‘Did you know he was coming?’
She hesitated only briefly. ‘No,’ she said.
He glanced at the medical report on his knees. ‘You realise the fact that he’d just left you could be interpreted as a motive for murder.’
‘Not by anyone who knows me.’ It was a plain, simple statement of fact. He looked at her for a moment and realised that this was meant for him. And she was right. He knew not the first thing about her.
He lifted the medical report from his knees. ‘It says here there is ample evidence of bruising and scratching about your body, as if you’d been in a fight.’
‘I was in a fight! For my life.’ Anger flared briefly in her eyes. ‘It’s hardly surprising I’m scratched and bruised. And I have no motive for murder, Mr Mackenzie. If you want to know the truth, I’d grown pretty much to hate the man. I would never have wanted to see him hurt, but I was happy that he was gone.’
Sime raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘Why?’
‘When we first met he pursued me …’ she searched for the right word, ‘relentlessly. I was his obsession. He sent me flowers and chocolates, wrote me letters. Phoned me a dozen times a day. He used his wealth to try to impress me, his passion to seduce me. And like an idiot I fell for it. Flattered by his attention, all the grand gestures. He swept me off my feet. I had just graduated from university. I was young, impressionable. And coming from the island, probably not very sophisticated, certainly not very experienced. So when he proposed to me, how could I refuse?’
She shook her head in sad recollection.
‘Marry in haste, they say, and repent at leisure. Well, I certainly had plenty of time for that. A real relationship’s based on trust and understanding, the sharing of little things. Moments of happiness and laughter. Realising you’ve both just had the same thought, or were about to say the same thing. James and I shared nothing, Mr Mackenzie, except the same space. And even that, less and less often. I grew to realise that his emotions were without substance. His obsession was with himself, not me. He’d be telling me about some big contract he’d signed, some export deal to the US, and I’d realise he was watching his own reflection in the window as he told me. Playing to his own imagined gallery. Posing for photographs that weren’t being taken. He was in love with the idea of me, but I was just another trophy in a life that was all about him. His image. His perception of how others saw him.’
Lightning forked out of the sky across the gulf, and the distant rumble of thunder punctuated the silence in the room. Sime waited for her to go on.
‘You must understand that when I found out that he was having an affair, my overwhelming emotion was one of relief. Of course I was hurt. How could I not feel some sense of betrayal? But when he left, it was as if I had got my life back again.’
And Sime remembered Marie-Ange’s words: Leaving you was the best thing I ever did. You have no idea how free I feel.
‘He was gone, Mr Mackenzie. Why would I want to kill him?’
After the interview Sime left Blanc to dismantle their equipment, and found Kirsty Cowell standing out on the stoop. The rain was blowing horizontally off the gulf and into the porch. But she didn’t seem to mind. She stood facing the wind and rain, something defiant in her stance, arms folded, face lifted slightly, rainwater running off it like tears. He stood beside her and felt the rain in his own face.
‘It’s going to be bad,’ she said, without turning to look at him.
‘So I’m told.’ The roar of the sea breaking over rocks at the foot of the south-facing cliffs below was almost deafening, and he had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘I’d like you to stay here tonight. Unless there’s somewhere else you want to go.’ He nodded towards the house that Cowell had built. ‘That’s off-limits.’
‘I’ll stay here.’
‘An officer will be posted in the big house overnight.’
She turned to look at him. ‘Am I a suspect?’
‘You’re not under arrest, if that’s what you mean. The officer will be there to maintain the integrity of the crime scene.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you have any friends, or relatives, that you’d like to come and stay with you?’
She shook her head. ‘I have plenty of acquaintances, Mr Mackenzie, but I have never made friends easily. And my only surviving relative is my cousin Jack. But he lives over on Havre Aubert and works shifts in the salt-mine up north. We really have very little contact, and almost nothing in common.’
Again she turned her gaze on him, and he found it hard to stop himself feeling some kind of emotional response.
‘I’m not going to leave the island, if that’s what you’re worried about. I haven’t left it in more than ten years, and I have no intention of leaving it now.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why won’t you leave the island?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I had to, of course, when I was younger. When my parents sent to me secondary school on Prince Edward Island. And then again when I went to university in Lennoxville. Which was fine, as long as my folks were still here. But my mom died during my final year. Cancer. And my dad went not long after. Just couldn’t face life without her, and gave up the fight. I haven’t been off the island since I buried him back there in the churchyard.’
She smiled. The first one Sime had seen. But it was sad.
‘It used to drive James mad. Oh, in the beginning he thought it was delightfully eccentric. Exotic, even. The two of us holed up here together, him flying off to conduct his business wherever it took him, then returning to this love nest he had built for us.’ She glanced wistfully towards the big house. ‘Where his love would always be waiting. The one constant he could always rely on.’ She turned her back on the weather and leaned against the rail, gazing up at the house where she had been born. ‘What he didn’t know was that when he was gone I hardly ever slept in his bed. I came over here. Like coming back to the womb. There is comfort and love in this house, Mr Mackenzie. The house that James built is cold and empty. Which is how it made me feel.’
She sighed deeply and turned to look at Sime once more.
‘Of course, he tired of my eccentricity soon enough. It frustrated him, became a source of friction. He liked to travel, you see. To dine in fine restaurants. And he had always wanted to go to Europe. None of which was possible with a stupid wife who wouldn’t leave a tiny island in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence.’
She stopped now, searching his face, a slightly puzzled look creasing around her eyes.
‘Why is it so easy to talk to you?’
Sime smiled. ‘That’s my job.’
‘And that’s why I am telling you things I’ve never told anyone in my life?’
His eyes never wavered from hers. ‘You still haven’t told me why you won’t leave the island.’
Her eyes drifted away then, to find focus somewhere in her thoughts. ‘Maybe that’s because I can’t.’
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘Can’t, Mr Mackenzie. You see, I have no real idea why. It’s just a feeling I have. Very powerful. Something inside me that I can’t explain. My mother was the same. Hated to leave the island. And it killed her in the end. She wouldn’t go over to Cap aux Meules to see the doctor, so they didn’t find the cancer until it was much too late.’ She refocused on her interrogator. ‘It’s like …’ she searched for words to give form to the thought, ‘… like I’m waiting for something. And if I leave I might miss it.’
He raised his right hand to sweep wet hair back from his forehead and saw more than heard her gasp. She reached out to take his hand in both of hers and turn the back of it towards her. She canted her head to one side and a frown formed between her brows.