Entry Island

I

Sime stood smarting in the doorway. She had always claimed that learning she couldn’t give him a child had changed him. Changed them. That it had been the beginning of the end. His fault, not hers.

And now the revelation that the baby had not even been his.

But for some reason, something didn’t quite ring true. Discovering Marie-Ange and Crozes in bed the night before. Realising that they’d been lovers for months, maybe years. And now replaying that awful time when she had lost the child. All of it brought a sudden reinterpretation of events. As if scales had fallen from his eyes. He felt a surge of anger and disbelief, and started off round the building at a run.

She was sitting behind the wheel of the second rental car, engine idling, but making no attempt to drive away. He ran across the car park and pulled the driver’s door open. She looked up at him, her face wet with tears, just as it had been that day at the hospital.

‘You liar,’ he said.

She flinched as if he had struck her.

‘That was my kid. But you figured if you had it you were going to be stuck with me, right?’ And when she didn’t respond. ‘Right?’

There was a singular vacancy in her eyes.

‘You didn’t go to your parents at all that week. You had an abortion, didn’t you? From some back-street quack. ’Cos you couldn’t do it legitimately without me knowing.’ He stared at her in disbelief. ‘You killed my child.’

She said nothing for a very long time, then in barely a whisper she said, ‘Our child.’ She pulled the door shut, engaged Drive, and accelerated away across the tarmac.

II

Long after she had gone, Sime stood by the sentier littoral staring out across the Baie de Plaisance towards the now familiar contour of Entry Island lying along the horizon. Children were playing on the beach, barefoot, running in and out of the incoming waves, screaming as cold water broke over little legs. The breeze ruffled his hair and filled his jacket. He felt hollowed out. His emptiness gnawed at him like a hunger. He was numbed by fatigue.

The longer he stared at this island which had grown to dominate his life these last days, the more compelled he felt to return to it. He had no idea why, except for a powerful sense that whatever answers it was he was seeking were to be found there.

He returned to the car park and got into the Chevy, driving up to the Chemin Principal and then north past the hospital and Tim Horton’s to the harbour. There he found the boatman whose fishing boat had been requisitioned by the Sûreté. He was sitting in the back of his vessel at the quayside smoking a small cigar and untangling fishing nets. He looked up, surprised, when Sime climbed down into the boat. ‘I need you to take me over to Entry,’ Sime said.

‘Lieutenant Crozes said I wouldn’t be needed till later.’

‘Change of plans. I need to go over now.’

When they arrived at Entry Island, Sime told him he could take the boat back to Cap aux Meules. He would make the return trip on the ferry. He stood watching as the fishing boat chugged out of the shelter of the breakwater and back into choppier waters in the bay, then turned to walk past the minibus where they had left it parked up for use on the island. He could have taken it. But he wanted to be on foot, to feel the island beneath his feet. He passed fishing boats with mundane names like Wendy Cora and Lady Bell, and turned on to the wide, unsurfaced Main Street that swept along the east coast of the island. Sunlight washed across the bay from the distant Cap in moments of broken sky. To the south-west, and much closer, was the Sandy Hook, a long curve of sandbank that extended from La Grave at the eastern point of the island of Havre Aubert. It reached out like a bony finger towards Entry Island.

The breeze was freshening a little, but it was still warm. He headed south past Josey’s restaurant. On his left, a chain was strung across the track that climbed to the little airstrip which had once played host to a winter passenger schedule between Entry Island and Havre aux Maisons. The short stretch of runway where Cowell had habitually landed his single-engined aircraft and picked up his Range Rover. The plane was still there, sitting on the tarmac.

At the top of the slope the road cut inland and he followed it up to the Anglican church. A plain white building of clapboard siding with green trim around small arched windows. It stood on the hill with a panoramic view extending west. A huge white cross, held in place against powerful winds by steel cables, cast its shadow across the graveyard.

Sime opened the gate and walked past a ship’s bell on a rusted metal mounting to wander among the headstones in the late-afternoon sunshine. Rifleman Arthur E. McLean; Curtis Quinn; Dickson, infant son of Leonard and Joyce. Some of them dated back decades. Others were more recent. But those who had staked their claim to a place here on the slopes of Entry Island were unlikely to be joined by too many more of their fellow islanders as the population dwindled towards extinction.

