Authors: Peter May
‘Not unless you were drinking. Or smoking dope.’
An uneasiness stirred among them, and Crozes turned back to Chuck. ‘Where were you the night Mr Cowell was murdered?’
Chuck gasped in disbelief and pulled a face. ‘You don’t think I had anything to do with that?’
‘I’m asking you a question.’
‘I woss at home wiss my parentss,’ Chuck said, mimicking Crozes’s strong French accent, and the other kids laughed.
Crozes grinned as if amused. ‘That’s very good, Chuck. Now if you like, I can have every item of clothing you own confiscated for forensic examination. And I can arrest you
and hold you in custody for forty-eight hours while a team of experts pulls your house apart piece by piece. Which I am sure will endear you to your parents.’
Chuck’s pale skin darkened. ‘I was at home all night. Ask my mother.’
And it seemed to Sime that Mary-Anne Clarke was providing alibis for the whole family.
Crozes’s cellphone rang in his pocket and he turned away to fish it out and take the call. He put a finger in one ear and walked several paces away, listening for a moment then speaking rapidly before hanging up. He turned back to the kids and waved a hand toward the far distance. ‘Go,’ he shouted. ‘And if you want to do something useful, join the search for Norman Morrison.’
The kids wasted no time in starting up their motors and wheeling off to snake in an undulating line away across the hillside. Crozes turned to Sime as the sound of the motors faded. ‘Ariane Briand just landed at the airport at Havre aux Maisons,’ he said. ‘You and Blanc take the boat and get over there. I want to hear what she’s got to say for herself.’
During the crossing to Cap aux Meules Blanc assiduously avoided asking him about the attack. They passed most of the fifty-five minutes it took to cross the bay in silence. But Sime caught him examining the bruising on the side of his face, and Blanc seemed embarrassed and compelled to say something.
‘Are you all right?’
Sime nodded. ‘I’ll live.’
But there was a tension between them.
They picked up the Chevy the team had left parked at the harbour, and Blanc drove them south on the Chemin Principal before turning off on to the coast road that they had driven two days earlier in the rain. This time there was a vehicle parked outside the Briand house. Ariane Briand was back in residence.
As soon as she opened the door, Sime saw what Aitkens had meant about her.
She was a real looker and still is
, he’d said.
I didn’t know a boy at school who didn’t have the hots for her
.
She was closer to forty than she would probably want to admit, and was still a good-looking woman. She wore a short-sleeved cut-off top revealing a taut, tanned belly above tight-fitting jeans that showed off her slim hips. Chestnut-brown hair with blonde streaks tumbled in big, loose, careless curls to her shoulders. She had soft brown eyes and fine, full lips, and a jawline that most women would require surgery to replicate.
She wore very little make-up, and her age was only discernible in the finest of lines creasing the skin around her eyes and mouth. She was the kind of woman, Sime knew from experience, that you could only ever admire from afar, unless you happened to be rich, or powerful. Cowell had most certainly been rich. And her ex, he supposed, could be described as powerful. At the very least, a big fish in a small pond.
She stepped back from the door, looking at them without curiosity, and Sime saw that she was barefoot. ‘Can I help you?’
Blanc showed her his ID. ‘Sûreté, madame. We’re investigating the murder of James Cowell.’
‘Of course you are. You’d better come in.’ She stood aside to let them pass.
They walked into a large dining room that extended up into the roof space where huge Velux windows set into the slope of the roof allowed light to cascade into the room. An arched opening led through to a big, square kitchen with an island set at its centre. They never got any further than the
dining room. Ariane Briand stood, almost barring their way to the rest of the house, her arms folded, defensive verging on hostile.
‘So …’ Blanc said. ‘Would you like to tell us where you’ve been for the last two days?’
‘Well, maybe you’d like to tell me why that’s any of your business.’
Blanc bristled. ‘Madame, you can answer my questions here or at the Sûreté. Your choice.’
She pursed her lips pensively, but if she was ruffled showed no sign of it. ‘I went shopping in Quebec City. Is that against the law?’
‘Even although you knew your lover had just been murdered?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I had no idea until I flew into the Madeleines this morning.’
