Entry Island

Sime noticed the thousands of lobster creels heaped up against brightly coloured wooden houses and barns set back from the road and dotted about the rolling green pasture of the island interior. There were no trees, just telegraph poles leaning at odd angles, and electric cables looping from one to the other. A late cut of summer grasses had produced big round hay bales that punctuated the landscape, and in the distance he saw the spire of a white-painted wooden church, the long shadows of gravestones reaching down the slope towards them in the yellow early light.

Aucoin said, ‘Cowell ran half the lobster boats in the Madeleines, landing around fifteen million dollars’-worth a year. Not to mention the processing and canning plant he owned on Cap aux Meules.’

‘Was he from the islands?’ Sime asked.

‘A Madelinot born and bred. From the English-speaking community at Old Harry in the north. But his French was good. You wouldn’t have known he wasn’t a native speaker.’

‘And his wife?’

‘Oh, Kirsty’s a native of Entry Island. Hasn’t been off it, apparently, in the ten years since she graduated from Bishop’s University in Lennoxville.’

‘Not once?’ There was incredulity in Crozes’s voice.

‘So they say.’

‘So what happened last night?’

‘Looks like it was her that did it.’

Crozes spoke sharply. ‘I didn’t ask for your opinion, Sergeant. Just the facts.’

Aucoin blushed. ‘According to Kirsty Cowell there was an intruder. A guy in a ski mask. He attacked her, and when the husband intervened he got stabbed and the intruder ran off.’ He couldn’t hide his disbelief and his own interpretation slipped out again. ‘It’s pretty weird. I mean, I know you guys are the experts, but you just don’t get break-ins here on Entry Island. The only way on and off since the air service got cut is by ferry, or private boat. It’s unlikely that anyone could motor into the harbour and out again without someone noticing. And there’s only one other jetty on the island. A small private quay that Cowell had built at the foot of the cliffs below his house. But the currents there make it pretty treacherous, so it’s hardly ever used.’

‘Another islander, then,’ Sime said.

The look that Aucoin turned in his direction was laden with sarcasm. ‘Or a figment of Mrs Cowell’s imagination.’

They left the lighthouse on their right and turned up the hill towards the Cowell house. Most of the homes on the island were traditional in design, wooden-framed with shingle-clad walls or clapboard siding beneath steeply pitched shingle roofs. They were vividly painted in primary colours. Red, green, blue, and sometimes more bizarrely in shades of purple or ochre, window and door frames picked out in white or canary-yellow. Lawns were well maintained. A local preoccupation, it seemed, and they passed several islanders out with their lawnmowers profiting from the autumn sunshine.

The Cowell house itself stood out from the others, not only in size but in design. It was out of place, somehow, like an artificial Christmas tree in a forest of natural pines. It was not of the island. A long yellow-painted building of clapboard siding with a red roof broken by dormers and turrets and a large arched window. As they pulled around the gravel path at the cliff side, they saw that there was a conservatory built along almost the entire south-facing length of it, windows looking out across a manicured lawn towards the fence that ran along the cliff’s edge.

‘It’s bloody huge,’ Lapointe said.

Aucoin blew air through pursed lips, savouring the importance that his local knowledge gave him. ‘Used to be a church hall,’ he said. ‘With a bell tower. Over on Havre Aubert. Cowell had it cut in three and floated across on barges brought up specially from Quebec City. They reassembled it here on the cliffs, then finished it inside and out to the highest specs. The interior’s quite amazing. Had it done for his wife, apparently. Nothing was too good or too expensive for his Kirsty, according to the neighbours.’

Sime’s eyes wandered to a smaller property no more than fifty yards away. It stood a little lower on the slope, a traditional island house, blue and white, with a covered porch that looked out over the red cliffs. It seemed to sit on the same parcel of land. ‘Who lives there?’

Aucoin followed Sime’s eyeline. ‘Oh that’s her place.’

‘Kirsty Cowell’s?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You mean they lived in separate houses?’

‘No, that’s the house she grew up in and inherited from her parents. She and her husband both lived in the big house that Cowell built. They had the old place renovated. Used it as a summerhouse, or guest house, apparently. Though according to the folk we’ve spoken to, they never had any. Guests, that is.’ He glanced back at Sime. ‘She’s in there just now, with a policewoman. Didn’t want her messing up the crime scene.’ If he expected some kind of pat on the back, he was disappointed when it didn’t come. He added, ‘At least, not any more than she already has.’