‘They caught the body in a net. That’s the crime scene, Sergeant Moralès. The sea.’
‘Marie Garant.’ He repeated the name to himself.
Men tend to dominate the summer drowning statistics. Ambitious swimmers, keen kayakers, drunk fishermen. He had been expecting this to be a case of carelessness and to have to palm some red-eyed, weepy tourist off on the duty psychologist.
Marie Garant, though. A woman. Sixty years old, thin and blue, tangled in a fine-mesh fishing net, her white hair streaked with salt, her skin washed pale by the sea. Marie Garant. When Langevin the undertaker, albeit delicately, zipped open the stiff body bag, Coroner Robichaud seemed oddly quick to slow the proceedings down. ‘Go easy with Marie Garant!’
Moralès pulled on a pair of gloves, then hesitated. Should he touch her? It was the same thing every time: How do you touch a dead body? Especially a woman. He harboured a certain sense of modesty around a woman’s corpse. Alive, she might refuse. Don’t turn up my collar, no, don’t read the label on my clothes, don’t lift up my head, don’t hold my hand, I won’t let you. Dead, she no longer had the option to refuse. Dead women were disarmed, and Moralès found that embarrassing. You wouldn’t stand for just anyone undressing your mother’s abandoned body, would you? In a gentle gesture, Moralès smoothed Marie Garant’s hair back into place where it was sticking out of the net. Should he uncover her face? He didn’t dare. Best leave it to the autopsy team to free her from the cumbersome netting that had wrapped around her, mummy-like.
So he looked at her. That was all. Thin lips, eyelids closed, arms crossed over her chest. As if she figured dying meant she had to lie sweetly, like a child being rocked to sleep. A plain blue blouse with the buttons popped off, probably when the body snagged on the net. Well-tailored clothes. Cotton trousers, also blue. Bare feet. Had she been wearing shoes, and did they come off in the water? Sandals maybe? What about glasses? No jewellery. No earrings, bracelets, rings or necklaces, unless the fishermen had robbed her. Soft wrinkles furrowed her temples, but there was no air of fragility about her. Rather, she gave the impression of solidity, despite her femininity and her age. Calm strength in her shoulders. Confidence. And something else. He looked at her again, more closely this time. What? Something was niggling at the detective. And suddenly, he understood. This woman was happy. He took a step backwards. It made him uneasy, how peaceful and certain she was of her happiness. No one was that happy, it was impossible. In life or in death.
Langevin the embalmer zipped the bag closed over Marie Garant’s body. Marlène Forest was still outside, petting the Langevins’ big Nordic dog as it lazily kept watch from the edge of the porch. Moralès realised she was palming the investigation off on him, only too happy to be free of a case people in her village were tangled up in.
The men barely said a word on their way out. Moralès wanted to go and see the fishing boat, but Vital was waiting at the station to be interviewed, so Marlène insisted on taking him and the coroner to Bonaventure.
She was still the one driving. The coroner was telling the story. He spoke slowly, with a lump in his throat, as if Marie Garant were still right before his eyes.
‘It was Vital Bujold and his deckhand, of the Ma Belle, who fished her out. About quarter past five. They pulled up their net and there she was, among the plaice and the starfish. They put her body in the boat and covered her up with a tarp, so they didn’t have to look at her, or so the sun wouldn’t eat away at her, I don’t know. You ought to understand, they brought her back to the marina like that. Vital must be going on sixty-eight. The other man on board was Victor Ferlatte. About the same age, give or take. They’ve been fishing together for years.’
The coroner turned to Moralès, looked him up and down. Could he be trusted? Robichaud wondered. Marlène had insisted on handing over the investigation to him. Probably because she knew what a minefield of controversy the Marie Garant business would be around here. Still, it bothered him to see a stranger poking his nose into their affairs. Mexican, as well… He’d be keeping an eye on him, because trouble and strife was easy to come by in a little village like this.
Robichaud continued: ‘It’s most likely an accident, although I don’t have a choice but to investigate. You’ll see, it’ll soon be sorted.’
Sitting next to the coroner in the back seat, Joaquin was sizing him up too. An old man ordering an investigation into a death that didn’t even appear to be suspicious; it smelled of a tragic love story to him.
The coroner sighed. ‘Where do you want to start?’
‘Did she live in Caplan?’
Moralès barely had an accent, Robichaud was surprised to hear.
‘Yes and no. You ought to understand she travelled a lot. By sailboat. She had a house on the cliff, but she’d been gone for two years. She was probably coming back from somewhere warm down south when it happened. Her sailboat hasn’t turned up yet, but it won’t be long before it does.’
‘She sailed solo?’
‘Yes. You ought to understand, sergeant, that Marie Garant was no ordinary woman. When she was five years old, she was already sailing with her parents. First her father died, then her mother. When she was twenty, she went off to sea alone. Everyone was against it, but there was no stopping her.
‘She stayed away for a long time. Four years, maybe five. You ought to understand, she lived dangerously. They were the good old days. With a Canadian passport and a solid sailboat, you could have had a tidy little business going, if you know what I mean. No doubt she was onto a good thing down there. We don’t know much about her, about Marie Garant, deep down. Then again, when you think about it, you don’t really know much about your own family, do you? Or even about yourself.
‘Anyway, she came back. Such a beautiful woman. She had these colourful dresses and she would drink rum and laugh with abandon. You ought to understand that wasn’t the kind of thing you saw a lot of around here. She got married and wound up a widow soon enough though. After that, she started kicking up all sorts of fuss. I thought she’d gone mad. Maybe she was already. Maybe we all are a little bit, when life rips our heart out.’
‘What kind of fuss?’
‘She would go out to bars, kick things, swear, spit on the ground… that kind of fuss.’
‘Spit on the ground?’
‘You ought to understand, she wasn’t exactly good news, if you know what I mean. She spent her life sailing the southern seas and coming back again. We never knew if she was coming or going.’
‘So, nobody knew Marie Garant was back in the Gaspé?’
‘I ought to say nobody knew. At least to my knowledge.’
‘I’ll need to see her medical records, her will—’
‘I’ll get you her medical records, I was her GP. She was sick, but she kept it in check with good medication. I’ll give you the details. And I’ll ask the notary about the will. He’s a friend, so he’ll dig it out quickly.’
‘And a list of people who knew her, loved her, hated her—’
‘She didn’t really live among the rest of us. She must have come back out of nostalgia. Nostalgia’s a big thing around here.’
‘Can we find out which boats were at sea that night?’
‘There’s no marine traffic control.’
‘And what about the weather conditions in the last three days?’
‘Yes, Marlène can pull that up for you.’
‘We’d better find the sailboat. Is there a lighthouse keeper, a marina or coast-guard station around here?’
‘The coast guard is in Rivière-au-Renard.’
‘We need to see whether she sent out a distress call.’