Entry Island (30 page)

We crash to the beach, with me on top, and all the air is expelled from his lungs in a short, painful explosion. I twist his wrist and forearm, forcing him to release his grip on the knife, and it goes sliding away across the sand.

But he recovers quickly from his surprise and with his superior strength pushes me away. He gets back to his feet, grimacing with pain and gasping to find his breath. I stoop and scoop up a handful of sand to throw in his face. But he turns his head quickly to avert it, and I see his eyes flicker away towards where his knife lies half buried. We each make the calculation about which of us might reach it first. He dives to his right, tumbling to the ground, and grasping it almost before I can move. He is on his feet again in an instant, the sand in his clothes whipped away by the wind. And his confidence floods back.

He has me now with my back to the sea and no means of avoiding him. I move cautiously backwards as he advances and feel the incoming waves break around my ankles. His lips part in what I imagine he believes to be a smile. But it is more like a wild animal baring its teeth.

He lunges at me and I feel his blade slash the skin of my forearm as I try to grab his wrist again. We come together, faces almost touching, and stagger back through the water. Then fall into the ocean as it breaks over us. I twist and turn trying to avoid the blade, and for a moment we are completely submerged. When I break the surface once more, gasping for breath, I am momentarily confused. The ocean is
red. George has released me, and I panic, staggering to my feet and looking for the wound that I cannot feel. Which is when I realise that he is floating face-down in the water, blood bubbling to the surface and eddying all around him.

I grab his jacket, and stumbling through the waves drag him up on to the sand and roll him over. Silver turns red beneath him, blood soaking his clothes from a wound somewhere in his midriff, where he has fallen on his own knife. He is still alive, eyes staring up at me and filled with fear. His lips move but there are no words, and I see his life leave him almost like a physical thing departing.

I feel the sea wash cold around my legs as I kneel beside him, and hear cries from the cliffs. I look up to see three constables looking down at us on the beach. It must be clear to them that George is dead, and with me crouched over his body this way there is only one conclusion that I know they will reach. No point in even trying to explain.

I stand up and sprint away along firm, wet sand. I hear them shout as they begin their descent, but I know now they won’t catch me. I turn away from the ocean and pound off into a sandy inlet overhung with soil and razor-sharp beach grass. Up and on to the machair again, heading for the cover of the hills, grateful for the rain that falls like mist and swallows me up to become a vanishing part of the landscape.

*

I have no idea how long it takes me to reach the crossroads. Water tumbles down the hill over fractured slabs of gneiss to
gather here in what I’ve heard called the drowning pool. The old Sgagarstaigh road passes close by and branches off a little further down the hill towards Ard Mor. But it is little used now, fallen into desuetude since Sir John Guthrie built the castle and the new road leading to it from the east.

Kirsty is waiting in the shelter of the single rowan tree that grows there. She has a horse and trap, the beast stamping its feet impatiently and snorting in the cold. Her relief is almost palpable until she sees the state of me.

‘What’s happened? Where are your mother and sisters?’

‘Taken,’ I tell her. ‘With everyone else from the village who survived the attack. They’re probably all aboard the
Heather
by now.’

‘But why didn’t you leave before they came?’ I see strain all around her eyes.

‘My mother wouldn’t go. And then it was too late.’ I choke back tears and wait some moments to recover my voice. ‘Baile Mhanais is in flames. Some of my neighbours are dead. Everyone else was taken away to Loch Glas.’ I stare at the ground, afraid now to meet her eyes. To tell her the rest. Then I look up suddenly. ‘Your brother’s dead, Ciorstaidh.’

I see her eyes blacken with shock in the cold grey of this awful day. ‘George …?’

I nod.

‘What happened?’

‘I got away. He came after me. We fought on the beach beyond the cliffs. He had a knife, Ciorstaidh. He meant to kill me. Gut me like an animal, he said.’

Her voice was little more than a breath. ‘You killed him?’

‘I didn’t mean to. I swear. We ended up in the water and he fell on his own knife.’