Sime’s shadow fell across an old, weather-worn headstone that stood no more than eighteen inches high and leaned at a slight angle in the grass. He was barely able to make out the name McKay, and he crouched down to brush away more than a century’s accumulation of algae and lichen. Kirsty McKay, he read. Daughter of Alasdair and Margaret. Died August 5th, 1912, aged 82. Kirsty’s great-great-great-grandmother. It had to be. The old lady whose photograph he had seen in the album started by Kirsty’s mother. He tried to recall her face, but the detail was gone. There was just an impression left in his mind of a time when people of a certain generation all seemed to look the same. Perhaps the homogenising effect of a popular hairstyle, or a fashion in clothes and hats. Or the limitations of those early cameras. The black, white and sepia prints, the poor lighting. Too dark or too light, too much contrast or too little.

Whatever it was, Sime found something sad in stumbling across the old lady’s grave like this. An image in a photo album perpetuates the illusion of life. Long after death, a smile or a frown lingers on. But a hole in the ground, with a stone marking the place where your head has been laid, is for eternity. He placed his hand on the stone. It was cool against his skin, and he felt the strangest sense of affinity with the old woman whose bones lay beneath him. As if somehow she made a bridge between his past and his present. Between him and her great-great-great-granddaughter.

As he stood up he shivered, although it was still warm. And goosebumps prickled all over his arms and shoulders as if someone had just stepped on his grave.

Clothes hanging out to dry in the late September sunshine flapped in the wind on a line strung from a characterless modern house next to the Epicerie. Two men in scuffed blue boiler suits and wellington boots interrupted their conversation to stand and watch as Sime walked past the junction. The road surface was broken and stony here. An old golden Labrador, with stiff, arthritic back legs, fell in step beside him.

‘Duke!’ one of the men called. ‘Duke! Here boy.’ But the dog ignored him and kept pace with Sime.

Where the path turned right towards the lighthouse, the road swung left, leading towards the Cowell House. Duke took the turn ahead of him and hobbled up the hill, almost as if he knew where it was that Sime was going. Sime hesitated for only a moment. He had no reason or authority to go back to the house. His interviews with Kirsty were over. And in any case, she would no longer speak without a lawyer present. Still, he followed Duke’s lead.

The house built by Cowell seemed like a sad extravagance now. It sat up here in cold testimonial to a failed marriage, empty and loveless. He stepped into the conservatory. ‘Hello?’ His voice reverberated around all the empty spaces within, but brought no response. He crossed the grass to the summer-house, and found the patrolman from Cap aux Meules making himself a sandwich in the kitchen. The young man looked up, a little surprised.

‘I thought you guys had gone back to Cap aux Meules,’ he said.

Sime just shrugged. ‘Where’s Mrs Cowell?’

‘You going to question her again?’

‘No.’

The patrolman bit into his sandwich and washed it over with a mouthful of coffee. He threw Sime a curious look. ‘Last time I saw her she was on the road heading off up the hill there.’

‘Where does that go?’

‘Nowhere in particular. It peters out after a while.’

Duke was waiting for him as he stepped back out of the house. The Labrador seemed to grin, then turned and started off up the road as if showing him the way. Sime stood and watched as the old dog ambled with his awkward arthritic gait up to the brow of the hill. There he stopped and looked back. Sime could almost feel his impatience.

But Sime turned away and followed the path that led to the cliffs and the narrow steps down to the jetty. The Cowells’ motor launch bobbed gently in the afternoon swell.

He imagined Kirsty, half drunk, fired by jealous humiliation, running down these steps in the dark and setting off across the bay in that small boat to Cap aux Meules. What kind of desperation must have driven her?

He turned and walked back towards the house and saw that Duke was still waiting for him on the hill.

Sime had no reason to talk to Kirsty again. And yet he wanted to see her. He wanted to tell her how much he hated this, even although he knew he wouldn’t. He started off up the hill after Duke. The dog waited until he was within a few metres, then turned and hobbled on.

