Entry Island

I

It was Arseneau who met Sime and Blanc at the harbour with the minibus and the news that they had found Norman Morrison.

The wind had felt much stronger on the return crossing and now, as they turned up Chemin Mountain at the end of Main Street, they saw the crowd on the clifftop buffeted by it. A dozen or more police and civilian vehicles were clustered around the Cowell House. Arseneau parked on the road just beyond them and the three detectives walked across the grass to the fence where the crowd was gathered. Perhaps twenty islanders, and several uniformed police officers from Cap aux Meules.

Sime glanced towards the summerhouse and saw a pale-faced Kirsty watching from the porch. He felt a wave of disillusion wash over him and knew that very soon he would have to face her with her lies.

A gate opened on to narrow concrete steps set into the angle of the cliffs, an incongruous grey against the red of the stone. They led down at a steep angle to a tiny jetty, partially formed by a natural arc of rock, and augmented by the same interlocking concrete blocks that made up the breakwater at the harbour. A blue-and-white four-person Seadoo Challenger jet launch was secured to rusted iron rings by weathered ropes and covered over by canvas. It rose and fell violently on the incoming swell. A group of officers wearing orange life jackets was making its way with difficulty across the adjoining outcrop of rocks, carrying among them the lifeless form of Norman Morrison. It brought to Sime’s mind the image of his ancestor’s father being carried back from the deer hunt. When they finally got to the jetty they laid the body down on the concrete, and seawater foamed out of his mouth and back across his face into open eyes.

Sime could see Crozes down there with the nurse and Aucoin and Marie-Ange. He pushed through the silent group of spectators and started off down the steps. Blanc followed. It was exposed here and he felt the wind yanking at his jacket and trousers and flattening his curls.

The nurse was wearing jeans and a yellow anorak and was crouched over the corpse as they got to the jetty. Morrison had horrific multiple injuries. Most of the back of his head was missing. His skin was bleached white, flesh bloated and straining against what was left of his pullover and jeans. From the abnormal lie of his limbs it appeared that both of his legs and one arm were broken. One shoe was missing, revealing a distended foot that bulged through a hole in his sock.

The nurse stood up. She was unnaturally white, her skin almost blue around the eyes. She turned to Crozes. ‘Impossible for me to tell you how he died.’ She had to raise her voice above the wind and the sound of the sea breaking all around them. ‘But injuries like that … I can only think he must have fallen off the cliff. And from the state of the body I’d say he’s probably been in the water since the night he went missing.’

Crozes flashed a quick look at Sime then turned back to the nurse. ‘No way he was alive last night, then?’

‘Not a chance.’

‘What in God’s name was he doing over here during a storm?’ Marie-Ange said.

No one had any answers. Crozes was grim. ‘Better get him bagged up and over to the airport. The sooner we get an autopsy the better.’ And he turned to Marie-Ange. ‘I want to take apart that room of his up in the attic. Piece by piece.’

II

The stillness of Mrs Morrison’s sitting room was broken only by the wind whistling around the windows and the sound of a mother softly sobbing for her dead child. The sky outside had grown heavy and the only light in the room, as before, was reflected off all its polished surfaces.

On the drive over, Blanc briefed Crozes on their interview with Ariane Briand, and the lieutenant almost smiled. He looked at Sime. ‘I’ll sit in with Thomas at the monitors when you interview her,’ he said. ‘Be interesting to hear how the lamenting widow talks her way out of this one.’ But first there was the matter of the man-boy found dead in the water below her house.

Mrs Morrison sat wringing her hands in her armchair by the cold of the dead fire. ‘I don’t understand,’ she kept saying. ‘I just don’t understand.’ As if understanding might somehow bring back her son.

Sime and Crozes sat uncomfortably on the settee, and Blanc emerged from the kitchen with a cup of tea for the grieving mother. He set it down on the coffee table beside her, on top of the book she was reading. ‘Here you are, Madame Morrison,’ he said. But Sime doubted if she was even aware of him. He sat in the armchair opposite.

Upstairs, Marie-Ange and her crime scene assistant were making a forensic examination of Norman Morrison’s bedroom.

Sime said, ‘You told us he’d never run off like this before.’

‘Never.’

‘But he was in the habit of wandering around the island?’

‘He went walking a lot. He liked the open air, and he told me once he loved the sting of the rain in his face when it blows in on a strong south-westerly.’

‘Did he have any friends?’

She stole a glance at him through her tears. ‘Not since the children stopped coming. Folk his own age tended to avoid him. Embarrassed, I suppose. And some of the teenagers used to tease him. He got upset when they did that.’

‘He was upset, you said, the night he went missing.’

She nodded.

