Entry Island

by Peter May

  At last I saw the road winding across the hills ahead of me. It was rutted and muddy, rainwater gathering in cart tracks and potholes. I turned north on to it, splashing through the puddles, feeling my pace slow as my strength was sapped. The land seemed to fold itself around me, closing off the sky. I could remember seeing men labouring to build this road, but the stones they laid were lost in the mud, and the ditches they dug were full of water.

  I pumped my arms as I ran to try to get more air into my lungs, and then I came to a sudden standstill as I rounded a blind bend in the road. Ahead of me a horse-drawn trap was overturned in the ditch. The horse lay on its side, still attached to the trap, whinnying and struggling to get to its feet. But I could see that one of its hind legs was hopelessly broken. They would shoot the poor beast for sure. But there was no sign of a driver or passengers.

  The rain began to fall in earnest as I approached the upturned vehicle. I jumped down into the ditch, which was half-hidden by the trap, and there sprawled among the roots of dormant heather lay a little girl, blue skirts and black coat fanned out around her, black hair pinned up under a royal blue beret. Her face was deathly pale, and the contrast with the bright red blood oozing from the gash at her temple was stark. Lying beside her, on his back in the ditch, was a middle-aged man, his top hat resting some feet away. His face was completely submerged, and somehow magnified by the water. Bizarrely his eyes, like saucers, were wide open and staring up at me. I felt myself trembling with the shock of it, realising that he was quite dead and that there was nothing I could do.

  I heard a tiny voice moan, then cough, and I turned my attentions back to the little girl in time to see her lids flicker open and reveal the bluest eyes.

  ‘Can you move?’ I asked her.

  But she looked back at me with vacancy in her face. A little hand reached up to grab the sleeve of my jacket. ‘Help, help me,’ she said, and I realised that she was speaking English, which I couldn’t understand any better than she understood my Gaelic.

  I was afraid to move her in case there was something broken and I did more damage. I took her hand and felt the chill in it, and I knew that I couldn’t leave her there in the cold and the wet. I had seen how exposure to the elements could take a life in no time at all.

  ‘Tell me if it hurts,’ I said to her, knowing she couldn’t understand, and she looked at me with such confusion in her eyes that it almost brought tears to mine. I slipped one arm beneath her shoulders, and the other into the crook of her knees, and carefully lifted her up into my arms. She was smaller than me, younger by maybe a couple of years, but still she was heavy, and I could not imagine how it would be possible to carry her all the way to the castle. But I knew I must. And now I felt the weight of responsibility for two lives in my hands.

  She did not cry out, so I was encouraged to believe that nothing was broken. She flung both arms around my neck to hold on to me as I climbed back up on to the road and started off again at a trot. I had gone no more than a couple of hundred yards before the muscles in my arms were screaming with the pain of supporting her weight. But I had no choice other than to carry on.

  After a while, I fell into a loping rhythm, somehow managing to keep my forward momentum. From time to time I looked down at her. Sometimes her eyes were closed and I feared the worst. At others I caught her gazing up at me, but she seemed almost fevered and I was not sure if she really saw me at all.

  I was at the end of my tether, ready to drop to my knees and give up, when I rounded another bend, and there ahead of me was Ard Mor. The castle sat on a spur of land that jutted out into a rocky bay. Lawns extended from the front of it to a crenellated wall with cannon aimed across the water, the hill rising steeply behind it. The road wound down to a clutch of estate workers’ cottages, and a stone archway led to the castle grounds.

  The sight of it gave me fresh energy, enough of it anyway to stagger the final few hundred yards, past the cottages and through the arch to the big wooden front door of the castle itself. Laying the little girl down on the step in front of me I pulled the bell ring and heard it sound somewhere distantly inside.

  It is hard to describe the maid’s expression as she opened the door, her pink face wide-eyed with astonishment above her black blouse and white pinny.

