Entry Island

by Peter May

  ‘You all right, Sime?’

  The voice, raised above the wind, startled his eyes open and he looked up, heart pounding, to see Lieutenant Crozes standing over him. ‘Sure,’ Sime said. ‘Just listening to the wind.’

  Crozes stared out over the ocean. ‘The forecasters say there’s one helluva storm coming.’

  Sime followed his gaze to the accumulation of clouds, black, contused and devouring the sky as they approached. ‘Certainly looks like it.’

  ‘The remnants of Hurricane Jess, apparently.’

  Sime had been only vaguely aware of TV news items about the hurricane that had torn up the eastern seaboard of the United States. ‘Really?’

  ‘Downgraded to storm status now. But they’re calling it a superstorm. It’s going to be touch and go whether we get off the island tonight.’

  Sime shrugged. He didn’t much care one way or another. Wherever he laid his head for the night he knew he wouldn’t sleep. ‘How’s the door-to-door going?’

  Crozes expelled air through pursed lips. ‘Like getting blood out of a stone, Sime. Oh, everyone’s nice enough. Lots to say but nothing to tell. Not to us, anyway. And no one’s got a bad word about Kirsty Cowell.’

  Sime got to his feet, brushing dead grasses from his trousers. ‘Why would they?’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t. She’s one of them. An islander born and bred. But although no one’s saying it, seems clear they all think she killed him.’

  Sime looked at him, startled. ‘Why?’

  Crozes shrugged. ‘That’s what we need to find out.’ He turned and nodded down the hill towards a green-painted house not a hundred yards away. ‘While she’s with Marie-Ange and the nurse it might be an idea if you and Blanc interviewed the neighbours. According to Aucoin they were the first ones on the scene.’

  Fine spits of rain stung their faces.

  II

  The McLeans were an odd couple. They sat nervously in the Cowells’ summerhouse. No doubt they had been in it many times, but today they were like fish out of water. Uncomfortable and uncertain in foreign surroundings. Agnes, as near as Sime could guess, was around seventy. Harry a little older. She had an abundance of white hair like cotton wool, crimped around the sides of her head and piled up on top of it. He had almost none, a bald brown head spattered by age. They seemed very small to Sime, like little shrunken people.

  ‘I couldn’t say exactly what time it was.’ Agnes had a shrill voice that dipped and dived like a butterfly on a summer’s day. ‘We were asleep.’

  ‘What time do you normally go to bed?’

  ‘About ten usually.’ Harry’s nicotine-stained fingers turned his wedding ring around as his hands lay in his lap. He would doubtless have been happier to have a cigarette in them.

  ‘So it was after ten, and sometime before midnight?’

  Agnes said, ‘It was about ten past twelve when I first noticed the time. And that was after we’d called the nurse.’

  ‘And it was the nurse who called the police?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me what happened when Mrs Cowell came to your door.’

  The elderly couple glanced at each other as if to reach agreement on who would speak first. It was Agnes who did so. ‘She came hammering at the door in the dark. It was like World War Three. I’m surprised she didn’t do damage to her hands.’

  ‘So that’s what woke you?’

  ‘Me, not him.’ Agnes snatched a quick look at her husband. ‘It would take more than a world war to rouse him from his slumbers. I had to shake him out of his sleep.’ He glared back at her. ‘But he was awake soon enough when we opened the door to her.’

  ‘Like an apparition, she was,’ Harry said, his beady blue eyes opening wide with recollection, like flowers in sunlight. ‘Just in her nightdress. All white and insubstantial-like, nearly see-through. I mean, with the moon up behind her like that it was plain she was buck naked beneath it.’

  Now it was Agnes who glared at him. But he was oblivious, still reliving the moment.

  ‘And she was just covered in blood. Man, I’ve never seen anything like it. On her hands and face and all over her nightdress.’

  ‘She was hysterical,’ Agnes butted in. ‘Just kept screaming, help me, help me, he’s dead, he’s dead.’ She cast a withering glance at her husband. ‘And, of course, he has to ask who. As if it wasn’t blindingly obvious.’