‘Because of Mr Cowell’s murder.’

‘He didn’t care about Mr Cowell. It was Mrs Cowell he was concerned about.’

‘Do you think he might have gone to try and see her?’

She tensed at the question, and avoided Sime’s eye. ‘I have no idea where he went, or why.’

‘But he was found at the foot of the cliffs below her house. So he must have gone there for a reason.’

‘I suppose he must.’

Sime thought for a moment. To discover the motivation of a man with the mind of a twelve-year-old was not an easy thing, and his mother, he felt, was being less than helpful. ‘Did he ever go out at night? After dark, I mean.’

Mrs Morrison turned towards the cup of tea that Blanc had made, as if aware of it for the first time. She lifted it to her lips to take a sip, holding it in both hands, and made the slightest shrug of her shoulders. ‘He wasn’t in the habit of asking my permission.’

‘You mean he did go out after dark?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I am in my bed at ten sharp every night, Mr Mackenzie. And Norman at times had trouble sleeping. I know he worked on his ceiling into the small hours some nights. He might have gone out for a breath of air from time to time.’ She sucked in her lower lip to stop it trembling and fight back more tears. ‘But I wouldn’t know.’

Crozes said, ‘Was Norman depressed, Mrs Morrison?’

She seemed puzzled. ‘Depressed?’

‘You said when the children stopped coming he retreated into the world of his little universe upstairs.’

‘He wasn’t depressed, sir. He just refocused his life. As you do. As I did when my husband died.’

‘So when you say he was upset, you wouldn’t describe him as suicidal?’

Now she was shocked. ‘Good God, no. Norman would never have taken his own life. Such a thing would never have entered his mind!’

A soft knocking at the door brought all their heads around. Marie-Ange stood tentatively in the hall at the open door. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something you should see.’

‘Excuse me, madame,’ Crozes said, and he got up to go out to the hall.

‘Simon, too.’ Marie-Ange glanced beyond him to her estranged husband, and Sime saw the most peculiar look on her face. He stood up immediately.

They left Blanc with Mrs Morrison and climbed up into the roof of the house. Marie-Ange had brought in crime scene lights and Norman’s bedroom was lit up like a film set. Sime and Crozes slipped on plastic shoe covers and latex gloves before entering. It was stiflingly hot up here, and in the glare of the lights the colours of Norman’s little universe seemed unnaturally lurid.

The floor had been cleared, and items laid out in some kind of sequence on the bed. Soft toys and model trains, and Norman’s dismembered dolly, had been put into plastic bags.

Marie-Ange said, ‘I haven’t touched the ceiling yet. But we’ve been photographing it in some detail.’ She glanced at Sime. ‘There’s stuff here that’s only apparent when you start examining it minutely. Stuff that seems like it’s just a part of the fabric of it until you look more closely.’ She used a pair of sprung plastic tweezers as a pointer. ‘You see this little group of houses here …’ She indicated a semicircle of terraced houses around a circular area of grass, like a small park. It was fenced off from the street, and the plastic figures of several upside-down children were gathered around a bonfire. It glowed red at its centre, with a tiny circle of stones around it. 3D smoke had been created by cleverly threading puffs of cotton wool on to a piece of shaped wire that was almost invisible.

Crozes and Sime peered at it closely to try to see what it was they weren’t seeing.

Very delicately, Marie-Ange caught a length of fencing with the tips of her tweezers and gently worked it free of the Plasticine. She held it up for the two men to look at. It was a hair clasp, a small arc of comb, the teeth of which had made up the fence posts. ‘There’s more of them,’ she said, and dropped it into Crozes’s outstretched hand for him to look at. ‘Four in total. But here’s the really interesting thing …’

She turned back to the ceiling, reaching up with her tweezers to invade the embers of the bonfire with the tip of them. The stones around the glow appeared to be tiny moulded pieces of Blu-tack. She worked the tweezers, trying to catch hold of something hidden beneath the Blu-tack. Finally she found what she was looking for and moved the tweezers gently back and forth, to pull away the red glow at the heart of the fire. Revealing something much larger than the circle of it which had been exposed. An oval of semiprecious stone set in gold, its coiled-up chain concealed beneath the Plasticine. She turned, and with her free hand took hold of Sime’s right hand so that the pendant and his signet ring could be viewed side by side. The arm and sword engraved in each stone were identical. Sime felt a shiver run through him.

III

He emptied the contents of the plastic bag on to the glass tabletop in the summerhouse and looked up to see her reaction. It was clear that Kirsty was shocked. And it was evident to Sime that she was sleeping as little as he was. She seemed to have aged in just three days. The hollows of her face a little deeper, the shadows a little darker. Even the startling blue of her eyes seemed to have lost its lustre.

