‘Really?’ Sime hardly dared believe it.
‘I think so, yes. Come on over and have a coffee and I’ll see if I can find it.’
*
As he poured them both coffee from a freshly plunged cafetière, the owner of the auberge said, ‘Your ancestor’s land and his house were about half a mile out of town on the old road south. All gone now, of course. The fella he came here with never developed his, apparently.’
Sime looked up, interested. ‘The Irishman?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Very unusual for an Irishman to settle in these parts.’
‘But he didn’t, you said. He never developed his land.’
‘No.’
‘So what happened to him?’
The man shrugged. ‘No idea. The story is that the two of them went off lumberjacking one year, and only one of them came back. But I don’t really know.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see if I can find that photograph.’
From his seat in the window Sime sipped his coffee and gazed with interest around the dining room. The walls were lined by old photographs and stags’ heads on one side, and shelves cluttered with bric-a-brac and memorabilia on the other. An antique coffee machine sat on an equally cluttered serving counter and Sime could see through a hatch into the kitchen beyond. The auberge, the owner had told him, was constructed on the site of the original Gould store, built by an émigré from the Scottish mainland.
He returned now with an album full of faded photographs of people long dead and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘There,’ he said, stabbing a finger at a photograph so bleached by time that it was hard to make out the figure in it.
But Sime saw that it was the portrait of an old man with a long beard sitting on a bench. His hair was pure white and swept back across his head, long and curling around his collar. He wore a dark jacket and trousers. A waistcoat and white shirt were only just discernible. He was leaning forward slightly, both hands resting on the top of a walking stick that he held upright in front of him, his right hand over his left. And there, on his ring finger, only just apparent, was the signet ring that Sime now wore on his.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
I
The flight from Quebec City to the Madeleine Isles took just under two hours in the small commuter aircraft. Sime sat next to an island woman whose two teenage sons fidgeted in the seats in front. They wore baseball caps with upturned brims, listening to iPods and playing computer games. She raised semi-regretful eyebrows at Sime, as if apologising for the behaviour of all teenagers. As if he might have cared.
Some time into the flight he closed burning eyes and very nearly drifted off, before being startled awake by an announcement from the pilot. Above the roar of the engines Sime heard him apologising for any turbulence experienced, and informing passengers that there was a storm on the way. Not on the same scale as the remnants of Hurricane Jess, which had so marked Sime’s first visit. But it was likely to hit the islands, the pilot said, with strong to gale-force winds and high precipitation later in the day.
When the plane began its final descent towards Havre aux Maisons, it banked left and Sime saw the storm clouds accumulating in the south-west. And as it swung around for landing, he caught a glimpse once more of Entry Island standing sentinel at the far side of the bay. A dark, featureless shadow waiting for him in the grey, pre-storm light. He had thought, just a matter of days ago, that he had seen the last of it. But now he was back. To try to resolve what seemed like an insoluble mystery. To right what he believed to be a miscarriage of justice. Something that, in all likelihood, would lose him his job.
The thought filled him with the same frightening sense of destiny he had experienced on that first visit.
*
He picked up a rental car at the airport and as he drove along the Chemin de l’Aéroport to join Highway 199 South, the first drops of rain hit his windshield. Worn wipers smeared them across a greasy surface, and he blinked as if that might clear the glass. But he was just fatigued.
His car bumped and splashed through the potholes on the loop of road that bypassed the work on the new bridge, and he crossed over to Cap aux Meules on the old, rusted box-girder construction that had served the islanders for two generations.
By the time he got to the offices of the Sûreté de Police, the rain was blowing across the bay on the edge of a wind that was gaining in strength.
Sergeant Enquêteur Aucoin was surprised to see him. ‘She just got back half an hour ago from the Palais de Justice on Havre Aubert,’ he said as they walked down the hall. ‘The judge couldn’t make it, so it was all done with video cameras. She pled not guilty of course.’