Entry Island(109)

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 …’

‘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?’