Entry Island Page 35

  Sime felt an aching sense of sadness for him, for everything he had been through, for ending up here alone, laid for ever to rest in the earth of a foreign place so far from his home.

  He knelt by the tombstone and placed both hands on the cool, rough stone, and touched the soul of his ancestor. Beneath his name was the inscription, Gus am bris an latha agus an teich na sgàilean.

  ‘Do you know what it means?’ The voice startled him, and Sime looked around to see a man standing a few paces away. A man in his forties, dark pony-tailed hair going grey around the hairline. He wore a collarless white shirt open at the neck beneath a tartan waistcoat. Black trousers folded over heavy boots.

  Sime stood up. ‘No, I don’t.’

  The man smiled. He said, ‘It means, Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away. Quite common on Hebridean graves.’

  Sime regarded him with curiosity. ‘Are you Scottish?’

  The man laughed. ‘Do I sound it? No, I’m as French as they come. My partner and I own the auberge across the way, but the history of this place is my obsession.’ He glanced down at his waistcoat. ‘As you can see.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ve even been to the Isle of Lewis myself in the company of some local historians. Smelled the peat smoke and tasted the guga.’ He reached out to shake Sime’s hand, then nodded towards the gravestone. ‘Some connection?’

  ‘My great-great-great-grandfather.’

  ‘Well, then, I’m even happier to meet you, monsieur. I have quite a collection of papers and memorabilia over at the auberge. Your ancestor was quite a local celebrity. I think I may even have a photograph of him.’

  ‘Really?’ Sime hardly dared believe it.

  ‘I think so, yes. Come on over and have a coffee and I’ll see if I can find it.’

  *

  As he poured them both coffee from a freshly plunged cafetière, the owner of the auberge said, ‘Your ancestor’s land and his house were about half a mile out of town on the old road south. All gone now, of course. The fella he came here with never developed his, apparently.’

  Sime looked up, interested. ‘The Irishman?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Very unusual for an Irishman to settle in these parts.’

  ‘But he didn’t, you said. He never developed his land.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what happened to him?’

  The man shrugged. ‘No idea. The story is that the two of them went off lumberjacking one year, and only one of them came back. But I don’t really know.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see if I can find that photograph.’

  From his seat in the window Sime sipped his coffee and gazed with interest around the dining room. The walls were lined by old photographs and stags’ heads on one side, and shelves cluttered with bric-a-brac and memorabilia on the other. An antique coffee machine sat on an equally cluttered serving counter and Sime could see through a hatch into the kitchen beyond. The auberge, the owner had told him, was constructed on the site of the original Gould store, built by an émigré from the Scottish mainland.

  He returned now with an album full of faded photographs of people long dead and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘There,’ he said, stabbing a finger at a photograph so bleached by time that it was hard to make out the figure in it.

  But Sime saw that it was the portrait of an old man with a long beard sitting on a bench. His hair was pure white and swept back across his head, long and curling around his collar. He wore a dark jacket and trousers. A waistcoat and white shirt were only just discernible. He was leaning forward slightly, both hands resting on the top of a walking stick that he held upright in front of him, his right hand over his left. And there, on his ring finger, only just apparent, was the signet ring that Sime now wore on his.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I

  The flight from Quebec City to the Madeleine Isles took just under two hours in the small commuter aircraft. Sime sat next to an island woman whose two teenage sons fidgeted in the seats in front. They wore baseball caps with upturned brims, listening to iPods and playing computer games. She raised semi-regretful eyebrows at Sime, as if apologising for the behaviour of all teenagers. As if he might have cared.

  Some time into the flight he closed burning eyes and very nearly drifted off, before being startled awake by an announcement from the pilot. Above the roar of the engines Sime heard him apologising for any turbulence experienced, and informing passengers that there was a storm on the way. Not on the same scale as the remnants of Hurricane Jess, which had so marked Sime’s first visit. But it was likely to hit the islands, the pilot said, with strong to gale-force winds and high precipitation later in the day.

