‘He’d been sleeping with her.’ It was out before he could stop himself. And immediately wished he could take it back. He felt his face redden.
‘Since before the break-up?’
He nodded.
‘And you just found out?’
‘Yes.’
‘And gave him a beating?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good for you.’
Somehow she seemed to have turned the tables on him. She was the interrogator, he the guilty party defending his actions.
She smiled and said, ‘We’re really not so different then, are we?’ He gave her an odd look. ‘Each of us capable of losing our cool in the face of losing a lover.’ She paused and sighed. ‘You of all people, Mr Mackenzie, should understand what drove me over to Cap aux Meules that night to confront James and the Briand woman.’
His mouth was dry. ‘Did it also drive you to kill him?’
She stared at him for a long time. ‘I think you know the answer to that.’
Duke had tired of waiting for them and wandered back to drop himself in a huff at their feet.
She said, ‘When we first met you thought you knew me.’
He nodded. He wanted to tell her about the diaries. About his dreams. About the little girl called Kirsty whose life his ancestor had saved. The teenage girl he had kissed on a windswept Hebridean island and lost on a quayside in Glasgow. How somehow in his dreams, in his mind, she had become one with the woman who stood before him here on this blustery hill on Entry Island.
She reached out unexpectedly to run fingertips lightly down his cheek and said, ‘You don’t know me at all.’
Some instinct, or some fleeting movement, made him turn his head. He saw the patrolman from Cap aux Meules approaching on the path, a couple of hundred metres away down the hill. Even from here Sime could see his consternation. How bizarrely intimate this moment must have seemed. Sime the detective, Kirsty the murder suspect, standing so close together on the hill, her fingers extended to touch his face.
She took her hand away, and Sime left her to hurry down the hill towards the policeman. Duke struggled to his feet and ran after him.
The young policeman continued up the slope to meet him halfway. He gave Sime the oddest look, but kept his thoughts to himself. ‘Lieutenant Crozes has been trying to reach you, sir.’
‘Why didn’t he call me on my cellphone?’ Sime dug a hand into his pocket to find it, and realised he had never gone back to the incident room to get it. ‘Damnit! I’ll call him back from the phone at the house.’
And with only the most fleeting of backward glances, he headed quickly off down the road with the patrolman towards the summerhouse. Kirsty stood on the prow of the hill watching them go.
He could hear the contained fury in Crozes’s voice. What the hell was he doing on Entry? But he was barely listening. From where Sime stood holding the phone in the living room of the summerhouse, he could see Kirsty walking slowly down the hill. He let Crozes rail at him without response. Until finally the lieutenant ran out of steam and said coldly, ‘We’ll deal with that later. The preliminary report from forensics is in. Lapointe had them do priority DNA testing. They just faxed the results.’
‘And?’ Sime knew it would not be good news.
‘The samples taken from beneath Kirsty Cowell’s fingernails contain skin matching the scratchmarks on her husband’s face.’ He paused, and Sime heard something that sounded almost like pleasure in his voice. ‘Maybe it’s just as well you’re over there, Sime. I want you to arrest her and bring her back here to be formally charged with murder.’
Sime said nothing.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes, Lieutenant.’
‘Good. We’ll see you both back here around six, then.’ He hung up.
Sime stood holding the receiver for a long time before slowly replacing it in its cradle. Through the window he saw that Kirsty had reached the big house now and was walking across the grass towards the summerhouse. Duke had gone to meet her and was gambolling excitedly around her legs, as enthusiastically as his arthritis would allow. Sime turned to find the patrolman looking at him. ‘I’m going to need a witness for this,’ he said. The young man flushed with anticipation. It was clear to him that something previously outside of his experience was about to go down.
Sime stepped out on to the porch as Kirsty climbed the steps. She could tell at once that something had changed. ‘What’s wrong?’
Sime said, ‘Kirsty Cowell, you are under arrest for the murder of James Cowell.’
All the colour drained from her face. ‘What?’ Her shock was clear. Her voice trembling.
‘Do you understand?’
‘I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.’
Sime drew a long breath, aware of the patrolman at his shoulder. ‘You have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. I am taking you back to the police station at Cap aux Meules where we will provide you with a toll-free telephone line to a lawyer referral service if you do not have your own lawyer. Anything you say can be used in court as evidence. Do you understand?’ He waited. ‘Would you like to speak to a lawyer?’
She stood staring at him for a very long time, every conflicting emotion reflected in her eyes. Until she lifted her hand and slapped him hard across the face where just a few minutes earlier she had touched him with tender fingers.
The patrolman stepped in quickly to grab her wrists.
‘Let her go!’ The imperative in Sime’s voice had almost as powerful an effect on the young man as Kirsty’s slap, and he released her immediately, as if she were electrically charged. Sime felt an ache of regret as he met her eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I
He left her in the care of the patrolman while she packed a bag and he went to get the minibus from the harbour. Which gave him plenty of time to think on the walk there and the drive back. But cogent thought did not come easily. From the moment he first set eyes on Entry Island he had felt something ominous in the dark shadow it laid along the horizon. The sense of destiny he had experienced on arrival had now reached some kind of perverse fulfilment. The woman who had become somehow synonymous in his mind with the girl in his dreams and the Ciorstaidh of the diaries had, after all, murdered her husband. And it had fallen on him to arrest her.
Back at the summerhouse he put her bag in the minibus and she slipped sullenly into the passenger seat beside him. They left the patrolman guarding the scene of the crime, and drove in silence across the island. The sun was dipping low in the western sky, edging pink and grey clouds with gold and lying shimmering like lost treasure across the bay.
It was the last time, he knew, that he was likely to set foot on the island, and he let his eyes wander sadly across its gentle green undulations, its colourfully painted houses, and the mountains of lobster creels piled up along the roadside. As the pitted track that passed for a road wound down below the church, he glanced up the shallow slope where headstones punctured the grass. Somewhere up there was the lichen-crusted stone that marked the final resting place of Kirsty’s many-times distant grandmother, and it seemed to him that he could almost feel the old lady’s reproach.
There was a crowd on the jetty to meet the incoming ferry. Sime noticed Owen and Chuck Clarke among them, watching him with sullen eyes. And when the boat had unloaded its cargo of people and goods, they all watched silently as Sime reversed the minibus on to the car deck. Kirsty sat in plain view beside him with dead eyes, a face like stone turning to neither left nor right. This woman who had not left the island for ten years. It could only mean one thing.