‘No, she’s fine.’
Aitkens frowned. ‘I thought you people had gone home.’
‘We had,’ Sime said. ‘But I’m not done here yet.’
‘They’re sending her to Montreal,’ Aitkens said, as if Sime wouldn’t know.
‘Were you in court?’
‘Of course. It’s just two minutes from my door.’ He paused. ‘There’s not much evidence against her, you know.’
Sime nodded. ‘I know that.’
Aitkens was taken aback. ‘Really?’
‘I need to talk to you, Monsieur Aitkens.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t really have time.’
‘I’d appreciate it if you’d make some.’ Sime’s tone conveyed the strong impression that it was more than a request. But, all the same, he wondered why Aitkens’s first response had not been to ask what Sime wanted to talk to him about. Almost as if he already knew.
Aitkens said, ‘Well, not out here. Let’s get a coffee.’
*
Most of the shops and restaurants on the main street were closed for the season, but the Café de la Grave was open, yellow light spilling out into the sulphurous afternoon. There were no customers. Just rows of polished wooden tables and painted chairs, wood-panelled walls peppered with colourful childlike paintings of fish and flowers. A menu chalked up on a blackboard had earlier offered Quiche à la Poulet or Penne sauce bolognese à la merguez for lunch. Sime and Aitkens sat by an old upright piano and ordered coffees. Aitkens was ill-at-ease and fidgeted with his fingers on the table in front of him.
‘So what do you want to talk to me about?’ At last the question.
‘Your family history.’
Aitkens swung his head towards Sime, frowning. He thought about it for a moment. ‘Is this an official line of enquiry?’ His tone was hostile. Sime, after all, was the man who had arrested his cousin for murder.
Sime was caught momentarily off-balance, but couldn’t lie. ‘My interest is more personal than professional.’
Now Aitkens tilted his head and squinted at Sime with both suspicion and confusion. ‘What? About my family history?’
‘Well, it’s Kirsty’s more than yours that interests me. But I guess much of it will be shared. She told me that genealogy was something of an obsession of yours.’
‘Not an obsession,’ Aitkens said defensively. ‘A hobby. What the hell else does a man do with his life when he’s not working? The hours I work, and a geriatric father in the hospital, I’m not exactly an eligible bachelor, am I? Winters here aren’t only hard, they’re long and damn lonely.’
‘So how far back have you been able to trace your lineage?’
Aitkens shrugged. ‘Far enough.’
‘As far back as your great-great-great-grandmother?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one buried in the cemetery on Entry Island. Kirsty McKay.’
Aitkens frowned darkly and examined Sime’s face for a long time, until the silence became almost embarrassing. Finally he said, ‘What about her?’
‘What do you know of her origins?’
He smiled now. ‘Well that wasn’t easy, Monsieur Mackenzie. When people have been shipwrecked and start a new life, the past can be pretty damned difficult to uncover.’
Sime felt his heart rate quicken. ‘But you did?’
He nodded. ‘Her ship went down just off Entry Island in the spring of 1848. Driven on to the rocks in a storm. The boat had come from Scotland and was bound for Quebec City. She was the only survivor, pulled out of the water by a family living on the cliffs at the south end of the island. There was no lighthouse back then. Seems she was in a bit of a state. They took her in and nursed her back to health, and in the end she stayed with them, almost like a kind of adopted daughter. In fact, she never left the island and five years later married their son, William.’
Sime said, ‘Which is how she ended up with the name McKay, the same as her parents. Only they weren’t really her parents.’
‘Parents-in-law. But since she had no parents of her own, she was kind of like a real daughter to them.’
Which explained the inscription on the headstone. ‘What happened to her real parents? Did they go down with the boat?’
‘No, she was travelling alone. Apparently she had some kind of short-term memory loss as a result of the trauma, and no real idea at first who she was or where she’d come from. But her memory did eventually come back. In fragments at first. She used to write things down in a notebook as she remembered them. A kind of way of keeping them real. That notebook came all the way down through the family. I found it in a trunk of memorabilia that my father kept in the attic. I’d no idea it was there until after they’d taken him into hospital.’