  When the plane began its final descent towards Havre aux Maisons, it banked left and Sime saw the storm clouds accumulating in the south-west. And as it swung around for landing, he caught a glimpse once more of Entry Island standing sentinel at the far side of the bay. A dark, featureless shadow waiting for him in the grey, pre-storm light. He had thought, just a matter of days ago, that he had seen the last of it. But now he was back. To try to resolve what seemed like an insoluble mystery. To right what he believed to be a miscarriage of justice. Something that, in all likelihood, would lose him his job.

  The thought filled him with the same frightening sense of destiny he had experienced on that first visit.

  *

  He picked up a rental car at the airport and as he drove along the Chemin de l’Aéroport to join Highway 199 South, the first drops of rain hit his windshield. Worn wipers smeared them across a greasy surface, and he blinked as if that might clear the glass. But he was just fatigued.

  His car bumped and splashed through the potholes on the loop of road that bypassed the work on the new bridge, and he crossed over to Cap aux Meules on the old, rusted box-girder construction that had served the islanders for two generations.

  By the time he got to the offices of the Sûreté de Police, the rain was blowing across the bay on the edge of a wind that was gaining in strength.

  Sergeant Enquêteur Aucoin was surprised to see him. ‘She just got back half an hour ago from the Palais de Justice on Havre Aubert,’ he said as they walked down the hall. ‘The judge couldn’t make it, so it was all done with video cameras. She pled not guilty of course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She was remanded in custody for trial in Montreal. They’ll fly her out tomorrow to a remand prison on the mainland.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I don’t mind telling you, we’ll be glad to see the back of her. We were never designed to host long-term guests. Especially of the female variety.’ They stopped in front of the door to the cells. ‘What do you want to see her for anyway?’

  Sime hesitated. He had no right to be here, no authority to question the accused. But no one in the Sûreté on Cap aux Meules had any reason to suspect that he didn’t. ‘New developments,’ he said. ‘I need to speak to her privately.’

  Aucoin unlocked the door and let him in. He heard the key turn in the lock behind him. Both cells lay open. Kirsty turned wearily from where she sat cross-legged on her bunk surrounded by books and papers. She wore a simple T-shirt, jeans and white trainers. Her hair was drawn back from her face and tied in a loose ponytail. It had only been a few days, but already she had lost weight. Her skin was almost grey in colour.

  Her initial expression of indifference gave way to anger as she realised who her visitor was. ‘Come to gloat?’

  He shook his head and stepped into her cell. He cleared a space beside her on the bunk to sit down, and she turned to glare at him. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’

  ‘This isn’t an official visit.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  He drew a deep breath. ‘I saw a painting of you yesterday.’

  A frown creased around her eyes. ‘No one’s ever painted me. At least not that I know of. Where did you see this picture?’

  ‘In the attic of my sister’s garage in the
town of Bury in the Eastern Townships. It was painted by my great-great-great-grandfather, and it used to hang above the mantel in my grandmother’s house when she read us stories as children.’ He held up his right hand. ‘This was his ring.’

  Kirsty exhaled her contempt. ‘If this is some kind of trick to get me to admit to murdering my husband, it’s not going to work.’

  ‘It’s no trick, Kirsty.’ And he took out his cellphone and tapped the screen to show her the picture he had taken in his sister’s attic the night before.

  She turned sulky eyes to look at it, and he saw her expression change. Not in a moment, but gradually. As if the shock of seeing it was slow in penetrating her resistance. Her lips parted and her eyes grew imperceptibly larger. She reached over to take his phone and examine the photograph more closely. Then she looked up. ‘How did you do this?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. That’s the painting that hung above my grandmother’s fireplace when I was a boy.’ He paused. ‘I knew I knew you. From the first moment I saw you.’

  Her eyes searched his, and she was remembering perhaps that first encounter when she came down the stairs in the summerhouse to find him waiting to interview her. I know you, he had said.

