Entry Island(80)

‘Stop right now or you’re a fucking dead man!’

He turned and saw her kneeling on the bed, the sheets and all modesty abandoned now, to be replaced by her standard-issue Glock 26 handgun, held in both hands and levelled at his head.

There were voices outside the hotel room and a frantic banging on the door.

Sime glared at his wife and one-time lover, breathing hard. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’

Her eyes were arctic cold. ‘Try me.’

And suddenly the madness was over, receding like water after a flash flood. Sime looked at Crozes, bloodied and battered and doubled up on the floor, and for a moment he almost felt sorry for him. He wondered why he had been gripped by such rage. People fall in love, after all. For a thousand different reasons. It chooses them. Not the other way around. And then he realised it was their lies that left him feeling so betrayed, so inconsolably angry.

‘For Christ’s sake open up in there!’ he heard a voice coming from the other side of the door. Fists still pounded on it. He stepped over the prone figure of Crozes and opened the door. Thomas Blanc, Arseneau and two other officers were bunched together in the corridor, wide-eyed in amazement. He saw them switch focus to the room behind him. Crozes lying bleeding on the floor, Marie-Ange stark naked on the bed, the Glock still clutched in her hand.

He pushed through the gaping mouths without a word and stalked off down the corridor, lost in a cauldron of bewilderment, regret, anger, hurt. He needed out, he needed air, he needed time to think, to reappraise. The sound of footsteps in pursuit was accompanied by Thomas Blanc’s voice. ‘Sime, Sime. For God’s sake stop, man!’

But Sime ignored him, pushing open the swing door out to reception and startling the night porter, before slamming through the front doors and out into the cold and dark.

He was halfway across the car park, walking blindly into the night, before Blanc caught his arm and forced him to stop. He turned to be confronted by the alarm and incomprehension in Blanc’s eyes, facing him with his own wild stare of what must have seemed like madness.

‘Are you insane, Sime!’ It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. ‘Have you any idea what you just did? Crozes is a senior officer, and you’ve just beaten the crap out of him.’

‘He’s also been sleeping with my wife for God knows how long.’ Sime had no idea what reaction he expected from Blanc, but what he hadn’t anticipated was the embarrassment he saw. His co-interrogator seemed at a loss for words. And the truth dawned on Sime with a sickening sense of humiliation. ‘You knew.’

Blanc looked at the ground as Sime pulled his arm free of his grasp. His discomfort was acute.

‘Which means everyone knew, right?’

Blanc managed to meet his gaze for just a moment before his eyes flickered away again.

‘But no one thought to tell me.’

Blanc sucked in a deep breath. ‘We thought we were doing you a favour, Sime, protecting you. Really.’ There was a plea for understanding in his eyes.

Sime glared at him with anger and dislike. ‘Fuck you,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck you all.’ And he turned and strode off into the dark.

II

The harbour was dominated at its south side by a large rock that towered over the quays. A wooden staircase zigzagged its way up to a viewpoint at the top. Sime stood there, fully exposed to the wind, having made the long slow climb with leaden legs. He had walked aimlessly in an almost trancelike state during all the hours of the night, before pitching up at the harbour. There he had stood at the water’s edge staring out across the bay towards Entry Island. Somehow he always seemed drawn back to it. Only a handful of lights twinkled faintly in the distance to betray its presence in darkness.

Now he stood clutching the wooden rail on the viewpoint, braced against the wind that powered out of the south-west. He saw the lights of the islands spread out below him, stretching away to north and south. He knew that sunrise was not far away, and for the first time fully understood the saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn.

While walking blindly through the night he had forced himself to think about nothing, entering a nearly zen-like state in which he had allowed none of the events of the last few days to impinge on his consciousness. Only now, overtaken by total exhaustion, did his resolve crumble, permitting those thoughts to flood his brain.

He replayed his life of the last few months in an endless loop, picking up for the first time on all the little details he had missed. The tell-tale signs he had ignored, consciously or otherwise. It seemed to him, looking back, that Marie-Ange and Crozes must have been having an affair for well over a year. She had converted her guilt into an anger that allowed her to blame him. Her infidelity had become his fault. If she had been forced into the arms of a lover, Sime was to blame. It explained so much. How affection had turned to contempt, intimacy to impatience and then anger.