Peter May - Entry Island

We could hear the soldiers in pursuit, and as we reached the crest of the rise a volley of shots rang out, and one of the Irishmen went down. ‘Leave him!’ one of the others shouted, but Michaél stopped, crouching beside him to turn him over. I stopped, too, scared as hell and breathing hard. Michaél looked up grimly. ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘Nothing we can do for him.’ And he was on his feet in an instant, pulling on my sleeve to drag me running off through the trees.

It got easier as we scampered down the other side, helter-skelter between the tree trunks, almost out of control, until finally we saw moonlight glinting on water through the foliage. And it occurred to me for the first time that if the boat wasn’t there, we would be cornered, and either killed or captured.

But there it was, a dark silhouette bobbing up and down between the rocks, waiting for us as planned. We slithered over the rocks and through the water, to be pulled on board by two men whose urgency was clear in the pitch of their voices. ‘Quick, quick!’ they shouted. Because already we could hear the soldiers crashing down the slope behind us.

In that moment God stepped in again and the moonlight vanished, darkness settling over us like black dust to obscure us from view. We pushed off from the shore, and the boatmen plied their oars to propel us out into the swell and flow of the river. Shots rang out from the shoreline. We could see the rifles flashing in the dark, but their shots went harmlessly wide or fell short. And soon we were well beyond range. Free.

But not safe. Not yet. The river seemed to move slowly, and yet the current was powerful, and the oarsmen had to fight hard against the drag of it. We had little control, it seemed, over where the river would take us, and we crouched there breathing hard and filled with fear, completely at the mercy of our rescuers and this vast flow of deep, dark water.

It seemed like for ever before we finally saw the black line of the shore, and then suddenly we were there, navigating our way through the rocks to pitch up on a shingle beach. The land rose away steeply from here, trees growing almost down to the water’s edge.

The first I knew there was any trouble was the sound of a shot as I stepped out of the boat. I turned around to see one of the Irishmen collapse into the stern of it. One of the oarsmen held a pistol on the three of us remaining while his companion went through the pockets of the dead man then pitched him out into the river.

‘Okay, hand over your money.’ The gunman’s voice was shaking.

‘You’ve got all the fockin’ money you’ll get from us,’ Michaél said.

‘Well, the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can hand over the money now, or I can take it off your dead bodies.’

‘We’ll be dead as soon as we hand it over,’ the other Irishman said.

The man with the gun grinned in the dark. ‘That’s a chance you’ll have to take.’

The swiftness with which the Irishman lunged at him took him by surprise. But as the two men went down, the gun went off, and the Irishman went limp on top of him. The other oarsman spun around, drawing a second pistol, and I barely saw the flash of Michaél’s blade before it slid up between the man’s ribs and into his heart.

Michaél stooped immediately to pick up his pistol, and as the first oarsman dragged himself free of the Irishman he had killed, Michaél shot him point-blank in the chest.

It had all happened so quickly, I had barely moved from the spot where I stepped ashore. And I stood now, gaping in horror and disbelief.

‘Fockers!’ Michaél said. Then, ‘Come on, Scotsman, help me go through their pockets. Get all the money you can and let’s get out of here.’

We tipped all the bodies into the water when we were finished, and Michaél crossed himself as he said farewell to his friends. Then we pushed the boat out into the river, and started scrambling up the embankment as the rain began to fall.

We have six gold sovereigns and ten Canadian dollars between us, and are lucky still to be in possession of our lives. I have no idea what the future holds, but it seems that mine is now inextricably linked with Michaél’s. I glance across the fire to see the flicker of its flames on his bloodless, bearded face. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be a dead man now.

The atmosphere in the incident room at the Sûreté on Cap aux Meules was tense. The team sat around an oval table studiously avoiding eye contact with either Sime or Marie-Ange. A map of the Madeleine Isles was pasted across one wall, the yellow-and-green flag of the Sûreté draped in the opposite corner. A blackboard that nearly filled the end wall by the door was covered in chalk scribbles. Names, telephone numbers, dates, places.

Lapointe was back from Montreal, having attended the autopsy. He told them the pathologist had been unable to establish much more than cause of death. Any one of the stab wounds would have been fatal, even without the other two. The knife used had a narrow six-inch blade with serrations along the blunt edge. Possibly a fish-scaling knife, he had thought. Apart from some bruising, the only other injuries the pathologist could find were scratch marks on Cowell’s face. His assumption was that they had been made by fingernails during the course of a struggle.

Crozes took a duster and roughly cleared space for himself on the blackboard. At the top of it he chalked up the name of James Cowell, then drew a line from it straight down to the foot of the board. Branching off alternately left and right, he wrote down the names of the suspects.

He began at the bottom with Briand. ‘As we’ve established, Briand has strong motive. His wife had been having an affair with Cowell, and the two men were fierce business competitors. Briand actually had more to gain than any of the others from Cowell’s death. Even without taking account of the jealousy factor.’ He paused. ‘But he has a very solid alibi. He was at home with his wife.’ He glanced at Sime and Blanc. ‘While you guys were flying back from Quebec City Arseneau and Leblanc reinterviewed her. She confirmed his story.’

Sime found it hard to meet his eye. He said, ‘Well, of course she would. She has motive, too, Lieutenant. If we’re to believe the two of them, then she was keen to ditch Cowell, but didn’t know how to tell him. Her husband said she was actually afraid of him. It’s perfectly possible that they both conspired to murder him.’

Crozes nodded his agreement. But beneath his veneer of professionalism his discomfort was clear. ‘That’s true. But we have not one single scrap of evidence to put either of them at the scene.’

‘Then maybe we should be looking for some.’

Now Crozes concealed his irritation with difficulty. ‘People have been looking for extraterrestrial life for years, Sime. It doesn’t mean it exists. Without evidence to the contrary, and with each providing an alibi for the other, I think we have to rule them out.’

He took his chalk and drew a firm line through Briand’s name. The room was silent. Then he tapped the tip of the chalk on Morrison’s name.

‘I don’t think there’s one of us who believes that Norman Morrison had anything to do with the murder. He was a sad case. Retarded. The mental age of a twelve-year-old. And while he might have had an obsession with Mrs Cowell, I think his story that James Cowell had him beaten up to warn him off was just that. A story. That he took a beating from someone seems clear, but it’s unlikely that we are ever going to find out who. And while his mother can’t definitively swear that he was home in bed on the night of the murder, a search of his house has failed to turn up a murder weapon, or any clothes that he might have been wearing during the attack. And certainly no ski mask. In fact, his mother would have known if he even possessed such a thing. And according to her he didn’t.’