  She looked back at the phone. ‘Coincidence. Some weird kind of resemblance. But it’s not me.’

  ‘If I had just shown that to you and asked if it was you, what would you have said?’

  ‘You just did. And I’m telling you, it might look like me, but it’s not.’

  ‘Look again. She’s wearing a red pendant.’

  Reluctantly she turned her eyes towards it once more. He saw the colour rise high on her cheeks, but her mouth set in a stubborn line. ‘That’s all it is. A red pendant. Nothing to say it’s mine.’

  He took back his phone and switched it off, slipping it into his pocket. ‘You told me that your great-great-great-grandmother McKay was Scottish.’

  ‘I think I told you she was probably Scottish. I don’t know, I’ve never gone into it. As far as I know her parents came from Nova Scotia, almost certainly Scottish immigrants. But whether Kirsty herself was born in Scotland, Nova Scotia or here, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never been interested enough to find out. If you want to know about my family history – though God knows why you would – you would need to ask Jack.’

  ‘Your cousin?’

  ‘He’s a fanatic on genealogy. Spends hours on the internet going through family records. Recently he was pestering me for access to papers that got handed down through my side of the family.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t see much of one another.’

  ‘We don’t. He hasn’t seen half the stuff I’ve got up at the house. Not that he really needs to. Apparently there’s not much that he doesn’t already know.’ She smiled sadly. ‘He never could understand my lack of interest.’

  And Sime thought how she was just like he had been. Indifferent to her past, heedless of her roots. And just as he had done, she had struggled to find her place in a world that lives only for the present, where culture is a disposable commodity, no matter how many generations it has been in the making. ‘Where did this obsession with not leaving Entry Island come from?’

  She turned her head sharply. ‘It’s not an obsession! It’s a feeling.’

  ‘You said your mother was reluctant to leave, too.’

  ‘As was her mother. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea.’ She was running out of patience with him. ‘Maybe it’s in the DNA.’

  ‘And your ancestor, Kirsty McKay?’

  ‘As far as I know, she never left the island once.’ She stood up. ‘Look, I’d like you to go. They’re sending me to prison on the mainland tomorrow. Who knows how long it will take to go to trial? But I can’t see any way I can prove my innocence, so I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life behind bars. Thanks to you.’

  He wanted to tell her about Sime Mackenzie from Baile Mhanais, and the Ciorstaidh he fell in love with on a remote Hebridean island in another century. Of the struggles that brought him to Canada, and how all these generations later it had brought his great-great-great-grandson to Entry Island and a chance encounter with a woman called Kirsty who was almost identical in every way to the Ciorstaidh he had lost on a quayside in Glasgow.

  But he knew how it would sound, and he had no rational way of explaining it to her. Even if she had been halfway receptive. Right now all he felt was her hostility. He stood up and looked into her eyes so directly that she had difficulty maintaining eye contact and looked away.

  As a policeman, he knew that all the evidence in the murder of her husband had pointed towards her. But he also knew that most of it was circumstantial, and he had never really believed it. Instinct. Or perhaps something even less tangible. Deep down inside he felt as if he knew this woman, and that there was no way she was capable of murder. ‘Kirsty,’ he said. ‘How did you get your husband’s skin under your fingernails?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I must have scratched him when I was fighting to pull his killer off him.’ She looked at the floor. ‘Just go.’

  But to her surprise he took each of her hands in his, holding them tightly. ‘Kirsty, look at me.’

  Her eyes flashed upwards to meet his.

  ‘Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t kill him.’

  She pulled her hands away. ‘I didn’t kill him!’ she shouted, and her voice reverberated around the tiny cell.

  He continued to stare at her. ‘I believe you.’

  He saw her confusion.

  ‘I’ll fly back with you to Montreal tomorrow, and I’ll do whatever it takes to prove your innocence.’

