Entry Island

by Peter May

  ‘Well, I don’t want you talking to my sister. We don’t associate with tenants.’ He said the word tenants as if it made a bad taste in his mouth.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such an ass, George!’ Kirsty tried to insinuate her way between us again, but he held her at bay.

  He never took his eyes off me. ‘If I ever see you with my sister again, I’ll give you such a hiding you’ll remember it the rest of your days.’

  I felt my honour at stake now, and I lifted my jaw and said, ‘You and who else?’

  He laughed in my face, and I recoiled a little from his bad breath. ‘Hah! I don’t need an army to deal with the likes of you.’ And from nowhere a big fist swung into my peripheral vision catching me square on the side of my face. Pain and light exploded in my head and my knees buckled under me.

  The next thing I knew, the smaller boy was leaning over me, taking one of my hands in his and helping me back to my feet. I was groggy and still a little in shock, and so quite unprepared for the boy suddenly stepping behind me to pull both my arms up my back. George’s pale, freckled face ballooned into view, leering at me, and I was helplessly exposed to the fists he pummelled into my stomach. The other boy let me go and I doubled over on my knees, retching.

  I could hear Kirsty screaming at them to stop, but her protests were ignored. George lowered his face to mine. ‘Just stay away,’ he hissed, then turned and, grabbing his sister by the arm, dragged her off protesting, the other boy trailing after them and grinning at me over his shoulder.

  I was still on my knees, leaning forward with my knuckles on the ground, when I felt strong hands lifting me to my feet. A fisherman with a woollen hat and a face weathered by sun and wind. ‘Are you all right, lad?’

  I nodded, only embarrassed that Kirsty should have seen me humiliated like this. Nothing was hurt as much as my pride.

  It must have been an hour or more before I met up with my father again. He looked at me, concerned, and saw how the knees were out of my trousers and my knuckles all skinned. ‘What happened to you, son?’

  I was too ashamed to tell him. ‘I fell.’

  He shook his head and laughed at me. ‘Damn, boy! I can’t take you anywhere, can I?’

  *

  It was just a few days later that I saw her again. There was very little sunshine that day. The wind was whipping itself up out of the south-west and bringing great rolling columns of bruised cloud in from the sea. But the air was not cold and I liked the feel of it blowing through my clothes and my hair as I worked. Hot work it was, too, moving great big lumps of stone up the hill to chip at them with my hammer so that they fit just right in the wall.

  My father had taught me how to build drystone dykes almost as soon as I could walk. ‘You’ll aye be able to keep some beasts in and others out, son,’ he had said. ‘Or put a roof over your head. The fundamentals of life.’ He liked to use big words, my father. I think he learned them from the Gaelic bible that he read to us every evening and half of Sunday.

  The day was waning, but there were still some hours of daylight left and I was hoping to finish the sheep fank by week’s end when my father would inspect my work and give it his approval. Or not. Though I would have been devastated if he hadn’t.

  I straightened up, back stiff and muscles aching, to look down on Baile Mhanais and the shore beyond it, strips of croftland running down the hill to the sea. Which was when I heard her voice.

  ‘Ciamar a tha thu?’

  I turned, heart suddenly pounding, to find her standing there on the crest of the hill. She wore a long dark cape over her dress, the hood pulled up to protect her hair. But still strands of it managed to break free and fly out like streamers in the wind. ‘I’m well, thank you,’ I replied in English. ‘How are you?’

  Her eyes dipped towards the ground, and I could see her hands clasped in front of her, one ringing the other inside of it. ‘I came to apologise.’

  ‘What for?’ Although I knew fine well, but my pride wanted her to believe that I hadn’t given it a second thought.

  ‘My brother George.’

  ‘Nothing to apologise for. You’re not his keeper.’

  ‘No, but he thinks he’s mine. I am so ashamed of how he treated you, after what you did for me. You don’t deserve that.’