  And then, it seemed, I lost all control of events, as servants were called to carry the little girl into the castle, and I was left standing in the big stone-flagged hall as people ran around like mad things. I saw the laird on the stairs, his face pale and etched with concern. I heard his voice for the first time. But I didn’t understand his English.

  No one paid me the least attention and I began to cry, desperately afraid that I had failed my mother and that she was going to die because I had been deflected from the purpose of my errand. The maid who opened the door hurried across the flags and knelt beside me, consternation in her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said to me in Gaelic. ‘You have done a brave thing. You have saved the life of the laird’s wee girl.’

  I clutched her hand. ‘I need the doctor to come.’

  ‘The doctor’s been sent for,’ she said reassuringly. ‘He’ll be here in no time.’

  ‘No, for my mother.’ I was close to hysteria then.

  But she didn’t understand. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  And I told her about my mother, and the birth of my little sister, and the bleeding. Her face paled.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said, and she hurried away up the big staircase.

  I stood there for a miserable eternity, until she returned at a run and knelt beside me again, a warm, comforting hand brushing the hair from my eyes. ‘As soon as he has seen to Ciorstaidh, the doctor will go with you to Baile Mhanais.’

  I felt a huge wave of relief. ‘Ciorstaidh,’ I said. ‘Is that the name of the laird’s daughter?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘But they call her by her English name. Kirsty.’

  *

  I’m not sure now how much time it took for the doctor to come and see to Ciorstaidh. But as soon as he was done we set off on his horse, back along the road towards my village. At the overturned trap we stopped. The horse was still alive, but had almost given up the struggle. The doctor took a look at the man in the ditch. He stood up, grim-faced. ‘Dead,’ he said. Though I could have told him that. ‘Ciorstaidh’s tutor from Glasgow. Only been here six months.’ He got back on his horse and half turned to me. ‘If you hadn’t brought her back to the castle, son, she’d have died out here from the exposure.’

  He hit the horse’s flank with his crop and we set off at a gallop, until we reached the turn on to the path and had to slow to let the horse pick its way gingerly among the stones and heather roots, before descending the hill finally to the village.

  Somehow, it seemed, they had managed to stop my mother from bleeding any further and she was still alive. The doctor was led into our fire room, and Annag and me were hustled outside to wait in the rain. But I didn’t mind. It seemed that I had saved two lives that day, and I related the whole story to my wee sister, all puffed up with pride in the telling of it.

  Then my father came out, and the relief on his face was visible to both of us. ‘The doctor says your mother should be all right. She’s weak and she’s going to need rest, so it’ll be up to all of us to fill her shoes for a bit.’

  ‘What’s the baby called?’ Annag asked.

  And my father smiled. ‘Murdag,’ he said. ‘After my mother.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You did well, son.’ And I felt such pleasure in the light of his praise. ‘The doctor tells me you carried the laird’s daughter all the way back to Ard Mor. Saved her life, without a doubt.’ He pushed his chin out and let his eyes drift thoughtfully across the hillside above us. ‘The laird will owe us for that.’

  *

  I can’t remember exactly how long afterwards it was that the new term at school began. Sometime after the New Year, I suppose. I do remember being on the path to the school-house that first day, passing below the c
hurch that served the townships of Baile Mhanais and Sgagarstaigh. The school sat out on the machair overlooking the bay on the far side of the hill and the strips of farmed land that rose beyond it. There were usually around thirty of us who attended, though that number could vary depending on the needs of the croft. But my father always said that there was nothing more important than a good education, and so he hardly ever kept me away.

  My mother had made a good recovery, and baby Murdag was doing well. I’d been up at first light that day to fetch in a creel of peats and fill my stomach with the potatoes we’d left roasting among the embers of the fire overnight. Then when the fire was blazing my mother had boiled up more tatties, which we had with milk and a little salted fish. So with a full belly, I didn’t feel the cold too badly, barely noticing the crust of snow crunching beneath my bare feet.

  When I got to school I was surprised to find that we had a new teacher: Mr Ross from Inverness. He was much younger than the other one, and he spoke both English and Gaelic.