He leaned over to angle one of the interview cameras down to focus on the items scattered across the table. ‘Do you recognise these?’

She went straight to the pendant, lifting it up to run delicate fingers over the engraving of the arm and sword. ‘I told you it was identical. Let me see?’ And she reached for his hand and his signet ring to make the comparison. ‘Where did you get these?’

‘Are they all yours?’ Along with the pendant there were two pairs of earrings, the four hair clasps used to make the fence, a necklace of paste diamonds that Norman had set along the centre of a road like cat’s eyes, a bracelet used to contain a small lake.

She nodded. ‘Where were they?’

‘Did you ever see Norman Morrison’s little universe on his bedroom ceiling?’

‘Not personally, no. But everyone knew about it. I think a lot of people went to see it, just out of curiosity.’ She frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with my things?’

‘They were all embedded in the Plasticine, a part of his little universe, Mrs Cowell. Unrecognisable for what they were, but performing one kind of landscape function or another.’ He paused. ‘Do you have any idea how they came to be in his possession?’

Her consternation was evident. She was at a complete loss. ‘I … I don’t know. He must have taken them from the house.’

‘When we talked about the missing photograph you said he’d never been in the house.’

‘He hadn’t.’ She caught herself, frustrated by the contradict ion. ‘At least, not to my knowledge.’

‘You think he broke in one night when your husband was away on business and you were sleeping over here?’

‘He wouldn’t have had to break in. The door’s never locked. And he couldn’t have taken them all at once. I’d have noticed. He must have been in the house several times over a period.’ Her voice caught in her throat, and she fought to hold back tears. ‘Poor Norman.’ She looked up. ‘What on earth was he doing over here on the night of the storm?’

‘His mother said he was worried about you.’

She put her hand on her chest and closed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘I never realised the obsession ran so deep.’ She looked at Sime. ‘What happened to him, do you think?’

Sime shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he came over here to see that you were okay. Maybe he didn’t realise there was a cop in the big house. Maybe he got spooked and lost his way in the dark. It was quite a storm. Well, you know that. And he must have been walking blind in it.’

She let her head fall forward to stare in some distress at the items on the table that he had stolen from her to be a part of his secret world. ‘So sad.’

Sime reset the camera to focus on Kirsty once more and sat down facing her in what had become his usual seat. It was raining outside now, and though not dark yet, there was very little light left in the day.

She looked up with a weary expression of resignation on her face. ‘More questions?’

He nodded and plunged straight in. ‘Why didn’t you tell us that you had paid a visit to the Briand home the night before the murder?’

Colour rose on her cheeks and she took a moment to answer. ‘Because I knew it would influence your interpretation of events on the night of the murder itself.’

‘Your version of events.’

She half-lifted an eyebrow. ‘See what I mean?’

‘And you didn’t think we would find out?’

‘I wasn’t exactly thinking straight about anything. To be honest it seemed irrelevant to me. All that mattered was what happened that night. Whatever had unravelled, or been said the night before, was beside the point.’

‘Unravelled?’ Sime frowned. ‘That seems a strange word to use.’

‘Does it?’ And she thought about it herself. ‘Maybe that’s because it describes the way I felt. Like I was unravelling.’

‘You told me that you were glad to discover James was having an affair. That it brought to an end a situation with which you were deeply unhappy.’

‘I know what I told you.’

‘But that wasn’t true.’

‘It was!’ Indignation flared briefly in her eyes.

‘Then how do you explain your behaviour? Turning up at Ariane Briand’s door, rampaging about her house looking for James?’

‘Rampaging? Is that how she described it?’

‘How would you describe it?’

She let her eyes drop to her hands in her lap. ‘Pathetic,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s what it was. What I was. Sad and pathetic. Everything I told you about the way I felt was true. But I also felt hurt, and humiliated.’ She looked up again, and he thought he saw an appeal for understanding in her eyes. ‘I’d been drinking that night.’ And now he saw her shame. ‘It’s not something I’m in the habit of doing. So it didn’t take much to tip me over the edge. You know, sitting alone here in the dark, thinking about all the wasted years, remembering every little thing he’d said, all his grand gestures and promises, and wondering if Ariane Briand was the first, or just the latest in a long succession. All those business trips away. I wanted to know. I wanted to confront him.’

‘So you took the boat that you keep at the jetty below the cliffs?’

