Entry Island

by Peter May

  Clarke thrust out his bristled jaw defiantly, as if challenging them to contradict him. ‘You have bad years, you know? It happens. And we had two of them. One after the other. No way to make it through the next winter. So the old man borrows money from Cowell. The boat’s his security. But he knows he’ll pay it off next season. Trouble is Cowell charged twice as much as the banks.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just borrow from the bank, then?’

  Clarke scowled. ‘Bad risk. No choice. Cowell or nothing. Then just before the spring season my old man goes and has a heart attack. Doc tells him he can’t go to sea, so it’s just me. And I can’t bring in as much as we did together. So we don’t have enough to pay off the loan and Cowell calls it in. And when we can’t cough up he takes the boat. Thinks he’s doing me a favour by letting me skipper it, too.’ He blew his contempt through loosely puckered lips. ‘Took away everything my old man worked for all his days. That boat was his pride and joy. And he wanted it to be mine.’ He pulled up phlegm from his throat to his mouth and spat it on to the floor. ‘He was dead within the month.’

  He drained his bottle and then stared at it, as if seeking inspiration in its emptiness.

  ‘If that boat was mine now, I’d have something to hand on to my own son. And maybe he wouldn’t want to leave.’

  A long silence hung as heavy as the smoke that moved in slow, shifting strands around the light bulb. Finally Sime said, ‘Where were you last night, Mr Clarke?’

  Clarke raised dangerous eyes to fix Sime in their glare. He spoke slowly, suppressing his anger. ‘I was at home. All night. You can ask my wife, or my mother.’

  ‘We will.’

  He pushed himself back from the bench and sat up straight. ‘I guess the good thing is that when you people go, you’ll take Cowell with you, and he won’t be back. See, I really don’t care who killed him. As long as he’s dead.’ He smiled grimly at the expression on the faces of the detectives. ‘There’s no law nor nothing on this island. People make their own justice. We’re free.’ He took a roll-up from a tin and lit it. ‘This our place. And you can all go to hell.’

  III

  Old Mrs Clarke sat at the dining-room table, her downturned mouth and sad eyes reflected in its polished surface. Entering the Clarke household had been like stepping back in time. Frilly yellow net curtains gathered around the windows. Floral striped wallpaper covering the walls above dark wood panelling. The floor laid with a dull green linoleum. Plastic ivy with red flowers draped around a profusion of mirrors that somehow seemed to light the room even in the fading afternoon. Every surface and every shelf groaned with ornaments and framed family photos.

  The old lady herself wore a long red blouse over a straight blue skirt that modestly covered her knees. Bloated feet at the end of corned-beef legs were squeezed into shoes that must once have fitted but now looked painfully small. Her face behind thick round glasses was pale, almost grey, and looked as if it had been moulded from putty.

  ‘I was just making up the message list,’ she said, indicating a printed sheet of grocery items and a scrap of lined paper covered with shaky scribbles. The wind outside whistled around the windows and door frames.

  ‘Message list?’ Sime said.

  The old lady chuckled. ‘Messages we call them. Shopping you would say. I phone in my grocery list to the Co-op on Grindstone every two weeks and they send them over on the ferry next day. That’s my job. Chuck’s job is to go and fetch them. Not much to ask a grown boy, but it doesn’t stop him complaining.’

  ‘You live here with your son and daughter-in-law then?’

  ‘No. They live here with me. Though you’d not know it to hear the way her ladyship calls the shots around the place. Not that I pay a blind bit of notice. They’ll get the house soon enough. I’m not long for this world.’

  Sime glanced at Blanc, who seemed confused. ‘You look well enough to me, Mrs Clarke.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive, son. Don’t believe everything you see.’

  The door from the hall flew open and a small, square woman in her forties with cropped, red-dyed hair stood glaring at them. Sime glanced from the window and saw a car at the gate where there hadn’t been one earlier. They had not heard it arrive above the clatter of the wind. Mary-Anne Clarke, he presumed.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Clarke?’

  ‘My house, I’ll ask the questions.’

  Sime began to understand why Owen Clarke hated the winters. He showed her his Sûreté ID and said, ‘Detectives Mackenzie and Blanc. Just trying to establish the where abouts of your husband yesterday evening.’

  ‘He didn’t kill that weasel Cowell, if that’s what you’re thinking. Wouldn’t have the balls for it unless he had half a pint of whisky in him. And then he wouldn’t be capable of it.’

  ‘Do you know where he was?’

  ‘He was right here at home. All night.’ She glanced at her mother-in-law. ‘That right, Mrs Clarke?’

  ‘If you say so, dear.’

