Entry Island

I

The bar shimmered in semi-darkness, light washing down across bottles and optics from hidden overhead lighting. Sime sat at the polished counter on his own, while a bored barman cleaned glasses to keep himself busy. He hadn’t felt much like eating with the others, and now they were all in the bowling alley. Friends and colleagues who had worked together on the same team for months, sharing friendship and downtime. Laughing. Cheering when someone made a strike, voices echoing around the cavernous bowling hall. There was a feeling that they were just one step away from cracking this case, and spirits were high. Norman Morrison had been dismissed as a red herring. At worst it seemed that his death had been nothing more than a tragic accident.

Sime had his back to them, but couldn’t shut out the noise.

He was on his third or fourth whisky and had begun to lose count. But the oblivion he had been hoping for seemed no nearer than it had when he first sat down. If the alcohol was having any effect on him he wasn’t aware of it.

As hard as he tried he couldn’t banish from his mind the wounded animal look in Kirsty’s eyes when she’d told him that the lion had just got the gazelle. It had left him feeling ruthless and predatory.

He no longer knew what to believe about her. But the fact that she had told him the truth about the pendant was no longer in any doubt, and it left him feeling hugely unsettled. How did they come to possess the same family crest engraved in the same semi-precious carnelian? One a ring, one a pendant. Clearly pieces of a matching set.

Crozes had been dismissive. Nothing to do with the case, he’d said. And Sime was unable to find any grounds with which to challenge that assessment. There was no obvious link to the murder.

And yet still Sime was haunted by that moment he’d first set eyes on the widow and been convinced he knew her. Somehow in that light the arm-and-sword crest seemed less of a coincidence. But he could not for the life of him imagine what it was that connected them.

If there was a connection, and the matching ring and pendant had some significance beyond coincidence, then he could only think that the answer must lie in the diaries. Something in all of this had sparked his dreams and recollections of them. And Annie had thought there was some mention of the ring in them, though he had no memory of that himself. Of course, he knew that his grandmother had not read them everything from the journals. And he vaguely recalled his parents expressing concern about one of the stories. Not suitable for young children, they had said.

He needed to get his hands on those diaries.

‘Another one of those, monsieur?’ The barman nodded towards his empty glass on the bar. But Sime couldn’t face another. He shook his head. It was time to face the night, with all its sleepless demons, and lie on his back to watch the TV screen send its shadow dancers around the walls.

On the walk down the hall he felt as if he were pulling each foot free of treacle. He closed the door of his room behind him and leaned back against it. When he shut his eyes the ground shifted beneath his feet and for a moment he thought he was going to fall over. He opened them again quickly.

He found the remote for the TV in the dark and turned it on. Better to have something meaningless to shut out, than to lie listening to reproachful silence. He kicked off his shoes and lay gingerly on the bed. His ribs were less painful than before. The nurse was right, he thought. Just bruised. And he wondered again who had attacked him the previous night. Not Norman Morrison. And certainly not Kirsty. So who? He spread his hands on the bed on either side of his hips, as if some unseen pressure were bearing down on him and pressing him into the mattress.

His throat felt rough and his eyes were on fire. He closed them and saw flickering red light through the lids. His breathing was slow but laboured, as if each breath took a conscious effort. His whole body was screaming out for sleep.

The hours passed in an almost fevered delirium, not always fully conscious, but never quite asleep. The passage of time was punctuated by frequent, involuntary glances at the clock. The last time he’d looked it was 1.57. Now it was 2.11. The TV channel had reverted to its nightly diet of teleshopping special offers. Tonight, a kitchen device capable of chopping any vegetable into a dozen different shapes or sizes.

Sime swung his legs off the bed and stood up. He walked stiffly into the bathroom, avoiding the mirror, and ran the cold tap. Cupped hands splashed icy water on to his face. The shock of it brought momentary relief from the fatigue that numbed him, and he rubbed himself vigorously dry with a towel. In the bedroom he slipped his feet back into their shoes.

Beyond the curtain he slid open the inner glass door, then the fly screen, and unlocked the outer window, sliding it aside and slipping out into the darkness of the car park. The wind blew in across the bay in cold gusts. He zipped up his hoodie, pushed his hands deep into his pockets and started walking. Anything to avoid the excruciating boredom that came with insomnia.

The yellow light of street lamps fell in gloomy patches on the tarmac, reflecting off the roofs of cars in the car park. The main north — south highway was deserted. Lights shining from the windows of the hospital across the way were the only sign of life. Lights that shone for the sick and the dead, and for those who had to deal with both.