She nodded. ‘It was pure madness. I’m not great with boats at the best of times. But the alcohol had me all fired up and I didn’t really care. If the weather had been worse I’d probably never have made it. James would still be alive, and my body would have been found washed up on a beach somewhere.’ She was looking in his direction, but he doubted that she saw him. She was somewhere else, reliving the madness. ‘I was, literally, unravelling.’ And suddenly she jumped focus and her eyes seared into him. ‘I’m not proud of myself, Mr Mackenzie. God knows what was going through my mind, or what kind of emotional state I was in. I just wanted to have it out with him. Face to face. Clear the air. I just wanted to know. Everything.’

‘And when he wasn’t there you turned on the next best thing. His lover.’

‘I didn’t turn on her!’

‘According to Madame Briand you said …’ Sime looked down to consult the notes taken during her formal interview, ‘I’m not giving him up without a fight. And if I can’t have him, neither you nor anyone else will.’ He looked up again. ‘Are those your words?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘So she paraphrased you?’

‘It doesn’t sound like me.’

‘But was that the sentiment you expressed?’

Her embarrassment was clear. ‘Probably.’

‘Was it or wasn’t it?’

‘Yes!’ she snapped at him. ‘Yes, yes, yes! I lost it, okay? Drink, emotion …’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Whatever. I was coming apart at the seams. It felt like my life was over. Tied to this damned island. Alone. Almost nobody my own age left. No way I was ever going to meet someone else. All I could see stretching ahead of me were a lot of lonely years in an empty house.’

Sime sat back and let a silence settle between them again, like dust after a fight. ‘You realise, Mrs Cowell, that what you said to Madame Briand could be construed as a threat to kill your husband.’

‘Well, of course, you’d just love to give it that construction, wouldn’t you?’ She imbued the word construction with all the sarcasm she could muster.

‘You told me that on the night of the murder you didn’t know that your husband was coming back to the island.’

She gazed at her hands.

Sime waited for several moments. ‘Are you going to respond or not?’

She looked up. ‘You didn’t ask a question.’

‘All right, is it true that you didn’t know your husband was coming home that night?’

Her eyes drifted away towards the window behind him, and the view out over the cliffs. And again she made no response.

‘According to Madame Briand he received a short, fractious call on his cellphone earlier in the evening and left immediately afterwards. Did you make that phone call?’

Her eyes drifted back in his direction, but all the fight had gone out of them.

‘We can check the phone records, Mrs Cowell.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, without further prompting.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘I told him I wanted to talk to him.’

‘To say what?’

‘All the things I wanted to have out with him the night before. Only I wasn’t drunk anymore. Just kind of cold, you know. Angry. Wanting to know stuff that we’d never had the chance to talk about, so I wouldn’t be wondering about it for the rest of my life.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘That we’d talked enough, and he had no intention of coming to the island. At least, not then.’

‘So how did you persuade him?’

‘I told him that first I was going to gather together all his clothes and make a nice big bonfire of them on top of the cliffs. And if he still didn’t come I was going to set his precious house on fire, his computer and all of his business records with it.’ She almost smiled. ‘That seemed to do the trick.’

He braced himself for a final onslaught. ‘So everything you told us about what happened that night was a lie.’

‘No!’

‘When you failed to confront him the night before at Ariane Briand’s house, you issued a veiled threat to kill him, and the following night lured him to the island by threatening to set his house on fire. When he arrived you fought, verbally at first, then physically.’

‘No!’

‘Whether it was premeditated or not, you grabbed a knife and in a frenzy you stabbed him three times in the chest.’

‘That’s not what happened!’

‘You immediately regretted it and tried to revive him. And when that didn’t work you made up a story about some intruder and ran off to tell it to your neighbours.’

‘There was an intruder. I did not kill my husband!’ She glared at him, breathing heavily, and he sat back in his seat, aware that his hands were trembling. He didn’t dare pick up the papers on his knee for fear that it would show.

She looked at him with hatred in her eyes. ‘I think the lion just got the gazelle.’

‘It’s only what you can expect from a prosecuting attorney if you ever go on the witness stand, Mrs Cowell.’ He knew that all the evidence was circumstantial, and accusations alone would not secure a conviction. But just one tiny piece of forensic evidence against her would be enough to tip the balance.

Her face was flushed. Whether from fear, or guilt, or anger it was impossible to tell.

‘Are you charging me?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’ She stood up. ‘Then this interview is over. And if you want to talk to me again you can do it in the presence of a lawyer.’ She strode past him, pushing the screen door open, and went out on to the porch. He got up to look from the window and watched as she ran down the steps and walked off along the edge of the cliffs. Her arms were folded, hair streaming out behind her, and it made him think of Ciorstaidh striding off across the machair after she had told his ancestor that she hated him.

When Sime turned back to the room, Crozes was standing there. He looked exhilarated. ‘Just about nailed her,’ he said. ‘Great job, Sime.’