Entry Island

by Peter May

  Sime smiled and they watched in silence for a while as Lapointe manoeuvred into the tight, two-vehicle car deck. He glanced at his co-interrogator. Blanc was six inches smaller than Sime, and carrying a good deal more weight. He had a head of thick, curly black hair balding on top, a monk’s tonsure in the making. ‘How’s your English?’ Sime said.

  Blanc pulled a face. ‘I understand it okay. But I don’t speak it so good.’ He nodded his head vaguely beyond the harbour wall. ‘I hear these Entry islanders refuse to speak French.’ He snorted. ‘I’m glad you’re doing the talking.’ Sime nodded. Blanc would sit with two monitors and a recorder at the end of a cable in another room and take notes while Sime conducted the interviews on camera. Everything was recorded these days.

  Lapointe was parked up now, and the rest of them walked up the vehicle ramp and on to the ferry, squeezing down a narrow corridor to the seating area in the bow. Sime let them go and climbed the stairs to the top deck, skirting the wheelhouse to make his way to the front of the boat. There he leaned on the rail beneath a torn CTMA flag, and counted three cruise ships berthed at various quays.

  It was another ten minutes before the ferry slipped out of the harbour, gliding past the outer breakwater on a sea like glass, to reveal Entry Island in the far distance, stretched out on the far side of the bay, the sun only now rising above a gathering of dark morning cloud beyond it. The island drew Sime’s focus and held it there, almost trancelike, as the sun sent its reflection careening towards him, creating what was almost a halo effect around the island itself. There was something magical about it. Almost mystical.

  IV

  None of them knew if the ferry was usually met by this many people, but the tiny quay was crowded with vehicles and curious islanders when the ferry berthed at the harbour on Entry Island. Sergeant Enquêteur André Aucoin from the Sûreté on Cap aux Meules was there to meet them. Middle-aged but lacking experience, he was overawed by the arrival of real cops from the mainland, but enjoying his fifteen minutes in the sun. This was his first murder. He sat up beside Lapointe in the front of the minibus and briefed them on it during their bumpy ride across the island.

  He pointed to a huddle of buildings above the road just past Brian Josey’s restaurant and general store on Main Street. ‘Can’t see it from here, but that’s the airstrip up there. Cowell had his own single-engined plane that he used to fly back and forth to Havre aux Maisons. There’s easy access from there by scheduled flight to Quebec City or Montreal for business meetings. He kept a Range Rover here at the strip.’

  ‘What business was he in?’ Crozes asked.

  ‘Lobsters, Lieutenant.’ Aucoin chuckled. ‘What other business is there on the Madeleine islands?’

  Sime noticed the thousands of lobster creels heaped up against brightly coloured wooden houses and barns set back from the road and dotted about the rolling green pasture of the island interior. There were no trees, just telegraph poles leaning at odd angles, and electric cables looping from one to the other. A late cut of summer grasses had produced big round hay bales that punctuated the landscape, and in the distance he saw the spire of a white-painted wooden church, the long shadows of gravestones reaching down the slope towards them in the yellow early light.

  Aucoin said, ‘Cowell ran half the lobster boats in the Madeleines, landing around fifteen million dollars’-worth a year. Not to mention the processing and canning plant he owned on Cap aux Meules.’

  ‘Was he from the islands?’ Sime asked.

  ‘A Madelinot born and bred. From the English-speaking community at Old Harry in the north. But his French was good. You wouldn’t have known he wasn’t a native speaker.’

  ‘And his wife?’

  ‘Oh, Kirsty’s a native of Entry Island. Hasn’t been off it, apparently, in the ten years since she graduated from Bishop’s University in Lennoxville.’

  ‘Not once?’ There was incredulity in Crozes’s voice.

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘So what happened last night?’

  ‘Looks like it was her that did it.’

  Crozes spoke sharply. ‘I didn’t ask for your opinion, Sergeant. Just the facts.’