  ‘Wasn’t obvious at all.’ Harry frowned. ‘Could have been anyone.’

  Sime said, ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘We followed her up to the house,’ Agnes said. ‘In our dressing gowns. Harry got a flashlight and his shotgun. And we found Mr Cowell lying in all that blood in the middle of the floor.’

  ‘She said she was attacked and Cowell tried to save her.’ Harry couldn’t hide his scepticism, and Sime was quick to pick up on it.

  ‘But you didn’t believe her?’

  Harry said, ‘No,’ and Agnes said, ‘Yes.’ Both at the same time. She glared at him again.

  ‘Why didn’t you believe her, Mr McLean?’

  ‘Harry …’ There was a clear warning in his wife’s tone.

  But he just shrugged. ‘Well, who could blame her? The man was a cheat and a liar, and everyone knew it.’

  Sime frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he up and left her just a week ago, didn’t he? For some floozy over on Grindstone.’ And as an afterthought he added, ‘That’s Cap aux Meules to you.’

  III

  They sat in the minibus on the crest of the hill, looking down on the Cowell house and the lighthouse beyond. L’île du Havre Aubert, the nearest of the islands in the archipelago, was almost obscured by the flurries of rain that blew in across the bay. Blanc sat in the front passenger seat, the window down, his cigarette smoke whisked away by the wind. Lapointe was hunched over the steering wheel munching on a sandwich that left crumbs clinging to his moustache. Crozes, Marie-Ange and Sime sat in the back. Two of the team were still out, tramping door to door and no doubt getting soaked. Marie-Ange’s crime scene assistant was taking photographs before they moved the body.

  ‘As soon as the Cowell woman is washed and changed I want you to ask her why she didn’t tell us she’d just split with her husband.’ Crozes was chewing absently on a fingernail.

  Sime washed down a mouthful of baguette with coffee from a plastic cup and nodded. For some reason it was almost a source of comfort for him to know that Kirsty Cowell’s had not been a happy marriage either. It gave them something in common. It also gave her a motive for murder.

  ‘You should maybe have a word with the nurse first.’ All heads turned towards Marie-Ange. She shrugged. ‘She’s not a local, but she’s familiar enough with the island and everyone on it to know where most of the bodies are buried.’ She smiled wryly. ‘So to speak.’

  ‘Are you thinking of any bodies in particular?’ Crozes said.

  She trapped him in the gaze of her green eyes and he looked momentarily discomfited. ‘We got to talking after she examined Mrs Cowell. Seems there’s a fisherman lives somewhere up near the school had a real grudge against Cowell. Claims he stole his father’s boat.’

  Crozes made a thoughtful moue with his lips and turned to Sime. ‘You and Thomas better talk to him, then, Sime. If you think it’s worth it we can bring him in for formal interview.’

  Thomas Blanc flicked his cigarette out into the early afternoon and saw it snatched away by the elements. He scratched his tonsure. ‘Suppose Mrs Cowell was telling the truth,’ he said. ‘Why would this guy attack her if it was Cowell he had the grudge against?’

  The minibus rocked as a sudden gust of wind lifted up over the cliffs and hit the side of it with the force of a physical blow. A moment of sunlight washed across the island, as if in the stroke of an artist’s brush. And then it was gone.

  ‘Well maybe he had something against the wife, too,’ Crozes said. ‘That’s what you guys need to find out.’

  CHAPTER SIX

&
nbsp; I

  The island health centre was located in a white-trimmed yellow hut that stood on the right-hand side of Big Hill Road fifty metres up from the island grocery store. To call it a road was a misnomer. It was an unmetalled track full of potholes. The sign outside the centre read Centre de santé et de services sociaux des Îles, even although no one on the island spoke French. Further evidence of the schizophrenic nature of the province to which the island belonged was to be found in street names preceded by the French Chemin, and followed by the English Road.

  The nurse was in her late thirties, an embodiment of that schizophrenia. She was a native French-speaker from Cap aux Meules, but spent every other week living and speaking English on Entry Island. Sime noticed that there was no ring on her wedding finger. She perched on the edge of her desk and looked worried. ‘You won’t tell anyone I told you this, will you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Blanc said. He was more comfortable now that they were speaking French again. ‘Anything you tell us is in complete confidence.’