  When we were all seated at our rough wooden desks he asked if there was anyone among us who spoke English. Not a single hand was raised.

  He said, ‘Well, who among you would like to speak English?’

  I looked around and saw that once again, there were no hands up. So I put mine in the air, and Mr Ross smiled at me, a little surprised, I think.

  It turned out that we were all going to have to learn the English. But I was the only one who wanted to, because I knew that if I was ever going to talk to that little girl whose life I’d saved, I’d have to learn to speak her language. Because there was no way the daughter of the laird was going to learn to speak the Gaelic.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  ‘Are you the cop?’ The voice startled Sime out of his recollections, and it took a moment to clear the confusion that fogged the transition in his mind from a nineteenth-century Hebridean winter to this salt-mine halfway across the world on the Îles de la Madeleine.

  He turned to see a man stooped by the open window, peering in at him, a long face shaded by the peak of a baseball cap.

  Almost at the same moment, the ground shook beneath them. A rumbling vibration, like a series of palpitating heartbeats. ‘What in God’s name is that?’ Sime said, alarmed.

  The man was unconcerned. ‘It’s the blasting. Takes place fifteen minutes after the end of each shift. They leave it to clear for two hours before the next shift moves in.’

  Sime nodded. ‘The answer to your question is yes.’

  The man ran a big hand over a day’s growth on his jaw. ‘What the hell do you want to talk to me for?’ His brows knitted beneath the skip of his cap as he glared in at Sime.

  ‘I take it you’re Jack Aitkens?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘Your cousin Kirsty’s husband has been murdered on Entry Island.’

  For a moment it seemed as if the wind had stopped and that for a split second Aitkens’s world had stood still. Sime watched his expression dissolve from hostility to surprise, then give way to concern. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘I need to get over there straight away.’

  ‘Sure,’ Sime said. ‘But first we need to talk.’

  II

  The walls of Room 115 in the police station of the Sûreté de Québec on Cap aux Meules were painted canary-yellow. A white melamine table and two chairs facing each other across it were pushed against one wall. Built-in cameras and a microphone fed proceedings to Thomas Blanc in the detectives’ room next door. A plaque on the wall outside read Salle d’interrogatoire.

  Jack Aitkens sat opposite Sime at the table. Big hands engrained with oil were interlinked on the surface in front of him. His zip-up fleece jacket was open and hung loose from his shoulders. He wore torn jeans and big boots encrusted with salt.

  He had removed his baseball cap to reveal a pale, almost grey, face, with dark, thinning hair that was oiled and scraped back across a broad, flat skull. He nodded towards a black poster pinned to the wall behind Sime.

  URGENCE AVOCAT gratuit en cas d’arrestation.

  ‘Any reason I might need a lawyer?’

  ‘None that I can think of. How about you?’

  Aitkens shrugged. ‘So what do you want to know?’

  Sime stood up and closed the door. The noise from the incident room along the hall was a distraction. He sat down again. ‘You can start by telling me about what it’s like to work in a salt-mine.’

  Aitkens seemed surprised. Then he puffed up his cheeks and blew contempt through his lips. ‘It’s a job.’

  ‘What kind of hours do you work?’

  ‘Twelve-hour shifts. Four days a week. Been doing it for ten years now, so I don’t think much about it anymore. In winter, on the day shift, it’s dark when you get there, it’s dark when you leave. And there’s precious little light underground. So you spend half your life in the dark, Monsieur … Mackenzie, you said?’

  Sime nodded.

  ‘Depressing. Gets you down sometimes.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ And Sime could hardly imagine anything worse. ‘What size of workforce is there?’

  ‘A hundred and sixteen. Miners, that is. I have no idea how many work in administration.’

  Sime was surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have guessed from the surface there were that many men down there.’

  Aitkens’s smile was almost condescending. ‘You couldn’t begin to guess what’s down there from the surface, Monsieur Mackenzie. The whole archipelago of the Madeleine islands sits on columns of salt that have pushed up through the earth’s crust. So far we have dug down 440 metres into one of them, with another eight or ten kilometres to go. The mine is on five levels and extends well beneath the surface of the sea on either side of the island.’