  Aucoin blushed. ‘According to Kirsty Cowell there was an intruder. A guy in a ski mask. He attacked her, and when the husband intervened he got stabbed and the intruder ran off.’ He couldn’t hide his disbelief and his own interpretation slipped out again. ‘It’s pretty weird. I mean, I know you guys are the experts, but you just don’t get break-ins here on Entry Island. The only way on and off since the air service got cut is by ferry, or private boat. It’s unlikely that anyone could motor into the harbour and out again without someone noticing. And there’s only one other jetty on the island. A small private quay that Cowell had built at the foot of the cliffs below his house. But the currents there make it pretty treacherous, so it’s hardly ever used.’

  ‘Another islander, then,’ Sime said.

  The look that Aucoin turned in his direction was laden with sarcasm. ‘Or a figment of Mrs Cowell’s imagination.’

  They left the lighthouse on their right and turned up the hill towards the Cowell house. Most of the homes on the island were traditional in design, wooden-framed with shingle-clad walls or clapboard siding beneath steeply pitched shingle roofs. They were vividly painted in primary colours. Red, green, blue, and sometimes more bizarrely in shades of purple or ochre, window and door frames picked out in white or canary-yellow. Lawns were well maintained. A local preoccupation, it seemed, and they passed several islanders out with their lawnmowers profiting from the autumn sunshine.

  The Cowell house itself stood out from the others, not only in size but in design. It was out of place, somehow, like an artificial Christmas tree in a forest of natural pines. It was not of the island. A long yellow-painted building of clapboard siding with a red roof broken by dormers and turrets and a large arched window. As they pulled around the gravel path at the cliff side, they saw that there was a conservatory built along almost the entire south-facing length of it, windows looking out across a manicured lawn towards the fence that ran along the cliff’s edge.

  ‘It’s bloody huge,’ Lapointe said.

  Aucoin blew air through pursed lips, savouring the importance that his local knowledge gave him. ‘Used to be a church hall,’ he said. ‘With a bell tower. Over on Havre Aubert. Cowell had it cut in three and floated across on barges brought up specially from Quebec City. They reassembled it here on the cliffs, then finished it inside and out to the highest specs. The interior’s quite amazing. Had it done for his wife, apparently. Nothing was too good or too expensive for his Kirsty, according to the neighbours.’

  Sime’s eyes wandered to a smaller property no more than fifty yards away. It stood a little lower on the slope, a traditional island house, blue and white, with a covered porch that looked out over the red cliffs. It seemed to sit on the same parcel of land. ‘Who lives there?’

  Aucoin followed Sime’s eyeline. ‘Oh that’s her place.’

  ‘Kirsty Cowell’s?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You mean they lived in separate houses?’

  ‘No, that’s the house she grew up in and inherited from her parents. She and her husband both lived in the big house that Cowell built. They had the old place renovated. Used it as a summerhouse, or guest house, apparently. Though according to the folk we’ve spoken to, they never had any. Guests, that is.’ He glanced back at Sime. ‘She’s in there just now, with a policewoman. Didn’t want her messing up the crime scene.’ If he expected some kind of pat on the back, he was disappointed when it didn’t come. He added, ‘At least, not any more than she already has.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Marie-Ange spoke sharply and for the first time. Suddenly this was her territory.

  Aucoin just smiled. ‘You’ll see, ma’am.’ His importance to them would pass quickly. He was determined to make the most of it while it lasted.

  They parked outside the house next to what was p
resumably Cowell’s Range Rover. Patrolmen from Cap aux Meules had hammered in stakes and stretched crime scene tape between them as they had no doubt seen in the movies. It fluttered and hummed now in the stiffening breeze. Marie-Ange got her trunk down from the roof and changed into a suit and hood of white tyvek, slipping bootees over her trainers. The others pulled on plastic overshoes and snapped their hands into latex gloves. Aucoin watched with admiration and envy. Marie-Ange chucked him some shoe covers and gloves. ‘I know you’ve probably tramped all over the place already, but let’s try not to fuck it up any more than you already have.’ He blushed again and glared at her with hate in his heart.

