of the whales meets the earth. And that’s where the vision came to me. The monster.’
‘The monster?’
‘A naked monster, with a translucent appendage and a shrivelled phallus.’
‘En la puta madre!’
Before this investigation had started, Moralès couldn’t remember the last time he’d uttered that old curse; and this time it was a more vulgar version than the one that had crossed his lips when they retrieved Angel Roberts’ body. It was the one he used to hear from the toothless mouth of his maternal grandfather, who had been a fisherman. Now it surged forth of its own volition, and he was sure the clairvoyant would claim it was her – making things resurface from the depths of time.
Dotrice advanced towards him with her hands at her navel, joined and open at the same time, as if she were a baker carrying an armful of bread. ‘The monster came right towards us.’
Joaquin raised his arms to push her away. The clairvoyant was so caught up in reliving her moment of enlightenment, she didn’t seem to notice.
‘The humans. The seers.’
‘Dotrice, get out of my room.’
‘He crossed right through the meditative circle and disappeared into the heather.’
Moralès rummaged beneath his bed sheets and eventually found and pressed the call button to alert the nurses’ station. Dotrice stood and lowered her arms, then opened them wide and welcoming in front of her. She looked like Jesus with the children, Moralès thought.
‘Our mothers, and our mothers’ mothers, and their mothers before them read the signs and placed trembling fragments on the surface of the depths. They warned us that the sea is a liar, and all men are traitors!’
She walked towards Moralès like a zombie, then stopped and pointed both index fingers at him.
‘Hypocrites,’ she said in a throaty whisper.
The door to the room opened abruptly. Sébastien walked in, followed by the nurse, but that didn’t deter Dotrice, who continued as if in a trance.
‘I implore you to ask me, Moral-less, what celestial truth is holding my mind captive.’
‘Ah, don’t be swayed by father’s Mexican charm,’ Sébastien purred, taking control of the situation. He grabbed the clairvoyant by the hand, snatched up her bag – and her bloody crystal ball, Moralès thought – and set about ushering her out of the room.
The nurse kicked into action, her recent training on victims of family violence still fresh in her mind. Powerless to prevent Sébastien strong-arming Dotrice from her parallel universe into a hospital corridor, she turned her wrath on Moralès with an icy stare. ‘What makes you think you can treat your wife like that?’