‘You’ve reviewed the interview tapes already?’ Sime was surprised.
‘What else was I going to do? Couldn’t sleep and it seemed like the best use of the time. I got Blanc out of his bed to set it up for me.’ He glanced a little self-consciously at his junior officer. ‘Guess I’m beginning to learn how it feels to be an insomniac like you.’
Sime lifted the keys from the table and stood up. He drained his mug of coffee. ‘Do you have an address for the cousin?’
‘He lives at a place called La Grave, on the next island down. Île du Havre Aubert. But he’s not there right now.’
Sime cocked an eyebrow. ‘You have been busy.’
‘I want this done and dusted, Sime. And I want us out of here by tomorrow, at the latest.’
‘So if he’s not at home where will I find him?’
‘He’s working the night shift in the salt-mines at the north end of the islands. He’s off at eight.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If you hurry you should be just in time to catch him.’
II
The road to Havre aux Maisons took a diversion to avoid roadworks where they were building a sleek new bridge to link it to Cap aux Meules. Sime drove through water-filled potholes, past shacks that advertised themselves as restaurants, or bars, or nightclubs. Flimsy, storm-battered structures painted in garish colours that belied the seedy night-time entertainment they offered the youth of the islands.
As he drove north through Havre aux Maisons, the land levelled off and the pine plantations and all signs of human habitation disappeared. Roadside reeds were flattened by the wind, and sand from the long, narrow strip of dunes on his right blew in swirls and eddies across the surface of the road. And all the time, sitting out across the bay, the shadow of Entry Island lurked in his peripheral vision.
The sky, at last, was beginning to break up, shredded by the wind to reveal torn strips of blue, and release patches of unusually golden, shallow-angled sunlight to fan out across the islands from the east.
The sea vented its wrath all along the shore, breaking in spume-filled spray over the causeway that linked Cap aux Meules and Île de Point-aux-Loups. Wolf Island was, in fact, a small cluster of islands in the middle of a long sandbar that linked the southern isles with a loop of three large islands at the north end of the archipelago. On his left the gulf stretched away to the unseen North American continent. On his right, the emerald-green waters of the Lagune de la Grande-Entrée were calmer, protected from the surging waters of the storm by a sandbar that ran parallel to the one on which they had built the road.
As he approached the final stretch of the sandbank on the west side, he saw the tanker terminal off to his right, where huge ships docked several times a week to fill their holds with salt. A long shed with a silver roof caught flashes of sunlight from the broken sky. A concrete pier extended out into the lagoon where a red-and-cream tanker was now docked, an elevated length of covered conveyor belt feeding salt into its belly.
The conveyor tracked back along the line of the shore for nearly a kilometre to the tower of the mine shaft itself, where a high fence topped by barbed wire delineated the secure perimeter of the mine. Thirty or forty vehicles were parked along the fringes of a muddy, semi-flooded car park. Sime parked up and found his way into the administration block where a secretary told him that Jack Aitkens would be off shift in about twenty minutes, if he would care to wait. She waved him towards a seat, but Sime said he would wait in his car and walked back out into the wind. It had been hot and claustrophobic in there. And he found it unimaginable that people could spend twelve hours a day underground in dark confined spaces. It would be worse than a prison sentence.
Sime sat in the Chevy with the engine running, hot air blowing on his feet, a window open to let in air. He gazed across the waters of the lagoon towards rock that rose almost sheer out of the sea, and the brightly painted houses that ran along the strip of green that topped it. Hardy folk, these. Fishermen mostly, the descendants of pioneers from France and Britain who had come to claim these uninhabited and inhospitable islands and make them their home. Until their arrival, only the Mi’kmaq Indians had ventured here on seasonal hunting forays.
Sime felt the wind rock his car as it blew in gusts across the open water, fading only a little now in strength. And he let his mind drift back to the diaries. Somehow it seemed important to understand why his subconscious had picked that particular moment from them to animate his unexpected dream.
It was odd. He could only have been seven or eight when their grandmother first read them the stories. Sitting out on the front porch in the shade of the trees during the hot summer holidays, or huddled around the fire on a dark winter’s evening. He had lost count of the number of times he and Annie had asked her to read them again. And being the same age as the young boy described in the first of them, Sime had always remembered it in great detail.