Entry Island

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