Peter May - Entry Island

Sime was reluctant to admit to himself that there was a ring of truth to all this. The photograph of Ariane and Briand had probably been reinstated to its place on the sideboard the night they planned to break the news to Cowell. The coat left hanging by the door was Briand’s. And Ariane hadn’t packed Cowell’s suitcase on her return from the airport. It had been packed the night he was murdered. But in any event, husband and wife each provided an alibi for the other. And one thing was certain. As he had pointed out to Blanc, it wasn’t Briand who attacked Sime on Entry Island. He had been here in Quebec City when it happened.

‘When did you hear about Cowell’s murder?’ he asked.

‘Not until Ariane got home. She called to tell me.’

Blanc said, ‘It’s been all over the news.’

‘We weren’t watching the news, detective. We were putting our marriage back together. Finding ourselves again. No one knew where we were. We’d turned our cellphones off. It was just us. A hotel room, a couple of restaurants. The world didn’t exist.’

‘And how did you feel,’ Sime said, ‘when you heard that Cowell had been murdered?’

A sardonic little smile played about the mayor’s lips. ‘To be perfectly honest, I gave a little jump for joy. The man was fucking up my personal and business life. His poor wife deserves a medal.’

‘His wife?’ Blanc said, surprised.

‘Sure.’

‘Why?’

‘For killing him.’

The Château Frontenac with its towers and spires, its green copper roofs and orange brick, dominated the skyline above them. Built on the site of the old Château Haldimand, once home to a succession of British colonial governors, it was now a luxury hotel. Autumn colours on the hill below it painted the slope yellow and fiery red, and a constant traffic of tourists rode the funicular railway up and down to the old city walls.

Sime and Blanc sat in a café beneath yellow parasols watching passengers stream off and on the river ferries at the terminal across the road. An enormous luxury cruise liner, berthed at the dock, almost dwarfed the old port. Cannon that guarded what was once the most important deep-water port on the eastern seaboard of North America poked through the crenellations in the harbour wall, unused in nearly two centuries and painted lacquer-black.

Blanc was on his second coffee and his third cigarette as they sat waiting for their taxi to take them back to the airport. He had already briefed Crozes by telephone. ‘He seems happy,’ he said. ‘It pretty much puts Briand out of the picture and refocuses everything on the wife.’

‘But we still don’t have any evidence against her. Not real evidence,’ Sime said.

Blanc shrugged. ‘We should get the pathologist’s report sometime today, and early results on the forensics.’ He scrutinised Sime carefully. ‘What is it with you and her, Sime?’

He felt himself blushing. ‘What do you mean?’

‘All this stuff with the ring and the pendant, thinking that you knew her. I’ve seen how you look at her.’

‘How do I look at her?’ Sime was suddenly self-conscious.

‘I don’t know. It’s hard to say. But it’s not how a cop usually regards a suspect. There’s something personal there, and it’s not right. It’s not professional. You know that, Sime.’

Sime didn’t respond, and Blanc thought for a moment.

‘You asked her the other day about her Scottish roots.’

‘So?’

‘You’re Scottish, aren’t you? I mean, that’s where your ancestors came from.’

Sime thought about it. ‘You know it’s funny. When I was growing up I never wanted to be anything other than Canadian. Quebecois. Of course, I knew about my Scottish heritage. My ancestors arrived here speaking Gaelic. And my father was so proud of our Scottish roots. Insisted we spoke English at home. Well, I already told you that.’ He smiled. ‘He was sure he had a Scottish accent. But I doubt if he did.’ He glanced at Blanc. ‘Trouble is, I didn’t want to be Scottish. I didn’t want to be different. Most of the other kids in my class were of French descent. We all spoke French together. I just wanted to be one of them. I was almost in denial about being Scottish. I guess I must have been a real disappointment to my dad.’

Sime turned his gaze thoughtfully towards the port.

‘But if you go back five generations, my great-great-great-grandfather arrived here in Quebec City from Scotland without a penny to his name. He and his family had been cleared off their land in the Outer Hebrides, and he got separated from his mother and sisters.’

Blanc sucked a mouthful of smoke into his lungs. ‘What about his father?’

‘His father was shot dead trying to poach deer on the estate during the potato famine.’

‘I thought that was an Irish thing.’

Sime shook his head. ‘The famine was just as bad in parts of Scotland.’ He nodded towards the port. ‘When he got here he went searching records at the harbour master’s office, trying to establish when the boat his family came on had arrived. So he could try and find them. A boat called the Heather .’

‘And?’

‘There was no record of it. And he was told it was presumed lost at sea. In those days, if a boat went down no one ever knew.’ He recalled only too clearly his grandmother reading that passage from the diaries. How his ancestor had got drunk, and been rescued from the hands of unsavoury characters by an Irishman he’d met. He shook his head. ‘Hard to imagine what it must have been like. Thrown off your land and forced on to boats. Arriving in a strange land with nothing. No family, no friends.’

‘What happened to him?’

Sime shrugged. ‘He did all right for himself in the end. Ended up making a bit of a reputation as an artist, of all things.’

‘You got any of his paintings?’

‘Just the one. A landscape. I guess it must be the Hebrides. A pretty bleak-looking place. No trees, nothing.’ And it occurred to him that the imagery that coloured the backdrop to his dreams must have come from that painting hanging in his apartment. He turned to Blanc. ‘What about you? What are your roots?’

Blanc said, ‘I can trace my ancestry all the way back to the early Acadians who first settled in Canada. They came from a town in the Poitou-Charentes region of western France called Loudun.’ He grinned. ‘So I’m a real pure-blood Frenchy. I guess the difference between my people and yours is that mine came voluntarily. Pioneers.’

A taxi pulled up at the kerb and beeped its horn. Both men stood up quickly and Blanc left some coins on the table.

They were in the air shortly after midday and would be back on the islands by two. Crozes had told Blanc on the phone that he was calling a team meeting at the Sûreté to assess the evidence gathered to date and decide what further steps to take.

Sime let his head fall back in the seat and closed his eyes only to find Kirsty Cowell’s face there, waiting for him, somehow etched on his retinas. He thought about what Blanc had said to him at the café about the way he was with her. There’s something personal there, and it’s not right. It’s not professional . And he wondered if he was losing all objectivity in this case.

He felt the plane bank left as it circled over the city below to set a course that would follow the river north towards the Gulf. Blanc nudged his arm. He was in the window seat peering down on the landscape beneath them as they made the turn. It was a beautiful crisp, clear autumn day and the colours of the forest lining the banks of the river were spectacular in the sunlight, as if they had been enhanced by photo-manipulation software. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘See that string of islands in the river?’