He smiled. ‘I didn’t.’ He looked along the ragged line of the cliffs. ‘But there’s a lot of erosion here. Not safe to get too close, I wouldn’t think.’
‘I’m touched by your concern.’ The sarcasm had returned.
He looked at her very directly. ‘I’m only doing my job, Mrs Cowell. I bear you no ill will.’
She gasped her disbelief. ‘Accusing me of killing my husband doesn’t feel like you bear me much good will either.’
‘Just testing the evidence.’ He paused. ‘A pathologist I know once told me that when he performs an autopsy on a murder victim he feels like that person’s only remaining advocate on earth. Someone to find and test the evidence that the body of the deceased has left in his care.’
‘And that’s what you’re doing for James?’
‘In a way, yes. He can’t speak for himself. He can’t tell us what happened. And whatever he might have done, whoever he might have been, he didn’t deserve to die like that.’
She looked at him steadily for a long moment. ‘No, he didn’t.’
An awkward silence settled between them. Then he said, ‘Do you really intend to spend the rest of your life here?’
She laughed. ‘Well. That depends on whether or not you put me in jail.’ He found a pale smile in response. ‘But the truth is, Mr Mackenzie, that whatever I might have said in an emotional moment, I really love this island. I played all over it as a child, I’ve walked every inch of it as an adult. Big Hill, Jim’s Hill, Cherry’s Hill. Pimples on the landscape really, but when you’re young they’re the Alps or the Rockies. The island is your whole world, and anything beyond it far off and exotic. Even the other islands in the Magdalens.’
‘Not an easy place to live, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Depends what you’re used to. We didn’t know anything else. At least, not until we were older. The weather is hard, sure, but even that you accept, because it’s just how it is. The winters are long, and so cold sometimes that the bay freezes over and it’s possible to walk across to Amherst.’ And for his benefit, ‘That’s Havre Aubert.’
‘How come you speak English here when the rest of the islands are francophone?’
‘Not all of them are,’ she said. A gust of wind blew her hair into her face and she carefully drew it aside with her small finger, then shook it back. ‘They speak English at the north end, too. At Grand Entry Island, and Old Harry and GrosseÎle. Old Harry is where James came from originally. But, yes, most of the population of the Magdalen Islands are French-speakers. I guess maybe only 5 or 10 per cent of us speak English.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s our heritage, our culture. And when you’re a minority you tend to protect those things, nurture them, defend them. Like the French minority in Canada.’
Duke had wandered off, sniffing among the grasses, and was very close to the cliff’s edge. She shouted to him, but all he did was raise his head and cast a dispassionate glance in their direction.
‘Come on,’ she said to Sime. ‘If we head back up the path he’ll follow us.’ She smiled. ‘Duke’s made it his lifetime’s work to follow every visitor to the island.’
They walked up along the path, side by side, at a leisurely rate. Anyone watching from a distance might have taken them for old friends. But the silence between them was tense.
She said suddenly, ‘You probably know, but we still use all the English names for the islands here on Entry. Magdalen rather than Madeleine. Cap aux Meules is Grindstone, Havre Aubert is Amherst — well, I already told you that. Havre aux Maisons is known as Alright Island.’ It was as if she felt that by talking about things of no consequence, those things of enormous consequence that were creating the tension, would be somehow dissipated. ‘The whole archipelago is surrounded by shipwrecks. I saw a map once that pinpointed them all. Hundreds of them, all around the coast.’
‘How come they all washed up here?’
‘Who knows? Bad weather, bad luck, and no lighthouse back in the early days. And I suppose we are slap-bang in the middle of the main shipping lane to the St Lawrence River and Quebec City.’ She glanced at him and bit her lip. ‘How the hell do you make polite conversation with someone who thinks you’re a murderer?’
‘That’s not necessarily what I think,’ he said, and as soon as he’d said it, regretted it. Because, on balance, it was what he thought. It just wasn’t what he wanted to think.
She looked at him intently. As if those blue eyes could penetrate his outer defences and reach the truth. ‘Sure,’ she said eventually, unconvinced.
Duke hirpled past them and threw himself into a ditch full of water at the side of the path. He splashed about in it for a while, cooling himself down, then hauled himself out again with difficulty. He shook his coat violently, and sent water spraying all over Kirsty and Sime. She let out a yell and stepped back, almost losing her footing, and Sime was quick to grab her arm and stop her from falling.
She laughed. ‘Damn dog!’ And then her smile faded as she realised that Sime was still holding her. They were both immediately awkward and he let go of her, self-conscious, almost embarrassed by their unexpected physical contact.
They turned and followed Duke as he ran off with renewed vigour to where the road dipped down over the top of the hill. The wind was stronger here. Below them the bay simmered intermittently in flitting sunlight. Cowell’s house stood proud on the edge of the cliffs, the summerhouse where Kirsty had been born just beyond it. The roof of the police patrol car glinted in the sunshine next to Cowell’s beige Range Rover.
‘Don’t you have a car?’ Sime said suddenly.
‘No.’
‘How do you get around?’
‘You don’t need a car on the island. There’s nowhere you can’t walk to.’
‘But James felt the need for one.’
‘He often brought stuff over on the plane with him. I suppose if I’d ever needed one, I could have used his. Except that I don’t drive.’
Sime was surprised. ‘That’s unusual.’
But she didn’t respond, her attention caught by his right hand as he ran it back through his hair. ‘What happened to your hand?’
He looked at it and saw that the knuckles were bruised and grazed, slightly swollen where he had struck Crozes. He pushed it into his pocket, embarrassed. ‘Nothing,’ he said. And to his amazement she reached forward to seize his wrist and pull his hand back out of the pocket so that she could examine it.
‘You’ve been in a fight.’
‘Have I?’
She was still holding his hand, and pushed up an eyebrow. ‘This is a tough island, Mr Mackenzie. There are no policemen here. Men often settle their differences with fists. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen busted knuckles.’ She paused, glancing down again at his hand. ‘And yours weren’t like this yesterday.’
She let him go, and he took his hand back to rub it gently with his other, almost as if trying to hide the damage, and became aware again of the ring with the arm and sword. In spite of a strange compunction to tell her the truth all he said was, ‘It’s a personal matter.’ He avoided her eye.
‘Let me guess. Men don’t usually hit complete strangers, and since you don’t know anyone here it’s probably someone you know. One of your co-workers. A fellow investigator. Am I right?’
Now he met her gaze full on. But still said nothing.
‘Since I don’t see any damage to your face other than the cut you got the other day, it might be fair to assume that you were the aggressor. Which means that you must have had some pretty powerful motivation for attacking a colleague. My guess would be that there’s a woman involved?’ She raised an eyebrow to ask the question. When there was no response she said, ‘And since the only woman on the team is your ex …’