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  ‘Oh, he didn’t like it, I can tell you that much. But, I mean, he wasn’t a threat to their marriage for God’s sake. Norman has the mental age of a twelve-year-old.’

  Sime had decided by now that he really didn’t like Jackie Patton. ‘But you thought he was a threat to your children.’

  She banged down her rolling pin on the worktop and turned to face him. ‘Do you have children, Mr Mackenzie?’

  ‘No, ma’am, I don’t.’

  ‘Then don’t judge me. The first responsibility of a parent is the protection of their children. You don’t take chances.’

  But Sime was unmoved. It seemed clear to him that Mrs Patton had already made that judgement on herself. And guilt read accusation even into innocent questions.

  III

  The Morrisons’ living room had big windows at the front and an archway leading to a dining room at the back. Although most of the furniture in it was dark and old-fashioned, light from the windows seemed to reflect off every polished surface. The patterned wallpaper was almost totally obscured by framed photographs and paintings. Family portraits and groups, black-and-white mostly, with some coloured landscapes. More light reflecting off glass. The air was heavily perfumed, with a background hint of disinfectant. Sime could tell at a glance that Mrs Morrison was someone who had a place for everything, and liked everything in its place.

  She was a woman in her sixties, big-boned and carefully dressed in a crisp white blouse beneath a knitted cardigan and a blue skirt that fell just below her knees. Her hair was still dark, with just a few strands of silver in it, drawn back severely from her face and arranged in a bun.

  There was little warmth in her blue eyes, and she seemed remarkably composed given the circumstances.

  ‘Would you like tea, gentlemen?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ Sime said.

  ‘Well, take a seat, then.’

  The three police officers perched uncomfortably on the sofa, and she resumed what Sime imagined to be her habitual seat by the fire, folding her hands in her lap.

  ‘He’s never done anything like this before,’ she said.

  ‘Done what?’ Sime asked.

  ‘Run away.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s run away?’

  ‘Well, of course he has. He told me he was going out to the garden. In that event he’d have been back long before I had to go looking for him. He must have lied to me.’

  ‘Is he in the habit of telling lies?’

  Mrs Morrison looked uncomfortable, and withdrew a little further into herself. ‘He can be economical with the truth sometimes.’

  Sime let that hang for a moment. ‘Was there some reason he might have run away? I mean, can you think why he would have lied to you?’

  She seemed to consider her response carefully. Finally she said, ‘He was upset.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He heard what had happened at the Cowell place.’

  ‘Where did he hear that?’

  ‘When we went down to the Post Office to pick up the mail yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘So you both heard the news at the same time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why was he upset?’

  She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. ‘He was very fond of Mrs Cowell. I suppose he was concerned for her well-being.’

  ‘What do you mean, fond of her?’ Sime said.

  She bristled a little. ‘Just that. She was fond of him, too. You must understand, Mr Mackenzie, my son has a mental age of eleven or twelve. We didn’t realise that until he began to have learning difficulties at school. It came as quite a shock when the psychologists told us. And it only really became more apparent as he got older. At first I was … well, I was devastated. But over the years I’ve come to see it as a blessing. Most people lose their children, you see, when they grow up. I never lost Norman. He’s thirty-five now, but he’s still my little boy.’

  ‘So Mrs Cowell was fond of him, as you would be fond of a child?’

  ‘Just that. And, of course, they were at the school together as children.’

  ‘And what did Mr Cowell make of it?’

  Her face darkened in an instant, as if a cloud had thrown her into shadow. ‘I’m a God-fearing woman, Mr Mackenzie. But I hope that man spends eternity in hell.’

  The three men were startled by her sudden, vitriolic intensity.

  ‘Why?’ Sime said.

  ‘Because he brought two thugs to this island from across the water and had my boy beaten up.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because they told him to stay away from Mrs Cowell or he could expect much worse.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  She nodded, her mouth drawn in a tight line to hold in her emotions. ‘He was in a terrible state when he came home that day. Bleeding and bruised and crying like a baby.’