  She wore jeans and a woollen jumper and folded her arms defensively across her chest. Dark hair showing the first signs of grey was drawn back severely from a high forehead and a face devoid of make-up. ‘His name’s Owen Clarke. A bit of a brawler. I mean, nice guy and all, but turns kind of sour with a drink in him. I’ve treated injuries inflicted by those big split knuckles of his often enough. Nothing serious. But these are hard men here. Some of them spend six months at a stretch fishing away from home. You can’t blame them for letting off a bit of steam now and then.’

  ‘What sort of age is he?’ Sime asked.

  ‘I guess he’s in his forties now. Got a teenage boy called Chuck. Not a bad kid, but looks to be following in his father’s footsteps. In temperament, I mean. Not on to the boats. Like most kids on the island these days, all he wants is to get off it.’

  She glanced from the window, almost longingly Sime thought. On a clear day she could probably see home on Cap aux Meules from here.

  ‘Strangely enough it’s the mother who rules the roost in the Clarke household. Owen’s a big brute of a man and Chuck’s not far behind him, but Mary-Anne’s the pack leader.’

  Blanc was playing absently with an unlit cigarette in his right hand, turning it over between three fingers like a magician performing a trick. It kept drawing the nurse’s eye as if she were afraid he might light it up. He said, ‘So what was his beef with Cowell?’

  ‘Something to do with his boat. I don’t know the details. But his father used to own it. And now Cowell does.’ She caught herself. ‘Did. And Owen skippered it for him.’

  Sime said, ‘And you think Clarke might have been capable of killing him?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she said quickly. ‘Just that there was no love lost.’

  ‘You were the first on the scene,’ Blanc said. ‘After the McLeans, that is.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Cowell was dead when you got there.’

  She bit her lip softly, and Sime could see the troubled recollection in her eyes. ‘He was.’

  ‘How did you verify that?’

  ‘Sergeant, nobody who’d lost that much blood could still be living.’

  ‘But you were able to determine what caused the bleeding?’

  ‘Only the pathologist can tell you that.’ She sighed and relented a little. ‘He appeared to have three stab wounds in his chest.’

  ‘So it must have been a pretty frenzied attack.’

  She shook her head. ‘I have no idea. I treat cuts and bruises and hand out advice to pregnant moms, Sergeant. All I can tell you is that at least one of the wounds must have punctured a lung, because there was a lot of frothy, very red oxygenated blood.’

  Blanc raised his cigarette as if to put it in his mouth, then seemed to think better of it and lowered it again. ‘What kind of state was Mrs Cowell in when you got there?’

  She raised her eyeline and her focus drifted off to relive the moment. ‘Almost catatonic.’

  ‘The McLeans said she was hysterical.’

  ‘Not by the time I got there. She was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs in the conservatory just staring into space. I’ve never seen a face so white. It made a shocking contrast with the blood on it.’

  Blanc flicked a glance at Sime then back to the nurse. ‘Do you like Mrs Cowell?’

  She seemed surprised by the question. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Do you think she killed her husband?’

  Colour rose on her cheeks and she pushed herself away from the edge of her desk and stood up. ‘I have no idea, Sergeant. That’s your job.’

  Outside, the wind whipped the hair on Blanc’s head almost straight up in the air. He turned to Sime. ‘I suppose we’ll have to talk to this guy Clarke. But something tells me it’ll be a wild-goose chase.’ He turned his cigarette around one last time and it snapped in half. The tobacco it spilled in the wind disappeared into the fading afternoon.

  II

  The minibus bumped and rattled over the pitted and uneven surface of School Road, the twin paps of Big Hill and Cherry Hill rising up to their right above scattered plantations of stunted pine. Blanc smoked at the wheel, and Sime wound down the window to let in some air. The rain of earlier was intermittent now, and smeared in streaks across the windscreen with each passage of the wipers.

  The school was housed in a long, low shed with windows all along one side and sat in the valley beyond the nearest plantation. Built at a time when the island population might well have been double its present number, Sime doubted if it was attended by more than a handful of children these days.