Sime nodded towards an expensive oxblood leather suitcase sitting against the island on the floor of the kitchen. ‘Is that your suitcase?’
She glanced over her shoulder, but her hostility remained intact. ‘That’s James’s. It’s the stuff he brought with him when he moved in.’
‘And when was that, exactly?’
‘Just over a week ago. The Thursday, or the Friday. I can’t remember.’
Blanc said, ‘And he never unpacked?’
She appeared momentarily discomposed. ‘I’ve just finished packing it. You can take it with you, if you like.’
Blanc scratched the bald patch on his head. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Madame Briand, you don’t exactly sound like the grieving lover.’
She set her fine jawline and thrust it in his direction. ‘Grief takes many forms, Sergeant.’
During this exchange Sime let his eyes wander around the room. A man’s coat hung on the coatrack beside the front door. A big coat that seemed too large to be Cowell’s. But even if it was, why had she not packed it with the rest of his things? On the sideboard stood a large, framed colour photo of Ariane and a man whom he did not recognise. He had an arm around her waist, and both were laughing freely at the camera, sharing a joke with whoever was taking the picture.
He heard Blanc ask, ‘Do you have any thoughts about who might have a motive for murdering Monsieur Cowell, madame?’
She shrugged, her arms still folded. ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ Sime said.
‘Of course it is. Kirsty Cowell, who else?’
Blanc said, ‘Why would you think that?’
‘Because she as good as threatened it.’
The ensuing seconds of silence seemed embarrassingly long, before Sime said, ‘Explain.’
Ariane Briand set her feet slightly apart as if preparing to stand her ground and defy them to challenge her. ‘She turned up at my door the night before the murder.’
Sime felt the shock of her words prickling across his scalp. ‘Kirsty did?’
She looked at him, fleeting incomprehension in her eyes. The Kirsty had sounded too intimate ‘Yes.’
Blanc said, ‘According to everyone we’ve spoken to she hasn’t been off the island in ten years.’
‘Well, she was off the island that night.’
‘How did she make the crossing?’
‘You’d have to ask her that. But I know that she and James kept a small boat at the jetty below their house. And there’s a tiny harbour just down the road at Gros-Cap. Presumably that’s where she berthed it. She must have walked up in the rain. She was soaked to the skin when I answered the door.’
Sime pictured her standing in the dark at the door, hair wet and hanging in knots over her shoulders, just as he had seen her that first day after she came out of the shower. But it was not an image he wanted to contemplate.
‘What did she want?’ Blanc asked.
‘James.’
Sime frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She was looking for her husband, that’s what I mean. Very nearly hysterical she was, too. And wouldn’t believe me when I said he wasn’t here. She forced her way into the house and rampaged around the place shouting his name. There was nothing I could do to stop her, so I just stood here until she realised I was telling the truth.’
Sime was shocked. This picture the Briand woman was
painting of Kirsty conformed to none of his perceptions of her, or to any of the things she had told him during their several interviews. Nor to the impression that Jack Aitkens had given of her.
Serene
was the word he had used.
Like she had some kind of inner peace. If she has a temper, then I’ve never seen her lose it
, he’d said. But, then, he had also confessed to barely knowing her.
‘When she finally accepted that he wasn’t here she went dangerously quiet.’ Ariane Briand was lost in a moment of recollection. ‘Her eyes were quite mad. Staring. Her voice was little more than a whisper when she told me she had no intention of giving up James without a fight. And that if she couldn’t have him she was damned sure no one else would.’
Sime caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the sideboard and saw how pale he was. And for the first time he allowed himself to contemplate the possibility that maybe Kirsty Cowell had killed her husband after all.
‘The night of the murder,’ Blanc said. ‘Did you know that Cowell was flying back to Entry Island?’
She shook her head. ‘No. He was here earlier. But he took a call on his cellphone. I have no idea who the caller was, but it was a fractious call, and he hung up in quite a state of agitation. Said he had something to take care of and would be back in a couple of hours.’
Blanc glanced at Sime, but Sime was lost in a confusion of thoughts. Blanc said, ‘You’ll have to come to the police station with us, Madame Briand, to make an official statement.’ He
pushed past her to pick up Cowell’s suitcase. ‘And we’ll take this with us.’
