Peter May - Entry Island

As he stood up he shivered, although it was still warm. And goosebumps prickled all over his arms and shoulders as if someone had just stepped on his grave.

Clothes hanging out to dry in the late September sunshine flapped in the wind on a line strung from a characterless modern house next to the Epicerie. Two men in scuffed blue boiler suits and wellington boots interrupted their conversation to stand and watch as Sime walked past the junction. The road surface was broken and stony here. An old golden Labrador, with stiff, arthritic back legs, fell in step beside him.

‘Duke!’ one of the men called. ‘Duke! Here boy.’ But the dog ignored him and kept pace with Sime.

Where the path turned right towards the lighthouse, the road swung left, leading towards the Cowell House. Duke took the turn ahead of him and hobbled up the hill, almost as if he knew where it was that Sime was going. Sime hesitated for only a moment. He had no reason or authority to go back to the house. His interviews with Kirsty were over. And in any case, she would no longer speak without a lawyer present. Still, he followed Duke’s lead.

The house built by Cowell seemed like a sad extravagance now. It sat up here in cold testimonial to a failed marriage, empty and loveless. He stepped into the conservatory. ‘Hello?’ His voice reverberated around all the empty spaces within, but brought no response. He crossed the grass to the summer-house, and found the patrolman from Cap aux Meules making himself a sandwich in the kitchen. The young man looked up, a little surprised.

‘I thought you guys had gone back to Cap aux Meules,’ he said.

Sime just shrugged. ‘Where’s Mrs Cowell?’

‘You going to question her again?’

‘No.’

The patrolman bit into his sandwich and washed it over with a mouthful of coffee. He threw Sime a curious look. ‘Last time I saw her she was on the road heading off up the hill there.’

‘Where does that go?’

‘Nowhere in particular. It peters out after a while.’

Duke was waiting for him as he stepped back out of the house. The Labrador seemed to grin, then turned and started off up the road as if showing him the way. Sime stood and watched as the old dog ambled with his awkward arthritic gait up to the brow of the hill. There he stopped and looked back. Sime could almost feel his impatience.

But Sime turned away and followed the path that led to the cliffs and the narrow steps down to the jetty. The Cowells’ motor launch bobbed gently in the afternoon swell.

He imagined Kirsty, half drunk, fired by jealous humiliation, running down these steps in the dark and setting off across the bay in that small boat to Cap aux Meules. What kind of desperation must have driven her?

He turned and walked back towards the house and saw that Duke was still waiting for him on the hill.

Sime had no reason to talk to Kirsty again. And yet he wanted to see her. He wanted to tell her how much he hated this, even although he knew he wouldn’t. He started off up the hill after Duke. The dog waited until he was within a few metres, then turned and hobbled on.

The road was rutted and uneven, loose stones skidding away underfoot. When he reached the top of the rise Sime turned and looked back. The house seemed a long way below him already. In the distance, at the southernmost point of the island, the lighthouse looked tiny. And across the water, Havre Aubert seemed almost close enough to touch. The wind was stronger up here, whipping through his hair, filling his hoodie and blowing it out behind him. He turned to find Duke waiting for him again, and he walked on to a point where the road became little more than a path worn through the grass. It divided in a hollow, one branch snaking up towards the summit of Big Hill, the other descending again to the cliffs and the red rock stacks that rose up out of the ocean.

And there he saw her. Standing very close to the cliff’s edge, silhouetted against the blaze of reflected sunlight on the ocean beyond. They were facing east here, out across the Gulf of St Lawrence and the North Atlantic towards a far distant land from which their ancestors had once come.

Duke reached her before he did. She stooped to ruffle his neck then crouched beside him. Sime saw her smiling, animated in a way he had not seen her before. Until he entered her peripheral vision and she turned her head to see him approaching. The smile vanished and she stood up immediately. Her whole demeanour became hostile and defensive. ‘What do you want?’ she said coldly when he reached her.

Sime pushed his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I was just taking a walk. Killing time till the ferry comes.’ He flicked his head beyond where she stood. ‘You’re a bit close to the edge here.’

She laughed, and it seemed to Sime that it was the first time he had seen her genuinely amused. ‘I’m not going to throw myself off, if that’s what you think.’

He smiled. ‘I didn’t.’ He looked along the ragged line of the cliffs. ‘But there’s a lot of erosion here. Not safe to get too close, I wouldn’t think.’

‘I’m touched by your concern.’ The sarcasm had returned.

He looked at her very directly. ‘I’m only doing my job, Mrs Cowell. I bear you no ill will.’

She gasped her disbelief. ‘Accusing me of killing my husband doesn’t feel like you bear me much good will either.’

‘Just testing the evidence.’ He paused. ‘A pathologist I know once told me that when he performs an autopsy on a murder victim he feels like that person’s only remaining advocate on earth. Someone to find and test the evidence that the body of the deceased has left in his care.’

‘And that’s what you’re doing for James?’

‘In a way, yes. He can’t speak for himself. He can’t tell us what happened. And whatever he might have done, whoever he might have been, he didn’t deserve to die like that.’

She looked at him steadily for a long moment. ‘No, he didn’t.’

An awkward silence settled between them. Then he said, ‘Do you really intend to spend the rest of your life here?’

She laughed. ‘Well. That depends on whether or not you put me in jail.’ He found a pale smile in response. ‘But the truth is, Mr Mackenzie, that whatever I might have said in an emotional moment, I really love this island. I played all over it as a child, I’ve walked every inch of it as an adult. Big Hill, Jim’s Hill, Cherry’s Hill. Pimples on the landscape really, but when you’re young they’re the Alps or the Rockies. The island is your whole world, and anything beyond it far off and exotic. Even the other islands in the Magdalens.’

‘Not an easy place to live, I wouldn’t have thought.’

‘Depends what you’re used to. We didn’t know anything else. At least, not until we were older. The weather is hard, sure, but even that you accept, because it’s just how it is. The winters are long, and so cold sometimes that the bay freezes over and it’s possible to walk across to Amherst.’ And for his benefit, ‘That’s Havre Aubert.’

‘How come you speak English here when the rest of the islands are francophone?’

‘Not all of them are,’ she said. A gust of wind blew her hair into her face and she carefully drew it aside with her small finger, then shook it back. ‘They speak English at the north end, too. At Grand Entry Island, and Old Harry and GrosseÎle. Old Harry is where James came from originally. But, yes, most of the population of the Magdalen Islands are French-speakers. I guess maybe only 5 or 10 per cent of us speak English.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s our heritage, our culture. And when you’re a minority you tend to protect those things, nurture them, defend them. Like the French minority in Canada.’