Entry Island полностью

I see the quiet determination that sets the line of her jaw. ‘They’ll not catch you,’ she says, and she turns to the trap and opens the trunk at the rear of it. There are two small suitcases inside it. She pulls one out and opens it on the ground. ‘I brought some of George’s clothes for you, and a pair of his boots. They might be a little big, but they’ll do. You can’t travel looking the way you do.’

I look at the folded trousers, and the jacket, and the pressed shirt in the case. And George’s shining black boots. And I can only imagine how he would have felt at the thought of me stepping into them. ‘I can’t travel at all,’ I tell her.

Her face creases in a frown of incomprehension. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t leave my mother and my sisters.’

‘Simon, you told me yourself they are probably already on the boat. There’s nothing you can do.’

I close my eyes and want to shout out loud. She is right, of course, but I find it next to impossible to accept.

She grabs my arm and forces me to look at her. ‘Listen, Simon. The Heather is bound for a place called Quebec City. It’s somewhere on the eastern seaboard of Canada. If we can get to Glasgow, then I have more than enough money to pay our passage on the next boat to Quebec ourselves. Once we get there, there’s bound to be shipping records or something. You’re sure to be able to track them down. But we’ve got to go. Now. We need to be on a sailing to the mainland before the police come after you.’

He woke up startled, feelings of pain and regret following him from the dream to his waking consciousness like a hangover. The dream itself had unfolded just as he remembered the telling of the story, but his years of life experience since its reading had coloured it with images and emotions he could not have known as a young boy. And once again Kirsty Cowell had been Ciorstaidh, and he his own ancestor.

Light leaked in all around the drawn curtains of his room and he checked the time. It was a little after seven, so he had not slept long.

These events from his ancestor’s life were haunting him now with increasing frequency. When they weren’t consciously in his thoughts, his subconscious was dredging them up to fill brief moments of sleep. It seemed there was no escape.

The clearing of Baile Mhanais and his running away with Ciorstaidh had somehow brought him full circle. Back to that first dream, and their separation on the quayside at Glasgow. And that’s what filled his mind now. But with a sense of something missing. Although he could not think what. He forced himself to replay the events of that fateful day when the Eliza had carried Simon off to the New World, leaving Ciorstaidh behind in the old. The promise his ancestor knew he could never keep. Just as he had dreamt it. Just as he remembered it in the telling from all those years before. And yet still, he knew, there was something he’d forgotten. Something lost in time and just out of reach.

A knock on the door dispersed the dream and its afterthoughts, and his recollection of events the night before came flooding back to replace them. Depression fell on him like snow.

The knock came again. More insistent this time.

Sime felt battered, his eyes full of sleep and still barely focusing. He swung his legs out of bed, his clothes crumpled and damp with sweat, and slipped his feet into his shoes.

‘Okay!’ he shouted as the knocking started again. He swept his hair back out of his face and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before opening the door.

Crozes stood in the hall. For a moment Sime wondered if he was going to attack him. But he was a pool of dark stillness. The cut on his lip had scabbed over, and there was bruising all around his left eye and cheek. ‘Can I come in?’

Sime stood back, holding the door wide, and Crozes pushed past him into the room. As Sime closed the door Crozes turned to face him. ‘We can play this one of two ways,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Sime could determine nothing from expressionless eyes. The pallor beneath Crozes’s tan turned his skin almost jaundice-yellow.

‘Either we behave as if nothing happened and we just get on with our lives.’ He hesitated. ‘Or I bring you up on a charge of assault which will see you immediately suspended, and almost certainly dismissed.’

Sime looked at him thoughtfully, his brain slowly clearing. ‘Well, let me tell you why you’re not going to do that.’ Crozes waited. Impassive. ‘One, you’d have to admit that you’d been screwing the wife of a fellow officer. Two, you’d have to suffer the humiliation of every single person in the department knowing how I beat the shit out of you.’ Still Crozes waited. ‘End to both of our careers. And I don’t think either of us wants that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that we can play this one of two ways.’ He got an almost perverse pleasure from throwing Crozes’s words back in his face. ‘We can make like nothing happened.’

Crozes contained his anger well. ‘Or?’