Entry Island

Marie-Ange clutched the sheets to her chest to hide her breasts, as if he might never have seen them before. ‘It’s none of your business. We are no longer an item, Sime. Our marriage is over.’

‘How long?’

But she could not maintain her facade of righteous indignation, and turned her head to avoid his eyes, the accusation in them and all his hurt.

Sime switched his focus toward Crozes. ‘Lieutenant?’ he said, his voice laden with irony, and Crozes couldn’t look him in the eye.

‘I’m sorry, Sime,’ he said.

And Sime went from stillness to fury before his brain could engage in reason. He crossed the room in several long strides and grabbed his superior officer by the shoulders, pulling him from the bed and slamming him hard back against the wall. All the air escaped Crozes’s lungs in a single breath, almost at the same moment as Sime’s bunched fist sank into his gut, causing him to double up. Without any predetermination, Sime’s knee came up into his face, bursting Crozes’s lip on his front teeth and spraying blood all over his naked chest and thighs. He heard Marie-Ange screaming, and Crozes’s voice gurgling through the blood in his mouth. But Sime was gripped by a rage that wouldn’t let him go and he swung Crozes through three hundred and sixty degrees to smash up against the wall again. A chair went flying. The champagne bottle toppled and smashed one of the glasses. Sime swung a fist and caught Crozes on the side of his head. The lieutenant fell to his knees, and only the low, threatening imperative in Marie-Ange’s voice stopped him from going for the kill.

‘Stop right now or you’re a fucking dead man!’

He turned and saw her kneeling on the bed, the sheets and all modesty abandoned now, to be replaced by her standard-issue Glock 26 handgun, held in both hands and levelled at his head.

There were voices outside the hotel room and a frantic banging on the door.

Sime glared at his wife and one-time lover, breathing hard. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’

Her eyes were arctic cold. ‘Try me.’

And suddenly the madness was over, receding like water after a flash flood. Sime looked at Crozes, bloodied and battered and doubled up on the floor, and for a moment he almost felt sorry for him. He wondered why he had been gripped by such rage. People fall in love, after all. For a thousand different reasons. It chooses them. Not the other way around. And then he realised it was their lies that left him feeling so betrayed, so inconsolably angry.

‘For Christ’s sake open up in there!’ he heard a voice coming from the other side of the door. Fists still pounded on it. He stepped over the prone figure of Crozes and opened the door. Thomas Blanc, Arseneau and two other officers were bunched together in the corridor, wide-eyed in amazement. He saw them switch focus to the room behind him. Crozes lying bleeding on the floor, Marie-Ange stark naked on the bed, the Glock still clutched in her hand.

He pushed through the gaping mouths without a word and stalked off down the corridor, lost in a cauldron of bewilderment, regret, anger, hurt. He needed out, he needed air, he needed time to think, to reappraise. The sound of footsteps in pursuit was accompanied by Thomas Blanc’s voice. ‘Sime, Sime. For God’s sake stop, man!’

But Sime ignored him, pushing open the swing door out to reception and startling the night porter, before slamming through the front doors and out into the cold and dark.

He was halfway across the car park, walking blindly into the night, before Blanc caught his arm and forced him to stop. He turned to be confronted by the alarm and incomprehension in Blanc’s eyes, facing him with his own wild stare of what must have seemed like madness.

‘Are you insane, Sime!’ It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. ‘Have you any idea what you just did? Crozes is a senior officer, and you’ve just beaten the crap out of him.’

‘He’s also been sleeping with my wife for God knows how long.’ Sime had no idea what reaction he expected from Blanc, but what he hadn’t anticipated was the embarrassment he saw. His co-interrogator seemed at a loss for words. And the truth dawned on Sime with a sickening sense of humiliation. ‘You knew.’

Blanc looked at the ground as Sime pulled his arm free of his grasp. His discomfort was acute.

‘Which means everyone knew, right?’

Blanc managed to meet his gaze for just a moment before his eyes flickered away again.

‘But no one thought to tell me.’

Blanc sucked in a deep breath. ‘We thought we were doing you a favour, Sime, protecting you. Really.’ There was a plea for understanding in his eyes.

Sime glared at him with anger and dislike. ‘Fuck you,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck you all.’ And he turned and strode off into the dark.

II