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  I lay for a long time trying to summon the will and the energy to make the long return trek to recover it. And I could hear my father’s voice in my head. Don’t think about it, boy, just do it.

  It took me perhaps twenty minutes to get back to the glen. The crossbow and the quiver lay where I had left them. And not a single bolt fired. I slung both over my back and set off at a trot again towards home.

  My spirits lifted now. I felt stronger, nourished by hope and a sense that somehow I was close to achieving the impossible. I took courage from the feeling that somewhere my father was watching me, and that I was making him proud.

  I had just come over the Sgagarstaigh hill when I saw them, and dropped instantly to the ground. The hunting party which had shot and wounded the stag was crossing the peat marsh from the road, where a pony and cart waited with the gillie. They had spotted the hind quarters of the deer not a hundred yards away, where I had let it fall, and were approaching it with some consternation. On reaching it, they were suddenly alert. I saw George’s head snapping up, sharp eyes quickly scanning the horizon, and I ducked my head and pressed myself into the grass. I knew I daren’t look up or I would be seen.

  I cursed my stupidity for having left the carcass lying in full view of the road. After all that I had been through, to get so close to home and yet still stare defeat in the face was almost more than I could bear.

  Eventually I risked lifting my head, and saw them dragging the rear section of the deer back to the road. The gillie and stalker loaded it on to the cart. I could not imagine what they were doing here, and could only think that the gamekeeper had sent them back out to find and kill the wounded animal. Heads were lifted again towards the horizon, and I pressed myself into the ground once more.

  When next I dared to look, the party was heading off along the road in the direction of the castle, the meat that would have fed my family with them on the cart. I let my head fall back into the grass, eyes closed. I wanted to weep, but I had no tears left. My defeat and my exhaustion were absolute, and it was fully ten minutes or more before I found the strength to get to my feet and drag myself off on the weary road home.

  *

  I saw smoke seeping up through the thatch of the Baile Mhanais blackhouses as I came over the brow of the hill. I was consumed by two things. Fatigue and failure. And almost wished there were no afterlife, so that my father would not have seen how I had let him down.

  It was hard to believe that it was only this morning that we had put him in the ground. A lifetime had passed since then, and I had no idea how I was going to face my mother and my sisters empty-handed.

  A voice carried on the wind seemed to call my name. At first I thought it was just my imagination. Then it came again, and I looked up to see Kirsty on the hill. This was the lowest ebb of my life, and I didn’t want her to see me like this. But she waved frantically for me to come to her and I could not just walk away.

  Reluctantly I left the path and climbed the hill. As I reached her I could hardly meet her eyes, and when I did I saw the shock in them. Covered in the blood and fat of the deer, and soaked to the skin, I must have presented a ghoulish and pathetic figure. ‘My God,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. But she didn’t ask what had happened. Instead she stooped to lift a large wicker basket at her feet. A checkered cloth covered its contents and she held it out to me.

  ‘What’s this?’ My voice sounded strange to me, oddly disconnected.

  ‘Take it.’ She pushed it into my chest, and I grabbed the handle. It was unexpectedly heavy.

  ‘What is it?’

  She said, ‘There is cheese, and eggs, and cold meat. And a quiche from the kitchen at Ard Mor.’

  I had no idea what a quiche was, but all I could feel was shame. I pushed it back at her. ‘I can’t take this.’ And I saw anger fire up her eyes.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Simon. It’s your responsibility to feed your family. You told me yourself. And if you knew how much I have risked to bring you this …’ She cut herself off, and I was unable to meet her eyes again. ‘There’ll be more. As and when I can get it.’

  I felt her hand on my face and looked up, tears brimming along my lower lids. She leaned in to kiss me softly on the lips and turned to hurry away. I stood there watching her go, until she had dipped below the nearest horizon and disappeared from view. I felt the weight of the food in my hands and knew that I had to put my shame aside. I would not go home empty-handed after all.

  As I turned to go back down the hill, my eye was caught by a movement. A figure standing at the far end of the path where it cut around the hill towards the road. Two, maybe three hundred yards away. He stood motionless, a black cutout against a grey sky. And it was not until he turned away, and I saw him in profile, that I realised it was Ciorstaidh’s brother, George.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  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 t
o 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.’