  ‘How do you know it was Mr Cowell’s doing?’

  ‘Well, who else could it be?’

  ‘And this was when?’

  ‘Early spring this year. There was still snow on the ground.’

  ‘Did you report it?’

  She almost laughed. ‘To whom? There is no law on this island, Mr Mackenzie. We settle things among ourselves here.’ Echoes of Owen Clarke.

  Sime hesitated just briefly. ‘Why did the neighbours stop their children from playing with Norman, Mrs Morrison?’

  Now her skin flushed red around her eyes and high on her cheeks. ‘You’ve been talking to the Patton woman.’

  Sime inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement.

  ‘It was just lies, Mr Mackenzie.’ Her cold blue eyes were now filled with the fire of indignation. ‘And jealousy.’

  ‘Why would she be jealous?’

  ‘Because this was a house always filled with children, including hers. They loved Norman. They came from all over the island to play with him, to see his little universe on the ceiling. You see he was a grown man, but he was just like them. A child himself.’ For a moment her face was lit by the pleasure of recollection. A house full of children. An extended family. It had clearly been a joy for her. But the light went out and her face darkened again. ‘And then that woman started putting it about that my Norman was touching the children in a bad way. It was a lie, Mr Mackenzie. Plain and simple. My Norman was never like that. But lies can be contagious. Like germs. Once they’re out there people get infected.’

  ‘And the children stopped coming?’

  She nodded. ‘It was awful the effect it had on poor Norman. Suddenly he had no friends. The house was empty. Silent, like the grave. And I missed them, too. All those bright little faces and happy voices. Life’s just not been the same since.’

  ‘And what did your husband have to say about all this?’

  ‘He didn’t have anything to say, Mr Mackenzie. He’s been dead almost twenty years. Lost at sea when his boat went down in a storm off Nova Scotia.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor Norman. He still misses his daddy. And after the children stopped coming, well … he just spent more and more time in his room. Expanding his little universe.’

  ‘His … universe on the ceiling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sime glanced at Crozes and Blanc. ‘Could we see this little universe, Mrs Morrison?’

  *

  She led them up creaking stairs to the first floor. There were three bedrooms here, and a large bathroom. But Norman’s bedroom was in an attic room built into the roof space. His den, his mother called it as they followed her up steep steps and into the room. There were no windows up here and they emerged from the floor into darkness until Mrs Morrison flicked a switch and flooded the room with yellow electric light.

  It was a claustrophobic space, large in floor area, but with low headroom and walls that took a shallow slope in from shoulder height to meet the ceiling. A single bed pushed against the far wall had several teddy bears and a thread-worn panda propped up on its pillows. Bedside tables stood cluttered with toy soldiers and pieces of Lego, c
rayons and tubes of paint. A dresser set against the right-hand wall was similarly lost beneath a chaos of plastic bricks and packs of Plasticine, a naked dolly with no arms, model cars, a railway engine. The floor itself was strewn with toys and books, and sheets of paper covered with scribbles.

  But their eyes were drawn almost immediately to the ceiling, and Sime saw at once what his mother had meant by Norman’s little universe. Almost the entire ceiling space was glued with layers of different-coloured Plasticine that formed meadows and roads, ploughed fields, lakes and rivers. Mountains had been moulded out of papier mâché and coloured with paint. Green and brown and grey. There were railway lines and plastic houses, the figures of tiny people populating gardens and streets. Little cars and buses, woolly sheep and brown cows in the fields. There were forests and fences. All stuck into the Plasticine. And everything was upside down.

  They had to crane their necks to look up, but it was as if they were looking down on another world. Norman’s little universe. So filled with the tiniest detail, that it was almost impossible to take it all in.