  The team moved carefully into the house through sliding doors that took them into a tiled sun room with a hot tub. They passed through it to the conservatory lounge, which was littered with recliners and glass tables, one of which was smashed. Shards of broken glass crunched underfoot. Then up two steps to the main living space, avoiding a trail of dried bloody footprints.

  A vast area of polished wooden floor delineated a space that rose up into the arched roof. A large dining table and chairs stood off to the left, and at the far side an open-plan kitchen was partitioned from the main entrance by a standing dresser. A staircase dog-legged up to a mezzanine level on the right, and to their left another three curved steps led up to a sitting area with a grand piano and three-piece suite set around an open fireplace.

  Almost in the centre of the floor a man lay on his back, one arm thrown out to his right, the other by his side. He was wearing dark-blue slacks and a white shirt that was soaked in blood. His legs were stretched straight out, slightly parted, his feet in their Italian leather shoes tilting to right and left. His eyes were wide open, as was his mouth. Unnaturally so. But the most striking thing was the way his blood was smeared across the floor all around him. In streaks and pools and random patterns. Bloody footprints seemed to circle him. Naked feet, which had left a trail leading away from the body towards the kitchen and then back, fading on the return before picking up fresh blood to track away to the conservatory and down the steps. The main body of blood was almost dry now, oxidised, sticky and brown in colour.

  ‘Jesus!’ Marie-Ange’s voice came in a breath. ‘When you said mess you weren’t kidding.’

  Aucoin said, ‘This is how it was when we arrived. Mrs Cowell claims she attempted CPR and tried to stop the bleeding. Without success.’

  ‘Obviously.’ Marie-Ange’s tone was dry.

  Aucoin shifted uncomfortably. ‘The footprints are hers. She ran over to the kitchen to get a towel to staunch the flow of blood. One of my men found it lying out there in the grass at first light. When she couldn’t revive him she ran down the hill to a neighbour’s house for help.’ He paused. ‘That’s the story she told them, anyway.’

  Marie-Ange moved around the body like a cat, examining every pool and spatter of blood, every footprint and smear on the floor. Sime found it difficult to watch her. ‘There are other footprints here,’ she said. ‘The tread of a shoe.’

  ‘That would be the nurse. She came when the neighbours called. She had to ascertain that he was dead. Then she called us.’

  ‘If the wife attempted CPR she must be covered in blood herself,’ Crozes said.

  ‘Oh yes, sir, she is.’ Aucoin nodded gravely.

  ‘I hope you haven’t allowed her to wash or change.’ Marie-Ange cast him a look almost as acid as her tone.

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  She turned to Lapointe. ‘We’ll need to have her photographed and medically examined, checked for fibres and injuries. I’ll want samples from beneath her nails. And you’ll need to bag her clothes and take them back with you to Montreal for forensic examination.’ She returned her attention to Aucoin. ‘Is there a doctor on the island?’

  ‘No, ma’am, just the nurse. There’s two of them. They come week about.’

  ‘She’ll have to do then. And I guess I’ll have to be the examining officer, since it’s a woman.’

  Blanc said, ‘Was there any sign of a break-in?’

  Aucoin’s laugh was involuntary. But he quickly caught himself. ‘No. There would be no need to break in. No one on the island locks their doors.’

  Lieutenant Crozes clapped his hands. ‘Okay, let’s get started. Have you interviewed the wife, Sergeant Aucoin?’

  ‘No, sir. I took statements from the neighbours, that’s all.’

  ‘Good.’ Crozes turned towards Sime. ‘Why don’t you and Blanc set up in the summerhouse and take an initial statement before we do the medical exam?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sound of her voice was almost hypnotic. Monotonous, unemotional. She recounted the events of the night before as if she were reading them off a printed account for the umpteenth time. And yet the images they painted for Sime were vivid enough, filled as they were with detail that he supplied himself from his own picture of the crime scene.

  But it was a picture that came and went, in sharp focus one moment then blurred the next. Everything about her distracted him. The way her hair fell to her shoulders, limp now but still animated by a natural wave. So dark it was almost black. The strangely emotionless eyes that seemed to drill right through him, to the point where he had to break contact and pretend he was thinking about his next question. The way her hands lay folded in her lap, one inside the other, long elegant fingers pressed together with tension. And her voice with its lazy Canadian drawl, not a hint of French anywhere present in its intonation.

