Entry Island

Her eyes were a dark, crystal-cut blue with darker rings around the pupils. Sad eyes filled with tragedy. He could see the shadows of sleeplessness smudged beneath them as if someone had drawn charcoal-stained thumbs across the skin.

He heard the slow tick, tick of an old pendulum clock on the mantel, and saw motes of dust suspended in the light that slanted through the windows. He saw her lips move, but there was no sound. They moved again in silence, forming words he couldn’t hear, until he became aware suddenly of the irritation in her voice. ‘Hello? Is there anyone home?’ And it was as if someone had released the pause button and his world wound back up to speed. But the confusion remained.

He said, ‘I’m sorry. You are...?’

He saw her consternation now. ‘Kirsty Cowell. They said you wanted to interview me.’

And out of his turmoil he heard himself saying, ‘I know you.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

But he knew he did. Not where, or how, or when. But with an absolute certainty. And that feeling he had experienced on the plane returned to almost overwhelm him.

Chapter two

I

Hard to believe that just a few hours ago he had been lying in his own bed over a thousand kilometres away in Montreal, arms and legs tangled among the sheets, sweating where they covered him, freezing where they did not. His eyes then had been filled with sand, and his throat so dry he could barely swallow.

During the long night he had lost count of the number of times he had glanced at the digital display on his bedside clock. It was foolish, he knew. When sleep would not come, time crawled with the unerring pace of a giant tortoise. Watching its painful passage only increased the frustration and reduced the odds of sleep even further. The faintest of headaches lay just behind his eyes as it did every night, increasing in its intensity towards morning and the painkiller that would fizz furiously in his glass when it was time at last to rise.

Rolling over on to his right side he had felt the empty space beside him like a rebuke. A constant reminder of failure. A cold emptiness where once there had been warmth. He could have spread himself across the bed, warming it from the heat of his own body, but he felt trapped on the side where he had so often lain in simmering silence after one of their fights. Fights, it had always seemed to him, that he never started. And yet through all the sleepless hours of these last weeks, he had begun to doubt even that. Harsh words endlessly replayed to fill the slow, dark passing of time.

Finally, at the very moment he had felt himself slipping off into darkness, the trilling of his cellphone on the bedside table had startled him awake. Had he really drifted off? He sat bolt upright and glanced at the clock, his heart pounding, but it was still just a little after three. He fumbled for the light switch, and blinking in the sudden glare of the lamp grabbed the phone.

From his riverside apartment in St Lambert, it could take anything up to an hour and a half during rush hour to cross the Pont Jacques Cartier on to the island that was Montreal City. But at this hour the huge span of arcing girders that straddled the Île Sainte Hélène fed only a trickle of traffic across the slow-moving water of the St Lawrence River.

As the lights of empty tower blocks rose up around him, he swung on to the off-ramp and down to Avenue de Lorimier before turning north-east on Rue Ontario, the dark silhouette of Mount Royal itself dominating the skyline in his rear mirror. The drive to 1701 Rue Parthenais took less than twenty minutes.

The Sûreté de Police was housed in a thirteen-storey tower block on the east side of the street with views out towards the bridge, the TV station and the mountain. Sime took the elevator up to the Division des enquêtes sur les crimes contre la personne on the fourth floor. It never failed to amuse him how the French language needed nine words where one in English would do. Homicide, the Americans would have said.

Capitaine Michel McIvir was returning to his office with a coffee, and Sime fell in beside him as he walked along the corridor past framed black-and-white photographs of crime scene investigations from the fifties and sixties. McIvir was barely forty, just a handful of years older than Sime, but wore an air of authority that Sime knew would never be a fit for him. The capitaine glanced at his sergeant enquêteur with shrewd eyes.

‘You look like shit.’

Sime grimaced. ‘That makes me feel so much better.’

‘Still not sleeping?’

Sime shrugged, reluctant to admit the extent of his problem. ‘Off and on.’ And he quickly changed the subject. ‘So why am I here?’

‘There’s been a murder on the Magdalen Islands, out in the Gulf of St Lawrence.’ He called them by their French name, Les Îles de la Madeleine. ‘The first in living memory. I’m sending an initial team of eight.’

‘But why me? I’m not on the rota.’