Peter May - Entry Island

Crozes stood in the hall. For a moment Sime wondered if he was going to attack him. But he was a pool of dark stillness. The cut on his lip had scabbed over, and there was bruising all around his left eye and cheek. ‘Can I come in?’

Sime stood back, holding the door wide, and Crozes pushed past him into the room. As Sime closed the door Crozes turned to face him. ‘We can play this one of two ways,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Sime could determine nothing from expressionless eyes. The pallor beneath Crozes’s tan turned his skin almost jaundice-yellow.

‘Either we behave as if nothing happened and we just get on with our lives.’ He hesitated. ‘Or I bring you up on a charge of assault which will see you immediately suspended, and almost certainly dismissed.’

Sime looked at him thoughtfully, his brain slowly clearing. ‘Well, let me tell you why you’re not going to do that.’ Crozes waited. Impassive. ‘One, you’d have to admit that you’d been screwing the wife of a fellow officer. Two, you’d have to suffer the humiliation of every single person in the department knowing how I beat the shit out of you.’ Still Crozes waited. ‘End to both of our careers. And I don’t think either of us wants that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that we can play this one of two ways.’ He got an almost perverse pleasure from throwing Crozes’s words back in his face. ‘We can make like nothing happened.’

Crozes contained his anger well. ‘Or?’

‘Or I can go upstairs with the fact that you’ve been sleeping with my wife for the last year and we’ll see how that plays out.’

‘Same result.’

Sime shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He was surprised himself just how cool and unemotional he felt. As if it was other people’s lives they were discussing. And he realised with something of a shock that he didn’t much care any more. About the Sûreté, about Marie-Ange, about Crozes. ‘Just depends which of us takes the initiative first.’

‘I could arrest you right now. It’s not as if there aren’t witnesses.’

‘And how do you know that I haven’t already called Captain McIvir with a full account of what happened. Including your infidelity with my wife?’ He saw Crozes stiffen.

‘Have you?’

Sime let the question hang for a few long moments. ‘No,’ he said finally.

Crozes’s relief was almost palpable. ‘So we’re agreed then?’

‘Are we?’

‘Nothing happened last night. If Marie-Ange and I have a relationship it only began after your marriage broke up. We wrap up this investigation and spend the rest of our careers staying out of each other’s way.’

Sime looked hard at the other man. ‘In other words you want me to keep my mouth shut.’ He could see by the movement of his jaw that Crozes was clenching his teeth.

‘You can interpret it any way you like. I’m just laying out the choices.’

It was some time, with silence hanging heavy in the room, before Sime broke eye contact with the lieutenant and sat down on the edge of his bed. ‘Whatever you want,’ he said wearily.

Crozes nodded, and his whole demeanour seemed to change in a heartbeat. Suddenly he was the lieutenant again, and it was back to business. The murder of James Cowell. As if nothing at all had passed between them he said, ‘The police in Quebec City have tracked down Mayor Briand finally. He’s staying at the Auberge Saint-Antoine.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s a flight in forty-five minutes. I want you and Blanc on it.’

‘Jesus!’ Blanc looked up from the folder on his knees. They were somewhere over the Gaspé Peninsula, probably less than an hour from Quebec City. The first hour of their flight had passed in a tense silence, and Blanc had buried his head in Arseneau’s briefing notes on Mayor Richard Briand. Now he looked at Sime, squeezed in beside him in the tiny nineteen-seater Jetstream commuter aircraft, unable to contain himself. ‘Have you read this stuff?’

Sime was miles away, turning over the traces of his ancestor in nineteenth-century Scotland, and if he thought about the present at all, picking at the scabs of his failed relationship with Marie-Ange. He glanced at his co-interrogator with a cold detachment. ‘No.’

Excitement coloured Blanc’s normally pale complexion and he flushed pink. ‘Everyone knows you don’t get to be top dog in politics without money behind you. And Briand’s no exception. Even if he is just an island mayor.’

‘He’s got money. So?’

‘It’s how he made his money that’s interesting.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Lobsters.’ He watched expectantly as Sime absorbed this.

‘He was in the same business as Cowell?’

‘Not just in the same business, Sime. They were competitors. The whole industry was pretty much sewn up between them. Cowell might have owned half the fishing fleet, but Briand owns the other half. And according to Arseneau’s notes the mayor was foiled in a major takeover attempt last year. It seems there was a big bust-up between the two men. No love lost.’

The significance of what Blanc was telling him was not lost on Sime. Dreams and diaries and failed marriages retreated into a distant corner of his mind. ‘So with Cowell dead, presumably the widow wouldn’t present much of an obstacle to his plans to expand his little empire.’

Blanc nodded. ‘Well, exactly. And it must have been a pretty bitter pill to swallow when Cowell moved in with his wife.’

Sime thought about it. ‘Which would provide Briand with a very strong double motive for murder.’

‘Casts everything in a different light, doesn’t it?’

‘Except for one little thing,’ Sime said.

‘What’s that?’

‘The same thing that’s always thrown doubt on Briand as a suspect. If it was Cowell he was after, why did he attack Kirsty?’

‘Maybe he wanted to kill them both. Then Cowell’s business would have had to be broken up for sure.’

‘So why didn’t he?’

Blanc frowned. ‘Why didn’t he what?’

‘Kill them both. He had the opportunity.’

Blanc was deflated. ‘Maybe he panicked.’

But Sime was shaking his head. ‘Having killed one, why wouldn’t he kill the other? And think on this. Briand flew to Quebec City the morning after the murder, so it wasn’t him who attacked me two nights ago. And the fact that I was attacked by a man in a ski mask would seem to bear out Kirsty Cowell’s story about an intruder on the night of the murder. Which would kind of let her off the hook, too.’

Blanc scratched the circle of bald, shiny skin on the crown of his head. ‘It also raises the question of why you were attacked at all.’

Sime nodded. ‘It does. But it doesn’t change the fact that I was.’ He paused, recalling only too clearly the moment that he thought he was going to die. He glanced at the file on Blanc’s knee. ‘Are you finished with that?’

‘Yes.’

Sime reached for it. ‘Well I guess I’d better read it for myself before we get to Quebec City.’ He flipped back through Arseneau’s printout and started reading. Only to become aware of Blanc still looking at him. He raised his head and saw embarrassment in the other man’s eyes. ‘What?’

Blanc said, ‘We’ve got to clear the air, Sime.’

‘About what?’

‘Last night.’

Sime looked back at the file on his knee. ‘Forget it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I hate to think that you blame me for any of it.’

‘I don’t.’

‘That’s not the impression you gave at two o’clock this morning.’

Sime sighed and swung his gaze back towards Blanc. ‘Look Thomas, I was a bit emotional, okay? I’d just found out my wife and the lieutenant had been sleeping together behind my back for who knows how long. And if she hadn’t pointed a gun at my head I might just have killed him.’