‘Hi, Sime. Fancy meeting you here.’
He blurted, ‘I’m waiting for someone.’
‘Oh?’ A wry smile spread itself across her face and she pushed up one eyebrow. ‘Hot date?’ In contrast to his agitation she seemed unnaturally relaxed.
‘Sort of.’
‘Anyone I’d know?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Can’t be anyone in the force, then. I only seem to know cops these days.’
‘Yeah, me too.’
‘Except for your date.’
Sime tried to seem amused. ‘Yeah. Except for my date.’
A silence settled awkwardly between them and they sipped on their respective plastic lids. She glanced at her watch and Sime stole a look at her. He had never really paid her much attention before. She was just one of the guys, the short hair and boyish figure contributing to that sense of her. But he saw now that there was a wonderful depth to the green of her eyes, a finely angled jawline and rather full lips. At second glance she was really quite attractive. She looked up and caught him watching at her.
‘What time’s your date?’
‘Seven.’
She sighed. ‘Pity. You could have taken me to dinner. I’ve got nothing else to do tonight.’
And suddenly he thought, yes! I would much rather have dinner with you. With someone I didn’t have to pretend with. Someone who already knows me. Who knows I’m a cop, and what that means. He raised his eyes towards the clock on the wall. It was still only 6.55. He stood up. ‘Let’s do that.’
She frowned. ‘Do what?’
‘Have dinner?’
She laughed. ‘What about your date?’
Sime shook his head and glanced nervously towards the door in case she would suddenly turn up. ‘Never liked her much anyway.’ He held out his hand. ‘Come on.’
She laughed again and took it and stood up. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I know a great little place over on Rue Jeanne-Mance.’
They sat and talked that night in a way they never did again. In some strange sense Sime felt suddenly unchained. The wine helped loosen ingrained inhibitions, and he found himself sharing all those little fears and foibles that he had kept locked away from the world, guarding them carefully, because sharing your weaknesses makes you vulnerable. But he didn’t feel at risk, because she unburdened herself too. Told him all about her failed teenage marriage, the uncle who liked to stroke her budding breasts when she was just thirteen, her mother’s battle with alcohol and then breast cancer.
Sime told her about his parents dying when a bridge over the Salmon River collapsed as they were driving across it. About his difficulty socialising with other kids at school. His ineptitude with girls.
All of which, in retrospect, seemed pretty depressing. But they laughed a lot as well. Funny stories accumulated over nearly ten years in the force, and it was late by the time they were on their second digestifs. Sime was feeling mellow, and the alcohol made him bold enough to confess finally that the real reason he had been at Starbucks that night was to meet a woman found by an online dating agency.
Marie-Ange’s smile faded and she looked at him with curious eyes. ‘Seriously?’
He immediately regretted telling her.
‘And you stood the poor woman up without even giving her a chance?’
Sime had a rush of guilt that made it hard to meet her eye. ‘Was that really bad of me?’
She pursed her lips and nodded. ‘I gotta tell you, Sime, it was pretty mean. Especially since I was the woman you stood up.’
Sime’s jaw dropped, and he must have presented such a look of shock that she laughed so much the tears ran down her cheeks. It took him only a moment to realise the truth. That each of them had stood up their blind dates in favour of someone they already knew. And that the someone they already knew had, in fact, been their blind date.
In the end their laughter had forced the owner of the restaurant to ask them to leave. They were annoying the other customers.
They had gone back to Sime’s apartment, and that night had the best sex of their future relationship. Pure lust, like Sime had never known before. They had been married within six months.
But the truth he had learned since then was that you can’t build a whole relationship on the basis of one night. And that what might seem like a good match to a computer doesn’t always work in life.
CHAPTER FIVE
I
The wind was gathering strength out of the south-west, sweeping up over the clifftops and flattening every growing thing in its path. The sun, veiled at first by high cloud, had now been swallowed by storm clouds rapidly approaching across the slate-grey swell of the ocean. But the air was warm, soft on the skin, and Sime sat among the tall grasses bowing all around him, just metres from the edge of the cliff. He could hear the waves breaking below, and had a sense of being fully exposed to the power of nature. Both at one with it, and completely at its mercy. He felt almost ghostlike, insubstantial, lost somewhere in a life gone wrong.
How was it possible that his relationship with Marie-Ange had been so easily found and so painfully lost? Affection exchanged for enmity. The fulfilment he had felt in those heady early days replaced by an aching emptiness. It occurred to him that neither of them had ever really loved the other. It had been need more than love. And that like a hunger satisfied, the need had simply passed.
At the start she had filled a gaping hole in his life. He had known from his early teens that he was somehow different from others. That there was something missing from his life. Something he had never quite identified or understood. And for a few short years it seemed that Marie-Ange had fitted into that missing piece of him, making him complete in some way. For her part, he suspected she had been driven by some mothering instinct, wrapping arms around the little boy lost. Which was no basis for a relationship. And so it had proved.
For a moment he closed his eyes and let the wind caress him. If only he could sleep, he was sure that much of this torture would pass. He was so tempted simply to lie down in the grass, with the sound of the wind and the ocean in his ears, the sense of coming storm still some way distant. But as his lids shut out the light, the face of Kirsty Cowell came to him in the dark. As if she had always been there. Just waiting for him.
‘You all right, Sime?’
The voice, raised above the wind, startled his eyes open and he looked up, heart pounding, to see Lieutenant Crozes standing over him. ‘Sure,’ Sime said. ‘Just listening to the wind.’
Crozes stared out over the ocean. ‘The forecasters say there’s one helluva storm coming.’
Sime followed his gaze to the accumulation of clouds, black, contused and devouring the sky as they approached. ‘Certainly looks like it.’
‘The remnants of Hurricane Jess, apparently.’
Sime had been only vaguely aware of TV news items about the hurricane that had torn up the eastern seaboard of the United States. ‘Really?’
‘Downgraded to storm status now. But they’re calling it a superstorm. It’s going to be touch and go whether we get off the island tonight.’
Sime shrugged. He didn’t much care one way or another. Wherever he laid his head for the night he knew he wouldn’t sleep. ‘How’s the door-to-door going?’
Crozes expelled air through pursed lips. ‘Like getting blood out of a stone, Sime. Oh, everyone’s nice enough. Lots to say but nothing to tell. Not to us, anyway. And no one’s got a bad word about Kirsty Cowell.’
Sime got to his feet, brushing dead grasses from his trousers. ‘Why would they?’
‘Well, they wouldn’t. She’s one of them. An islander born and bred. But although no one’s saying it, seems clear they all think she killed him.’