  His mother gazed up at it with pride. ‘It started in a very small way. With a pack of Plasticine and a few tiny figures. But the children loved it so much, Norman just kept expanding it. Always wanting to surprise them with something new. It just got bigger and bigger, and more ambitious.’ She looked away suddenly. ‘Until the children stopped coming. Then it ceased being a hobby and became his world. His only world.’ She glanced at them, self-conscious now. ‘He lived in that world. Became a part of it himself, really. I don’t know what went through his mind, but in the end I think he replaced the children who used to come with the ones on the ceiling. If you look you can see that some of them are just faces cut from magazines, or little cardboard cut-outs. And then the tiny coloured plastic figures you get in boxes of breakfast cereal.’ She cast her eyes sadly towards his bed. ‘He spent all his time up here, and gradually he covered the whole ceiling. When he runs out of space, no doubt he’ll start expanding it down the walls.’

  Sime gazed up in amazement. A lonely boy trapped in the body of a man, Norman had only found company in a world he created himself on his ceiling. He scanned the mess of the floor beneath it, and his gaze fell on the head of a little girl cut out from an old colour print. She looked familiar somehow. He stooped to pick it up. ‘Who’s this?’

  His mother peered at it. ‘I’ve no idea.’ The girl was perhaps twelve or thirteen. She wore glasses that reflected the light and almost obscured her eyes. She was smiling awkwardly, a toothy grin, and her dark hair was cut short in a bob. ‘Something he cut from a magazine probably.’

  ‘No, it’s a print,’ Sime said.

  Mrs Morrison shrugged. ‘Well, it’s no one I know.’

  Sime laid it carefully on top of the dresser and turned to Crozes. ‘The sooner we find Norman the better, I think.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sime and Blanc left Crozes and the others to organise the search for Norman Morrison, dividing the island into quadrants and the searchers into groups. Although it was not large, Entry Island was peppered with hundreds of properties, domestic and agricultural, and its coastline was ragged and inaccessible in places. It would not be a simple search.

  When they got back to the Cowell place Aitkens and Kirsty had still not returned, and the two investigators set up their monitors and cameras for the interview.

  After they had finished, Blanc came through from the back room to find Sime gazing from the window towards the cliffs. ‘Do you think Cowell really had the Morrison boy beaten up?’ he said.

  Sime thought it was odd to hear Norman Morrison described as a boy. But it’s what he was, really. A boy in the body of a man. He turned back to the room. ‘I think it’s what he told his mother. But whether it’s true or not …’ He shrugged.

  Blanc said, ‘Who else would want to work him over?’

  ‘Depends,’ Sime said. ‘If there’s any truth in the stories about him touching children, then any number of angry fathers. And, of course, that’s not something he would want to tell his mother.’

  Blanc nodded thoughtfully. ‘Hadn’t considered that.’ Then, ‘Listen, I’m going out back for a cigarette.’

  ‘Okay.’ Sime walked through the kitchen to the back door with him. ‘I might take a look around the big house while we’re waiting.’

  Blanc seemed surprised. ‘What for?’

  ‘I’d just like a better feel for Mrs Cowell before we talk to her again.’

  Blanc said, ‘I think Marie-Ange is still in there.’

  Sime felt a tiny prickle of anger. ‘If I get in her way I’m sure she’ll tell me.’

  Blanc was embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘I know.’ Sime cut him off, then regretted his shortness. ‘Ignore me,’ he said. ‘I’m just tired.’

  *

  Marie-Ange was in the main room dismantling the lights they had erected to photograph the spatter and smears of blood on the floor. Sime slid open the door of the conservatory and stepped inside.

  Without looking up she said, ‘Watch where you put your feet. And don’t touch anything.’ When he didn’t respond she raised her head and seemed surprised to see him.

  He held up latexed hands. ‘I have done this before.’

  She relented a little. ‘I thought you were one of the patrolmen.’ Which was the closest he was going to get to an apology. ‘What do you want in here?’

  ‘To look around.’

  ‘Since when did you become a crime scene expert?’

  ‘Not the crime scene, the house.’

  She raised an eyebrow and repeated the question that Blanc had asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Professional interest. They say that people and their relationships are reflected in their homes.’