  I shrugged, feigning indifference, but searching desperately for some way to change the subject. Humiliation ran deep. ‘How is it you’re not with your tutor?’

  And for the first time her face broke into a smile, and she giggled as if I had said something I shouldn’t. ‘It’s a new tutor I have just now. A young man. Just in his twenties. He only arrived a few weeks ago, and I think he’s fallen hopelessly in love with me.’

  I felt a jab of jealousy.

  ‘Anyway, I can wrap him around my little finger any time I like. So getting away from the castle is not a problem.’

  I glanced down the slope towards the village, wondering if anyone down there had seen us. She didn’t miss it.

  ‘Ashamed to be seen with me?’

  ‘Of course not! It’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it’s not normal, is it? The likes of me seen talking to the likes of you.’

  ‘Oh, stop it. You sound like George.’

  ‘Never!’ The comparison fired up my indignation.

  ‘Well, if you’re so worried about being seen with me, maybe we should meet somewhere that no one can.’

  I looked at her, confused. ‘Meet?’

  ‘To talk. Or maybe you don’t want to talk to me.’

  ‘I do,’ I said a little too quickly, and I saw a smile tickle her lips. ‘Where?’

  She flicked her head beyond the rise to the curve of silver sand below us on the other side of the hill. ‘You know the standing stones at the far end of the beach?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s a wee hollow below them, almost completely sheltered from the wind, and you get a great view of the sea breaking over the rocks.’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘I go there sometimes. Just to be alone. You’d not have to be scared about people seeing us together if we were to meet there.’

  *

  It was late afternoon the day I set off to keep my tryst with Kirsty. I made solitary tracks in sand left wet by the receding tide as I followed the curve of Traigh Mhor north, glancing a little nervously across the machair in case someone was watching. But I might have been the last person on earth. There was not a soul to be seen. I had for company only the sound of the sea breaking on the shore and the gulls that wheeled around the rocks.

  At the far side of the beach I climbed up through the cemetery, head and foot stones poking up through the long grass, and I trod carefully, aware that my ancestors lay here and that one day I would join them. I stopped and glanced out over the ocean to see the sun starting its slow descent towards the horizon, edging distant clouds with gold and sending shards of light skimming across the surface of the water. What a view it was from eternity that I would share with the folk who had inhabited this land for all the centuries before me.

  The standing stones cast long shadows over the machair. Some of them were more than twice my height. Thirteen primary stones that formed a central circle, with a long approach avenue of stones to the north, and shorter arms to the south, east and west.

  A movement caught my eye, and I saw a furl of skirt in the wind, half hidden by one of the taller stones, before Kirsty appeared, turning around the edge of it to stand looking down the slope as I climbed towards her. As I approached I saw that the colour was high on her face. Her skirts and cape streamed out behind her, along with her hair, and she folded her arms and leaned against the grain of the gneiss.

  ‘Did they teach you about the stones at school?’ she asked when I reached her, a little out of breath.

  ‘Only that they’re about four thousand years old and nobody knows who put them there.’

  ‘My tutor says if we were able to look down on t
hem from above they would form the rough shape of a Celtic cross.’

  I shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘Simon, they were put here more than two thousand years before Christ was born.’

  I saw her point and nodded sagely, as if the thought had occurred to me long ago. ‘Yes, of course.’

  She smiled and ran the flat of her hand down the stone that she was leaning against. ‘I love the texture of the stones,’ she said. ‘They have grain running through them like wood.’ She tipped her head back and looked up towards the top of it. ‘I wonder how they moved them. They must be terribly heavy.’ She grinned then and extended her hand towards me. ‘Come on.’ I hesitated for only a moment, before grasping it, feeling it small and warm in mine. She pulled me away from the stones, and we went running down the slope together, almost out of control, laughing with exhilaration before coming to a halt where the elements had eaten away at the machair and loose, peaty earth crumbled down into a rocky hollow.

