Entry Island

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Sime braced himself against one side of the wheelhouse as Gaston Boudreau’s fishing vessel rose and fell on a swell that was heavy, even within the harbour wall.

Boudreau stood in the doorway unconcerned, it seemed, at the prospect of taking Sime over to Entry Island with the storm so close. But he was perplexed. ‘Why can’t you just wait till morning, monsieur? The storm’ll have blown itself out by then and you can get the ferry over.’

But Sime wanted to be on the plane with Kirsty when it flew out at midday. Tonight would be his last chance to take another look at the house, and to go through the family papers stored in the basement. Besides which, he knew that sleep would probably escape him, and he would be unable to contain himself during the long waking hours of darkness. ‘How much will it take?’ is all he said.

‘How much are you offering?’

Sime’s opening gambit of two hundred dollars drew a laugh from the fisherman. ‘Take away the cost of the fuel and there’s bugger all left for me,’ he said. ‘Five hundred.’

‘Done.’ Sime would have paid double. And something about the speed with which he agreed conveyed that to Boudreau. The fisherman pulled a face, realising he could have negotiated more.

‘Give me a minute.’

Boudreau stepped inside his wheelhouse and slid the door shut. Sime could see him inside making a call on his cellphone. He had an exchange with someone at the other end that lasted around thirty seconds, then he hung up and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He slid open the door.

‘Okay, we’ve got the green light. Let’s get going.’

He turned back inside to start the motor and Sime followed him in. ‘Who were you phoning?’

‘The owner, of course.’

‘Oh, I thought you owned the boat yourself.’

‘Hah!’ Boudreau smiled wryly. ‘I wish.’

‘Who’s the owner, then?’

GPS and sonar monitors flickered into life. ‘Mayor Briand.’

Within fifteen minutes of leaving the harbour, any thoughts that Sime might have had about Briand had deserted him. The commanding sensation of seasickness drove everything from his mind, and by the time they were halfway across the bay he was regretting his foolishness in making the crossing at all.

Boudreau himself stood easily at the wheel, legs apart, somehow moving in time with the boat. Sime took comfort from the fact that he seemed so relaxed. The light was fading fast, the sky ominously black overhead. It wasn’t until they were close to Entry Island that he actually saw it, emerging out of the spray and spume to take dark shape and fill their eyes.

The sea was less turbulent in the lee of the island, and they motored easily into the comparative calm of the little harbour as the sea vented its wrath against the concrete breakwaters that protected it.

Boudreau eased his vessel up to the quayside with all the skill of a practised boatman and leaped out to secure it with a rope. He took Sime’s hand to steady him as he jumped across the gap between heaving boat and dry land. He grinned happily. ‘You want me to stay and take you back?’ he shouted above the howl of the wind.

‘Good God no, man,’ Sime shouted back at him. ‘Get home before the storm breaks. I’ll take the ferry back in the morning.’

It was only when Boudreau was gone, the lights of his fishing boat devoured by darkness, that Sime was able to take stock for the first time. His entire focus had been on getting here, and now that he was, a flood of emotions drowned all coherent thought. He had forced himself not to think about what Aitkens had told him until this moment, almost afraid to face the implications of what he now knew.

Kirsty Cowell was the great-great-great-granddaughter of Kirsty Guthrie, who had come looking for her Simon and ended up shipwrecked here on this tiny island in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence. And she had waited, and waited. Because he had promised, no matter where she was, he would find her. But he never did. And in the end she had married another, as he had. And all that had survived both the time and the generations in between were the ring that she had given his ancestor and the pendant she had kept for herself.

The rain whipped into Sime’s face as he stood on the quayside trying to come to terms with the bizarre quirk of fate that had somehow brought him and Kirsty Cowell together.

A group of fisherman securing boats against the storm had stopped what they were doing and gathered now in a knot to stand and watch him from a distance. Aware of them suddenly, Sime became self-conscious and turned to hurry away through the rain-streaked pools of light that lay all along the length of the harbour. A lamp burning in the wheelhouse of the last of the fishing boats caught his eye. A figure stepped out into the stern of the boat as he passed. The face turned towards him and was momentarily caught in the light. A face he knew at once. Owen Clarke. Sime pulled his hood up over his head and lowered it into the wind as he hurried away, following the road up to Main Street.

The thrum of the generators at the top of the road was barely audible above the roar of the wind that he fought against all the way up the hill until he reached the church. A couple of pickups passed him on the road, bumping and lurching through the puddles. Headlights picking him out against the black of the night, then passing with the growl of an engine to be swallowed by the dark. Lights shone in the windows of the few houses dotted around the hillside, but there was not a soul in sight. Sime opened the gate of the church and by the light of his cellphone found his way back to the grave of Kirsty McKay, whom he now knew to be Kirsty Guthrie.

