Entry Island

‘Can’t be very healthy, down there twelve hours a day breathing in all that salt.’

‘Who knows?’ Aitkens shrugged. ‘I’ve not died of it yet, anyway.’ He chuckled. ‘They say that salt-mines create their own microclimate. In some Eastern European countries they send people down the mines as a cure for asthma.’

Sime watched his smile fade and waited while Aitkens grew slowly impatient.

‘Are you going to tell me what happened out on Entry Island or not?’

But Sime was not ready to go there yet. He said, ‘I want you to tell me about your cousin.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Anything. And everything.’

‘We’re not close.’

‘So I gather.’

Aitkens gave him a look, and Sime could see the calculation in his eyes. Had Kirsty told him that? ‘My father’s sister was Kirsty’s mother. But my father fell for a French-speaking girl from Havre Aubert and left Entry Island to marry her when he was barely out of his teens.’

‘You don’t speak English, then?’

‘I grew up speaking French at school. But my father always spoke English to me in the house, so it’s not bad.’

‘And your parents are still alive?’

He pressed his lips together in a grim line. ‘My mother died some years ago. My father’s in the geriatric ward of the hospital. Doesn’t even know me when I go to see him. I have full power of attorney.’

Sime nodded. ‘So basically you and Kirsty grew up in two very different linguistic communities.’

‘We did. But the differences aren’t just linguistic. They’re cultural, too. Most of the French-speakers here are descended from the original seventeenth-century settlers of Acadia. When the British defeated the French and created Canada, the Acadians got kicked out, and a lot of them ended up here.’ He grunted, unimpressed. ‘Most of my neighbours still think of themselves as Acadians rather than Quebecois.’ He started picking the grime from beneath his fingernails. ‘A lot of the English-speakers got shipwrecked here on the way to the colonies, and never left. That’s why the two communities have never mixed.’

‘So you didn’t have much contact with Kirsty when you were growing up?’

‘Hardly any. I mean, I can see Entry Island from my house at La Grave. Sometimes you feel you could almost reach out and touch it. But it was never somewhere you would drop by casually. Of course, there were occasional family gatherings. Christmas, funerals, that sort of thing. But the English-speakers are Presbyterian, and the French mostly Catholic. Oil and water. So, no, I never really knew Kirsty that well.’ He stopped picking at his nails and stared at his hands. ‘In recent years I’ve hardly seen her at all.’ He looked up. ‘If I didn’t go to see her, then she certainly wouldn’t come and see me.’

Sime wondered if he detected a hint of bitterness in that. But there was nothing in Aitkens’s demeanour to suggest it. ‘From what you know of her, then, how would you describe her?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What sort of person is she?’

There seemed to be a fondness in his smile. ‘You’d be hard pushed to find a more gentle person on this earth, Monsieur Mackenzie,’ he said. ‘Almost... what’s the word... serene. Like she had some kind of inner peace. If she has a temper, then I’ve never seen her lose it.’

‘But you said yourself, you haven’t really seen her that much over the years.’

Which irritated him. ‘Well, why the hell are you asking me, then?’

‘It’s my job, Monsieur Aitkens.’ Sime sat back and folded his arms. ‘What do you know about her relationship with James Cowell?’

Aitkens made a noise somewhere between a spit and a grunt to express his contempt. ‘Never liked the man. And never could figure out what it was he saw in her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, no harm to Kirsty. I mean, she’s a good-looking woman, and all. But weird, you know?’

And Sime remembered Crozes’s description of her — She’s a weirdo, right?

‘Weird in what way?’

‘This fixation she has with staying put. Never leaving the island. Not Cowell’s thing at all. He was all fancy cars and airplanes, big houses and expensive restaurants. I was at the wedding. He had a big marquee erected over on the island, a company brought in from Montreal to do the catering. As much champagne as you could drink. Flash bastard! More fucking money than sense. Full of himself, too. Thought he was better than the rest of us because he’d made a pile. But he was just another islander. A fucking fisherman who got lucky.’

‘Looks like his luck ran out.’

Aitkens inclined his head a little. ‘How did he die?’

‘According to Kirsty she was attacked by an intruder at the house. When Cowell intervened he got stabbed to death.’

Aitkens seemed shocked. ‘Jesus! An intruder? On Entry Island?’ Then he had a further thought. ‘What was Cowell doing there, anyway? I heard he’d left her.’

‘What, exactly, did you hear?’