Sime turned to lift the coat from the hanger by the door. ‘And the coat?’
Her hesitation was almost imperceptible. ‘No, that’s not his.’
Ariane Briand had repeated her version of events in the interrogation room at the police station. Thomas Blanc had conducted the interview while Sime watched on monitors in the office next door. Under Blanc’s forensic questioning she had provided further detail that painted an even more graphic picture of Kirsty’s unexpected visit.
Now, as he sat on the edge of the bed in his room at the auberge, Sime found himself sinking into a depression. He had painted a picture for himself of Kirsty Cowell, carefully constructed, layer upon layer, that had been erased in a single wash that coloured her a liar. She had left the island. She had threatened her husband’s lover, and implicit in that was a threat to Cowell himself.
The boat which had brought Sime and Blanc across to Cap aux Meules had returned to Entry with more volunteers to help in the search for Morrison. So they had an hour to kill before they could make the return crossing themselves. Sime had declined Blanc’s suggestion of a coffee in the Tim
Horton’s across the road and retired to his hotel room instead, drawing curtains on the world and retreating into semi-darkness.
He kicked off his shoes and swung his feet up on to the bed. He sat up against the headboard, propped by a pillow to support his back, and took out his cellphone. A growing sense of guilt crept over him. It was time, he knew, to phone his sister. There was no one else he could ask about the ring or the diaries.
He had not spoken to her in such a very long time. Not even on the phone. How long was it? Five years? More? Poor Annie. For some reason he had never felt close to her. Of course there was an age gap. She was four years older. But it was more than that. He had always been a loner, a solitary boy, self-sufficient and never interested in his sister. Even when she had reached out to him after the death of their parents.
As soon as he left school he had gone his own way, heading for the big city. While she stayed behind and married a neighbour, a boy who had been in her class. A French-speaker. And bore him a baby boy and then a little girl. Teenagers now, who spoke no English.
He had been back only once, for their parents’ funeral.
The last time he and Annie had met was when she came to his wedding. Without her husband. She had made excuses for him, but Sime knew that Gilles resented the way his brother-in-law had neglected her.
Guilt washed over him again, cold and reproachful. Maybe Marie-Ange was right. Maybe he was all those things she had called him. Selfish, self-centred. They were not pleasant reflections, and he veered away from them, just as these days he avoided his reflection in the mirror.
He found Annie’s number in the contacts list of his cellphone and with a great effort of will tapped autodial. He raised the phone to his ear with trepidation. After several rings it was answered by a boy whose voice sounded as if it might be breaking. ‘Yeah?’
‘Hi. Is your mother there?’
‘Who’s calling?’ He seemed bored. Or disappointed. Perhaps he’d been waiting for a call himself.
Sime hesitated. ‘It’s your Uncle Simon.’
There was a long silence at the other end of the line that was difficult to interpret. Then the boy said, ‘I’ll get her.’
He could hear voices distantly in the background. Then more silence. And Sime could actually feel his heart pulsing in his throat. Suddenly his sister’s voice. ‘Sime?’
‘Hey, sis.’ He dreaded her response.
But he should have known better. She had never been one to bear grudges. Beyond her surprise, he heard the delight in her voice. ‘Oh, my God, little brother! How the hell are you?’
And he told her. Without preamble. The plain, unvarnished truth. His break-up with Marie-Ange, his insomnia. And while he could feel the shock in her silence as she
listened, the simple act of sharing everything he had bottled up for so long came as an enormous release.
‘Poor Sime,’ she said, and meant it, echoing his own thought of poor Annie, just a few minutes earlier. ‘Why don’t you come home. Stay with us for a while.’
Home seemed like an odd word for her to use. The little military town of Bury, in the Eastern Townships south-east of Montreal, was where she still lived. It hadn’t been home to Sime in years. But home had a good sound to it, full of comfort.
‘I can’t right now. I’m on the Madeleine Islands, a murder investigation.’ He hesitated. The moment he asked, she’d know there had been an ulterior motive for him calling. ‘Annie, remember those diaries? The ones that Granny used to read from when we were kids.’