He had walked no more than fifty metres when he heard a woman cry out. And then a man’s voice. At first he thought that perhaps the woman was being attacked, and he spun around looking for the source of the voices. And then it came to him that these were the sounds of people making love. Voices that drifted out into the night from one of the hotel rooms, issuing from behind curtains drawn across doors left open for air.

Sime closed his eyes. Other people’s lives, he thought, and felt the ache of lost love, of moments once shared and now misplaced. Although his marriage was dead and hopelessly beyond resuscitation, he missed the warmth and comfort that comes with being close to another human being.

He stood for a self-conscious moment, listening to the shared experience of the strangers beyond the curtain, almost wallowing in his own misery. Before an ugly thought wormed its way through his self-pity. He looked back along the row of glass doors to his own and made a quick count. And then a moment of pure, incandescent jealousy seared his soul.

Without even thinking, he strode towards the lovers’ room and slid the screen door roughly aside, dragging the curtains out of his way. Pale light washed into the room from the street lamps outside, spilling across the bed and startling the man and woman mid-passion. The man rolled to one side, and the woman sat up, wide-eyed and staring towards the figure who stood silhouetted in the doorway. The bedside light snapped on, and Sime gazed in disbelief at the dishevelled figures of Marie-Ange and Daniel Crozes, their nakedness only half hidden by a tangle of sheets.

‘Sime!’ There was both disbelief and alarm in Marie-Ange’s almost involuntary evocation of his name.

So many things passed through his mind in a single moment that not one of them achieved any clarity. His wife and his boss were making love in her hotel room. Two people having sex. People he knew. One he respected, the other he used to love. And when suddenly the fog of confusion cleared he realised with a sickening sense of betrayal that this was not a one-night stand. He saw the half-empty bottle of champagne that stood on the dresser, the two empty glasses. The clothes discarded carelessly on the floor.

‘How long?’ he said.

Marie-Ange clutched the sheets to her chest to hide her breasts, as if he might never have seen them before. ‘It’s none of your business. We are no longer an item, Sime. Our marriage is over.’

‘How long?’

But she could not maintain her facade of righteous indignation, and turned her head to avoid his eyes, the accusation in them and all his hurt.

Sime switched his focus toward Crozes. ‘Lieutenant?’ he said, his voice laden with irony, and Crozes couldn’t look him in the eye.

‘I’m sorry, Sime,’ he said.

And Sime went from stillness to fury before his brain could engage in reason. He crossed the room in several long strides and grabbed his superior officer by the shoulders, pulling him from the bed and slamming him hard back against the wall. All the air escaped Crozes’s lungs in a single breath, almost at the same moment as Sime’s bunched fist sank into his gut, causing him to double up. Without any predetermination, Sime’s knee came up into his face, bursting Crozes’s lip on his front teeth and spraying blood all over his naked chest and thighs. He heard Marie-Ange screaming, and Crozes’s voice gurgling through the blood in his mouth. But Sime was gripped by a rage that wouldn’t let him go and he swung Crozes through three hundred and sixty degrees to smash up against the wall again. A chair went flying. The champagne bottle toppled and smashed one of the glasses. Sime swung a fist and caught Crozes on the side of his head. The lieutenant fell to his knees, and only the low, threatening imperative in Marie-Ange’s voice stopped him from going for the kill.

‘Stop right now or you’re a fucking dead man!’

He turned and saw her kneeling on the bed, the sheets and all modesty abandoned now, to be replaced by her standard-issue Glock 26 handgun, held in both hands and levelled at his head.

There were voices outside the hotel room and a frantic banging on the door.

Sime glared at his wife and one-time lover, breathing hard. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’

Her eyes were arctic cold. ‘Try me.’

And suddenly the madness was over, receding like water after a flash flood. Sime looked at Crozes, bloodied and battered and doubled up on the floor, and for a moment he almost felt sorry for him. He wondered why he had been gripped by such rage. People fall in love, after all. For a thousand different reasons. It chooses them. Not the other way around. And then he realised it was their lies that left him feeling so betrayed, so inconsolably angry.

‘For Christ’s sake open up in there!’ he heard a voice coming from the other side of the door. Fists still pounded on it. He stepped over the prone figure of Crozes and opened the door. Thomas Blanc, Arseneau and two other officers were bunched together in the corridor, wide-eyed in amazement. He saw them switch focus to the room behind him. Crozes lying bleeding on the floor, Marie-Ange stark naked on the bed, the Glock still clutched in her hand.

