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  Now, as he sat on the edge of the bed in his room at the auberge, Sime found himself sinking into a depression. He had painted a picture for himself of Kirsty Cowell, carefully constructed, layer upon layer, that had been erased in a single wash that coloured her a liar. She had left the island. She had threatened her husband’s lover, and implicit in that was a threat to Cowell himself.

  The boat which had brought Sime and Blanc across to Cap aux Meules had returned to Entry with more volunteers to help in the search for Morrison. So they had an hour to kill before they could make the return crossing themselves. Sime had declined Blanc’s suggestion of a coffee in the Tim Horton’s across the road and retired to his hotel room instead, drawing curtains on the world and retreating into semi-darkness.

  He kicked off his shoes and swung his feet up on to the bed. He sat up against the headboard, propped by a pillow to support his back, and took out his cellphone. A growing sense of guilt crept over him. It was time, he knew, to phone his sister. There was no one else he could ask about the ring or the diaries.

  He had not spoken to her in such a very long time. Not even on the phone. How long was it? Five years? More? Poor Annie. For some reason he had never felt close to her. Of course there was an age gap. She was four years older. But it was more than that. He had always been a loner, a solitary boy, self-sufficient and never interested in his sister. Even when she had reached out to him after the death of their parents.

  As soon as he left school he had gone his own way, heading for the big city. While she stayed behind and married a neighbour, a boy who had been in her class. A French-speaker. And bore him a baby boy and then a little girl. Teenagers now, who spoke no English.

  He had been back only once, for their parents’ funeral.

  The last time he and Annie had met was when she came to his wedding. Without her husband. She had made excuses for him, but Sime knew that Gilles resented the way his brother-in-law had neglected her.

  Guilt washed over him again, cold and reproachful. Maybe Marie-Ange was right. Maybe he was all those things she had called him. Selfish, self-centred. They were not pleasant reflections, and he veered away from them, just as these days he avoided his reflection in the mirror.

  He found Annie’s number in the contacts list of his cellphone and with a great effort of will tapped autodial. He raised the phone to his ear with trepidation. After several rings it was answered by a boy whose voice sounded as if it might be breaking. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Hi. Is your mother there?’

  ‘Who’s calling?’ He seemed bored. Or disappointed. Perhaps he’d been waiting for a call himself.

  Sime hesitated. ‘It’s your Uncle Simon.’

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line that was difficult to interpret. Then the boy said, ‘I’ll get her.’

  He could hear voices distantly in the background. Then more silence. And Sime could actually feel his heart pulsing in his throat. Suddenly his sister’s voice. ‘Sime?’

  ‘Hey, sis.’ He dreaded her response.

  But he should have known better. She had never been one to bear grudges. Beyond her surprise, he heard the delight in her voice. ‘Oh, my God, little brother! How the hell are you?’

  And he told her. Without preamble. The plain, unvarnished truth. His break-up with Marie-Ange, his insomnia. And while he could feel the shock in her silence as she listened, the simple act of sharing everything he had bottled up for so long came as an enormous release.

  ‘Poor Sime,’ she said, and meant it, echoing his own thought of poor Annie, just a few minutes earlier. ‘Why don’t you come home. Stay with us for a while.’

  Home seemed like an odd word for her to use. The little military town of Bury, in the Eastern Townships south-east of Montreal, was where she still lived. It hadn’t been home to Sime in years. But home had a good sound to it, full of comfort.

  ‘I can’t right now. I’m on the Madeleine Islands, a murder investigation.’ He hesitated. The moment he asked, she’d know there had been an ulterior motive for him calling. ‘Annie, remember those diaries? The ones that Granny used to read from when we were kids.’

  If she was disappointed there was no hint of it in her voice. Just surprise. ‘Well, yes, of course. Why?’

  ‘Do you still have them?’