He stood in the wind and rain looking down at her headstone, knowing that her bones lay beneath his feet.

Just as he had done that morning, Sime knelt in front of the stone and laid both hands upon it. The wet of the earth soaked into the knees of his trousers. The stone felt cold and rough in his hands. And he had a powerful sense of somehow bridging the gap between these ill-fated lovers, bringing them together at last after all these years.

He felt, too, a strong sense of grief. He had lived through passionate moments in the skin of his ancestor. In his dream he had sacrificed everything to try to be with his Ciorstaidh. And here she lay, dead in the earth, as she had done for a very, very long time. He stood up quickly.

Impossible, he knew, to tell tears from rain.

The hoarse revving of a motor reached him above the howl of the wind, and he turned in time to see the shadow of a figure on a quad bike vanishing over the lip of the hill.

By the time he got to the big yellow house on the cliffs it was pitch-dark. He had struggled all the way against the wind, stumbling through the potholes that pitted the road. His clothes were soaked through and he was shivering from the cold.

But he did not go in straight away. He circled the big house and crossed the grass to the summerhouse, the house which had originally belonged to the McKays. The house where Kirsty Guthrie had grown up and in all probability later lived with her husband. The house where, several generations later, Kirsty Cowell had been born and raised. Walking in the footsteps of her ancestor, seeing all the same things that she had seen. Entry Island, almost unchanged in two hundred years. The sun coruscating across the bay towards the other islands of the archipelago stretched out along the horizon. She would have felt the same wind in her face, picked the same flowers from the same hills.

The front door was not locked, and Sime let himself in. He switched on a table lamp and wandered around in the half-dark just touching things. Things that belonged to Kirsty Cowell. An ornamental owl sculpted out of a piece of coal, an old clock that ticked slowly on the mantel. A book she had been reading, laid aside on a coffee table. A mug of tea never returned to the kitchen. And with every touch, the connection between them seemed to grow stronger until he could hardly bear it.

He pushed through the screen door and back out onto the porch, and ran across to the house that James Cowell had built. The last shredded remnants of crime scene tape clung to a wooden stake, fluttering wildly in the wind. The door to the conservatory was not locked and he slid it open to step inside and fumble for a light switch.

Lighting concealed around the conservatory and up into the living area and kitchen flickered and cast warm light among the shadows. Dried blood still stained the floor, and Marie-Ange had stuck down white tape to trace the outline of where the body had lain.

Sime stood dripping on the wooden floor and gazed at it for a long time. He was trying to replay the scene exactly as Kirsty had described it. The clear impression her story had given was that she and not James was the intended target. The intruder had attacked her in the dark of the conservatory, and then chased her across the floor of the living area and tried to stab her.

Which meant that if James were not the object of the attack, it couldn’t have been Briand. Because what possible motive could he have had for killing Kirsty?

But then, she had stumbled upon the intruder by accident while James was upstairs. Wasn’t it possible that he had simply tried to shut her up, to stop her from raising the alarm? That it only appeared she was the victim?

On the other hand, if she were the target, and her attacker wasn’t Briand, he would not have anticipated Cowell being there. As far as anyone knew he had left her and moved in with a woman across the water. His presence would have come as a huge surprise.

Sime turned away from the crime scene, spooked suddenly by a sense of being alone with ghosts, and frustrated by the lack of any real clarity. He headed along the passage that ran towards the far end of the house, and found a light switch on the stairs that led down to the basement.

Here in the bowels of the house you wouldn’t have known there was a storm raging outside. Only the occasional deep thudding vibration, as the building soaked up a particularly heavy gust of wind, betrayed the fact that the storm had well and truly arrived.

Sime found a panel of light switches and flicked them all up, flooding the entire basement with the glare of fluorescent light. He went straight to the storeroom he had discovered on his previous visit. It was full of cardboard boxes, a couple of old trunks, a set of leather suitcases. The shelves that lined the walls were bowed with the weight of books and papers and box files.

And everything went dark.

Sime stood stock-still, his heart pounding. He could even have sworn he heard his pulse in the thick black silence. The darkness was profound. He couldn’t see his hands in front of his face. For several moments he stood hoping that his eyes would accustom themselves to the dark and he could at least discern something. But still it enveloped him, soft and sightless, and he felt completely blind.

