‘Yves, you ought to come ashore to speak with Detective Sergeant Moralès. Over.’
Over and effing out, he thought. One thing was for sure, Yves Carle was going to finish his coffee before he set foot on shore.
Moralès, for his sins, only woke around six, when a man as taciturn as he was monosyllabic knocked at his door before retreating to join two other comatose crime-scene technicians caffeinating their numb yawns in an unmarked van, on their way to dust Pilar for prints. The man had offered an apology and seemed put out that he’d had to do the dirty job of waking the detective up because the coroner hadn’t been able to rouse Moralès on his mobile – or so he said.
Moralès vaguely thanked the technician, who shrugged before driving off. The phone hadn’t woken Moralès because he had deliberately left it in his jacket pocket. He had come home late and had had to force a window to get into his own house. He had then emptied the car and trailer in the middle of the night, stacking boxes all over the place according to a decidedly male logic, before sinking into bed, exhausted, around the time Yves Carle went to sea. He had fallen asleep sulking about his wife’s silence.
Cursing Marie Garant, the coroner and the trio of crime-scene technicians, Moralès showered, tripped over boxes, realised there was no coffee in the house and then hurried off to the sloop without eating breakfast. Driving down the hill to the Ruisseau-Leblanc wharf, he blinked in surprise. Someone had taken the sailboat out of the water. Why? A hull thirty feet long. He’d never seen anything like it. He was amazed by the size of the sailboat, how heavy it looked, how elegant it was.
He stepped out of his car and scanned his surroundings. The fishermen were nowhere to be seen, and the silhouette of another sailboat at anchor was rocking gently on the dawn swell.
Coroner Robichaud strode purposefully towards him like a man who had been up all night running the show.
‘I ought to tell you, sergeant, I brought the boat in myself. The three crime-scene guys you met have lifted the prints and left you a box of things in the cockpit so you can see what they’re planning to send to the lab. You ought to take care of bringing that down to the station.’
It occurred to Moralès that he was missing a second opportunity here to take the coroner down a peg – to remind him who was in charge of this investigation and how important it was not to spread unnecessary prints all over the place. But he kept his mouth shut. You don’t make waves in a village you’re just settling in to.
‘I ought to tell you, they’ve gone for breakfast and they’ll be waiting for you at Marie Garant’s house. I’ve written the address for you here, on the search warrant you asked me for yesterday.’
The coroner handed an envelope to Moralès, who put it in his car.
‘I ought to call the notary so he can pull out the will for you.’
‘I can take care of that later, coroner—’
‘No, no, he’s a friend of mine. We’re used to this kind of thing. I ought to introduce you to Yves Carle. He’s the one who found Pilar. He knows sailboats, so he can go aboard with you and show you around.’
Moralès turned towards the newcomer. In his late sixties, he had the look of a man lost in nostalgia.
‘Detective Sergeant Joaquin Moralès, from the Sûreté du Québec.’
Yves Carle’s gentle nod made Moralès feel awkward and pompous, all suited up with his weighty title.
‘Yves, you ought to tell the detective the boom wasn’t secured.’
‘The boom wasn’t secured, sergeant.’
Seemingly satisfied, the coroner retreated to his car.
Alone with Yves Carle, Moralès once again found himself feeling like a fool without knowing why. ‘You know your boats, then?’ he asked.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Can you tell me about this one?’
‘She’s an Alberg 30. A great seafarer.’
‘I’d like you to show me around her.’
The mariner nodded.
Moralès fetched a bag from his car. ‘We’ll have to put gloves and overshoes on so we don’t contaminate the scene.’
Yves Carle acquiesced and they pulled on their plastic attire in silence and climbed aboard. A boxful of items bagged by the crime-scene technicians sat waiting in the cockpit. As for the rest, Moralès was clueless. This was the first sailboat he had been on, but with its cables, pulleys, electronic screens and giant compass, it was not as exciting as promised by the advertisements for holidays in the Caribbean.
‘What’s a boom?’
Yves Carle was standing on the bench seat on the port side. ‘That’s the horizontal part of the mast, right here, that supports the bottom of the mainsail.’
‘The coroner said it wasn’t secured—’
‘When you loosen the mainsail sheets, behind you, it makes the ropes go slack and the boom can swing from side to side.’
‘Ah.’ He wasn’t in a chatty mood. ‘Could that knock you into the water?’
‘Yes. With an unexpected change of direction, it could crack you on the head and knock you overboard.’
Still that same feeling of awkwardness at being with the mariner, who suddenly bent down for a closer look at some black marks on the deck.
Moralès pre-empted the question. ‘That was the crime-scene team who did that. Those are fingerprint marks.’
Yves Carle nodded. The detective had made him put gloves on and slip plastic bags over his shoes, but they had sullied the sailboat, rifled through her and lifted Marie Garant’s prints from the time-salted wood. And the other prints they found.
‘Shall we go inside?’
‘Yes, yes. Let’s go.’
The man of the sea led the way down into the hull of the dead woman’s sailboat, laying delicate, pale eyes on Marie Garant’s card table, her galley kitchen, the skipper’s berth in the forepeak. Detective Moralès stooped imposingly inside the cramped space just as Yves stopped in front of the berth with a look of surprise. He craned his neck, inspecting the bed, and raised an eyebrow.
‘Have you seen something out of the ordinary?’
‘No. Nothing out of the ordinary, sergeant.’
It was the same feeling he’d had the day before, with Bujold the fisherman. The old mariner was hiding something. It was annoying, but he had learned his lesson. These Gaspesians would only say what they wanted to.
Moralès scanned his surroundings. What was he looking for? A compass needle pointing right to the perp, a detail opening an avenue to a suspect or a snippet of evidence the crime-scene technicians had missed? No, as a matter of fact, and in spite of the move, the fatigue, the driving, the day-to-day annoyances, Moralès knew deep down that the accident theory was the most plausible one. Of course, they couldn’t rule anything out, as any police training school in the world would tell you. Suicide, set-up – anything was possible. But what was the point in always spreading themselves so thinly in order to cover every vague possibility? In his youth, he would track down every lead. Now he had come to understand how much effort that was for so few results! Of course, an investigation that was out of the ordinary could occur, that was true, but usually…
Moralès took his time, while Yves Carle leaned against the stairs and waited. The thing was, Joaquin didn’t approach a woman’s space the same way he approached a man’s. Feminine spaces were always brimming with life, with objects and memories. The sanctuaries of beautiful women harboured colourful fabrics, exotic photographs and fine china. It was amazing what beauty and comfort a woman could bestow on her inner sanctum, he thought. Man caves were generally more understated… or messier. Moralès had noticed how some men’s empty shells were simply an expression of absence, while others’ places were somehow bursting at the seams, suggesting an imminent explosion. Their sufferings were latent and destructive: murder or suicide. Sometimes both at once. Moralès found men to be miserable. And violent. He would far rather investigate a woman’s space.