Entry Island

I

The wind was gathering strength out of the south-west, sweeping up over the clifftops and flattening every growing thing in its path. The sun, veiled at first by high cloud, had now been swallowed by storm clouds rapidly approaching across the slate-grey swell of the ocean. But the air was warm, soft on the skin, and Sime sat among the tall grasses bowing all around him, just metres from the edge of the cliff. He could hear the waves breaking below, and had a sense of being fully exposed to the power of nature. Both at one with it, and completely at its mercy. He felt almost ghostlike, insubstantial, lost somewhere in a life gone wrong.

How was it possible that his relationship with Marie-Ange had been so easily found and so painfully lost? Affection exchanged for enmity. The fulfilment he had felt in those heady early days replaced by an aching emptiness. It occurred to him that neither of them had ever really loved the other. It had been need more than love. And that like a hunger satisfied, the need had simply passed.

At the start she had filled a gaping hole in his life. He had known from his early teens that he was somehow different from others. That there was something missing from his life. Something he had never quite identified or understood. And for a few short years it seemed that Marie-Ange had fitted into that missing piece of him, making him complete in some way. For her part, he suspected she had been driven by some mothering instinct, wrapping arms around the little boy lost. Which was no basis for a relationship. And so it had proved.

For a moment he closed his eyes and let the wind caress him. If only he could sleep, he was sure that much of this torture would pass. He was so tempted simply to lie down in the grass, with the sound of the wind and the ocean in his ears, the sense of coming storm still some way distant. But as his lids shut out the light, the face of Kirsty Cowell came to him in the dark. As if she had always been there. Just waiting for him.

‘You all right, Sime?’

The voice, raised above the wind, startled his eyes open and he looked up, heart pounding, to see Lieutenant Crozes standing over him. ‘Sure,’ Sime said. ‘Just listening to the wind.’

Crozes stared out over the ocean. ‘The forecasters say there’s one helluva storm coming.’

Sime followed his gaze to the accumulation of clouds, black, contused and devouring the sky as they approached. ‘Certainly looks like it.’

‘The remnants of Hurricane Jess, apparently.’

Sime had been only vaguely aware of TV news items about the hurricane that had torn up the eastern seaboard of the United States. ‘Really?’

‘Downgraded to storm status now. But they’re calling it a superstorm. It’s going to be touch and go whether we get off the island tonight.’

Sime shrugged. He didn’t much care one way or another. Wherever he laid his head for the night he knew he wouldn’t sleep. ‘How’s the door-to-door going?’

Crozes expelled air through pursed lips. ‘Like getting blood out of a stone, Sime. Oh, everyone’s nice enough. Lots to say but nothing to tell. Not to us, anyway. And no one’s got a bad word about Kirsty Cowell.’

Sime got to his feet, brushing dead grasses from his trousers. ‘Why would they?’

‘Well, they wouldn’t. She’s one of them. An islander born and bred. But although no one’s saying it, seems clear they all think she killed him.’

Sime looked at him, startled. ‘Why?’

Crozes shrugged. ‘That’s what we need to find out.’ He turned and nodded down the hill towards a green-painted house not a hundred yards away. ‘While she’s with Marie-Ange and the nurse it might be an idea if you and Blanc interviewed the neighbours. According to Aucoin they were the first ones on the scene.’

Fine spits of rain stung their faces.

II

The McLeans were an odd couple. They sat nervously in the Cowells’ summerhouse. No doubt they had been in it many times, but today they were like fish out of water. Uncomfortable and uncertain in foreign surroundings. Agnes, as near as Sime could guess, was around seventy. Harry a little older. She had an abundance of white hair like cotton wool, crimped around the sides of her head and piled up on top of it. He had almost none, a bald brown head spattered by age. They seemed very small to Sime, like little shrunken people.

‘I couldn’t say exactly what time it was.’ Agnes had a shrill voice that dipped and dived like a butterfly on a summer’s day. ‘We were asleep.’

‘What time do you normally go to bed?’

‘About ten usually.’ Harry’s nicotine-stained fingers turned his wedding ring around as his hands lay in his lap. He would doubtless have been happier to have a cigarette in them.

‘So it was after ten, and sometime before midnight?’

Agnes said, ‘It was about ten past twelve when I first noticed the time. And that was after we’d called the nurse.’

‘And it was the nurse who called the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me what happened when Mrs Cowell came to your door.’

