Roxanne Bouchard - The Coral Bride

The door creaked open a touch behind her to reveal a peppy home-fitness instructor on the screen, isolating the triceps, a muscle group that just dangles until you flex it, said the voice. Dotrice was getting antsy. She was missing her workout.

‘What time was that?’

‘Quarter past midnight.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. At midnight exactly, I heard the sound of an engine on the water. I know that for a fact because it was a time of alignment.’

She didn’t elaborate, but Moralès gathered she must be talking about stars and energy rather than hands on a clock.

‘The sound of an engine arriving or leaving?’

‘Arriving and being turned off. Fifteen minutes later, the naked monster passed right by me.’

The triceps were pumping hard on the TV screen, by the sounds of it.

‘Where, exactly, was your meditation taking place?’

She gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘You’re not very good at listening, are you? I told you all that the other day.’

‘You said something about red land, as I recall.’

‘The land of our red ancestors – though I know it’s not very PC to say that kind of thing these days – where the all-powerful breath of the whales meets the earth. It’s not that hard to understand.’

‘Perhaps, but I didn’t grow up around here…’

She looked him up and down and gave a curt nod that suggested she admitted this fact might have been an impediment to his understanding of the blindingly obvious.

‘L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens. It’s a popular whale-watching spot. There’s a little cabin on the right. You’ll see it when you get there. I was sitting just behind it, so I’d be out of the north wind.’

Moralès thanked her.

‘If you do happen to have any other questions, I’d rather you come back at a different time.’ She closed the door.

Moralès dashed to his car and set off in a hurry for Forillon Park – the end of the road.

He grasped the door knob, turned it one way, then the next, and gave it a pull. The door wouldn’t budge. It must have warped with time and damp. The knob threatened to come off in his hand. A surge of nausea made him feel dizzy for a second. His heart was pounding. He tried again. Was he swaying, or was it the room? Then he pushed the door, and realised that it opened outwards, not inwards. He felt like an idiot to have panicked like that for nothing.

He was glad to get out of the room. Everything in the little camp kitchen was spotless. All the dishes had been washed, dried and put away. He went over to a cupboard and opened it. Dishes. He opened another one. And kept going until he found what he was looking for. Tools. Towels. Spare rain jackets. Eventually he found a cabinet filled with containers bearing pharmaceutical labels. He swallowed a couple of tablets. They scraped their way down his throat and his mouth felt like it was full of cotton wool.

He stepped outside into the fresh air. Kimo’s car was still parked there, but she was nowhere to be seen.

It took Detective Sergeant Moralès barely twenty minutes to cover the distance from Cap-des-Rosiers to L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens. He parked and walked into the observation area the wildlife officers had set up for visitors. A rustic-looking wooden fence surrounded the broad grassy promontory that perched on the cliff top, dominating the shore below. There were three picnic tables near the cliff’s edge. To the east, a gravel slope led down to a small rocky beach, at the far end of which was a wooden staircase.

Making his way towards it, Moralès could see the spot just offshore where he, Annie Arsenault and Jacques Forest had been fishing that morning. He could also see the little cabin on the cliff edge that Dotrice Percy had mentioned. It was more of a wooden box.

The clairvoyant must have been sitting on the other side of it, looking out to sea in the lee of the wind, when the monster with the atrophied member came up the stairs at the far end of the beach. He ventured off the path for a closer look at the small wooden structure, to get a sense of what it might be used for. He had no idea. It was narrow and about a metre and a half high. There was a small padlocked door on one side, to which a faded notice was stapled, warning curious passersby not to touch. Whoever had built the structure had left a gap of about ten centimetres between the planks on the side that faced the sea.

Moralès turned on his phone’s torch function and looked inside. It was empty. He backed away and turned towards the path again, and that was when he noticed another box to his right, further east, on the other side of the stairs that led down to the shore, and another one a little further away. Moralès made his way back to the parking area and looked for a path that might lead to the second wooden box. He couldn’t see one. From the parking area, there was only one path, the main one that led to the viewpoint at Land’s End. He set off in that direction, keeping his eyes peeled for a way to get to one or other of the boxes. There was no obvious path, so he ended up forging his own way through two thickets of bushes to where he figured the boxes must be. It was slow going, and after a while he still couldn’t see either of the boxes. They must be camouflaged – designed to be visible only from the sea, he thought.

Moralès kept inching his way forward until he reached the edge of the cliff. When he turned around, he saw one of the two boxes not far away and went over for a closer look. It was the same kind of structure. On the padlocked door, there was a notice similar to the one on the first box, but this one wasn’t as weathered. Do Not Open , it read. At the bottom of the notice, there was a printed logo bearing the letters MLI.

Moralès walked around the structure, turned his phone torch on again and peered inside through the gap at the front. What he saw made him gasp and take a step back. Now he understood why these boxes were so well hidden. He looked out to sea, turned off his torch and dialled Lefebvre’s number.

‘Hi, Moralès. Where the heck are you, you and that son of yours? I stopped by the auberge at lunchtime and—’

‘I need your help, Lefebvre. A company called MLI – does that ring any bells?’

Silence. Then: ‘Not off the top of my head, no.’

‘Look into it and get back to me, will you?’

Moralès hung up. There was no point hiking over to the other box. He walked back to the parking area. Eager to hear what Lefebvre had managed to find out, he checked his phone as he approached his car – and saw he had missed several calls that morning. He had turned off the ringer when they were out fishing and forgotten to turn it on again. He must have been too preoccupied to see the notifications when he used the torch function earlier. As if on cue, the phone vibrated in his hand. He picked up right away.

‘MLI could refer to a packaging company near the Ontario border, a company in the Eastern Townships that makes plastic wrappers for the agrifood industry, a label design business in the suburbs of Montreal – or the Maurice Lamontagne Institute near Rimouski.’

‘What is the Maurice Lamontagne Institute, exactly?’

Moralès could hear Lefebvre tapping away at his computer keyboard.

‘Right, well, here’s what the website says – “The Maurice Lamontagne Institute is a marine-science research institute located in Mont Joli, Quebec and is part of the Canadian department of Fisheries and Oceans…” – is that what you’re looking for?’

‘Fisheries and Oceans Canada, you said?’