  They turned off on a rough track before they got to the school, and strained up the slope to a purple-painted house on the rise. A white picket fence enclosed an overgrown garden, and they found Clarke in a breeze-block hut at the far end of it, directed there by an elderly lady who answered their knock on the front door. Not his wife, Sime thought.

  Piles of lobster creels lay around the hut like seaweed washed up on the shore. They were piled six or seven deep, a hundred or more of them, linked by rope and pegged to the ground to keep them from being carried off by the winter gales.

  There were no windows in the hut, the only light provided by a single naked bulb hanging from the darkness of the roof space. The air was filled with cigarette smoke and the hum of a large chest freezer that stood against the rear wall, and Sime detected a background perfume of stale alcohol. The walls were hung with nets and tools and ropes, batons of wood two metres long stacked up along one wall. A profusion of white and pink buoys hung from the roof like fungus growing from its timbers.

  Clarke was hunched over on a stool at a workbench beneath the light bulb, eyes screwed up against the smoke from the brown-stained cigarette that burned in the corner of his mouth. A half-drunk bottle of beer stood at one end of the bench, and Clarke was attaching netting to the frame of a newly built lobster trap. The table and floor were covered in sawdust, and a rusted fretsaw hung from a vice bolted to the bench next to the beer.

  He laughed when they told him why they were there. A laugh that seemed filled with genuine mirth. ‘And you think I killed him? Goddamnit, I wish I had. He sure had it coming.’ He sucked smoke into his lungs and blew it at the light bulb, momentarily clouding its glare. Most of his lower front teeth were missing, and he hadn’t shaved in at least a week. A cat watched them with studied disinterest, curled up inside a cardboard box that stood on an old wooden cabinet cluttered with the detritus of a chaotic life.

  Blanc deferred to Sime, since they were back in English-language territory. But he used Clarke’s cigarette as a pretext for lighting one himself, and the air grew thicker. The three men eyed each other warily like so many faces peering through fog. ‘What exactly was it that you had against Mr Cowell, sir?’

  Clarke guffawed. ‘Sir? Hah!’ Then his smile faded, the fleeting light in his eyes replaced by a dark hatred. ‘I’ll tell you what I had against the bastard. He stole my father
’s boat and killed him in the process.’

  ‘How so?’

  Clarke dropped his cigarette on the floor and extended a foot to crush it. Then he took a swig of beer and held the bottle in his hand as he leaned forward into the light. ‘This is a hard fucking life, man. You spend your winters cooped up here, months on end with nothing better to do than listen to the goddamn womenfolk chewing your ear off. Drives you stir-crazy. Snow and cold. Endless damn darkness, and days on end sometimes when the ferry doesn’t come ’cos of ice in the bay, or winter storms.’

  He took a long pull from the neck of his bottle.

  ‘When the spring comes you gotta prep the boat, then you’re out fishing. Short lobster season here, too. Two months only, from May first. Out at 5 a.m. for the flare going up, and then you’re off. Long hard days, and dangerous too. When those creels leave the boat they’re linked by rope. Long damn coils of the stuff. Get your feet tangled up in that and you’re in the water in a heartbeat. Those things are heavy, and they pull you right down. Man, you’re drowned before you know it.’ For a moment he couldn’t meet their gaze. ‘Brother went that way. There one minute, gone the next. Not a damn thing I could do about it.’

  And Sime saw in shining eyes a hint of tears that were quickly blinked away.

  ‘We spend three, four months up in Nova Scotia most years. See, it’s a small window of earning opportunity we got, and you have to make it last through long idle winters. That’s why it was important to my old man to have his own boat. To work for himself. Sell at the best price. He spent his whole damn life out there fishing, just so he could pass that boat on to me.’ He paused. ‘Well, me and Josh. Only Josh is gone. Near broke my old man’s heart, too. So it was just me. And I was everything to him, you know? I was the reason he did it. Then Cowell goes and takes it all from him. In the blink of an eye.’ His lips curled as he spoke, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.

  ‘How did he do that?’ Sime said.