I see silent tears run down her face. ‘Poor George. I always hated him. I don’t know if he deserved to die or not, but one way or another he brought it on himself.’ She bit her lip to fight back some inner grief that belied her words. There must have been some moments of affection between them when they were children.

‘They’ll say I killed him. No matter that he was the one trying to kill me. You can be sure they’ll want me for murder. And if they catch me it’ll be the gallows.’

I see the quiet determination that sets the line of her jaw. ‘They’ll not catch you,’ she says, and she turns to the trap and opens the trunk at the rear of it. There are two small suitcases inside it. She pulls one out and opens it on the ground. ‘I brought some of George’s clothes for you, and a pair of his boots. They might be a little big, but they’ll do. You can’t travel looking the way you do.’

I look at the folded trousers, and the jacket, and the pressed shirt in the case. And George’s shining black boots. And I can only imagine how he would have felt at the thought of me stepping into them. ‘I can’t travel at all,’ I tell her.

Her face creases in a frown of incomprehension. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t leave my mother and my sisters.’

‘Simon, you told me yourself they are probably already on the boat. There’s nothing you can do.’

I close my eyes and want to shout out loud. She is right, of course, but I find it next to impossible to accept.

She grabs my arm and forces me to look at her. ‘Listen, Simon. The
Heather
is bound for a place called Quebec City. It’s somewhere on the eastern seaboard of Canada. If we can get to Glasgow, then I have more than enough money to pay our passage on the next boat to Quebec ourselves. Once we get there, there’s bound to be shipping records or something. You’re sure to be able to track them down. But we’ve got to go. Now. We need to be on a sailing to the mainland before the police come after you.’

He woke up startled, feelings of pain and regret following him from the dream to his waking consciousness like a hangover. The dream itself had unfolded just as he remembered the telling of the story, but his years of life experience since its reading had coloured it with images and emotions he could not have known as a young boy. And once again Kirsty Cowell had been Ciorstaidh, and he his own ancestor.

Light leaked in all around the drawn curtains of his room and he checked the time. It was a little after seven, so he had not slept long.

These events from his ancestor’s life were haunting him now with increasing frequency. When they weren’t consciously in his thoughts, his subconscious was dredging them up to fill brief moments of sleep. It seemed there was no escape.

The clearing of Baile Mhanais and his running away with Ciorstaidh had somehow brought him full circle. Back to that first dream, and their separation on the quayside at Glasgow. And that’s what filled his mind now. But with a
sense of something missing. Although he could not think what. He forced himself to replay the events of that fateful day when the
Eliza
had carried Simon off to the New World, leaving Ciorstaidh behind in the old. The promise his ancestor knew he could never keep. Just as he had dreamt it. Just as he remembered it in the telling from all those years before. And yet still, he knew, there was something he’d forgotten. Something lost in time and just out of reach.

A knock on the door dispersed the dream and its afterthoughts, and his recollection of events the night before came flooding back to replace them. Depression fell on him like snow.

The knock came again. More insistent this time.

Sime felt battered, his eyes full of sleep and still barely focusing. He swung his legs out of bed, his clothes crumpled and damp with sweat, and slipped his feet into his shoes.

‘Okay!’ he shouted as the knocking started again. He swept his hair back out of his face and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before opening the door.

Crozes stood in the hall. For a moment Sime wondered if he was going to attack him. But he was a pool of dark stillness. The cut on his lip had scabbed over, and there was bruising all around his left eye and cheek. ‘Can I come in?’

Sime stood back, holding the door wide, and Crozes pushed past him into the room. As Sime closed the door Crozes turned to face him. ‘We can play this one of two ways,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Sime could determine nothing from expressionless eyes. The pallor beneath Crozes’s tan turned his skin almost jaundice-yellow.

‘Either we behave as if nothing happened and we just get on with our lives.’ He hesitated. ‘Or I bring you up on a charge of assault which will see you immediately suspended, and almost certainly dismissed.’