  She let go of my hand and jumped down into it. I followed suit and landed beside her. Beach grass grew in tussocks and clumps, binding the loose earth and pushing up between cracks in the rock. The wind blew overhead but the air here was quite still, and there was a wonderful sense of shelter and tranquillity. No one could see us, except perhaps from a boat out at sea.

  Kirsty arranged her skirts to sit down in the grass and patted the place beside her. I saw her ankle-length black boots and a flash of white calf. I knew she was younger than me, and yet she seemed possessed of so much more confidence. I did as I was bid and sat down next to her, self-conscious again, and a little scared by strange, unaccustomed feelings.

  She said, ‘Sometimes I look out and wonder if on a clear day it might be possible to see America.’ She laughed. ‘Which is daft, I know. It’s far too far away. But it makes me think about all those folk who set off in boats not knowing what, if anything, lay at the end of their voyage.’

  I loved to hear her talk like this, and I watched the light in her eyes as she looked out over the ocean.

  ‘I wonder what it’s like,’ she said.

  ‘America?’

  She nodded.

  I laughed. ‘We’ll never know.’

  ‘Probably not,’ she agreed. ‘But we shouldn’t limit our horizons to only what we can see. My father always says if you believe in something you can make it happen. And he should know. Everything we have, and are, is because of him. His vision.’

  I gazed at her, filled for the first time with curiosity about her father and mother, the life she led, so different from mine. ‘How did your father get rich?’

  ‘Our family came from Glasgow originally. My great-grandfather made his fortune in the tobacco trade. But all that collapsed with the American war of independence, and it was my father who eventually restored the family’s fortunes by getting us into the cotton and sugar trade with the West Indies.’

  I listened to her with a sense of amazement, as well as inferiority, aware of all the things of which I was completely ignorant. ‘Is that still what he does?’

  She laughed. ‘No, not now. He’s retired from business. Since he bought the Langadail estate and built the castle at Ard Mor that’s what takes up all his time. Even if it doesn’t make him any money.’ She turned the radiance of her smile on me. ‘Or so he’s always saying.’

  I smiled back, engulfed somehow by her gaze, my eyes held by hers, and there was a long silence between us. I heard the wind and the gulls, and the sound of the ocean. I could feel the pounding of my heart like the waves beating on the shore. And without any conscious decision I reached out to run my fingers back through the silky softness of her hair and cradle the back of her head in my palm. I saw her pupils dilate and felt an ache of longing deep inside me.

  I remembered the little girl I had lifted into my arms from the ditch and how, as I trotted the long wet mile to the castle, I would look down and see her gazing up at me.

  I found her face with my other hand, tracing the line of her cheek so softly with the tips of my fingers, before leaning in to kiss her for the very first time, guided by some instinct which had been aeons in the making. Lips cool and soft and giving. And although I knew nothing of love, I knew that I had found it, and never wanted to lose it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I

  Sime returned from memories of his ancestor’s diaries to the realisation that he had been sitting staring all this time at the ghostly imprint left in the album by the missing photograph of Kirsty as a child. And he looked up, suddenly startled by the awareness of another presence in the room. Marie-Ange stood leaning against the door jamb watching him. He saw the usual contempt in her eyes, something which had become only too familiar. But there was something else. Concern? Guilt? It was hard to tell.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘When was the last time you slept properly?’

  He felt grit scratching his eyes as he blinked. ‘Sometime before you left.’

  She sighed. ‘Something else that’s my fault, no doubt.’ And she pushed herself away from the door and wandered over to the desk, turning her gaze on to the teenage pictures of Kirsty in the album. ‘Is that her? The Cowell woman?’

  He nodded. ‘Aged about thirteen or fourteen I think.’

  Marie-Ange leaned over him to flip forward through the pages, casting cold eyes over the growing Kirsty. She stopped at the final photograph. Kirsty with her mother and father, taken in bright sunlight somewhere along the cliffs. Kirsty, a young woman by then, smiling unreservedly at the camera, sandwiched between her mum and dad, an arm around each of them. As she had grown, so they had diminished somehow, and you could see that her mother was not well. ‘You’d never guess from this that she’d be capable of killing someone,’ Marie-Ange said.

