The stooped figure of Sergeant Superviseur Jacques Lapointe emerged from the tiny cockpit clutching a sheaf of papers. He was the man who would facilitate everything. Accommodation, transport, all their technical requirements. And it was Lapointe who would accompany the body of the victim back to Montreal for autopsy in the basement of 1701 Rue Parthenais. He was an older man, somewhere in his mid-fifties, with big-knuckled arthritic hands and a spiky black moustache shot through with silver.
‘Okay.’ He raised his voice to be heard above the roar of the engines. ‘I’ve booked us into the Auberge Madeli on the Île du Cap aux Meules. That’s the main administrative island, and it’s from there that the ferry leaves for Entry. About an hour for the crossing.’ He consulted his notes. ‘The airport’s on Havre aux Maisons, linked to Cap aux Meules by bridge, apparently. Anyway, the local cops’ll meet us there with a minibus, and it looks like we’ll be just in time to catch the first ferry of the day.’
‘You mean they’d have sailed without us?’ Lieutenant Daniel Crozes raised an eyebrow. The team leader was almost the same age as Sime, but a little taller and possessed of dark good looks. Somehow he always managed to maintain a tan. Quite a feat during the long, cold Quebecois winters. Sime was never quite sure if it derived from a bottle or a sunbed.
‘Not on your life!’ Lapointe grinned. ‘It’s the only way of getting a vehicle over there. I told them I’d sink the fucking thing if they didn’t hold it for us.’ He inclined his head to one side. ‘Still, it looks like we won’t be disrupting the schedules. And it does no harm to keep the locals on side.’
‘What do we know about Entry Island, Jacques?’ Crozes asked.
The big man pulled on his moustache. ‘Not a lot, Lieutenant. Main industry’s fishing. Dwindling population. All English-speakers. Fewer than a hundred, I think.’
‘One less now,’ Crozes said, and there was some muted laughter.
Sime glanced across the aisle and saw Marie-Ange smiling. With her short, brown, blonde-streaked hair and lean, athletic figure, there was something almost boyish about her. But nothing masculine in her liquid green eyes, or the full red lips she stretched across the white teeth of that disarming smile. She caught him looking at her, and the smile immediately vanished.
He turned back to the window and felt his ears pop as the small aircraft banked to the right and began its descent. For a moment he was dazzled by a flash of red sunlight reflecting off the ocean, before the aircraft banked again and he saw the Îles de la Madeleine for the first time. A string of big and small islands linked by causeways and sandbanks, lying on an axis that ran from south-west to north-east. Oddly, it formed an overall shape not unlike a fish-hook, and was perhaps around sixty kilometres in length.
As they turned to make their final descent towards the airstrip on the Île du Havre aux Maisons, the pilot told them that if they looked out to their right they would see Entry Island sitting on its own on the east side of the Baie de Plaisance.
Sime saw it for the first time, silhouetted against the rising sun and lying along the horizon with its two distinctive humps like some toppled Easter Island statue, almost lost in a pink early morning mist that rose from the sea. And quite unexpectedly he felt a shiver of disquiet down his spine.
III
Sime stood stamping on the quayside, breath billowing about his head in the early morning light as Lapointe reversed their minibus on to the Ivan-Quinn ferry. Flight cases packed with their equipment were strapped to the roof. Sime wore jeans, leather boots and a hooded cotton jacket, and stood a little apart from the others. Not a space that the casual observer might have noticed, but to him it felt like a rift as deep as the Grand Canyon. And it was more than just language that separated them. Blanc crossed the divide to offer him a cigarette. Had he known him better, he would have known better. But Sime appreciated the gesture.
‘Gave it up,’ he said.
Blanc grinned. ‘Easiest thing in the world.’
Sime cocked a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Is it?’
‘Sure. I’ve done it hundreds of times.’
Sime smiled and they watched in silence for a while as Lapointe manoeuvred into the tight, two-vehicle car deck. He glanced at his co-interrogator. Blanc was six inches smaller than Sime, and carrying a good deal more weight. He had a head of thick, curly black hair balding on top, a monk’s tonsure in the making. ‘How’s your English?’ Sime said.
Blanc pulled a face. ‘I understand it okay. But I don’t speak it so good.’ He nodded his head vaguely beyond the harbour wall. ‘I hear these Entry islanders refuse to speak French.’ He snorted. ‘I’m glad you’re doing the talking.’ Sime nodded. Blanc would sit with two monitors and a recorder at the end of a cable in another room and take notes while Sime conducted the interviews on camera. Everything was recorded these days.