The road was rutted and uneven, loose stones skidding away underfoot. When he reached the top of the rise Sime turned and looked back. The house seemed a long way below him already. In the distance, at the southernmost point of the island, the lighthouse looked tiny. And across the water, Havre Aubert seemed almost close enough to touch. The wind was stronger up here, whipping through his hair, filling his hoodie and blowing it out behind him. He turned to find Duke waiting for him again, and he walked on to a point where the road became little more than a path worn through the grass. It divided in a hollow, one branch snaking up towards the summit of Big Hill, the other descending again to the cliffs and the red rock stacks that rose up out of the ocean.

And there he saw her. Standing very close to the cliff’s edge, silhouetted against the blaze of reflected sunlight on the ocean beyond. They were facing east here, out across the Gulf of St Lawrence and the North Atlantic towards a far distant land from which their ancestors had once come.

Duke reached her before he did. She stooped to ruffle his neck then crouched beside him. Sime saw her smiling, animated in a way he had not seen her before. Until he entered her peripheral vision and she turned her head to see him approaching. The smile vanished and she stood up immediately. Her whole demeanour became hostile and defensive. ‘What do you want?’ she said coldly when he reached her.

Sime pushed his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I was just taking a walk. Killing time till the ferry comes.’ He flicked his head beyond where she stood. ‘You’re a bit close to the edge here.’

She laughed, and it seemed to Sime that it was the first time he had seen her genuinely amused. ‘I’m not going to throw myself off, if that’s what you think.’

He smiled. ‘I didn’t.’ He looked along the ragged line of the cliffs. ‘But there’s a lot of erosion here. Not safe to get too close, I wouldn’t think.’

‘I’m touched by your concern.’ The sarcasm had returned.

He looked at her very directly. ‘I’m only doing my job, Mrs Cowell. I bear you no ill will.’

She gasped her disbelief. ‘Accusing me of killing my husband doesn’t feel like you bear me much good will either.’

‘Just testing the evidence.’ He paused. ‘A pathologist I know once told me that when he performs an autopsy on a murder victim he feels like that person’s only remaining advocate on earth. Someone to find and test the evidence that the body of the deceased has left in his care.’

‘And that’s what you’re doing for James?’

‘In a way, yes. He can’t speak for himself. He can’t tell us what happened. And whatever he might have done, whoever he might have been, he didn’t deserve to die like that.’

She looked at him steadily for a long moment. ‘No, he didn’t.’

An awkward silence settled between them. Then he said, ‘Do you really intend to spend the rest of your life here?’

She laughed. ‘Well. That depends on whether or not you put me in jail.’ He found a pale smile in response. ‘But the truth is, Mr Mackenzie, that whatever I might have said in an emotional moment, I really love this island. I played all over it as a child, I’ve walked every inch of it as an adult. Big Hill, Jim’s Hill, Cherry’s Hill. Pimples on the landscape really, but when you’re young they’re the Alps or the Rockies. The island is your whole world, and anything beyond it far off and exotic. Even the other islands in the Magdalens.’

‘Not an easy place to live, I wouldn’t have thought.’

‘Depends what you’re used to. We didn’t know anything else. At least, not until we were older. The weather is hard, sure, but even that you accept, because it’s just how it is. The winters are long, and so cold sometimes that the bay freezes over and it’s possible to walk across to Amherst.’ And for his benefit, ‘That’s Havre Aubert.’

‘How come you speak English here when the rest of the islands are francophone?’

‘Not all of them are,’ she said. A gust of wind blew her hair into her face and she carefully drew it aside with her small finger, then shook it back. ‘They speak English at the north end, too. At Grand Entry Island, and Old Harry and GrosseÎle. Old Harry is where James came from originally. But, yes, most of the population of the Magdalen Islands are French-speakers. I guess maybe only 5 or 10 per cent of us speak English.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s our heritage, our culture. And when you’re a minority you tend to protect those things, nurture them, defend them. Like the French minority in Canada.’

Duke had wandered off, sniffing among the grasses, and was very close to the cliff’s edge. She shouted to him, but all he did was raise his head and cast a dispassionate glance in their direction.

‘Come on,’ she said to Sime. ‘If we head back up the path he’ll follow us.’ She smiled. ‘Duke’s made it his lifetime’s work to follow every visitor to the island.’

They walked up along the path, side by side, at a leisurely rate. Anyone watching from a distance might have taken them for old friends. But the silence between them was tense.