He reached out to touch the wall and made his way back to the door by touch, reaching it sooner than expected and almost bumping into it. Now he could feel the architrave and the doorframe and stepped cautiously out into what he knew was a large open space with the stairs at the far side of it. He cursed the storm, which seemed louder now, penetrating the layers of insulation that cocooned the house. The chances were that the whole island had lost power, or at least part of it if cables had come down.

A sudden flash of light left an imprint on his retinas of everything around him. Lightning. It had flooded through windows high up on the walls. And vanished again just as suddenly. But with an image in his mind of exactly where he stood, Sim moved quickly in the remembered direction of the stairs. He tripped over the bottom step and gashed his knee on the one above it.

‘Shit!’

He waited for several moments for the pain to subside before climbing the stairs, his hands touching the walls on either side to help him feel his way up. Still he could see nothing. And then at the top of the steps, another flash of lightning lit up the whole house. Again he used the lingering image it left to guide himself through to the main room.

There he stopped, and for the first time became aware of an alarm bell ringing distantly in his mind. Through the windows of the conservatory he could see across to the summer-house where the table lamp he had switched on earlier still burned in the living room. He turned around, and through other windows saw the twinkle of distant lights in other houses. Only Cowell’s house had lost electricity. Either the fuses had tripped, or someone had switched off the power. Even if he could find his way to it he had no idea where the fusebox was.

He stood absolutely still, listening in the dark, hearing nothing more than the sound of the storm outside. But something else had every nerve-end tingling. A very powerful sense that he was not alone. Only minutes before the lights went out he had been spooked by the imagined presence of the dead. Now, whether he sensed the warmth of a body or some faint odour, all of his instincts told him there was someone else in the house. Boudreau aside, only a handful of people knew he was here. Aitkens and Briand. The fishermen he’d seen at the harbour, Owen Clarke among them. And was it Chuck he had seen on the quad bike by the cemetery? Of all of them, it seemed to Sime, only Briand had motive. Take away his wife’s alibi and he’d also had the opportunity.

Sime cursed himself suddenly for his own stupidity. Just half an hour earlier he had guided himself to Kirsty Guthrie’s grave using his cellphone. And he had spent the last several minutes stumbling about in the dark when he had a perfectly usable source of light in his pocket. He fumbled to retrieve it and switch it on.

To reveal a masked face less than half a metre away, a blade rising through the dark.

A startled cry released itself from his throat, and in reaching out to grab the knife hand of his attacker, his phone went clattering away across the floor, its light with it. All that he was left with was the imprint in his mind of two dark eyes glinting behind the slits of a ski mask.

He felt the blade strike his shoulder, cutting through flesh and glancing off the bone. Pain seared through his neck and arm, but he had a hold of the man’s wrist with one hand and swung a fist blindly through the dark. He felt the jarring contact of bone on bone and the other man gasped in pain. Sime swivelled side-on and threw all his weight forward, pushing his attacker back until he lost his footing on the two steps leading to the conservatory. Both men fell down into it, Sime on top, the sound of the knife rattling away across the floor. Sime’s weight expelled all the air from the other man’s lungs, like a long deep sigh, and Sime felt a blast of bad breath in his face.

But he wasn’t prepared for the hand that searched for and found his mouth and eyes, fingers like steel tearing at him in the dark. He released his grip on the man’s wrist and rolled away, crashing into a reclining chair.

Lightning spiked through the sky outside, and in that moment he saw his opponent stagger to his feet. Sime rolled over on to his knees, trying to control his breathing and steady himself for another attack. But all he felt was the rush of wind and rain that burst into the house as the door of the conservatory slid open. The crack of thunder that exploded overhead made him duck involuntarily.

The fleeting shadow of his would-be killer darted through the light of the summerhouse across the way and vanished into the night. Sime stumbled back up the steps and slithered across the floor, trying to find his phone. Lightning flashed again and he saw it just a few feet away. He dived to get it before the lightning map left his memory, fumbling then with shaking fingers to switch it on, hoping that it wasn’t broken. To his relief, it shed an amazing amount of illumination around him. He staggered to his feet and ran over to the kitchen, grabbing a knife from the block. How he wished he still had his Glock. He turned away to pursue his attacker, but stopped suddenly as he saw a flashlight clipped to an electric wall-charger by the door. He tore it free of its charger and with shaking fingers flicked the on-switch. It released a powerful beam of light into the kitchen. He thrust his phone back into his pocket and ran across the room, armed now with blade and light to chase the killer into the storm.

