Entry Island (7 page)

‘Tell me why he left you.’

‘I’m tempted to tell you to ask him that.’ She paused. ‘But I’m sure you already know that he was having an affair with another woman.’

He wondered if perhaps her hostility was a shield against the humiliation she must surely feel at having to discuss the failure of her marriage with a stranger – he could imagine how he himself might feel if the roles were reversed. Or whether she was just wary of being caught out in an inconsistency. ‘I’d like to hear your version of events.’

She sighed, resigned to the inevitable. ‘He was spending more and more time away on business, Mr Mackenzie. As I’m sure you’ve been told, I have not left the island for many years, so I never accompanied him on any of his trips.’

‘Was it unusual for him to be away so often?’

‘No, he left the island frequently. Almost daily during the lobster season, but was never gone for long. It was the amount of time he was spending away from the island that was new. Whenever I asked about it, he just said it was the increasing demands of the business. But business had never been that demanding before, and he was quite capable of running it all from his upstairs office in the house.’

‘So you challenged him about it?’

‘No.’ Her tiny laugh was facetious. ‘Like a fool I believed him. I had no inkling of the truth until a neighbour returning on the ferry from Cap aux Meules one day told me she had seen him there.’

‘And he was supposed to be somewhere else?’

‘Montreal. He had phoned me just the night before. From his hotel, he said. The one he always stayed in. He wanted to warn me that he was going to be delayed for a couple of days in the city and wouldn’t be home until the end of the week. So when I heard he was just across the water I knew he’d been lying to me.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I waited until he got home, and I asked him how it had gone in Montreal. Wanting to give him every chance to tell
me a change of plans had brought him back to Cap aux Meules and he just hadn’t had the opportunity to tell me.’

‘But he didn’t.’

She shook her head. ‘He even told me about the meal he’d had the previous night in his favourite Montreal restaurant, La Porte in Boulevard St-Laurent.’ She closed her eyes and for just a moment Sime felt released from their hold. When she opened them again they were burning like ice. ‘I told him I knew he’d been on Cap aux Meules, and I watched the colour drain from his face.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was pathetic. Floundered around trying to find some excuse, some reason to explain why he’d been in one place when he said he’d been in another. And then suddenly he just gave up. Knew it was hopeless, I suppose. Admitted that he’d been lying. That there was someone else. That he’d been having an affair for months. And that somehow it was all my fault.’

‘How was it your fault?’

‘Oh, I was cold and distant, apparently.’ Accusations that were only too familiar to Sime. ‘And my biggest crime of all? Refusing to leave the island. Like he hadn’t known that from day one of our relationship.’ She was breathing hard now, and Sime could feel her pain and anger in the memory of the confrontation.

‘When did all this happen?’

She closed her eyes again, drew a deep breath, and it was as if a cloud of calm descended upon her. Her lids fluttered
open and she looked at him candidly. ‘About ten days ago, Mr Mackenzie. He moved out and in with her last week.’

Evidently the wounds were still fresh. ‘Did you know her?’

‘Not personally. But I knew of her. Everyone knows of her.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Ariane Briand. She’s married to the mayor of Cap aux Meules.’

Sime gazed at her thoughtfully. Suddenly there was another jilted lover in the frame, and he wasn’t quite sure why he felt a sense of relief. ‘Why did your husband fly back to the island last night if he had already left you?’

‘Because there’s a ton of his stuff still in the house. He came to pack some cases.’

‘Did you know he was coming?’

She hesitated only briefly. ‘No,’ she said.

He glanced at the medical report on his knees. ‘You realise the fact that he’d just left you could be interpreted as a motive for murder.’

‘Not by anyone who knows me.’ It was a plain, simple statement of fact. He looked at her for a moment and realised that this was meant for him. And she was right. He knew not the first thing about her.

He lifted the medical report from his knees. ‘It says here there is ample evidence of bruising and scratching about your body, as if you’d been in a fight.’

‘I
was
in a fight! For my life.’ Anger flared briefly in her eyes. ‘It’s hardly surprising I’m scratched and bruised. And I
have no motive for murder, Mr Mackenzie. If you want to know the truth, I’d grown pretty much to hate the man. I would never have wanted to see him hurt, but I was happy that he was gone.’

