Entry Island

Sime said, ‘Kirsty Cowell, you are under arrest for the murder of James Cowell.’

All the colour drained from her face. ‘What?’ Her shock was clear. Her voice trembling.

‘Do you understand?’

‘I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.’

Sime drew a long breath, aware of the patrolman at his shoulder. ‘You have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. I am taking you back to the police station at Cap aux Meules where we will provide you with a toll-free telephone line to a lawyer referral service if you do not have your own lawyer. Anything you say can be used in court as evidence. Do you understand?’ He waited. ‘Would you like to speak to a lawyer?’

She stood staring at him for a very long time, every conflicting emotion reflected in her eyes. Until she lifted her hand and slapped him hard across the face where just a few minutes earlier she had touched him with tender fingers.

The patrolman stepped in quickly to grab her wrists.

‘Let her go!’ The imperative in Sime’s voice had almost as powerful an effect on the young man as Kirsty’s slap, and he released her immediately, as if she were electrically charged. Sime felt an ache of regret as he met her eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Chapter thirty-two

I

He left her in the care of the patrolman while she packed a bag and he went to get the minibus from the harbour. Which gave him plenty of time to think on the walk there and the drive back. But cogent thought did not come easily. From the moment he first set eyes on Entry Island he had felt something ominous in the dark shadow it laid along the horizon. The sense of destiny he had experienced on arrival had now reached some kind of perverse fulfilment. The woman who had become somehow synonymous in his mind with the girl in his dreams and the Ciorstaidh of the diaries had, after all, murdered her husband. And it had fallen on him to arrest her.

Back at the summerhouse he put her bag in the minibus and she slipped sullenly into the passenger seat beside him. They left the patrolman guarding the scene of the crime, and drove in silence across the island. The sun was dipping low in the western sky, edging pink and grey clouds with gold and lying shimmering like lost treasure across the bay.

It was the last time, he knew, that he was likely to set foot on the island, and he let his eyes wander sadly across its gentle green undulations, its colourfully painted houses, and the mountains of lobster creels piled up along the roadside. As the pitted track that passed for a road wound down below the church, he glanced up the shallow slope where headstones punctured the grass. Somewhere up there was the lichen-crusted stone that marked the final resting place of Kirsty’s many-times distant grandmother, and it seemed to him that he could almost feel the old lady’s reproach.

There was a crowd on the jetty to meet the incoming ferry. Sime noticed Owen and Chuck Clarke among them, watching him with sullen eyes. And when the boat had unloaded its cargo of people and goods, they all watched silently as Sime reversed the minibus on to the car deck. Kirsty sat in plain view beside him with dead eyes, a face like stone turning to neither left nor right. This woman who had not left the island for ten years. It could only mean one thing.

He sat with her in the vehicle until the ramp had been raised, hiding them from the view of curious eyes on the quayside. The boat pitched gently as it pulled away to round the breakwater and headed out across the bay. Without a word he reached into his pocket for a pair of handcuffs, and before she realised what was happening took her left wrist and cuffed it to the steering wheel. Her shock was patent, blue eyes blackened by dilating pupils and brimming with hurt and anger. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I can’t risk letting you free on the boat in case you jump overboard.’

She gazed at him in disbelief, her mouth half open. ‘You really think I’d commit suicide?’

‘It’s been known.’ He paused. ‘Unless you’d rather go up on deck handcuffed to me for all the passengers and crew to see.’

Her jaw set and she turned to gaze sightlessly through the windshield. ‘I’ll stay in the van.’

He nodded and slipped wearily out of the vehicle to climb the stairs to the top deck, and there make his way along to the prow of the boat. He closed aching, scratchy eyes, and felt the wind in his face like cold water, refreshing, bracing, but not enough to wash away his fatigue or his sense of guilt and betrayal.

He turned to find his way unsteadily back to the stern, and stand holding the rail while he watched Entry Island receding into the gloom of approaching night. He remembered the touch of Kirsty’s fingers on his cheek. Could almost feel them still. And everything about what he was doing seemed wrong.

II