  The clouds he had seen earlier were massing now out in the gulf to the south of the islands, and the sun came and went in fleeting moments that fired up the ocean in occasional patches of dazzling light. He felt as much as heard the wind beating against the house.

  ‘I was preparing for bed,’ she said. ‘Our bedroom is downstairs, at the far end of the house. French windows open on to the conservatory, but the lights were out there. James was upstairs in his study. He had arrived home not long before.’

  ‘Where from?’

  She hesitated momentarily. ‘He’d flown over from Havre aux Maisons and picked up his Range Rover at the airfield. He always leaves it there.’ She paused to correct herself. ‘Left, I mean.’

  Sime knew from professional experience how hard it was for someone to refer suddenly to a loved one in the past tense.

  ‘I heard a noise in the conservatory and called out, thinking it was James.’

  ‘What kind of noise?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember now. Just a noise. Like a chair scraping on tiles or something.’ She interlaced her fingers in her lap. ‘Anyway, when he didn’t respond I went to take a look, which is when a man lunged at me out of the darkness.’

  ‘Did you get a look at him?’

  ‘Not then, no. As I said, it was dark. He was just a shadow coming out of nowhere. He was wearing gloves, though. I knew that because one of his hands was in my face and I could feel and smell the leather.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s strange the things you’re aware of in moments of stress.’ Now it was she who broke eye contact, and her gaze seemed to drift off into the middle distance as if she were trying to reconstruct the moment. ‘I screamed and punched and kicked, and he tried to pin my arms to my side. But we fell over a chair and landed on one of the tables. Glass. It just gave way beneath us and shattered on the floor. I think I must have landed on top of him because for a moment he seemed incapable of moving. Winded, I guess. And then I saw the blade of his knife catch a reflection from the light in the living room. And I was on my feet and running for my life. Up the steps into the living room, screaming for James.’

  Her breathing increased with the pace of the storytelling, and he noticed how the colour rose on her cheeks and around her eyes as she turned them back on him.

  ‘I could hear him right behind me. And then felt the force of his shoulder in the back of my thighs. I went down like a ton of bricks. Hit the floor with such a force it knocked all the air out of my lungs. I couldn’t catch a b
reath, couldn’t scream. There were lights flashing in my eyes. I tried to wriggle free, get on to my back so I could see him. And then I did. He was on his knees above me.’

  ‘Your first good look at him.’

  She nodded. ‘Not that I can tell you much. He wore jeans, I think. And a dark jacket of some kind. And a black ski mask pulled over his head. But, really, Mr Mackenzie, my whole focus was on the knife in his right hand. It was raised high and just about to plunge down into me. In that moment I was sure I was going to die. And everything suddenly became clear, like I was watching an HD movie in slow-motion. I could see every reflected surface of the room along the length of that blade. The stitched leather fingers around the haft. A strange intensity in the eyes behind the slits.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘His eyes?’

  Sime nodded.

  ‘I suppose I should remember. They just seemed dark. Black. Like maybe the pupils were fully dilated.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘And then James was there behind him, both hands around the wrist of the knife hand, pulling it back, dragging him away from me. I saw him try to pull off the mask, and the man swung a fist into his face, and they both staggered off across the floor. Then they went over with a terrible crash, and the other man was on top.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing that made much sense. I ran across the room and jumped on the man’s back. Like I had the strength to stop him! I was punching and kicking and screaming, and I could feel James bucking beneath us both. Then an elbow or a fist, or something, came back and caught me full on the side of the head.’ She raised a hand to pass fingertips delicately over her right temple. ‘I’ve heard of people seeing stars. Well, I saw stars, Mr Mackenzie. My head was filled with the light of them. And it stole all the strength from my arms and legs. I went over on my back and thought I was going to be sick. I was completely helpless. I heard James shouting, and then a terrible gasp, and a thudding like punches, and then the man ran past me, back down the steps and out through the conservatory.’