Entry Island Read online

  ‘Hi.’ Kirsty’s voice rises above the roar of the wind and the sea as she jumps down smiling into the hollow to join me. I can hear the happiness in her voice, and I try not to let it affect me. She stoops to kiss my cheek and I turn my head away to avoid it.

  I feel her tension immediately. She stands up straight. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Your father’s what’s wrong.’

  I don’t look at her, but I can hear the immediate anger in her voice. ‘What do you mean?’

  I stand up and turn to face her. ‘Do you know what he’s doing?’ She just stares back at me, her face a mask of confusion. ‘He’s forcing people out of their homes and setting their houses on fire so that they can’t come back.’

  ‘He is not!’

  ‘And he sends constables and estate workers to force them on to boats to sail them off across the Atlantic against their will.’

  ‘Stop it! That’s not true.’

  ‘It is.’ I feel my own anger fired by hers. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Folk I know beaten and kicked. Neighbours at Sgagarstaigh, kids I was at school with, made to leave the houses they were born in, and forced to watch as the bastards set them on fire. I saw them ferried out to a boat in the loch and put in chains if they tried to escape. Just ordinary folk, Ciorstaidh. Folk whose ancestors have lived here for generations. Folk whose parents and grandparents are buried here on the machair. Forced to leave it all and sent off to some godforsaken place on the other side of the world, just because your father wants to put sheep on the land.’

  I see the shock on Kirsty’s face. Her hurt and bewilderment, her desperate desire for it not to be true. ‘I don’t believe you!’ she shouts in my face, giving voice to that desire, but I have no doubt, too, that she can see in my face that it is.

  The tears that have been brimming in her eyes spill from them now, and are spread across her cheeks by the wind. Her hand comes out of nowhere, its open palm catching me squarely on the cheek. I almost stagger with the force of it, and feel how it stings my skin. I see the distress behind her tears. And as she turns and climbs back out of the hollow to run off between the stones that stand proud on the hill, skirt and cape flowing out behind her, I realise that I have just destroyed her world. And mine.

  I so dearly wish I could run after her and tell her that none of it is real. But I can’t. And I understand fully for the first time how both our lives have changed, and how nothing will ever be the same again.

  *

  It is low tide, and the smell of the sea fills the air. A rich, rotting seaweed smell that is so familiar. For once there is no wind and the sea is a placid pewter reflecting a sky that lies low above my head, a sad, unbroken grey. It laps tamely along the shore, licking around the ragged tendrils of Lewisian gneiss that invade it from the shore, ancient hard rock encrusted with shellfish and made slippery by the kelp that grows here in profusion and covers it so abundantly.

  I have two wicker baskets that sit at angles on the rock as I hack at the seaweed with a long, curved blade, shredding my fingers on shells like razorblades as I pull it free of the rock to throw in the baskets. My back aches, and my feet, which have been in the water off and on for hours, are frozen numb. The baskets are nearly full and I will shortly make the return trek to the croft once more to spread the kelp on our lazy beds.

  I have not been aware of her approach, and only now as I glance up do I see her standing there on the rocks looking down at me. She wears her cape buttoned for warmth, the hood pulled up over her head, and with the light behind her as she stands silhouetted against the sky I cannot see her face. It is some days since our confrontation in the hollow and I had thought I would never see her again.

  I straighten up slowly, stepping out of the water and on to the rock. Crabs scuttle about in the pools that gather there, scraps of reflected light scattered randomly amongst the sombre green seaweed.

  Now I see how pale she is, dark shadows staining the pure unblemished skin beneath her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her voice so tiny I can barely hear it above the breath of the ocean. She lowers her eyes. ‘It seems I’m always having to apologise to you.’

  I shrug, knowing that whatever it is she feels, my remorse is greater. ‘What for?’

  ‘For slapping you.’ She pauses. ‘For not believing you.’