She said suddenly, ‘You probably know, but we still use all the English names for the islands here on Entry. Magdalen rather than Madeleine. Cap aux Meules is Grindstone, Havre Aubert is Amherst — well, I already told you that. Havre aux Maisons is known as Alright Island.’ It was as if she felt that by talking about things of no consequence, those things of enormous consequence that were creating the tension, would be somehow dissipated. ‘The whole archipelago is surrounded by shipwrecks. I saw a map once that pinpointed them all. Hundreds of them, all around the coast.’

‘How come they all washed up here?’

‘Who knows? Bad weather, bad luck, and no lighthouse back in the early days. And I suppose we are slap-bang in the middle of the main shipping lane to the St Lawrence River and Quebec City.’ She glanced at him and bit her lip. ‘How the hell do you make polite conversation with someone who thinks you’re a murderer?’

‘That’s not necessarily what I think,’ he said, and as soon as he’d said it, regretted it. Because, on balance, it was what he thought. It just wasn’t what he wanted to think.

She looked at him intently. As if those blue eyes could penetrate his outer defences and reach the truth. ‘Sure,’ she said eventually, unconvinced.

Duke hirpled past them and threw himself into a ditch full of water at the side of the path. He splashed about in it for a while, cooling himself down, then hauled himself out again with difficulty. He shook his coat violently, and sent water spraying all over Kirsty and Sime. She let out a yell and stepped back, almost losing her footing, and Sime was quick to grab her arm and stop her from falling.

She laughed. ‘Damn dog!’ And then her smile faded as she realised that Sime was still holding her. They were both immediately awkward and he let go of her, self-conscious, almost embarrassed by their unexpected physical contact.

They turned and followed Duke as he ran off with renewed vigour to where the road dipped down over the top of the hill. The wind was stronger here. Below them the bay simmered intermittently in flitting sunlight. Cowell’s house stood proud on the edge of the cliffs, the summerhouse where Kirsty had been born just beyond it. The roof of the police patrol car glinted in the sunshine next to Cowell’s beige Range Rover.

‘Don’t you have a car?’ Sime said suddenly.

‘No.’

‘How do you get around?’

‘You don’t need a car on the island. There’s nowhere you can’t walk to.’

‘But James felt the need for one.’

‘He often brought stuff over on the plane with him. I suppose if I’d ever needed one, I could have used his. Except that I don’t drive.’

Sime was surprised. ‘That’s unusual.’

But she didn’t respond, her attention caught by his right hand as he ran it back through his hair. ‘What happened to your hand?’

He looked at it and saw that the knuckles were bruised and grazed, slightly swollen where he had struck Crozes. He pushed it into his pocket, embarrassed. ‘Nothing,’ he said. And to his amazement she reached forward to seize his wrist and pull his hand back out of the pocket so that she could examine it.

‘You’ve been in a fight.’

‘Have I?’

She was still holding his hand, and pushed up an eyebrow. ‘This is a tough island, Mr Mackenzie. There are no policemen here. Men often settle their differences with fists. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen busted knuckles.’ She paused, glancing down again at his hand. ‘And yours weren’t like this yesterday.’

She let him go, and he took his hand back to rub it gently with his other, almost as if trying to hide the damage, and became aware again of the ring with the arm and sword. In spite of a strange compunction to tell her the truth all he said was, ‘It’s a personal matter.’ He avoided her eye.

‘Let me guess. Men don’t usually hit complete strangers, and since you don’t know anyone here it’s probably someone you know. One of your co-workers. A fellow investigator. Am I right?’

Now he met her gaze full on. But still said nothing.

‘Since I don’t see any damage to your face other than the cut you got the other day, it might be fair to assume that you were the aggressor. Which means that you must have had some pretty powerful motivation for attacking a colleague. My guess would be that there’s a woman involved?’ She raised an eyebrow to ask the question. When there was no response she said, ‘And since the only woman on the team is your ex …’

‘He’d been sleeping with her.’ It was out before he could stop himself. And immediately wished he could take it back. He felt his face redden.

‘Since before the break-up?’

He nodded.

‘And you just found out?’

‘Yes.’

‘And gave him a beating?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good for you.’

Somehow she seemed to have turned the tables on him. She was the interrogator, he the guilty party defending his actions.