  Mary-Anne swung her gaze back towards the two policemen. ‘Satisfied?’

  *

  ‘Jesus, Sime,’ Blanc said as they closed the garden gate behind them. ‘If I was Clarke I wouldn’t be able to wait till that flare went up on May first.’

  Sime grinned. ‘Are you married, Thomas?’

  Blanc cupped his hands around the end of a cigarette to light it, and Sime saw the smoke whipped away from his mouth as he lifted his head. ‘Tried it once and didn’t like it.’ He paused. ‘Didn’t learn my lesson, though. Second time I got snared. Three teenage kids now.’ He took another pull on his cigarette. ‘Guess there’s not much point in pulling him in for a formal interview.’

  Sime shrugged, disappointed somehow. ‘Guess not. For the moment anyway.’

  Blanc looked at his watch. ‘Probably just got time to interview the Cowell woman again before the ferry leaves.’ He raised his eyes to the sky. ‘If it leaves.’

  They were upwind of the quad bikes and so didn’t hear them until they swung into view. Five of them, engines screaming. Sime and Blanc turned, startled at the sound of throttles opening up to give vent to pent-up horsepower. They came, almost from nowhere it seemed, up over the brow of the hill, one after the other to start circling the two police officers.

  Just kids, Sime realised. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen-year-olds. Two girls, three boys. Sime raised his voice. ‘Cut it out!’ But it was lost in the wind and the roar of the engines.

  Rain had begun to fall in earnest now, and Sime and Blanc were trapped by the circle of bikes, unable to reach the shelter of the minibus. The teenagers were laughing and hollering above the noise. Sime stepped into the path of the nearest bike to break the circle and for a moment thought it was going to run him down. But at the last moment it turned sharply away, overturning and sending its rider sprawling into the grass.

  The others pulled up abruptly and Blanc went over to the fallen biker to take his arm and drag him to his feet. He was a sullen-faced boy who looked like the eldest of the group. His hair was shaven at the sides and gelled into spikes on top. ‘Damned idiot!’ Blanc shouted at him. ‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’

  But the boy never took his eyes off Sime. Humiliated in front of his friends. ‘No, he’s the one trying to do that.’

  A sharp, shrill voice cut across the noise of wind and motors. ‘Chuck!’ Everyone turned towards the house. Mary-Anne Clarke’s dyed hair looked incongruously red in the sulphurous light. She stood in the doorway, and there wasn’t one among them, adult or adolescent, who didn’t know that she was not to be argued with. ‘Get yourself in here. Now!’

  Reluctantly, and with the worst possible grace, Chuck righted his quad bike with the help of one of his friends and turned a sulky face towards Sime. ‘You leave my dad alone. He’d nothing to do with killing that fucking man.’ And he climbed back on the bike, revving its motor several times, before driving it away around the back of the house. His mother
went inside and closed the door. The other kids gunned their engines and wheeled away up the hill, kicking up mud and grass in their wake.

  The rain was coming in waves now, blown in on the wind. And Sime felt it burning his face.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The imminent weather event had now leached most of the light out of the sky. There was a strange ochre quality to it, and it was dark enough in the summerhouse to warrant the use of electric light to record the second interview with Kirsty Cowell.

  The wind had reached something approaching storm force. Shutters were rattling and shingles lifted on the roof. It was nearly as noisy inside as out. The rain was still coming in bursts and flurries. Just an advance guard. But the main body of it was visible out across the water, like a black mist, and it was on its way.

  Sime sat again with his back to the window but with his face lit now by the overhead light. It left him feeling more exposed than he would have liked. A digest of the nurse’s medical examination of Mrs Cowell lay across his knees. His face was pink from the sting of the rain. He had dried his hair with a towel, but it still felt damp.

  ‘Why did you not tell me that you had broken up with your husband?’

  Her face remained expressionless. ‘You didn’t ask.’

  ‘You do yourself no favours, Mrs Cowell, by withholding information.’

  She said nothing, and he examined her face. With the blood washed away, and not a trace of make-up, he saw now that she was a handsome woman without being beautiful. And oddly, even more familiar. She had a strong bone structure with slightly high cheekbones, and a full wide mouth. Her nose was a little broader than it might have been in a perfect world, but not disproportionate to the rest of her face. She had a well-defined jawline that culminated in a slightly pointed chin, but her eyes were still her most striking feature. They were fixed on him now, cool and wary. Her hair, wet from her shower, hung in limp ropes down to her shoulders, and she wore a simple pair of cut-off jeans with tennis shoes and a sweatshirt that seemed several sizes too big. There was light bruising on her left cheek and right temple.

  ‘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 s
ame 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?’