Entry Island

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

He woke up startled, feelings of pain and regret following him from the dream to his waking consciousness like a hangover. The dream itself had unfolded just as he remembered the telling of the story, but his years of life experience since its reading had coloured it with images and emotions he could not have known as a young boy. And once again Kirsty Cowell had been Ciorstaidh, and he his own ancestor.

Light leaked in all around the drawn curtains of his room and he checked the time. It was a little after seven, so he had not slept long.

These events from his ancestor’s life were haunting him now with increasing frequency. When they weren’t consciously in his thoughts, his subconscious was dredging them up to fill brief moments of sleep. It seemed there was no escape.

The clearing of Baile Mhanais and his running away with Ciorstaidh had somehow brought him full circle. Back to that first dream, and their separation on the quayside at Glasgow. And that’s what filled his mind now. But with a sense of something missing. Although he could not think what. He forced himself to replay the events of that fateful day when the Eliza had carried Simon off to the New World, leaving Ciorstaidh behind in the old. The promise his ancestor knew he could never keep. Just as he had dreamt it. Just as he remembered it in the telling from all those years before. And yet still, he knew, there was something he’d forgotten. Something lost in time and just out of reach.

A knock on the door dispersed the dream and its afterthoughts, and his recollection of events the night before came flooding back to replace them. Depression fell on him like snow.

The knock came again. More insistent this time.

Sime felt battered, his eyes full of sleep and still barely focusing. He swung his legs out of bed, his clothes crumpled and damp with sweat, and slipped his feet into his shoes.

‘Okay!’ he shouted as the knocking started again. He swept his hair back out of his face and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before opening the door.

Crozes stood in the hall. For a moment Sime wondered if he was going to attack him. But he was a pool of dark stillness. The cut on his lip had scabbed over, and there was bruising all around his left eye and cheek. ‘Can I come in?’

Sime stood back, holding the door wide, and Crozes pushed past him into the room. As Sime closed the door Crozes turned to face him. ‘We can play this one of two ways,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Sime could determine nothing from expressionless eyes. The pallor beneath Crozes’s tan turned his skin almost jaundice-yellow.

‘Either we behave as if nothing happened and we just get on with our lives.’ He hesitated. ‘Or I bring you up on a charge of assault which will see you immediately suspended, and almost certainly dismissed.’

Sime looked at him thoughtfully, his brain slowly clearing. ‘Well, let me tell you why you’re not going to do that.’ Crozes waited. Impassive. ‘One, you’d have to admit that you’d been screwing the wife of a fellow officer. Two, you’d have to suffer the humiliation of every single person in the department knowing how I beat the shit out of you.’ Still Crozes waited. ‘End to both of our careers. And I don’t think either of us wants that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that we can play this one of two ways.’ He got an almost perverse pleasure from throwing Crozes’s words back in his face. ‘We can make like nothing happened.’

Crozes contained his anger well. ‘Or?’

‘Or I can go upstairs with the fact that you’ve been sleeping with my wife for the last year and we’ll see how that plays out.’

‘Same result.’

Sime shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He was surprised himself just how cool and unemotional he felt. As if it was other people’s lives they were discussing. And he realised with something of a shock that he didn’t much care any more. About the Sûreté, about Marie-Ange, about Crozes. ‘Just depends which of us takes the initiative first.’

‘I could arrest you right now. It’s not as if there aren’t witnesses.’

‘And how do you know that I haven’t already called Captain McIvir with a full account of what happened. Including your infidelity with my wife?’ He saw Crozes stiffen.

‘Have you?’

Sime let the question hang for a few long moments. ‘No,’ he said finally.

Crozes’s relief was almost palpable. ‘So we’re agreed then?’

‘Are we?’

‘Nothing happened last night. If Marie-Ange and I have a relationship it only began after your marriage broke up. We wrap up this investigation and spend the rest of our careers staying out of each other’s way.’

Sime looked hard at the other man. ‘In other words you want me to keep my mouth shut.’ He could see by the movement of his jaw that Crozes was clenching his teeth.

‘You can interpret it any way you like. I’m just laying out the choices.’

It was some time, with silence hanging heavy in the room, before Sime broke eye contact with the lieutenant and sat down on the edge of his bed. ‘Whatever you want,’ he said wearily.

Crozes nodded, and his whole demeanour seemed to change in a heartbeat. Suddenly he was the lieutenant again, and it was back to business. The murder of James Cowell. As if nothing at all had passed between them he said, ‘The police in Quebec City have tracked down Mayor Briand finally. He’s staying at the Auberge Saint-Antoine.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s a flight in forty-five minutes. I want you and Blanc on it.’