He pushed through the gaping mouths without a word and stalked off down the corridor, lost in a cauldron of bewilderment, regret, anger, hurt. He needed out, he needed air, he needed time to think, to reappraise. The sound of footsteps in pursuit was accompanied by Thomas Blanc’s voice. ‘Sime, Sime. For God’s sake stop, man!’

But Sime ignored him, pushing open the swing door out to reception and startling the night porter, before slamming through the front doors and out into the cold and dark.

He was halfway across the car park, walking blindly into the night, before Blanc caught his arm and forced him to stop. He turned to be confronted by the alarm and incomprehension in Blanc’s eyes, facing him with his own wild stare of what must have seemed like madness.

‘Are you insane, Sime!’ It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. ‘Have you any idea what you just did? Crozes is a senior officer, and you’ve just beaten the crap out of him.’

‘He’s also been sleeping with my wife for God knows how long.’ Sime had no idea what reaction he expected from Blanc, but what he hadn’t anticipated was the embarrassment he saw. His co-interrogator seemed at a loss for words. And the truth dawned on Sime with a sickening sense of humiliation. ‘You knew.’

Blanc looked at the ground as Sime pulled his arm free of his grasp. His discomfort was acute.

‘Which means everyone knew, right?’

Blanc managed to meet his gaze for just a moment before his eyes flickered away again.

‘But no one thought to tell me.’

Blanc sucked in a deep breath. ‘We thought we were doing you a favour, Sime, protecting you. Really.’ There was a plea for understanding in his eyes.

Sime glared at him with anger and dislike. ‘Fuck you,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck you all.’ And he turned and strode off into the dark.

II

The harbour was dominated at its south side by a large rock that towered over the quays. A wooden staircase zigzagged its way up to a viewpoint at the top. Sime stood there, fully exposed to the wind, having made the long slow climb with leaden legs. He had walked aimlessly in an almost trancelike state during all the hours of the night, before pitching up at the harbour. There he had stood at the water’s edge staring out across the bay towards Entry Island. Somehow he always seemed drawn back to it. Only a handful of lights twinkled faintly in the distance to betray its presence in darkness.

Now he stood clutching the wooden rail on the viewpoint, braced against the wind that powered out of the south-west. He saw the lights of the islands spread out below him, stretching away to north and south. He knew that sunrise was not far away, and for the first time fully understood the saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn.

While walking blindly through the night he had forced himself to think about nothing, entering a nearly zen-like state in which he had allowed none of the events of the last few days to impinge on his consciousness. Only now, overtaken by total exhaustion, did his resolve crumble, permitting those thoughts to flood his brain.

He replayed his life of the last few months in an endless loop, picking up for the first time on all the little details he had missed. The tell-tale signs he had ignored, consciously or otherwise. It seemed to him, looking back, that Marie-Ange and Crozes must have been having an affair for well over a year. She had converted her guilt into an anger that allowed her to blame him. Her infidelity had become his fault. If she had been forced into the arms of a lover, Sime was to blame. It explained so much. How affection had turned to contempt, intimacy to impatience and then anger.

And somehow he understood, for the first time since she had left, what it was he felt. Grief. For the lover he had lost. Almost as if she had died. Except that the body was still there. Walking, talking, taunting, tormenting him.

He clutched the rail, holding himself steady, his body rigid with tension, and he was caught almost unawares by the trickle of hot tears that ran down his cheeks.

It was still dark when he got back to the hotel. The long, low, two-storey building lay silently beneath the yellow glow of the streetlights. There was no hint of the drama which had played itself out there just a few hours before. Sime wondered how many of the team were asleep, what whispered words had passed between them in rooms and corridors. But found that he didn’t really care any more. The acute sense of humiliation had passed, leaving him empty of emotion, and indifferent to the opinions of others.

The night porter gazed at him from behind the reception desk with a surreptitious curiosity. In his room, the tele-shopping channel was selling an exercise machine to provide a whole-body workout. Sime locked all the doors and turned the TV off. He kicked away his shoes and slipped between the sheets still fully dressed. It was just after 5.30 a.m., and he lay shivering until gradually he started to recover some heat. A slow-burn warmth began to seep through his limbs, permeating his thoughts. He felt his body go limp, the red glow of the digital display on the clock fading to black as lids like lead closed on aching eyes …