  II

  The rain was battering his windshield as he turned back on to Highway 199 to head south. He had no idea if Jack Aitkens was still on night shift, but it was closer to drive to his home on Havre Aubert to find out than head north to the salt-mine. Besides which, if he was underground, then he wouldn’t be reachable until after six.

  It was still just mid-afternoon, but the light was so poor that every car had turned on its headlights, a dazzle of red and yellow lights reflecting on a wet, black road surface.

  Sime drove up over the hill, and saw power cables swinging overhead in the wind. He had no idea what drew his attention, but as he passed the car park of the Cooperative supermarket he glanced left and saw a face he recognised. A face caught in the momentary flash of a car’s headlights. Pale under a black umbrella, but lit up by a smile. And then it was gone as the umbrella dipped in the wind.

  Ariane Briand. And she wasn’t alone. Richard Briand had his arm around her, sharing her umbrella.

  Sime slammed on his brakes and took a hard left turn into the far entrance of the car park. Car horns sounded in the rain, and he caught the glimpse of an angry face behind flashing wipers. He slowed and cruised among the lines of cars towards where he had last seen the couple, peering past his own wipers through the rain.

  There they were, still beneath the umbrella, putting a shopping basket in the trunk of a car, huddled together against the elements. At that final briefing, it was Crozes himself who’d said Briand actually had more to gain that any of the others from Cowell’s death. And yet he had never seriously been considered a suspect because his wife had provided his alibi. Even Sime had dismissed him, because on the night that Sime was attacked on Entry Island, Briand had been in Quebec City. Or so he said. No one had actually checked that. He and his wife claimed to have shut themselves away from the world in their hotel, but there was no proof that this was true. All the investigators had was their word for it. The focus had been so much on Kirsty that any other possibility had simply been ignored.

  Sime ran through the sequence of events in his mind as the windows inside his car began to steam up. Arseneau had gone looking for Briand on the evening of their first day here. The start of the investigation. Briand’s secretary had told him that Briand had left for Quebec City that morning, but that he’d booked his own travel and accommodation, so no one knew w
here to find him. Had anyone even checked with the airline that Briand had actually left the island?

  He wiped the mist from his windscreen in time to catch Ariane Briand and her husband laughing, caught unexpectedly in the rain as their umbrella blew inside out in the wind. Briand stooped to give her a quick kiss before they ran around opposite sides of the vehicle to jump in.

  Sime took out his phone and tapped the name of Briand’s hotel in Quebec City into Google. Up came the website and a telephone number. He tapped dial, and sat listening as a phone rang somewhere 1,200 kilometres away.

  ‘Auberge Saint-Antoine. Reception. How may I help you?’

  ‘This is Sergeant Enquêteur Sime Mackenzie with the Sûreté in Montreal. You had a guest staying with you recently by the name of Richard Briand. I’d like to check his arrival date, please.’

  ‘One moment, Sergeant.’

  Sime watched Briand’s car turn out of the car park into a side street and then drive up to the main highway.

  ‘Hello, Sergeant. Yes, Monsieur Briand checked in on the 28th. He left us yesterday.’

  Sime hung up. The 28th was the day before he and Blanc had flown to Quebec City to interview him. Where had he and Ariane Briand been for the previous two days if not there? Had Briand left the islands at all before the 28th? Because if not, then he could just conceivably have been Sime’s attacker. His flights in and out of Havre aux Maisons could be checked with the airline. Sime would do that first thing in the morning before flying out with Kirsty.

  The thought that the Briands might have been lying elevated his pulse rate. But that same old doubt still nagged at the back of his mind. Even if he wasn’t in Quebec City as he claimed, why would Briand attack Sime?

  III

  The rain had eased off a little by the time Sime found himself driving directly south along a narrow strip of land towards Havre Aubert. The sea was breaking all along the Plage de la Martinique on his left. On his right the wind rippled across the surface of the Baie du Havre aux Basques, which was protected from the full force of the storm surge by sand dunes all along its western perimeter. Kite surfers were out in force on this side, taking advantage of the powerful sou’westerly.