  ‘Somewhere, yes. I’ve still got everything here that we took from Mum and Dad’s. And from Granny’s. I keep meaning to sort through it all some day, but we put everything in the attic above the garage. And, you know, out of sight …’

  ‘I’d like to read them again, sis.’ He could tell that she was containing her curiosity with difficulty.

  ‘Of course. Any time you like.’

  ‘I’ll come down as soon as we’re finished here on the Madeleines.’

  ‘That would be great, Sime. It’ll be lovely to see you.’ And then she couldn’t help herself. ‘What’s the sudden interest in the diaries?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain when I get there.’ Then, ‘Annie … you know the signet ring I inherited from Dad?’

  ‘Yes. Some kind of red, semi-precious stone, wasn’t it? Engraved with a family crest. Not ours, though. It was an arm and sword or something.’

  ‘That’s right. Do you know anything about its history?’

  She laughed. ‘Am I really going to have to wait till you get here to find out what this is all about?’

  ‘Sorry, sis, there just isn’t time for me to go into it right now.’

  ‘Well, it got passed down through the male line,’ she said. ‘Came originally from our great-great-great-grandfather, I think. The one who wrote the diaries. The one you were named after. In fact, I’m sure there’s something about the ring in the diaries themselves. Can’t remember what, though.’

  ‘Do you remember how or where he got it?’

  ‘I think it was given to him by his wife.’

  Sime was deflated. If that was true he couldn’t imagine what possible connection it could have with Kirsty Cowell. ‘He met his wife here in Canada, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. She was a serving girl or something in Quebec City.’

  A dead end.

  When he didn’t speak for a long time, Annie said, ‘Sime? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  He heard her hesitation. ‘It was the tenth anniversary last week, Sime.’

  He was momentarily confused. ‘Of what?’

  ‘Mum and Dad’s accident.’

  His guilt returned. He had barely even thought about his parents in all the years since the accident. Of course, he remembered, it had been at this time of year. An autumn deluge which had swollen the River Salmon, washing away the bridge and the cars that were on it at the time. Ironically, it was only their parents who had lost their lives in the accident.

  Annie said, ‘Someone put flowers on their grave. I visit them often. And I thought it was lovely that someone else had remembered. No idea who, though.’

  Sime said, ‘Annie, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get home, okay?’

  He hung up and closed his eyes. There was so much in his life he had simply learned to shut out. Like the death of his parents. He’d always thought there would be time to tell them that he loved them, even if he’d never been quite sure that he did. And then death had stepped in and left him feeling all alone in the world for the very first time.

  His ancestor’s pain at the loss of his father came flooding back in a surge of childhood memories. It had been a cold winter’s night, sometime just after New Year, that their granny had read the account of it to them. Right after dinner, and he and Annie had sat by her feet at the fire while she read. The story had given him nightmares later that night. And he couldn’t imagine then what it would feel like to lose a parent. Never mind both of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Even although there was still plenty of light in the sky, it was as dark as a winter’s night in the blackhouse. And there
was conspiracy in all the faces huddled around the flicker of the peat fire.

  I sat among the men listening, but saying nothing.

  I still have a clear recollection of the potato crop first failing the previous year. Green, healthy leaves on the lazy beds that turned black and slimy almost overnight. And I remember being sent to the potato store in our barn, pulling aside the tarpaulin to be greeted by a smell like death that rose from the rotting tubers we had so carefully nurtured and harvested twelve months before.

  Disaster!

  Without the potato there was no way to survive. It was the ever-present at every meal. Our meagre harvest of oats and barley served only to supplement a diet that was totally dependent upon the humble spud. And yet some invisible malady had robbed us of the gift of life that it gave us. A disease visited on us by God. For our sins, as the minister would have it.

  There must have been a dozen men or more sitting around the embers of the peat, almost lost in the fug of smoke that hung heavy in the air of the fire room. But I could see the hunger in their sunken cheeks. I had watched strong men grow weak, as I had, and stout men grow thin. I had seen my mother and my sisters wasting away, reduced to scouring the shore for shellfish. Limpets and clams. Food for old women without teeth. They collected nettles for soup, and silver leaf from among the grasses. The roots, when dried and ground, made a kind of flour. But it was a poor substitute for proper grain and we could barely gather enough to sustain us.