  I don’t know what to say. I can only imagine the pain and disillusion that would have beset me if someone had dismantled the belief I have in my own father.

  ‘It’s still so hard for me to believe that daddy could be responsible for such things. I knew I couldn’t ask him straight out. So I asked the serving staff. At first no one would admit to knowing anything. Until I pressed them. It was my tutor who told me in the end.’

  She sucks in her lower lip and seems to be biting on it to control her emotions.

  ‘Only then did I finally confront my father. He was …’ She closes her eyes in wretched recollection, ‘… he was incandescent. He told me it was none of my business and that I simply didn’t understand. And when I told him that what I didn’t understand was how he could treat people like that, he did what I did to you.’ She draws a trembling breath and I see her pain. ‘He slapped me. So hard he bruised me.’ Her hand moves up to her face instinctively and her fingertips trace the line of her cheekbone. But there is no sign of the bruising now. ‘He had me locked in my room for two days, and I’m not sure that I stopped crying once. My mother wanted to reason with me. But I wouldn’t even let her in the room.’

  She lowers her eyes to the ground and I see defeat in the slump of her shoulders.

  ‘My tutor has been dismissed, and I am confined to the house. I managed to slip out the kitchen door this morning. They probably don’t know I’m gone yet, though I’m not sure I care if they do.’

  I step close now and take her in my arms, feeling her tremble as I draw her into my chest and hold her there. Her head rests against my shoulder and she slips her arms around me. We stand like this for an age, breathing in time with the slow beat of the ocean. Until finally she releases me and steps back from my arms.

  ‘I want to run away, Simon.’ Her eyes fix me in their earnest gaze and I feel the desperate appeal in them. But running away is not a concept that I can easily understand.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I want to leave here. And I want you to go with me.’

  I shake my head in confusion. ‘Go where?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Anywhere but here.’

  ‘But, Ciorstaidh, I have no money.’

  ‘I can get us money.’

  I shake my head again. ‘I can’t, Ciorstaidh. This is my home. My parents and my sisters need me. My father can’t manage the croft on his own.’ The whole notion of it is alien to me. ‘And anyway, where would we go? What would I do? How would we live?’

  She stands staring at me, her eyes filled with betrayal and tears. Her face is bleak and hopeless, and suddenly she shouts at me, ‘I hate you, Simon Mackenzie. I hate you more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life.’

  And she turns and strides away across the rocks, both hands pulling her skirt and cape free of the kelp and the pools of seawater, until reaching the grass where she runs off into the morning gloom, leaving sobs of distress in her wake.

  And me with a debilitating sense of guilt.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sime sat bolt upright and wondered if he had really called out loud in the dark, or just imagined it. In the silent aftermath he listened for any sign that he had disturbed Kirsty. But there was no sound from upstairs. All he could hear was his own rapid breathing and the pounding of blood through his head.

  He was perspiring profusely, and he pushed the duvet aside. He remembered the story clearly from his grandmother’s reading of it, but dreaming it made it personal in a way that no amount of reading could.

  He checked his watch. It was not even midnight. He had slept barely half an hour and all the sleepless hours of the night
still lay ahead of him. Endless time to wonder what was sparking these dreams and recollections of his ancestor’s journals. What it was that his subconscious was trying to tell him. Something relating to that first meeting with Kirsty Cowell, and his conviction that he knew her. Of that he was certain. And then there was the ring, and the pendant. The arm and sword engraved in carnelian.

  There was only one person in the world he knew who might be able to cast light on that. His sister, Annie. And despite his reluctance, he knew that he was going to have to call her tomorrow.

  He swung his legs around and planted his feet on the floor, leaning forward on his elbows, his face in his hands. It had seemed chilly earlier, but now he could barely breathe for the heat that he was generating himself. He slipped his feet into his shoes and zipped on his hoodie. He needed air.

  *

  A light wind blew high clouds across an inky sky, stars like jewels set in ebony. An almost full moon came and went in washes of colourless silver light. The air was filled with the sound of the ocean, the slow steady breath of eternity.