In the conservatory he stopped for a moment to stoop and pick up his attacker’s knife by the tip of its blade and lay it carefully on one of the chairs. There was every possibility that this was the knife used to kill Cowell.

And then he was out and into the rain and wind, the sharp pain of his shoulder wound dulling to a pervasive ache. He felt his arm stiffening up. He raised the flashlight and raked it across the clifftops. He saw nothing but the rain that drove through its beam like warp speed on Star Trek. He ran around the side of the house and swung the light back down the road towards the lighthouse. Nothing again. The man had disappeared. He turned and directed the beam up the road, and caught the briefest glimpse of a shadow disappearing over the top of the hill.

Sime drew a deep breath and started after him, his torchlight zigzagging around the hillside as he ran. When he reached the brow of the hill he stopped and swung it through an arc of 180 degrees. This was where he and Kirsty had stood just a few days earlier, when they had made some kind of connection for the very first time, and she had touched his face. Just before the call from Crozes that had led him to arrest her for murder.

There was no sign of the fugitive. Then another flash of lightning lit up the hillside, and he saw the man in the hollow below, running along the edge of the cliffs. Sime ran down the hill after him, fighting to keep his feet and his balance in the dark and the wet, buffeted face-on by the wind.

Just metres from the edge of the cliffs he stopped and focused the beam of his flashlight along their ragged contours. Aeons of erosion had eaten away at rock that glowed blood-red in the dark. Columns of it rose almost sheer out of the sea below. The noise of the storm was deafening. The wind threw mountainous seas against the base of the cliffs. Spray rose fifty feet in the air and glowed like silver mist in the light of his torch.

And then he saw him. His attacker had given up. There was nowhere to go. He was unarmed and without light. Sime was sure to catch him. Crouching in the grass to catch his breath, he had extended one arm to his right to keep his balance. And he watched as Sime approached, slow and cautious, keeping the beam of his torch fully focused on him the whole time.

‘Give it up, Briand!’ Sime shouted above the roar of the wind.

But the man neither spoke nor moved. Sime was within a metre of him now. And suddenly he sprang forward, filling the beam of light, almost snuffing it out, as he powered into Sime and grabbed his knife arm with one hand, punching his wounded shoulder with the other. Once, twice, three times. Sime yelled with pain, and his flashlight went spinning away through the grass. The other man was powerful, and with his weight on top as the two men fell, was able to twist Sime’s wrist, forcing him to unclench his fist and release the knife.

Now he had the upper hand, grabbing the knife and turning quickly to get back to his feet. Sime clutched desperately at his face as he did, fingers finding only the slick wet material of the man’s ski mask. Which tore off in his hand as the other man rolled away.

The flashlight lay tipped at an angle in the grass. But it cast enough light for Sime to see Jack Aitkens, wild-eyed, his back to the cliffs, the ocean behind him. He stood with his legs apart, slightly bent at the knees, his knife hand extended to his right. He was gasping for breath.

Sime got slowly to his feet, looking at him in astonishment. ‘Why?’ he shouted.

But Aitkens made no attempt to respond, keeping his eyes fixed on the detective.

‘For God’s sake, Aitkens!’ Sime bellowed. ‘Give it up.’

Aitkens shook his head, but still said nothing. Sime glanced towards the flashlight. If he had that, then he could at least blind the man when he came at him. He dived for it at the same time as Aitkens made his move.

Stretched out on his belly, he grasped the torch, half expecting Aitkens’s blade to sink itself between his shoulders. He rolled over and shone the light up into Aitkens’s face. But there was no one there. He scrambled to his knees and swept the beam of his torch across the clifftops. Nothing. Aitkens had vanished.

The ground beneath Sime started to move, and he scrambled backwards in a panic as the cliff began collapsing along its leading edge. And he realised what had happened. The ground had simply given way beneath Aitkens’s feet and dropped him down on to the rocks below.

Soaked and in pain, gasping for breath and sick to his stomach, Sime spread himself out, lying on his belly, and eased himself towards the precipice until he could see down on to the jumble of debris at the foot of the cliffs.

It wasn’t a sheer drop, but a steep scree slope that fell in increments to shelves and ledges, before finally plunging down to an ocean thrashing itself against lethal outcrops of rock.

Aitkens lay on his back about fifteen metres down, still some ten metres above the sea, but drenched by the spray it tossed up into the wind. He was alive, one arm reaching up to grasp a ledge of rock above him. But he didn’t seem able to move the rest of his body.

Sime wriggled back from the drop and got to his feet, training the light of his torch along the edge of the cliffs until he saw a way down. A gentle cutaway from the top, and a steep seam of rock running downwards at an angle that would lead him to Aitkens. He ran along to it, and carefully lowered himself over the edge, gingerly testing the rock underfoot in case it would give way.

