Peter May - Entry Island

The thought filled him with the same frightening sense of destiny he had experienced on that first visit.

He picked up a rental car at the airport and as he drove along the Chemin de l’Aéroport to join Highway 199 South, the first drops of rain hit his windshield. Worn wipers smeared them across a greasy surface, and he blinked as if that might clear the glass. But he was just fatigued.

His car bumped and splashed through the potholes on the loop of road that bypassed the work on the new bridge, and he crossed over to Cap aux Meules on the old, rusted box-girder construction that had served the islanders for two generations.

By the time he got to the offices of the Sûreté de Police, the rain was blowing across the bay on the edge of a wind that was gaining in strength.

Sergeant Enquêteur Aucoin was surprised to see him. ‘She just got back half an hour ago from the Palais de Justice on Havre Aubert,’ he said as they walked down the hall. ‘The judge couldn’t make it, so it was all done with video cameras. She pled not guilty of course.’

‘And?’

‘She was remanded in custody for trial in Montreal. They’ll fly her out tomorrow to a remand prison on the mainland.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I don’t mind telling you, we’ll be glad to see the back of her. We were never designed to host long-term guests. Especially of the female variety.’ They stopped in front of the door to the cells. ‘What do you want to see her for anyway?’

Sime hesitated. He had no right to be here, no authority to question the accused. But no one in the Sûreté on Cap aux Meules had any reason to suspect that he didn’t. ‘New developments,’ he said. ‘I need to speak to her privately.’

Aucoin unlocked the door and let him in. He heard the key turn in the lock behind him. Both cells lay open. Kirsty turned wearily from where she sat cross-legged on her bunk surrounded by books and papers. She wore a simple T-shirt, jeans and white trainers. Her hair was drawn back from her face and tied in a loose ponytail. It had only been a few days, but already she had lost weight. Her skin was almost grey in colour.

Her initial expression of indifference gave way to anger as she realised who her visitor was. ‘Come to gloat?’

He shook his head and stepped into her cell. He cleared a space beside her on the bunk to sit down, and she turned to glare at him. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say.’

‘This isn’t an official visit.’

‘What is it, then?’

He drew a deep breath. ‘I saw a painting of you yesterday.’

A frown creased around her eyes. ‘No one’s ever painted me. At least not that I know of. Where did you see this picture?’

‘In the attic of my sister’s garage in the town of Bury in the Eastern Townships. It was painted by my great-great-great-grandfather, and it used to hang above the mantel in my grandmother’s house when she read us stories as children.’ He held up his right hand. ‘This was his ring.’

Kirsty exhaled her contempt. ‘If this is some kind of trick to get me to admit to murdering my husband, it’s not going to work.’

‘It’s no trick, Kirsty.’ And he took out his cellphone and tapped the screen to show her the picture he had taken in his sister’s attic the night before.

She turned sulky eyes to look at it, and he saw her expression change. Not in a moment, but gradually. As if the shock of seeing it was slow in penetrating her resistance. Her lips parted and her eyes grew imperceptibly larger. She reached over to take his phone and examine the photograph more closely. Then she looked up. ‘How did you do this?’

‘I didn’t do anything. That’s the painting that hung above my grandmother’s fireplace when I was a boy.’ He paused. ‘I knew I knew you. From the first moment I saw you.’

Her eyes searched his, and she was remembering perhaps that first encounter when she came down the stairs in the summerhouse to find him waiting to interview her. I know you , he had said.

She looked back at the phone. ‘Coincidence. Some weird kind of resemblance. But it’s not me.’

‘If I had just shown that to you and asked if it was you, what would you have said?’

‘You just did. And I’m telling you, it might look like me, but it’s not.’

‘Look again. She’s wearing a red pendant.’

Reluctantly she turned her eyes towards it once more. He saw the colour rise high on her cheeks, but her mouth set in a stubborn line. ‘That’s all it is. A red pendant. Nothing to say it’s mine.’

He took back his phone and switched it off, slipping it into his pocket. ‘You told me that your great-great-great-grandmother McKay was Scottish.’

‘I think I told you she was probably Scottish. I don’t know, I’ve never gone into it. As far as I know her parents came from Nova Scotia, almost certainly Scottish immigrants. But whether Kirsty herself was born in Scotland, Nova Scotia or here, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never been interested enough to find out. If you want to know about my family history — though God knows why you would — you would need to ask Jack.’

‘Your cousin?’

‘He’s a fanatic on genealogy. Spends hours on the internet going through family records. Recently he was pestering me for access to papers that got handed down through my side of the family.’

‘I thought you didn’t see much of one another.’

‘We don’t. He hasn’t seen half the stuff I’ve got up at the house. Not that he really needs to. Apparently there’s not much that he doesn’t already know.’ She smiled sadly. ‘He never could understand my lack of interest.’

And Sime thought how she was just like he had been. Indifferent to her past, heedless of her roots. And just as he had done, she had struggled to find her place in a world that lives only for the present, where culture is a disposable commodity, no matter how many generations it has been in the making. ‘Where did this obsession with not leaving Entry Island come from?’

She turned her head sharply. ‘It’s not an obsession! It’s a feeling.’

‘You said your mother was reluctant to leave, too.’

‘As was her mother. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea.’ She was running out of patience with him. ‘Maybe it’s in the DNA.’

‘And your ancestor, Kirsty McKay?’

‘As far as I know, she never left the island once.’ She stood up. ‘Look, I’d like you to go. They’re sending me to prison on the mainland tomorrow. Who knows how long it will take to go to trial? But I can’t see any way I can prove my innocence, so I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life behind bars. Thanks to you.’

He wanted to tell her about Sime Mackenzie from Baile Mhanais, and the Ciorstaidh he fell in love with on a remote Hebridean island in another century. Of the struggles that brought him to Canada, and how all these generations later it had brought his great-great-great-grandson to Entry Island and a chance encounter with a woman called Kirsty who was almost identical in every way to the Ciorstaidh he had lost on a quayside in Glasgow.

But he knew how it would sound, and he had no rational way of explaining it to her. Even if she had been halfway receptive. Right now all he felt was her hostility. He stood up and looked into her eyes so directly that she had difficulty maintaining eye contact and looked away.

As a policeman, he knew that all the evidence in the murder of her husband had pointed towards her. But he also knew that most of it was circumstantial, and he had never really believed it. Instinct. Or perhaps something even less tangible. Deep down inside he felt as if he knew this woman, and that there was no way she was capable of murder. ‘Kirsty,’ he said. ‘How did you get your husband’s skin under your fingernails?’