At last the undertaker stopped talking and stepped off the mound of earth. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief, then reached into his jacket pocket.
‘Let me give you a couple of business cards. You’re a police sergeant, so you never know, eh? Feel free to hand one out, or even both of them. I’ve got plenty more, and if I get the chance, I’ll bring some down to the station, just in case.’
Moralès left the cemetery on autopilot. He drove to the supermarket and wandered through the aisles looking for products he couldn’t find. After going around in circles for a while, he went to the fish market then headed back to the auberge. He dropped the groceries in the kitchen and went up to his room. Something caught his eye on the way in. It was the origami seabird – he had no idea what kind it was – the intricately folded paper Simone Lord had left on the kitchenette table a few days earlier. Moralès had picked it up off the floor and kept for some reason. He took some painkillers and went back downstairs, turning on the ceiling lights in the dining room, then turning them off again, opting for the little lamps on the tables instead. They gave a more muted light.
He hadn’t looked at the sea at all.
Cyrille was dead. The ocean would make coral of him. Coral that might one day be turned into jewellery a bride would wear on her wedding day.
He unpacked the groceries, then picked up a measuring cup, opened the bag of flour and heaped two cupfuls into a mound on the counter. The wind must be blowing from the north. He could hear the waves crashing on the rocks behind the auberge. No. It wasn’t that. It was just the sound of the fridge compressor. He was hearing the sea everywhere he turned. He added oil and salt, then started to knead the mixture with his hands, adding water, little by little, turning the flour into dough.
‘Hi there.’ It was Simone Lord’s voice, so near and yet so far.
Moralès peered into the dining room and saw she was standing just inside the front door. By the looks of it, she’d just been on a boat. She bent down and took off her boots. Her socks got caught on the rubber and came off too. Moralès couldn’t resist stealing a glance at the delicate yet disconcerting curve of her heels. Simone pulled her socks on again, straightened up and came into the dining room.
‘I’ve done the calculations you asked me for – about how Angel’s boat would have drifted,’ she said. ‘From the dock at the Grande-Grave wharf, the lobster trawler has to be manoeuvred carefully for about a hundred and fifty metres to get out of the channel.’
She let her hair down, and her lively locks cascaded messily over her shoulders as she shook out all the tension of the day – like a warrior resting at last, Moralès mused.
‘That night, the tide was high around midnight. Angel’s death occurred in the morning hours, so the tide was going out. If the engine was off, it would have taken about two hours for the boat to get to where we found the body. Since the estimated time of death was after four in the morning, the killer would have had to have been at Grande-Grave around two o’clock.’
She stopped at the corner of the kitchen counter and made a clumsy attempt to smooth the wrinkles from her clothes. She looked uncomfortable. She lowered her voice. It wasn’t quite a whisper, but almost.
‘This morning, the coast guard brought a lobster boat back to shore that belonged to a fisherman in Caplan who, in all likelihood, went out to sea to die.’
Joaquin drifted to the bar, selected a bottle of wine and two glasses, and brought them into the dining room. He put the bottle and glasses down on a table. His body was aching. It wasn’t just the pain in his ribs. There was a stiffness in his shoulder and his head felt heavy. Not surprising, given the beating he’d taken.
‘Cyrille Bernard,’ Simone continued softly. ‘Someone at the station in Bonaventure told us he was a friend of yours.’
Last night there had been a magnificent full moon, perfect to pave the way for the ageing, ailing man. Moralès was aching in a place beyond the physical, a place the fisherman’s death had hit far harder than all the blows he had suffered the other night.
‘I’m sorry, Detective Moralès.’
He turned away from her and moved towards the kitchen counter. He draped a damp towel over the ball of dough, then picked up a bowl and reached for the tomatoes, mango, basil and a knife.
‘I’d like to offer my deepest condolences for your friend.’
He set about dicing the fruit. Behind him, Simone Lord’s voice had faded to silence. Joaquin swept the chunks of tomato and mango into the bowl and tore the basil.
‘I’ll leave you be, then…’
He drizzled some oil and squeezed a lime into the bowl, added the basil and pushed the salsa to the end of the counter so he could wipe the work surface clean. Leaning back against a kitchen unit, Simone Lord showed no signs of going anywhere. Moralès turned, looked her way without seeing her, found what he was looking for and moved towards her. She gulped. He reached a hand towards her, plucked a rolling pin from the shelf behind her, carried it back to the counter and placed it beside the ball of dough.
Simone straightened up and was getting ready to leave, when he started talking. Softly. She wasn’t sure if he was even talking to her.
‘When I was young, I used to go to Puerto Morelos for the school holidays. Both my parents worked, so I spent summers with my grandparents, who had a restaurant by the sea.’
Simone felt uncomfortable about staying, and about leaving too. He unwrapped the fish from their wax paper wrapping and put them on the counter.
‘It wasn’t really a restaurant. There were no signs, no tables and no menus. But my grandmother would always cook for people there.’
He reached for a slender, sharp knife and sliced the fillets, then put them on a plate beside the stove and wiped the counter clean.
‘It was my grandfather’s idea. He was a fisherman and, since he was afraid of dying at sea and leaving my grandmother destitute, he set her up with a little business so she could stand on her own two feet. She wasn’t the kind of woman to refuse an offer like that.’
He floured the work surface, heated the hotplate, pulled the damp towel away and kneaded the ball of dough for a few strokes before breaking a chunk off.
‘They had a house by the beach, across from the wharf. My grandfather built a brick oven into a wall that could be heated from inside or outside the house. There was a huge baking stone in there, and just beside it was a little window with a tiled sill that made a good hatch to pass dishes through.’
Moralès rolled the pinch of dough into a circle.
‘My grandfather used to go out fishing every day. There were four of them on board. My grandmother and I, we would watch them until they were a blur on the horizon.’
He placed the flattened circle on the hotplate and started to roll another. The dough puffed up in the heat as if it were breathing.
‘Then, she’d light the fire from the inside in the middle of the day, and once it got going all the local kids would come around and add more wood. She used to give them little sweet pancakes in exchange. In the summer, I was in charge of the fire – me and my friends.’
He flipped the tortilla. It was golden brown on one side.
‘We used to pick up driftwood on the beach and put it out to dry in the sun. By the side of the river was where we put the dampest wood. The drier stuff went under the palm tree and we stacked the wood that was ready to burn beside the house. When we saw the embers were dying, we would grab some of the wood that was ready to burn and toss it onto the fire.’