‘You’re a loyal man. You were looking for someone to blame for your father’s death, because you wanted to avenge him, but it was an accident.’
‘No. It wasn’t an accident.’
Moralès lowered his weapon. He was a man of his word.
‘Your father was drunk and he made a mistake. That’s why the boat capsized.’
‘My old man wasn’t drunk!’
Moralès immediately realised his error and raised his arm to shoot, but he wasn’t quick enough. Clément Cyr whirled around in a flash and lunged at him. He tackled him so hard, Joaquin was thrown against the wall of the wheelhouse. In the impact, he let go of his weapon and heard it clattering across the deck towards the hold. Before he had time to react, the giant of a man grabbed him by the collar and dragged him towards the edge of the boat. Moralès extended his arms, grappling for something to hold on to. In vain. He could feel the wall of the wheelhouse sliding away beneath his fingers.
‘You just don’t get it, do you? My old man was murdered by the Robertses!’
Moralès could feel the guardrail of the trawler pressing into his back. Clément Cyr lifted him off his feet. Moralès saw three storeys of thin air out of the corner of his eye. En la madre! The giant was going to throw him overboard, and it wouldn’t be a splash landing.
‘Hands up, Clément Cyr. You put him down now, or I shoot!’
The fisherman froze and turned his head. Moralès tried to grab hold of something as Érik Lefebvre advanced across the deck with his gun pointed at Clément Cyr.
The fisherman laughed. ‘Give it a rest, Lefebvre, everyone knows there aren’t any bullets in that toy gun of yours.’
‘Maybe not in his, but believe me, I’ve got plenty of lead for you in mine.’
Clément Cyr turned to see where the voice was coming from. Standing aboard the neighbouring shrimp trawler was Bruce Roberts, pointing a rifle right at him.
‘Oh come on Roberts, you don’t want to shoot a cop in the back, do you?’
‘Maybe not, but I’ll be blowing a hole in the face of the man who murdered my sister.’
Clément Cyr was about to retaliate when Moralès heard the clinking of Lefebvre’s boot spurs on the metal deck. The next thing he knew, the giant was crumpling to the ground, as if he’d been knocked out cold. He heard a sound similar to the one his weapon had made moments earlier when it went clattering across the tween deck.
Lefebvre swaggered over to Moralès pumping his fists. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, he’s down for the count.’
Moralès realised that Lefebvre had thrown his revolver at Clément Cyr and hit him square on the head.
‘Strikeout for the Mariners!’ Lefebvre cheered, happy to have put his baseball training to good use.
Bruce Roberts unloaded and put his rifle down, while Moralès pushed the unconscious giant away from him and sat against the edge of the boat to catch his breath.
‘Cuff him before he comes around, will you?’ he said.
Lefebvre was only too happy to turn the man over onto his stomach and cuff his wrists behind his back.
‘I’ve never used it like that before. What a thrill.’
Moralès sat in silence, reflecting on the reasons why he had erroneously dismissed Clément Cyr’s confession. Was it simply that he had lacked awareness of the local tidal currents and been unable to see how the seemingly impossible could in fact be possible? Or had he let misguided empathy cloud his judgement? Through the dining-room window, he saw a sliver of a crescent lazing in the night sky. The moon was waning, casting the pale glow of a tired streetlamp on the autumn water. Somewhere out there, Joaquin thought, Cyrille was slowly turning to coral. In just a few days, it would be pitch-dark out there. A sudden eruption broke the surface before his eyes. It was a seal, launching itself into the air as if trying to snatch a shimmering of silver, then plunging back into the sea like a stone.
‘I have to say, I’m mighty proud of you, Moralès.’ Érik Lefebvre strode into the auberge and hung his jacket at the entrance.
Sébastien and Kimo had come down to the winter mooring yards to check on him, but Joaquin had been busy explaining to his colleagues from the Gaspé station what had happened, so he hadn’t had the chance to talk to them. His son had hugged him tight, then left him to it. When he had finally prised himself away, he had invited Érik Lefebvre and Simone Lord to join him for supper at the auberge.
‘How about a beer?’ Lefebvre sidled over to the bar, pulled two bottles from the fridge and went over to join Moralès, who had just closed his case file, in the dining room.
SQ patrol officers had rapidly descended on the winter-mooring yard after Lefebvre had intervened, and taken Clément Cyr away. Moralès and Lefebvre had followed the patrol cars to the station, given their statements and promised to deliver their reports that week. Moralès had called his boss, Lieutenant Marlène Forest, from the road.
In the early morning of Saturday 22nd September, Clément Cyr had gone to hide his bike in the bushes at L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens. Next, he had gone home and switched his wife’s antihistamines for sleeping pills. At the end of the afternoon, the couple had begun their wedding anniversary celebrations, starting with a drink at his mother’s place, followed by dinner at her father’s. Angel was allergic to dogs, and her father had two of them, so she took an antihistamine pill. It didn’t seem to be working, so she took another one. The alcohol and sleeping pills had made her feel so ill that around eleven that night, she had asked her husband to drive her home.
Clément Cyr had lied to the investigators. He hadn’t taken the road the locals called La Radoune, but the coast road that skirted the national park. His wife didn’t know – she didn’t like driving that way at night – because she’d closed her eyes and fallen asleep. He had driven her to the wharf at Grande-Grave. They had taken her car that night, and he had only touched the bottom of the steering wheel to leave as few fingerprints as possible. He knew the code for the barrier at the entrance to the park, because he had often gone with his wife to her boat in the middle of the night.
When they arrived at the wharf, he had put gloves on and carried Angel aboard the Close Call II. Then he had pushed away from the dock and driven the trawler to L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens. There, he had brought the boat to a standstill, killed the engine and tied Angel’s legs to the lobster trap. The entire manoeuvre had taken about half an hour. He had undressed, stuffed his clothes into a transparent plastic bag, dived into the water and swum ashore, pushing the bag of clothes, which in the light of the moon the clairvoyant had perceived to be a ‘transparent appendage’. The frigid water certainly explained why she had thought the ‘monster’ had a ‘shrivelled phallus’.
The men sipped their beers in silence. Sébastien’s car pulled into the parking area. Moralès junior got out of the driver’s seat, opened the hatchback and took out the fishing rod, lures and other paraphernalia Corine had loaned him, walked to the shed by the shore and returned without them.
All told, Cyr was away from the party at the bar for an hour and a half. Because fishing had been a common topic of conversation for him and his wife, he knew that the slack water at L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens at that stage of the tide would keep the boat in place for at least two hours. When he returned to the bar, he had drunk to get drunk. Not just to forget the chain of events he had set in motion, and perhaps to flee from his demons, but also to have an excuse to stay the night at the auberge, which would give him an alibi.
Sébastien walked into the dining room carrying some plastic bags. Earlier that day, their discussion about loyalty had jogged Kimo’s memory about a conversation she had had with Clément Cyr at the bar on the night Angel went missing. The man was haunted by a devastating and fateful sense of loyalty. It had dawned on her that he had been drinking heavily and coming on strong to her that night, not to make Bruce Roberts jealous, but to strengthen his own alibi. Deeply shaken by what she had realised, she had gone with Sébastien to the police station and asked him to drive her home afterwards. She just wanted to be alone now, she had said; she’d call him later.