‘Marlène can take care of that, can’t you, Marlène?’
‘Yes, coroner.’
‘If you’ll sign the search warrant for me, I’ll pay a visit to her house.’
They arrived at the station. The coroner looked up and Marlène discreetly made her exit.
‘You ought to understand, sergeant, there’s not much of the ordinary in this village. You’ve only just arrived, so you couldn’t know. I ordered an investigation because I couldn’t do things any other way. Someone dies, you have to give reasons, and I’m old enough to know you can’t get away with sending any old paperwork to the authorities. If it were up to just me, though, I wouldn’t have ordered anything. It can happen, an old woman dying at sea. Especially if she’s living on her sailboat. She was on her way back from warmer climes and we hadn’t seen her for months, so her house was sitting empty. So it’s the sailboat we ought to find. But to do that, we ought to find out where she anchored when she came back to the area. And that’s anybody’s guess because Marie Garant always was a stubborn and elusive woman.
‘Around here, you ought to understand, the sea puts food on people’s plates, but every family pays their dues to the water. Drownings are frequent. A fisherman, a careless child… Every time, there has to be an inquest. And what do we find? It was an accident, a bit of clumsiness or a stroke of bad luck. That’s what life’s like by the water. That said, we couldn’t live without the sea. You see, I was born with the sea in my backyard. I played in it all the time in my youth. When I was away studying in the city I missed it so much I came back. And I’ve not managed to leave the village again – not ever.
‘You ought to understand, the sea’s all of this. She’s the wave that drags you away from shore and then carries you home. A whirlpool of indecisiveness, hypnotising, holding you captive. Until the day she chooses you. I suppose that’s what passion is… a groundswell that sweeps you up and carries you further out than you thought, then washes you up on the hard sand like an old fool.’
He closed his eyes – as if to picture Marie Garant once more on the blank screen of his eyelids.
‘You’ll have your piece of paper tomorrow. Tomorrow. Today, I’m old and I’m tired. I don’t feel like having just anyone go into Marie Garant’s house any old how.’
‘Sorry?’
A vague hand gesture, wiping clean the slate of the past. ‘Langevin’s taking her body to Montreal for the autopsy. Start by questioning Vital Bujold. He’s been waiting for hours. Then you can go and unpack your suitcases in your new home. You can go into Marie Garant’s house tomorrow.’
Taken aback, Moralès wondered whether he should react. Insist on going to visit the house straight away. Show he knew how to lead an investigation. Impose his own pace on these Gaspesian clocks. But he hesitated. And by the time he was done hesitating, it was already too late.
‘You know, sergeant… Is it sergeant or detective? Christ in a chalice, what an idiot I am, but it’s been a long day! And it’s been slim pickings, this season. Christ in a chalice, talk about slim pickings! You’re not from round here, are you, so you couldn’t know. And now we’re fishing bodies up in our bait nets!’
Vital Bujold had barely had time to get home and take a breather after his disastrous fishing trip when he was called in to the Bonaventure police station to undergo his second interview of the day. He didn’t appear nervous, though, he just seemed exasperated and would clearly rather have been somewhere else. But he was managing to restrain himself. Moralès sat down across from the man. Being anywhere else was obviously a holidaymaker’s luxury.
‘Would you like to tell me how it happened?’
‘There’s not much I can say. I went out fishing about quarter past four. I always set off before everyone else, especially them Indians! You won’t have seen, will you? They only set off at six o’clock! Not that we have anything against that Native bunch, but they’ve never had the knack with timing the tide right!’
‘And then?’
The fisherman sighed. A good fifteen years older than Moralès, he was taller and stronger too, sculpted from thick clay, with a seaward look in his eye. Moralès suddenly envied him. That stature, the strength of a man who knows where he’s at.
‘I started pulling up my traps. Three lobsters this morning. Not even big ones, either! Christ in a chalice! Any less and we’ll be paying out of our own pockets to go fishing! Then, when I got to my net… I only cast one net. For bait, you know. Sometimes I catch a few plaice or a water hen I can sell along with my lobster. When there’s some around.’
With his chair pushed a long way back from the table, he made simple, honest gestures as he spoke.
‘And as he was pulling in the buoy to haul in the net, Victor shouted, “We’ve caught a big one here, you should feel it pulling!” Well, he didn’t shout it quite like that, he stuttered it, but it’s all the same. So anyway, I went over to give him a hand and make sure nothing got broken, and Victor said he could see something strange. He stuttered when he said that too. He stutters all the time, when he says anything. When he was young, he fell into a well. Ever since then, he’s stuttered every sentence. I knew him before his accident, but I’ve got used to it. I’m a patient man. I wait for him to finish, because I don’t like it when other people finish his sentences for him.’
‘Carry on, please.’
Moralès caught the fisherman raising an eyebrow. He knew there was no point ruffling the man’s feathers, but this wasn’t a good day for anyone.
‘Christ in a chalice, there’s not much to say! We saw it was a body soon enough, so we hauled it aboard. We didn’t see who it was right away because we pulled it up feet first. We took care to pull it up with our bare hands, mind you, even though that’s nobody’s idea of fun. Christ in a chalice! I don’t know how you police do it! Or the undertakers either. Just goes to show, we’re all made for different jobs.’
‘If you say so.’
Another eyebrow raised, perhaps in contempt.
‘So anyway, we pulled it up on deck and put a tarp over it. In the morning, the birds circle around us a lot; they like it when we throw them our fish scraps. We didn’t want the seagulls to start pecking away at the corpse’s face.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, after that I put a call in to the coast guard. They’re all the way up in Rivière-au-Renard, so they don’t get down here much. Usually they send the coroner out; he’s got a boat and he likes to put his volunteer-police hat on. Must suit them, I reckon, because it’s always him they call. Wasn’t much to do this time; they told us to come back to shore, even though we weren’t done pulling up the traps. So that’s what we did. In any case, we couldn’t have done any work with that thing on board. We were careful, even though she was a nut job.’
‘A nut job?’
The fisherman had let the words slip. He’d been more candid than he wanted to be. Too late.
‘That’s one way to put it. A woman who was always sailing off abroad. She would leave, and people thought she was never coming back, then – bam! – her boat would just reappear overnight!’
‘Did it bother you that she would go off travelling? Or that she came back?’
‘Where are you from, then?’
Moralès was used to this. ‘Just outside Montreal. Longueuil.’
Vital Bujold nodded. ‘I’m not saying people are crazy just because they travel to other countries. I’m saying she was crazy because she had a strange way of behaving. She would get off her sailboat and start kicking kelp around. Kelp, for crying out loud! Who in their right mind kicks kelp? Nobody! Christ in a chalice, you’d have to be a bloody nut job to do that kind of rubbish!’