It took him almost ten minutes to make the descent, battered by the explosive breath of the storm, soaked by the salt spray thrown up all along the cliffs.

Aitkens was breathing hard. Short, mechanical bursts of breath. His eyes wide and staring in fear. Sime perched precariously on the ledge beside him. ‘Can you move?’

Aitkens shook his head. ‘There’s no feeling in my legs. My whole lower body.’ His voice was feeble. He bit his lip and tears filled his eyes. ‘I think my back’s broken.’

‘Jesus,’ Sime said. ‘What the hell were you doing, Aitkens? Why would you want to kill Kirsty?’

Aitkens said, ‘I thought you already knew. When you came asking questions about our family history.’

‘Knew what?’

Aitkens closed his eyes, pained by irony and regret. ‘Obviously not.’ He opened them again and a tear ran back down the side of his head and into his hair. ‘Sir John Guthrie …’

‘Kirsty’s father?’

He nodded. ‘He was worth a damn fortune, Mackenzie. All that family wealth accumulated during the tobacco trade, and then sugar and cotton. He didn’t just own the Langadail Estate. He had property in Glasgow and London. Investments, money in the bank. And he left all of it to his daughter, since his son was dead.’ He closed his eyes again and let out a long, painful breath. He tried to swallow, then looked up at Sime once more. ‘Only they couldn’t find her. She’d run off to Canada in search of her crofter boy. His wife was dead and there was no other heir.’ He seemed to have trouble breathing and speaking at the same time. Sime waited until he found his voice again. ‘I did my research. In Scotland, in those days, when a beneficiary couldn’t be traced, it had to be reported to the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid name! It’s now the Crown Office.’ He swallowed to catch his breath. ‘In Guthrie’s case, the lawyers sold off all his assets and the money was put in the care of the Crown, until someone turned up to claim it. Only no one ever did.’

For the first time, Sime saw how greed had been the motive for everything.

Aitkens screwed up his face in what might have been either pain or regret. ‘The only people left alive with a claim on that money were me and Kirsty. Well, my father before me. But since I have power of attorney …’

‘And you didn’t want to share it.’

His eyes fired up with indignation. ‘Why the hell should I? She had a big house, a big divorce settlement in her future. More money than she could ever spend on her precious Entry Island. And what did I have? A subterranean life spent in the dark for a pathetic monthly wage. No life, no future. That money could have given me everything.’

And now, Sime thought, if he survived he faced a life of imprisonment, both in a wheelchair and behind bars. And that realisation was writ large all over Aitkens’s face, too.

Sime said, ‘It was you who attacked me that night.’

Aitkens found his voice again but it was just a whisper. ‘Yes.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘The ring,’ he said. ‘I’d seen Kirsty’s pendant. I knew it came from Kirsty Guthrie. I thought …’ He shook his head in despair. ‘I thought that somehow you might be family, too. Some distant damned relative that was going to come and stake his claim on the money. If you look inside the band of the ring you’ll probably find it’s engraved with the Guthrie family motto. Sto pro veritate.’ He closed his eyes, the despair in his sigh conveying all the irony of the words. ‘I stand for truth.’

Sime shook his head. ‘Jesus.’ The ring again. He took out his cellphone and punched in nine-one-one.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Aitkens said.

‘Getting help.’

‘I don’t want help. For God’s sake, it’s over. Just let me die. I want to die.’ He struggled to try and shift his body. If he could move himself just a few centimetres nearer the edge, he could fall away to the oblivion that he saw now as his only escape. But he couldn’t do it.

When Sime hung up he found Aitkens staring at him with hate in his eyes. Sime said, ‘There should be a rescue team here within an hour.’

Aitkens said nothing and closed his eyes to contemplate the future hell that would be his life.

‘One little thing, Aitkens.’

Aitkens opened his eyes.

‘You had a watertight alibi for the night that Cowell was murdered. You were on the night shift at the salt-mine.’

Something very like a smile stretched Aitkens’s lips across bloodied teeth. ‘You people are so fucking stupid. You checked with the mine, of course. And they checked their records. Yes, they told you, Jack Aitkens was on the night shift when Cowell was killed.’

‘Obviously you weren’t.’

‘I swapped with a pal. An informal arrangement. We do it all the time. But it’s never recorded. Same guy’s standing in for me tonight.’ His smile came from lips tinged with the bitter taste of irony. ‘You see? I’m not even here.’