  He walked through the light that fell from the windows of the big house in slabs and rectangles, and stepped up on to the dirt road. For someone raised so far from the sea, the sense of being surrounded by it now was quite unsettling. It lay all around, momentarily at peace, reflecting moonlight in pools and patches, dangerously deceptive in its tranquil beauty. On the far horizon he could see the lights of Havre Aubert and Cap aux Meules twinkling in the dark.

  As he walked down towards the lighthouse, his feet crunching on the gravel underfoot, he reflected on the missing man-boy. Why had he run away, and where could he possibly have gone? Did he have any involvement in the Cowell murder? The neighbour claimed he had a temper and was prone to tantrums. Might he simply have taken revenge for the beating he got from Cowell’s hired hands, and seen Kirsty as complicit in her husband’s actions? Or had he just made the whole thing up?

  And then there was the photograph taken from Kirsty’s album. How had he got hold of it? If he had been in the house before, might he not have been the intruder who attacked Kirsty on the night of the killing?

  Rows of creels, three deep, sat up on a wooden drying platform off to his left. Ahead of him the beam from the lighthouse raked the night sky. The houses dotted about the southern tip of the island lay in darkness, the good people of Entry Island long ago tucked up in bed, getting in practice for the long winter nights that lay ahead. Somewhere in the distance he heard a dog barking, seconds before a swishing sound made him turn to his right and he felt the full force of a blow to the side of his head. Pain and light filled it as his knees folded under him and he hit the ground with force enough to empty his lungs.

  Without breath in them he was unable to cry out, and when a boot thumped with sickening force into his midriff he thought he was going to pass out. Instinct took over and he curled up into the foetal position to take the blows on his back and arms and legs. He fumbled desperately for the Glock holstered beneath his hoodie, but even as he pulled it free and tried to swing himself around towards his attacker it was kicked from his hand and spun away into darkness.

  His assailant was a shadow against the sky, a big man dressed in black, soaking up the light, blotting out the stars. From where Sime lay retching on the ground, he seemed to fill it completely, eyes burning behind the slits of his mask. He could hear the man’s breathing, fast and tremulous, then saw the moonlight reflected on the blade in his right hand. Sime felt as if his insides had turned to liquid. He knew there was nothing he could do to stop this man from taking his life. Plunging the knife into him again and again. Pain, pure and simple, had robbed him of the capacity to defend himself, and in a moment his whole sorry life played itself out before him, filling him with regret for all his wasted years.

  An elongated wedge of yellow light fell across the grass, throwing their shadows long into the night. Sime turned his head towards the source of it and saw the silhouette of a stout man standing in the open door of his house, a shotgun held firmly across his chest.

  ‘What the hell’s going on out there?’ he roared.

  And in a moment Sime’s attacker was gone, silently sprinting off into the dark, a shadow in the wind, leaving behind him barely a whisper.

  Sime very nearly blacked out with relief. He rolled over and emptied the contents of his stomach into the grass, then looked up as a flashlight shone in his face.

  ‘Jesus!’ he heard the man say. ‘You’re one of them cops from Montreal.’

  *

  Sime had not realised just how far he had walked in the dark, and it took him almost ten minutes to get back to the house, hampered as he was by the pounding in his head and the sharp pain like cramp that gripped his chest with every step.

  His gun, retrieved from the grass, was safely back in its holster, but he was unnerved by just how easily he had been disarmed and left at the mercy of his attacker. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of a light-sleeping islander, the earth of Entry Island would have been soaking up his blood by now, his body growing cold in the grass.

  Now his concern was for Kirsty. He should never have left her alone in the house. The assailant would have had ample time to kill her as she lay sleeping in her bed before coming after Sime. Though why he had attacked Sime at all was a mystery.

  Sime hobbled up the steps on to the porch of the summer-house cursing his stupidity. He threw open the door and called her name at the top of his voice.