Sime raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘Why?’

‘When we first met he pursued me …’ she searched for the right word, ‘relentlessly. I was his obsession. He sent me flowers and chocolates, wrote me letters. Phoned me a dozen times a day. He used his wealth to try to impress me, his passion to seduce me. And like an idiot I fell for it. Flattered by his attention, all the grand gestures. He swept me off my feet. I had just graduated from university. I was young, impressionable. And coming from the island, probably not very sophisticated, certainly not very experienced. So when he proposed to me, how could I refuse?’

She shook her head in sad recollection.

‘Marry in haste, they say, and repent at leisure. Well, I certainly had plenty of time for that. A real relationship’s based on trust and understanding, the sharing of little things. Moments of happiness and laughter. Realising you’ve both just had the same thought, or were about to say the same thing. James and I shared nothing, Mr Mackenzie, except the same space. And even that, less and less often. I grew to realise that his emotions were without substance. His obsession was with himself, not me. He’d be telling me about some big contract he’d signed, some export deal to the US, and I’d realise he was watching his own reflection in
the window as he told me. Playing to his own imagined gallery. Posing for photographs that weren’t being taken. He was in love with the idea of me, but I was just another trophy in a life that was all about him. His image. His perception of how others saw him.’

Lightning forked out of the sky across the gulf, and the distant rumble of thunder punctuated the silence in the room. Sime waited for her to go on.

‘You must understand that when I found out that he was having an affair, my overwhelming emotion was one of relief. Of course I was hurt. How could I not feel some sense of betrayal? But when he left, it was as if I had got my life back again.’

And Sime remembered Marie-Ange’s words:
Leaving you was the best thing I ever did. You have no idea how free I feel
.

‘He was gone, Mr Mackenzie. Why would I want to kill him?’

*

After the interview Sime left Blanc to dismantle their equipment, and found Kirsty Cowell standing out on the stoop. The rain was blowing horizontally off the gulf and into the porch. But she didn’t seem to mind. She stood facing the wind and rain, something defiant in her stance, arms folded, face lifted slightly, rainwater running off it like tears. He stood beside her and felt the rain in his own face.

‘It’s going to be bad,’ she said, without turning to look at him.

‘So I’m told.’ The roar of the sea breaking over rocks at the foot of the south-facing cliffs below was almost deafening, and he had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘I’d like you to stay here tonight. Unless there’s somewhere else you want to go.’ He nodded towards the house that Cowell had built. ‘That’s off-limits.’

‘I’ll stay here.’

‘An officer will be posted in the big house overnight.’

She turned to look at him. ‘Am I a suspect?’

‘You’re not under arrest, if that’s what you mean. The officer will be there to maintain the integrity of the crime scene.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you have any friends, or relatives, that you’d like to come and stay with you?’

She shook her head. ‘I have plenty of acquaintances, Mr Mackenzie, but I have never made friends easily. And my only surviving relative is my cousin Jack. But he lives over on Havre Aubert and works shifts in the salt-mine up north. We really have very little contact, and almost nothing in common.’

Again she turned her gaze on him, and he found it hard to stop himself feeling some kind of emotional response.

‘I’m not going to leave the island, if that’s what you’re worried about. I haven’t left it in more than ten years, and I have no intention of leaving it now.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why won’t you leave the island?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I had to, of course, when I was younger. When my parents sent to me secondary school on Prince Edward Island. And then again when I went to university in Lennoxville. Which was fine, as long as my folks were still here. But my mom died during my final year. Cancer. And my dad went not long after. Just couldn’t face life without her, and gave up the fight. I haven’t been off the island since I buried him back there in the churchyard.’

She smiled. The first one Sime had seen. But it was sad.