  Sime returned the smile. ‘You’re right, Mr Aitkens, I would never have guessed that.’ He paused. ‘Where were you on the night of the murder?’

  Aitkens didn’t blink. ‘What night was that exactly?’

  ‘The night before last.’

  ‘I was on night shift. Like I’ve been all week. You can check the records if you like.’

  Sime nodded. ‘We will.’ He sat back in his seat. ‘What kind of salt is it you mine?’

  Aitkens laughed. ‘Not table salt, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s salt for the roads. About 1.7 million tons of it a year. Most of it for use in Quebec or Newfoundland. The rest goes to the States.’

  ‘Can’t be very healthy, down there twelve hours a day breathing in all that salt.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Aitkens shrugged. ‘I’ve not died of it yet, anyway.’ He chuckled. ‘They say that salt-mines create their own microclimate. In some Eastern European countries they send people down the mines as a cure for asthma.’

  Sime watched his smile fade and waited while Aitkens grew slowly impatient.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what happened out on Entry Island or not?’

  But Sime was not ready to go there yet. He said, ‘I want you to tell me about your cousin.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything. And everything.’

  ‘We’re not close.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  Aitkens gave him a look, and Sime could see the calculation in his eyes. Had Kirsty told him that? ‘My father’s sister was Kirsty’s mother. But my father fell for a French-speaking girl from Havre Aubert and left Entry Island to marry her when he was barely out of his teens.’

  ‘You don’t speak English, then?’

  ‘I grew up speaking French at school. But my father always spoke English to me in the house, so it’s not bad.’

  ‘And your parents are still alive?’

  He pressed his lips together in a grim line. ‘My mother died some years ago. My father’s in the geriatric ward of the hospital. Doesn’t even know me when I go to see him. I have full power of attorney.’

  Sime nodded. ‘So basically you and Kirsty grew up in two very different linguistic communities.’

 
‘We did. But the differences aren’t just linguistic. They’re cultural, too. Most of the French-speakers here are descended from the original seventeenth-century settlers of Acadia. When the British defeated the French and created Canada, the Acadians got kicked out, and a lot of them ended up here.’ He grunted, unimpressed. ‘Most of my neighbours still think of themselves as Acadians rather than Quebecois.’ He started picking the grime from beneath his fingernails. ‘A lot of the English-speakers got shipwrecked here on the way to the colonies, and never left. That’s why the two communities have never mixed.’

  ‘So you didn’t have much contact with Kirsty when you were growing up?’

  ‘Hardly any. I mean, I can see Entry Island from my house at La Grave. Sometimes you feel you could almost reach out and touch it. But it was never somewhere you would drop by casually. Of course, there were occasional family gatherings. Christmas, funerals, that sort of thing. But the English-speakers are Presbyterian, and the French mostly Catholic. Oil and water. So, no, I never really knew Kirsty that well.’ He stopped picking at his nails and stared at his hands. ‘In recent years I’ve hardly seen her at all.’ He looked up. ‘If I didn’t go to see her, then she certainly wouldn’t come and see me.’

  Sime wondered if he detected a hint of bitterness in that. But there was nothing in Aitkens’s demeanour to suggest it. ‘From what you know of her, then, how would you describe her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What sort of person is she?’

  There seemed to be a fondness in his smile. ‘You’d be hard pushed to find a more gentle person on this earth, Monsieur Mackenzie,’ he said. ‘Almost … what’s the word … serene. Like she had some kind of inner peace. If she has a temper, then I’ve never seen her lose it.’

  ‘But you said yourself, you haven’t really seen her that much over the years.’

  Which irritated him. ‘Well, why the hell are you asking me, then?’

  ‘It’s my job, Monsieur Aitkens.’ Sime sat back and folded his arms. ‘What do you know about her relationship with James Cowell?’