Sime looked at him thoughtfully, his brain slowly clearing. ‘Well, let me tell you why you’re not going to do that.’ Crozes waited. Impassive. ‘One, you’d have to admit that you’d been screwing the wife of a fellow officer. Two, you’d have to suffer the humiliation of every single person in the department knowing how I beat the shit out of you.’ Still Crozes waited. ‘End to both of our careers. And I don’t think either of us wants that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that we can play this one of two ways.’ He got an almost perverse pleasure from throwing Crozes’s words back in his face. ‘We can make like nothing happened.’

Crozes contained his anger well. ‘Or?’

‘Or I can go upstairs with the fact that you’ve been sleeping with my wife for the last year and we’ll see how that plays out.’

‘Same result.’

Sime shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He was surprised himself just how cool and unemotional he felt. As if it was other people’s lives they were discussing. And he realised with something
of a shock that he didn’t much care any more. About the Sûreté, about Marie-Ange, about Crozes. ‘Just depends which of us takes the initiative first.’

‘I could arrest you right now. It’s not as if there aren’t witnesses.’

‘And how do you know that I haven’t already called Captain McIvir with a full account of what happened. Including your infidelity with my wife?’ He saw Crozes stiffen.

‘Have you?’

Sime let the question hang for a few long moments. ‘No,’ he said finally.

Crozes’s relief was almost palpable. ‘So we’re agreed then?’

‘Are we?’

‘Nothing happened last night. If Marie-Ange and I have a relationship it only began after your marriage broke up. We wrap up this investigation and spend the rest of our careers staying out of each other’s way.’

Sime looked hard at the other man. ‘In other words you want me to keep my mouth shut.’ He could see by the movement of his jaw that Crozes was clenching his teeth.

‘You can interpret it any way you like. I’m just laying out the choices.’

It was some time, with silence hanging heavy in the room, before Sime broke eye contact with the lieutenant and sat down on the edge of his bed. ‘Whatever you want,’ he said wearily.

Crozes nodded, and his whole demeanour seemed to
change in a heartbeat. Suddenly he was the lieutenant again, and it was back to business. The murder of James Cowell. As if nothing at all had passed between them he said, ‘The police in Quebec City have tracked down Mayor Briand finally. He’s staying at the Auberge Saint-Antoine.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s a flight in forty-five minutes. I want you and Blanc on it.’

‘Jesus!’ Blanc looked up from the folder on his knees. They were somewhere over the Gaspé Peninsula, probably less than an hour from Quebec City. The first hour of their flight had passed in a tense silence, and Blanc had buried his head in Arseneau’s briefing notes on Mayor Richard Briand. Now he looked at Sime, squeezed in beside him in the tiny nineteen-seater Jetstream commuter aircraft, unable to contain himself. ‘Have you read this stuff?’

Sime was miles away, turning over the traces of his ancestor in nineteenth-century Scotland, and if he thought about the present at all, picking at the scabs of his failed relationship with Marie-Ange. He glanced at his co-interrogator with a cold detachment. ‘No.’

Excitement coloured Blanc’s normally pale complexion and he flushed pink. ‘Everyone knows you don’t get to be top dog in politics without money behind you. And Briand’s no exception. Even if he is just an island mayor.’

‘He’s got money. So?’

‘It’s how he made his money that’s interesting.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Lobsters.’ He watched expectantly as Sime absorbed this.

‘He was in the same business as Cowell?’

‘Not just in the same business, Sime. They were competitors. The whole industry was pretty much sewn up between them. Cowell might have owned half the fishing fleet, but Briand owns the other half. And according to Arseneau’s notes the mayor was foiled in a major takeover attempt last year. It seems there was a big bust-up between the two men. No love lost.’

The significance of what Blanc was telling him was not lost on Sime. Dreams and diaries and failed marriages retreated into a distant corner of his mind. ‘So with Cowell dead, presumably the widow wouldn’t present much of an obstacle to his plans to expand his little empire.’

Blanc nodded. ‘Well, exactly. And it must have been a pretty bitter pill to swallow when Cowell moved in with his wife.’

Sime thought about it. ‘Which would provide Briand with a very strong double motive for murder.’

‘Casts everything in a different light, doesn’t it?’

‘Except for one little thing,’ Sime said.