Entry Island Page 28

  ‘I don’t think there’s one of us who believes that Norman Morrison had anything to do with the murder. He was a sad case. Retarded. The mental age of a twelve-year-old. And while he might have had an obsession with Mrs Cowell, I think his story that James Cowell had him beaten up to warn him off was just that. A story. That he took a beating from someone seems clear, but it’s unlikely that we are ever going to find out who. And while his mother can’t definitively swear that he was home in bed on the night of the murder, a search of his house has failed to turn up a murder weapon, or any clothes that he might have been wearing during the attack. And certainly no ski mask. In fact, his mother would have known if he even possessed such a thing. And according to her he didn’t.’

  ‘And his death?’ Lapointe asked.

  ‘A sad accident, Jacques. He was concerned for Mrs Cowell when he heard about the murder. We think he went out in the storm to go and see that she was all right. It was dark. The island was being battered by a force ten or eleven. He must have lost his way and gone over the edge.’

  Crozes drew another line through Morrison’s name before turning back to the room.

  ‘Then there’s Mr Clarke.’ He scratched his chin. ‘There was clearly antipathy on his part towards Cowell. He blamed him for the death of his father and the loss of their family boat. But his wife swears that he was home in bed, and we have absolutely no evidence to the contrary.’ He scored out his name. Then looked up at the one remaining suspect. ‘Which leaves us with Mrs Cowell. Who in my view is, and always has been, the most likely killer.’

  Sime listened with growing disquiet as Crozes outlined the case against her. It was strong and indisputable, and he knew that in any normal circumstance he could not have found fault with it. But this was different, for one simple reason. He didn’t want it to be true.

  Crozes said, ‘She is the only witness to the murder. She was there when it happened. She doesn’t deny that. She was covered in his blood. And, yes, she told us a story to explain that. But there is not one shred of evidence at the scene to support it. There is nothing to suggest that there was in fact a third party.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘She lied to us more than once. About being happy that her husband had left her. About not leaving the island. About not knowing he was coming back that night. She’s admitted to all that. Why would an innocent person lie?’

  He looked around all the faces focused on him and knew that his summation was compelling.

  ‘She threatened him. Not directly. But she doesn’t dispute that she told Ariane Briand that if she couldn’t have him she’d see that no one else could. In his last interview with her, Sime very clearly, very concisely, outlined the most likely scenario. We’ve all seen the tapes by now. He accused her of luring her husband back to the island by threatening to set their house on fire, and killing him in a fit of jealous rage. He suggested that, immediately filled with remorse, she tried to revive him, and when she failed made up a story about an intruder.’ He looked at Sime. ‘Powerful stuff, Sime.’ There was an edge in his voice.

  Sime felt his face colour. He didn’t want the credit for any of this. It was almost as if Crozes knew it and was deliberately salting a wound that Sime couldn’t even acknowledge. And any praise coming from Crozes had a double edge to it in the light of the previous night’s events. Sime stayed focused. ‘There are two problems,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ Crozes tried to look interested. ‘And what are they?’

  ‘The guy who attacked me two nights ago. You say there’s no evidence that Kirsty Cowell’s claimed intruder exists. But this guy fitted the description, right down to the ski mask.’

  ‘And that could have been anyone trying to deflect suspicion away from themselves.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like Owen Clarke.’

  ‘Who has an alibi. And no motive that I can think of for attacking me.’

  ‘His son, then. He might have felt you humiliated him in front of his friends and wanted to teach you a lesson.’

  ‘He also has an alibi.’

  Crozes was scathing. ‘Yes, if we’re to believe his pals. And think about it, Sime. What possible motive could the killer have for attacking you? I think this is a red herring. And I don’t want us wasting time on it. What’s the second problem?’

  ‘Simple,’ Sime said. ‘We don’t actually have any physical evidence against Mrs Cowell.’

  ‘Oh, but we do.’ Crozes’s smile was laden with satisfaction. ‘Or, at least, we might have. The autopsy report shows that Cowell had scratches on his face, almost certainly made by fingernails.’ He paused. ‘Mrs Cowell claims that her attacker was wearing gloves. So how could he have left scratch marks? If forensics can match the residue taken from beneath Mrs Cowell’s nails with skin from Cowell’s face we’ve got her.’