  The fishermen no longer dried their white fish on the rocks in case we stole them, and we had no boats of our own to take fish from the sea for ourselves.

  As always my father led the discussion, old blind Calum squatting at his side, listening intently from within his world of darkness, his head so shrunken now that his Glengarry seemed almost to drown him.

  I heard the fettered fury in my father’s voice. ‘Guthrie hands out grain rations from the Poor Board then charges it against our rents. Earns a name for himself as a man of generosity, while creating the excuse for throwing us off our land. Rents beyond our means, debts we can never repay. And while we’re starving, he and his cronies hunt deer and take salmon from the river and eat like kings.’

  Discontent rose up from around the fire like smoke. I heard men of God using the language of the Devil. ‘Food all around us, and not a damned thing we can eat,’ one of the men said.

  My father’s voice trembled with anger. ‘But we could eat. We’re just not allowed to. The law that serves the rich forbids it.’ It was a favourite theme, and I had heard him vent his anger often on the subject. ‘Well, enough’s enough. Time to take the law into our own hands and harvest what the Lord provided for all, not just the few.’

  Which brought a hush around the fire. For there wasn’t a man there who didn’t know what that meant.

  My father’s voice rose in frustration at their lack of gumption. ‘It’s our job to feed our families. And I for one am not going to stand by and watch my kinfolk waste away before my eyes.’

  ‘What do you propose, Angus?’ It was our neighbour, Donald Dubh, who spoke up.

  My father leaned in towards the fire, his voice low and earnest. ‘The land on the far side of the Sgagarstaigh hill is teeming with red deer. In what the toffs laughingly call a deer forest.’ There was no mirth in his own laughter. ‘And not a bloody tree in sight!’ His face was set, his eyes black, reflecting only the burning of the peats. ‘If we set off after midnight tomorrow, there should be enough light for us to hunt by, but not a soul around. We’ll kill as many deer as we can carry and bring them back here.’

  Old Jock Maciver spoke then. ‘We’ll get the jail if we’re caught, Angus. Or worse.’

  ‘Not if there’s enough of us, Jock. A big hunting party. If they catch us it’ll make the newspapers. And just think how that’ll read. Starving men arrested for trying to feed their families. Guthrie’ll do nothing if we’re caught. Because he knows the courts would never dare to convict. There would be bloody revolution!’

  There wasn’t a man around the fire who wouldn’t have given his right arm for a haunch of venison. But not one of them who wasn’t afraid of the consequences.

  *

  When they were gone my mother and sisters came back into the house. They had been out with the other women of the village sitting around a long table between the blackhouses waulking the newly woven tweed to soften it. Usually they sang as they beat the cloth, and the meeting of men around the fire would have been accompanied by the voices of their womenfolk raised in Gaelic song outside. But with the hunger the women had fallen silent. The very first thing that starvation steals is your spirit.

  My father took his old crossbow out from the bottom drawer of the dresser and with a cloth started to work oil into the first signs of rust in the iron. It was heavy and lethal. A weapon of war made by a blacksmith, traded to my father years ago by a tinker in return for a hank of tweed. My father was proud of it, and of the bolts he had made himself, short but well balanced with feather flights and flint heads.

  When he had finished he laid it aside and started to sharpen the hunting knife he had taken with him on those occasions when the estate had employed him as a gillie. He was skilled with it at the gralloch, the gutting of the deer. The times he had taken me with him I had watched him do it with something like awe. And disgust. It is quite a thing to see the insides of an animal taken out of it almost intact, steam rising from blood that is still hot.

  ‘What knife shall I take?’ I asked him, and he turned serious eyes in my direction.

  ‘You’re not coming, son.’