She smiled and said, ‘We’re really not so different then, are we?’ He gave her an odd look. ‘Each of us capable of losing our cool in the face of losing a lover.’ She paused and sighed. ‘You of all people, Mr Mackenzie, should understand what drove me over to Cap aux Meules that night to confront James and the Briand woman.’

His mouth was dry. ‘Did it also drive you to kill him?’

She stared at him for a long time. ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

Duke had tired of waiting for them and wandered back to drop himself in a huff at their feet.

She said, ‘When we first met you thought you knew me.’

He nodded. He wanted to tell her about the diaries. About his dreams. About the little girl called Kirsty whose life his ancestor had saved. The teenage girl he had kissed on a windswept Hebridean island and lost on a quayside in Glasgow. How somehow in his dreams, in his mind, she had become one with the woman who stood before him here on this blustery hill on Entry Island.

She reached out unexpectedly to run fingertips lightly down his cheek and said, ‘You don’t know me at all.’

Some instinct, or some fleeting movement, made him turn his head. He saw the patrolman from Cap aux Meules approaching on the path, a couple of hundred metres away down the hill. Even from here Sime could see his consternation. How bizarrely intimate this moment must have seemed. Sime the detective, Kirsty the murder suspect, standing so close together on the hill, her fingers extended to touch his face.

She took her hand away, and Sime left her to hurry down the hill towards the policeman. Duke struggled to his feet and ran after him.

The young policeman continued up the slope to meet him halfway. He gave Sime the oddest look, but kept his thoughts to himself. ‘Lieutenant Crozes has been trying to reach you, sir.’

‘Why didn’t he call me on my cellphone?’ Sime dug a hand into his pocket to find it, and realised he had never gone back to the incident room to get it. ‘Damnit! I’ll call him back from the phone at the house.’

And with only the most fleeting of backward glances, he headed quickly off down the road with the patrolman towards the summerhouse. Kirsty stood on the prow of the hill watching them go.

He could hear the contained fury in Crozes’s voice. What the hell was he doing on Entry? But he was barely listening. From where Sime stood holding the phone in the living room of the summerhouse, he could see Kirsty walking slowly down the hill. He let Crozes rail at him without response. Until finally the lieutenant ran out of steam and said coldly, ‘We’ll deal with that later. The preliminary report from forensics is in. Lapointe had them do priority DNA testing. They just faxed the results.’

‘And?’ Sime knew it would not be good news.

‘The samples taken from beneath Kirsty Cowell’s fingernails contain skin matching the scratchmarks on her husband’s face.’ He paused, and Sime heard something that sounded almost like pleasure in his voice. ‘Maybe it’s just as well you’re over there, Sime. I want you to arrest her and bring her back here to be formally charged with murder.’

Sime said nothing.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

‘Good. We’ll see you both back here around six, then.’ He hung up.

Sime stood holding the receiver for a long time before slowly replacing it in its cradle. Through the window he saw that Kirsty had reached the big house now and was walking across the grass towards the summerhouse. Duke had gone to meet her and was gambolling excitedly around her legs, as enthusiastically as his arthritis would allow. Sime turned to find the patrolman looking at him. ‘I’m going to need a witness for this,’ he said. The young man flushed with anticipation. It was clear to him that something previously outside of his experience was about to go down.

Sime stepped out on to the porch as Kirsty climbed the steps. She could tell at once that something had changed. ‘What’s wrong?’

Sime said, ‘Kirsty Cowell, you are under arrest for the murder of James Cowell.’

All the colour drained from her face. ‘What?’ Her shock was clear. Her voice trembling.

‘Do you understand?’

‘I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.’

Sime drew a long breath, aware of the patrolman at his shoulder. ‘You have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. I am taking you back to the police station at Cap aux Meules where we will provide you with a toll-free telephone line to a lawyer referral service if you do not have your own lawyer. Anything you say can be used in court as evidence. Do you understand?’ He waited. ‘Would you like to speak to a lawyer?’

She stood staring at him for a very long time, every conflicting emotion reflected in her eyes. Until she lifted her hand and slapped him hard across the face where just a few minutes earlier she had touched him with tender fingers.

The patrolman stepped in quickly to grab her wrists.

‘Let her go!’ The imperative in Sime’s voice had almost as powerful an effect on the young man as Kirsty’s slap, and he released her immediately, as if she were electrically charged. Sime felt an ache of regret as he met her eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.