‘It used to drive James mad. Oh, in the beginning he thought it was delightfully eccentric. Exotic, even. The two of us holed up here together, him flying off to conduct his business wherever it took him, then returning to this love nest he had built for us.’ She glanced wistfully towards the big house. ‘Where his love would always be waiting. The one constant he could always rely on.’ She turned her back on the weather and leaned against the rail, gazing up at the house where she had been born. ‘What he didn’t know was that when he was gone I hardly ever slept in his bed. I came over here. Like coming back to the womb. There is comfort and love in this house, Mr Mackenzie. The house that James built is cold and empty. Which is how it made me feel.’

She sighed deeply and turned to look at Sime once more.

‘Of course, he tired of my eccentricity soon enough. It frustrated him, became a source of friction. He liked to travel, you see. To dine in fine restaurants. And he had always wanted to go to Europe. None of which was possible with a
stupid wife who wouldn’t leave a tiny island in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence.’

She stopped now, searching his face, a slightly puzzled look creasing around her eyes.

‘Why is it so easy to talk to you?’

Sime smiled. ‘That’s my job.’

‘And that’s why I am telling you things I’ve never told anyone in my life?’

His eyes never wavered from hers. ‘You still haven’t told me why you won’t leave the island.’

Her eyes drifted away then, to find focus somewhere in her thoughts. ‘Maybe that’s because I can’t.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Can’t, Mr Mackenzie. You see, I have no real idea why. It’s just a feeling I have. Very powerful. Something inside me that I can’t explain. My mother was the same. Hated to leave the island. And it killed her in the end. She wouldn’t go over to Cap aux Meules to see the doctor, so they didn’t find the cancer until it was much too late.’ She refocused on her interrogator. ‘It’s like …’ she searched for words to give form to the thought, ‘… like I’m waiting for something. And if I leave I might miss it.’

He raised his right hand to sweep wet hair back from his forehead and saw more than heard her gasp. She reached out to take his hand in both of hers and turn the back of it towards her. She canted her head to one side and a frown formed between her brows.

‘Where did you get this?’

Sime took his hand away from her and looked at the gold signet ring on his third finger. He had been wearing it for so long he had almost forgotten it was there. ‘Why?’

She took his hand back and ran her thumb over the engraved surface of the oval red stone set into the gold. ‘It’s carnelian.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A semi-precious stone. Very hard. Ideal for engraving.’ She glanced up, the strangest look in her eyes. Confusion. Even fear. ‘You know what the engraving is?’

She was still holding his hand. He looked at the ring again. ‘To be honest, I’ve never really thought about it. Looks like a crooked arm holding a sword.’

‘Where did you get it?’ she asked again. More insistent this time.

He pulled his hand away. ‘It was my father’s. Passed down through the family, I guess. I got it when he died.’

She stared at him for a long time with a strange, silent intensity, then looked down again at his hand. ‘I have a pendant,’ she said. ‘Bigger. But oval, and set in gold, with exactly the same symbol engraved in the carnelian. I’d swear it was identical.’

Sime shrugged. ‘It was probably fashionable at some time in history. I bet there’s thousands of them out there.’

‘No.’ Her contradiction was sharp and its vehemence startled him. ‘It really is identical. A family crest of some sort. I’ve looked at it hundreds of times. I can show you it.’

In spite of his curiosity, Sime was wary of indulging her in this bizarre turn of events. ‘I don’t think that would serve any purpose. And, anyway, you can’t go back into the big house for the moment. Not while it’s still a crime scene under investigation.’

‘I don’t need to. The pendant’s here. I brought most of my personal stuff back into the summerhouse after James left. Including my jewellery box.’ She turned and hurried into the house. Sime stood for a moment with the rain whipping in under the eaves, and felt infused by the oddest sense of uncertainty. He had already been unsettled by his sense of knowing her. Now this. He looked at the engraving on the ring. It could only be some kind of bizarre coincidence. He pushed through the screen door back into the sitting room as Blanc brought the flight cases containing the monitors through from the bedroom.

Kirsty ran down the stairs holding a polished wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She set it on the coffee table in front of the fireplace and knelt to open the lid. Blanc glanced from Sime to Kirsty and back again, the almost imperceptible raising of one eyebrow asking his silent question. Sime’s response was the merest of shrugs. Both men turned their heads at the sound of her gasp of frustration.