  I felt anger and disappointment spiking through me in equal measure. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if for some reason I don’t come back tomorrow night, someone’s going to have to look after your mother and sisters.’

  I could feel my heart pushing up into my throat. ‘What do you mean, if you don’t come back!’

  But he just laughed at me and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I have no intention of being caught, boy, but if I am then they’ll probably take me and anyone else they catch to the jail in Stornoway. At least until there is some kind of a court hearing – or they let us go. But either way, it’ll be your job to take my place till I get back.’

  *

  I watched them leave shortly after midnight. It was still light, and would never get fully dark. It was a clear night, with a good moon that would flood the land when dusk finally came. There was no wind, which was unusual, and meant that they would be eaten alive by the midges. Before he left my father smeared bog myrtle over his hands and face to keep them at bay.

  There must have been fifteen men or more in the hunting party, all armed with knives and clubs. And a couple of them had crossbows like my father. I climbed the hill above Baile Mhanais to watch them disappear from view, disappointed not to be with them. At almost eighteen, I was more man than boy now.

  I found a sheltered spot to watch for them coming back and settled down to feel the midges in my hair and on my face. I pulled my jacket over my head, and my knees up under my chin, and thought about Ciorstaidh. There was not a day had passed that I didn’t think about her with an ache like the hunger of the famine. I had often wondered what would have become of us if I had run away with her as she asked. But it was pointless thinking about might-have-beens. And it was already more than a year since I had last seen her.

  It was about two hours later that I heard the far-off sound of men’s voices carried in the still of the night. I stood up and could see them huddled together as they came back over the Sgagarstaigh hill at a trot. They were carrying something heavy in their midst. My first thought was that they were back early, and only had the one deer to show for it.

  I ran down to the path and struck out across the dry summer heather, feeling the ground give beneath my feet and sap the strength from my legs. As I got nearer I could hear them breathing, like horses gasping at the end of a race, but not a single voice was raised in greeting when they saw me ru
nning towards them.

  I scanned the faces for my father, and when I couldn’t see him was confused. Had he stayed on to hunt some more on his own? Or had he been caught? I could hardly think of anything worse until I realised that it was not a deer that they carried in their midst, but a man. They came to a stop as I reached them, and I saw that the man was my father. His face deathly pale, his shirt and jacket soaked black by blood.

  For a moment we stood in the semi-darkness and no one knew what to say. I was shocked to my core, and couldn’t have spoken even had I found the words. I stared at my father, hanging by his arms and legs, sweat glistening on the faces of his bearers.

  ‘They were waiting for us,’ Donald Dubh said. ‘As if they knew we were coming. The gamekeeper and water bailiff and half a dozen men from the estate. They had guns, boy!’

  ‘Is he …?’ I couldn’t bring myself to give voice to the thought.

  ‘He’s alive,’ someone else said. ‘But God knows for how much longer. They fired warning shots over our heads. But your father refused to run. As if he wanted them to catch us. Like he wanted to be paraded in front of the public and the press. Like a bloody martyr.’ He paused. ‘Off he went, walking towards them, shouting like a man demented. And some bastard shot him. Full in the chest.’

  ‘Aye, and then the cowards turned and bloody ran,’ Donald Dubh said. ‘It’s murder, pure and simple. But you can bet your life there’s not one of them that’ll be held to account for it.’

  *

  My mother was hysterical when we carried him into the house and laid him out on the stone floor next to the peat fire. Screaming and tearing at her clothes. Some of the men tried to calm her down. I saw my sisters peering out from the gloom of the back room, faces the colour of ash.

  I knelt over my father and cut away his shirt. There was a gaping hole where the bullet had torn through his chest just below the ribcage, shattering bone and flesh. The bullet had not come out the other side, so I could only think it had lodged in his spine. I could tell from the feeble beating of his heart, and the fact that the wound had stopped bleeding, that he had lost too much blood to recover. He was in shock and fading fast.