  ‘And you think you can learn something about the Cowells from their house?’

  ‘I’m sure I can.’

  She gazed at him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Please yourself.’

  Sime walked off along the hall that led to the far end of the house. On his right, stairs descended into a basement. He went down and switched on the lights. Fluorescents flickered on overhead to reveal a guest living room and a further two bedrooms. Cowell had clearly nurtured expectations of many visitors. Sime wondered if they had ever materialised. There was a large storeroom full of files and boxes, and papers stacked on shelves. And through a double door, a sprawling workshop with a pristine workbench that looked as if it had never been used. One wall was hung with myriad tools all neatly arranged in rows and sizes.

  Sime plunged the basement once more into darkness and climbed back up into daylight. Next along the corridor a door leading to a guest bedroom stood ajar. On the far side of it French windows opened into the conservatory. He wondered if any guests had ever slept here. It didn’t feel like it. There was a lack of warmth, of anything personal. It was furnished like a five-star hotel room.

  Further along, another door led to the master bedroom, and Sime was surprised to find that it was just as impersonal as the guest room. There seemed to be nothing shared in here. No photographs, no mementos of happier times. No paintings on the walls. Not even clothes draped over chairs or lying on the bed, no slippers discarded at the bedside. There were no jars of face cream or make-up on the dresser, no combs or brushes with hair caught in the bristles. Just shiny, dust-free surfaces. The room was as sterile, it seemed, as the relationship it had played host to.

  At the end of the hall, a door on the left led to her study, and crossing its threshold Sime at once felt a change in atmosphere. This was Kirsty Cowell’s private space and every cluttered surface and crowded bookshelf spoke of her. One entire wall was devoted to books. Everything from classical English literature to the ground-breaking American writers of the twentieth century – Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mailer, Updike; encyclopaedias, books on British and Canadian history, almost a full shelf on the history of Scotland.

  There was a well-worn lea
ther recliner with a shawl draped over it, and moccasin slippers beneath it. There were paintings on the walls, amateur efforts that made up for lack of technique in capturing the mood of the island. Crude sea views and clumsy landscapes. One was particularly striking. A line of black crows sitting along an electric cable strung between two telegraph posts, a typical island house behind them, painted a garish green and white, a sky of purple-edged clouds. And Sime realised that he hadn’t seen any seagulls on his two trips to the island. Only crows. He glanced from the window and saw them now in black huddled rows, sitting on rooftops and along fences and telephone lines, silent witnesses to an investigation of murder.

  He turned back to the walls, and found his eye drawn by a framed black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged couple standing outside the summerhouse across the way. Kirsty’s parents, he assumed. Judging from their age, the picture had been taken only a dozen or so years before, yet it felt dated. Not only because it was in black and white, but the couple themselves seemed to belong to another era. The way they dressed and wore their hair. It was taken before the remodelling of the house, and the building looked older, old-fashioned, like the couple themselves.

  He saw Kirsty in both of them. She was tall and willowy like her father. But she had her mother’s strong features, and her thick black hair, which here had already been invaded by a creeping grey.

  He turned then to her desk. A surface cluttered with papers and bric-a-brac. A small wooden Buddha with a fat, laughing face, a mug that hadn’t been washed. Scissors, a letter-opener, innumerable pens and pencils in chipped ceramic cups, tissues, reading glasses, endless doodles on a large blotter. A reflection of idle moments of absent thinking. Whorls and stick figures, happy faces and sad. Some just lightly sketched, others worked over again and again until almost cutting through the paper. An indication, perhaps, of darker moods.

  A pile of magazines testified to her interest in current affairs. Time Magazine, Newsweek, Maclean’s.

  In a drawer he found an old family photo album bound in dark-green cracked leather, and sat in her captain’s chair to open it on the desk in front of him. Its pages were thick grey paper turned brittle with age. Discoloured black and white snapshots in the early pages were slipped into slits cut to hold them, captions written in faded ink beneath.