The elderly couple glanced at each other as if to reach agreement on who would speak first. It was Agnes who did so. ‘She came hammering at the door in the dark. It was like World War Three. I’m surprised she didn’t do damage to her hands.’

‘So that’s what woke you?’

‘Me, not him.’ Agnes snatched a quick look at her husband. ‘It would take more than a world war to rouse him from his slumbers. I had to shake him out of his sleep.’ He glared back at her. ‘But he was awake soon enough when we opened the door to her.’

‘Like an apparition, she was,’ Harry said, his beady blue eyes opening wide with recollection, like flowers in sunlight. ‘Just in her nightdress. All white and insubstantial-like, nearly see-through. I mean, with the moon up behind her like that it was plain she was buck naked beneath it.’

Now it was Agnes who glared at him. But he was oblivious, still reliving the moment.

‘And she was just covered in blood. Man, I’ve never seen anything like it. On her hands and face and all over her nightdress.’

‘She was hysterical,’ Agnes butted in. ‘Just kept screaming, help me, help me, he’s dead, he’s dead.’ She cast a withering glance at her husband. ‘And, of course, he has to ask who. As if it wasn’t blindingly obvious.’

‘Wasn’t obvious at all.’ Harry frowned. ‘Could have been anyone.’

Sime said, ‘So what happened then?’

‘We followed her up to the house,’ Agnes said. ‘In our dressing gowns. Harry got a flashlight and his shotgun. And we found Mr Cowell lying in all that blood in the middle of the floor.’

‘She said she was attacked and Cowell tried to save her.’ Harry couldn’t hide his scepticism, and Sime was quick to pick up on it.

‘But you didn’t believe her?’

Harry said, ‘No,’ and Agnes said, ‘Yes.’ Both at the same time. She glared at him again.

‘Why didn’t you believe her, Mr McLean?’

‘Harry …’ There was a clear warning in his wife’s tone.

But he just shrugged. ‘Well, who could blame her? The man was a cheat and a liar, and everyone knew it.’

Sime frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he up and left her just a week ago, didn’t he? For some floozy over on Grindstone.’ And as an afterthought he added, ‘That’s Cap aux Meules to you.’

III

They sat in the minibus on the crest of the hill, looking down on the Cowell house and the lighthouse beyond. L’île du Havre Aubert, the nearest of the islands in the archipelago, was almost obscured by the flurries of rain that blew in across the bay. Blanc sat in the front passenger seat, the window down, his cigarette smoke whisked away by the wind. Lapointe was hunched over the steering wheel munching on a sandwich that left crumbs clinging to his moustache. Crozes, Marie-Ange and Sime sat in the back. Two of the team were still out, tramping door to door and no doubt getting soaked. Marie-Ange’s crime scene assistant was taking photographs before they moved the body.

‘As soon as the Cowell woman is washed and changed I want you to ask her why she didn’t tell us she’d just split with her husband.’ Crozes was chewing absently on a fingernail.

Sime washed down a mouthful of baguette with coffee from a plastic cup and nodded. For some reason it was almost a source of comfort for him to know that Kirsty Cowell’s had not been a happy marriage either. It gave them something in common. It also gave her a motive for murder.

‘You should maybe have a word with the nurse first.’ All heads turned towards Marie-Ange. She shrugged. ‘She’s not a local, but she’s familiar enough with the island and everyone on it to know where most of the bodies are buried.’ She smiled wryly. ‘So to speak.’

‘Are you thinking of any bodies in particular?’ Crozes said.

She trapped him in the gaze of her green eyes and he looked momentarily discomfited. ‘We got to talking after she examined Mrs Cowell. Seems there’s a fisherman lives somewhere up near the school had a real grudge against Cowell. Claims he stole his father’s boat.’

Crozes made a thoughtful moue with his lips and turned to Sime. ‘You and Thomas better talk to him, then, Sime. If you think it’s worth it we can bring him in for formal interview.’

Thomas Blanc flicked his cigarette out into the early afternoon and saw it snatched away by the elements. He scratched his tonsure. ‘Suppose Mrs Cowell was telling the truth,’ he said. ‘Why would this guy attack her if it was Cowell he had the grudge against?’

The minibus rocked as a sudden gust of wind lifted up over the cliffs and hit the side of it with the force of a physical blow. A moment of sunlight washed across the island, as if in the stroke of an artist’s brush. And then it was gone.

‘Well maybe he had something against the wife, too,’ Crozes said. ‘That’s what you guys need to find out.’