Peter May - Entry Island

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

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?’

Aitkens made a noise somewhere between a spit and a grunt to express his contempt. ‘Never liked the man. And never could figure out what it was he saw in her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, no harm to Kirsty. I mean, she’s a good-looking woman, and all. But weird, you know?’

And Sime remembered Crozes’s description of her — She’s a weirdo, right?

‘Weird in what way?’

‘This fixation she has with staying put. Never leaving the island. Not Cowell’s thing at all. He was all fancy cars and airplanes, big houses and expensive restaurants. I was at the wedding. He had a big marquee erected over on the island, a company brought in from Montreal to do the catering. As much champagne as you could drink. Flash bastard! More fucking money than sense. Full of himself, too. Thought he was better than the rest of us because he’d made a pile. But he was just another islander. A fucking fisherman who got lucky.’