  II

  Sime was halfway across the car park to pick up the Chevy and take it back to the Auberge when he realised that he’d left his cellphone lying on the desk in the incident room. He hadn’t charged it for several days and needed to plug it in when he got back to his room. He hurried past the cormorant sculpture on the front grass and up to the main door, just as Marie-Ange was coming out. She had been searching for something in her bag as she came through the door and almost bumped into him. A tiny gasp of surprise escaped her lips as they found themselves just inches apart. Her surprise quickly gave way to anger, and he almost withered under its simmering virulence. She glanced quickly behind her. There was no one in the hall. And under her breath she said, ‘I should just have shot you. Then we’d both have been put out of your misery.’

  ‘Well, since you’re the source of it, maybe you should have turned the gun on yourself.’

  Her lips formed themselves into a sneer. ‘You’re so fucking smart, Simon.’

  ‘At least I’m honest.’ Strangely, he felt quite emotionally detached. ‘And maybe you should have shot me. You’ve done just about everything else to me.’

  She pushed past him to stride off down the path. But he caught her arm. Her head whipped around. ‘Let go of me!’

  He said, ‘I’m so glad we never had that kid.’

  An odd, sick smile flitted across her face. ‘Yeah, be grateful. It wasn’t even yours.’

  She pulled her arm free and hurried away around the side of the building.

  He stood staring after her, his face smarting as if she had slapped him. Until now he had thought it impossible for her to hurt him any more than she already had.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The news of Marie-Ange’s pregnancy had changed the way he felt about everything. If he had spent his life searching for something, a reason for being, a point to his existence, then suddenly it seemed that he had found it.

  But from the start Marie-Ange had been ambivalent. Sime had been unable to understand why she didn’t share his excitement. They had been going through a difficult time, and it seemed to him that a child could provide the glue that would keep them together. But looking back on it later, he realised that she had probably only seen it as an impediment to their breaking up. A responsibility to child and family that she didn’t want.

  They’d had a debate about the scan. Sime had wanted to know the sex of their child. She had not. And, as usual, she prevailed.

  Four months into the pregnancy, and having regular appointments with the gynaecologist, she still appeared to have little or no maternal instinct. And yet Sime’s sense of fatherhood had been powerful. He had found himself seeing children on their way home from school and imagining how it would feel to be a father. Bringing back memories of his own first day at school, insisting that he could find his way home himself, and then getting lost. He had even caught himself looking at prams and baby seats for the car.

  It had stirred memories, too, of the story about his ancestor delivering the baby on the boat, and the moment of parting at Grosse Île when the child had gripped his thumb with tiny fingers. Sime had wanted that feeling. The unqualified and absolute love of a child. T
he sense that a part of him would live on when he had gone.

  At about seventeen weeks Marie-Ange had taken a week’s leave to visit her parents in Sherbrooke. Sime was upcountry on a case the day she was due back. That afternoon he got a call to say she’d been rushed to hospital with severe bleeding, but it was twenty-four hours before he was able to get back to Montreal.

  Without any idea of what had happened he went straight to the hospital, where he was left sitting in a waiting room for almost two hours. No one told him anything, and he was almost beside himself with worry.

  People came and went. Sick people. Worried relatives. Sime was just about to read the riot act to the nurse at reception when Marie-Ange came through the swing door. She was deathly pale, and clutching a small bag of belongings. She seemed oddly hunched, and when he hurried across the room to her she put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. Sobs ripped themselves from her throat, and when she tipped her face back to look up at him he saw that it was shiny and wet with tears. She didn’t need to tell him that they had lost the baby.

  Strangely, they had been closer in those next few days than they had in years. Sime pampered her, cooking, doing the washing, taking her breakfast in bed. They sat together at night on the settee with a glass of wine, watching mindless TV.

  It was the following week that she had broken the news to him. Her gynaecologist had told her she would no longer be able to have children.

  Sime had been devastated. Taking it almost harder than the loss of the baby. He had been revisited by the same sense of bereavement experienced after the death of his parents. Of regret. Of being all alone in the world. Not just then, but for ever. And of somehow failing, not just his parents, but their parents, and their parents before them. It would all end with him. So what point had there been to any of it?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  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.’