  He was halfway up the stairs in the darkness when the light came on, and a pale and frightened-looking Kirsty stood on the top landing, pulling on her dressing gown, eyes dilated and dark with fear.

  His legs almost gave way beneath him from the relief of seeing her. Then her mouth and eyes opened wide as she saw the blood on the side of his head and the mud on his clothes, and she hurried down the few steps that separated them to catch his arm. ‘For God’s sake, Mr Mackenzie, what happened to you?’

  Through his pain and relief, he felt the comfort of the warmth that came from her body, the sureness of her touch. He had not been this close to her before, breathing in her scent, and had to overcome a powerful urge to take her in his arms. ‘I was attacked,’ was all he managed to say, and he drew himself upright again. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. But you’re not. I’m going to call the nurse.’

  Downstairs they heard the clatter of footsteps, and the screen door banging open. The patrolman left to guard the crime scene in the big house stood breathing hard at the foot of the stairs, gazing up at them in alarm. ‘What’s happened?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I

  The harbour was crowded for the arrival of the morning ferry. Pickup trucks with colourful Entry Island licence plates stood idling along the quayside. Men of all shapes and sizes, old and young, in baseball caps and trainers, baggy jeans and T-shirts, hung around in knots smoking and talking. The womenfolk stood apart in groups of their own, conducting quite different conversations. A forest of aerials and masts and radar pods broke the skyline behind them, fishing boats berthed along the pier rising and falling on the gentle grey swell.

  Sime stood at the end of the quay beyond the yellow ticket hut, the breeze in his face, watching as the now familiar shape of the blue-and-white Ivan-Quinn ferry nosed into the harbour. He was aware of the eyes that were on him, of the lowered voices exchanging the latest gossip that was doubtless spreading like wildfire across the island in the wake of the previous night’s attack. He was not looking forward to his meeting with Crozes.

  The cut on the side of his head was taped up, the contusion around it angry and inflamed. The nurse had strapped his chest tightly and the support had helped relieve the pain. She thought that he was probably just bruised, but that he should get an X-ray anyway.

  He had lain then through all the hours of darkness, feeling the pain ebb away as the paracetamol she had given him took effect. Morning had brought stiffness, and an ache to muscles and joi
nts. After an uncomfortable telephone conversation with Crozes he had taken the minibus to the harbour early and walked along the coast road and back to try to loosen up.

  With the ramp down, passengers and vehicles debouched now on to the quayside, locals stepping forward to pick up boxes of groceries and other goods ordered from across the water and beyond. Crozes detached himself from the rest of his team and approached Sime, hands pushed deep into his pockets. He wore dark glasses below the peak of his baseball cap and the only real clue to his mood was in his demeanour. Sime saw Marie-Ange and Blanc glance towards him as they climbed into the minibus to await the lieutenant. The Cap aux Meules cops had brought their own vehicles and set off to resume their search for the missing Norman Morrison.

  ‘What the fuck were you playing at, Mackenzie?’ Crozes didn’t even look at him. He stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, staring out across the bay.

  ‘I just went out for some air, Lieutenant. I was only gone a few minutes.’

  ‘A few minutes in which he could have killed her.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he?’ Sime said.

  Crozes turned his head to look at him for the first time. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he had the chance, but he didn’t. He came after me.’

  Crozes stared at him thoughtfully. ‘You got a look at him?’

  Sime blew exasperation through pursed lips. ‘Not really. He was wearing dark clothes, and a ski mask. Just like she described.’

  Crozes turned away. ‘There won’t be a single person on this island who doesn’t know Mrs Cowell claimed to be attacked by a guy wearing a ski mask. Not very hard to replicate.’ He swung his head back towards Sime. ‘I don’t know why anyone would want to attack you, Sime, but it’s just one more complication we really don’t need.’ He paused. ‘Do you have any thoughts?’