  Sime looked at her sharply. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘Looks more and more that way.’

  ‘And the evidence?’

  ‘Oh, that’ll come, for sure. There’s bound to be something to give her away. And you can bet I’ll find it.’ She looked around the study. ‘So what did you discover here that tells you about the Cowells?’

  Sime thought about it. ‘Enough to know that they weren’t close. That it was a relationship without warmth. She sought comfort in her own company, her own interests. He found fulfilment elsewhere, and in the end with another woman.’

  She gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘I wonder what conclusions someone might have come to about us if they had taken a tour through our apartment.’

  ‘Pretty much the same, I would have thought. Only, in reverse.’

  She tutted her annoyance. ‘Same old broken record.’

  ‘You were never there, Marie. All those hours when I never knew where you were. And always the same old excuses. Work. A girls’ night out, a visit to your parents in Sherbrooke.’

  ‘You never wanted to come. Anywhere. Ever.’

  ‘And you never wanted me to. Always found a good reason why I shouldn’t join you. Then made it seem like my fault.’ He glared at her, remembering all the frustration and loneliness. ‘There was someone else, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? If I’d had an affair. Then it wouldn’t have been your fault. No guilt, no blame.’ She stabbed an angry finger at him. ‘But here’s the truth, Simon. If you need someone to blame for the break-up of our marriage, just look in the mirror.’

  The clearing of a throat brought both their heads around. Crozes stood awkwardly in the doorway, his embarrassment clear. He chose to ignore whatever it was he might have overheard. ‘Just had a call from Lapointe,’ he said. ‘He’ll be taking off for Montreal with the body in about an hour.’ He paused. ‘The autopsy will take place first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Good,’ Marie-Ange said.

  ‘What about Morrison?’ Sime asked.

  ‘Still missing. But we’ll find him.’

  ‘Is he connected, do you think?’ M
arie-Ange said. ‘To the murder?’

  Crozes was non-committal. ‘We’ll know that better once we talk to him.’

  Sime turned the photo album around on the desk so that the page with the missing photograph was facing his superior officer. ‘You’d better take a look at this, Lieutenant.’

  Crozes stepped into the room and tilted his head to look at the photographs. For a moment he simply seemed puzzled. Then light dawned in his eyes. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘That’s the kid you found on the floor of Morrison’s room.’ He looked up. ‘Kirsty Cowell?’

  Sime nodded. ‘Probably cut from the very print that’s been taken from this album.’

  ‘Well, how the hell did he get that?’

  Marie-Ange looked from one to the other. ‘What am I missing here?’

  But neither man paid her any attention. Sime said, ‘It’s the first thing we need to ask him when we find him.’

  Crozes exhaled his frustration. ‘And maybe you’d better get over there and ask Mrs Cowell.’ He tipped his head towards the door. ‘She’s back.’

  II

  The heating in the summerhouse had been turned on after the storm and the air was stifling. Sime found himself distracted by Kirsty Cowell’s penetrating blue eyes, and an almost irresistible desire to close his own. Concentration was proving difficult in the warmth.

  He sat once more with his back to the window, and she seemed cooler, more composed since her long walk with her cousin.

  ‘I want you to tell me about your relationship with Norman Morrison,’ he said. Which instantly shattered that composure.

  ‘What do you mean? I have no relationship with Norman Morrison.’

  ‘Are you aware that he went missing last night?’

  Now her eyes opened wide. ‘No, I wasn’t. What happened?’

  ‘He went out after his evening meal and never came back.’

  She paled visibly. ‘But what does that mean? Is he all right?’

  ‘We don’t know. There’s a search under way at the moment.’ He watched her closely as she tried to evaluate the information he had just given her. ‘We understand from more than one source that he was … somewhat obsessed by you, Mrs Cowell.’