‘I’m surprised your son didn’t tell you, because the two of you seem so close. It’s obvious he looks up to you.’
Moralès put his fork down, He thought back to the morning Sébastien had washed up at his place in Caplan, hiding behind his box of pots and pans.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything, but in a place like the Gaspé, secrets are hard to keep.’
What was it that his son had spoken about the other night? Loyalty. To whom? Joaquin Moralès felt uncomfortable. The way everything had happened suggested that Sébastien had come to see his father to ask for some sort of permission. What for, though? There was something he wasn’t seeing.
‘This is a breath of fresh air for Kimo. It’ll do her good. She needs to see that love has nothing to do with jealousy and competition.’
They had made fish tacos together. A family tradition. But what had they really talked about? The relationships we choose. He could picture Sébastien’s phone sitting on the kitchenette table upstairs. His son was trying to get something off his chest. But what? He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
Detective Sergeant Moralès stared at Corine without seeing her. Suddenly he had lost his appetite.
‘Aren’t you finishing your plate, Joaquin? Where are you going? Was it something I said?’
‘Fast-forward the video,’ Simone Lord insisted.
‘Why, are you in a hurry?’
Lefebvre took his feet off the conference-room table with a sigh and reached for the mouse. The fisheries officer had been granted access to a link to view the recording from the camera online. The technician from the marine research institute had explained to Simone that they always set up three wooden boxes at their video-recording sites. Two were located in places that were not difficult to access and were left empty to deter vandalism and theft. The idea was that if any criminally minded individuals saw that two of the boxes were empty, they wouldn’t bother trying to access the third. It was a cost-effective strategy that had saved countless cameras.
The numbers at the bottom of the screen scrolled by rapidly, with the occasional pause in playback while the video was buffering. Night fell over L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens and the sea was bathed in moonlight.
‘There, look!’ Lefebvre paused the video, rewound the recording and resumed playing at normal speed, then pointed to the screen. ‘Look at that whale’s spout. It’s breathtaking.’
Simone Lord sighed. ‘Yes, but that’s not what we’re looking for.’
‘I’m just being thorough,’ Lefebvre protested.
‘Put it back on fast-forward.’
Reluctantly, he did as she said and the numbers scrolled by against the background of a calm moonlit sea broken only by the occasional spouts of whales surging up without warning, like geysers in the night.
‘There!’ This time, Lefebvre had made the right call.
He paused the video, rewound the recording and played it back again. A lobster trawler glided onto the screen. Even in the half-light and the shadows, it was easy to identify the contours of the Close Call II. Suddenly, a silhouette emerged at the bow. The figure approached the anchor well, crouched or knelt down for a moment, then moved away from the front of the boat. A few moments later, the silhouette reappeared at the very stern of the vessel. It was impossible to see exactly what was happening. Whatever it was, it took a while. Next, the figure dived into the water and quickly swam ashore, pushing something. It looked like some sort of package, floating on the surface. The angle of the camera didn’t show the figure emerging from the water.
The officers craned their necks towards the screen.
‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Lefebvre’s phone rang, but he didn’t answer. He was too focused on the screen. Eventually the figure reappeared. It moved closer to the camera and retrieved something from the bushes.
‘It’s a bicycle,’ Lefebvre said.
The figure moved out of the camera’s field of vision before they could see any real detail.
Simone Lord turned to look at Érik Lefebvre just as he was peering at his phone to see who had called. ‘Did you see the time?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I saw.’
For a moment, she seemed to come completely undone. Then she pulled herself together. ‘We have to check the previous days’ recordings. That bike didn’t get there all by itself.’
Lefebvre nodded again. ‘We need to find out who put it there. You take care of that. I have to call my doctor back.’
He stood and left the room.
Moralès went outside, walked to the far end of the parking area and looked over to the neighbouring property to the west. A few hundred metres away, on the other side of Kimo’s house, he saw the rear of what looked like Sébastien’s car. He walked back to his own car and got into the driver’s seat.
That night, the killer had sailed the Close Call II to L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens half an hour before high tide. The place had been deserted, the sea a millpond. They’d killed the engine and gone to the bow. Cut the anchor line and removed the anchor from its chain. Carried the chain and line across the deck and bound the legs of Angel Roberts, who was drugged and left slumped against the wheelhouse. Then the killer had gone inside the cabin of the trawler, found the old wooden lobster trap, stuffed it with blankets, grabbed a length of cord and gone to the stern. There that person had attached the trap to the chain, then opened the tailgate, taken the cord and tied one end to the trap and the other to the boat, so the trap filled with blankets would be suspended over the water from the stern. Finally, the ‘monster’, as Dotrice Percy had described the killer, had undressed, stuffed those clothes into a plastic bag, dived into the sea and swum ashore. The water was frigid, but it hadn’t taken long for the killer to make it to the shore, because the slack water had held the trawler completely immobile just metres from the beach.
As he drove, Moralès played out the scenario in his mind. He pictured the gentle curve Annie Arsenault’s boat had followed that morning, when the current had started to flow along the coast. Angel Roberts’ lobster trawler must have drifted the same way, very slowly, for more than two hours. Then, two and a half hours before low tide, before the dawn, the Close Call II was caught in what Annie had called a rip, a powerful current that had carried the boat out of Gaspé Bay and into the open sea.
Moralès turned off the road and onto the gravel driveway. He was amazed how meticulously the whole thing had been planned. The further out to sea the boat drifted, the choppier the water became. As the waves began to crest, the blankets in the lobster trap soaked up the spray. The heavier the trap became, the closer the cord suspending it from the stern came to snapping. When it did, the trap plunged into the sea and sank, dragging the chain and line overboard – and carrying Angel Roberts to her watery demise. The current had swept the Close Call II out to sea without her, until the vessel was discovered some seventeen kilometres offshore.
While Sébastien dunked his head in the river, Kimo went inside to make him some breakfast. Then she came back to fetch him with a mug of coffee in her hand. Could it be that he had led her, like Maude, in a direction other than her own? And had he perhaps unjustly accused his father as a means to justify his own behaviour? Sébastien Moralès took the coffee from the young woman’s hand. He felt ashamed. He wished he could shed this skin of his, delete this whole narrative of clinking pots and pans.
‘Did you plan for us to spend last night here?’ he asked.