Peter May - Entry Island

Sime shrugged.

‘You should see a doctor.’

‘I already have.’

‘Not a medical doctor. A shrink. Someone who can figure out what’s going on in your head.’ He drew a frustrated breath. ‘I mean, what was all that about Scottish roots and great-grannies? Jesus, man! Crozes is going to be reviewing these tapes. And so will others.’ He paused and his expression softened. He put a hand on Sime’s arm. ‘You need help, Sime. You’re not up to this. Really. And there’s not a single member of the team that doesn’t know it. You should be on sick leave. Not attached to a murder case.’

Sime suddenly felt an almost overpowering sense of failure and, like a mask, the brave face he’d been wearing for the world slipped. He let his head drop and couldn’t meet Blanc’s eyes. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like, Thomas,’ he heard himself say. But his voice seemed disembodied, far away. As if it belonged to someone else. ‘Night after night after night. Staring at the goddamn ceiling. Counting your heartbeats. Seconds turning to minutes, minutes to hours. And the harder you try to sleep the harder it gets. Then in the morning you’re even more tired than when you went to bed, and you wonder how the hell you’re going to get through another day.’

He looked up, and the sympathy in Blanc’s eyes was almost harder to take than his earlier frustration. Blanc shook his head slowly. ‘You really shouldn’t be working, man. I don’t know what they were thinking of, attaching you to this case.’

He clammed up, suddenly, averting his eyes and stooping to pick up a camera case. Sime turned and saw Crozes approaching.

‘How did it go?’ he said when he reached them.

Sime glanced at Blanc, but his co-interrogator was ostentatiously busying himself packing camera cases into the minibus. He said, ‘She can’t explain how Norman Morrison comes to have a photograph of her in his room, or how he got it. And she claims to have no idea why anyone might want to kill her. It didn’t even seem to have occurred to her that if she was the object of the attack, then her attacker must have had a reason.’

‘Unless, of course, there was no attacker, and she simply hasn’t thought it through.’ Crozes paused. ‘How did she seem to you?’

Sime had no recourse other than to answer honestly. ‘Flustered, Lieutenant. Not very convincing.’

‘How about you, Thomas? Did she convince you?’

Blanc straightened up. ‘Not at all, boss. She’s hostile and evasive, and guilty as hell, if you ask me.’

Aitkens stepped on to the porch from inside the summer-house and they turned as he came down the steps towards them. He shrugged hopelessly. ‘She doesn’t want me to stay with her overnight.’ Then he turned hostile eyes on Sime. ‘I don’t know what you said to her in there, but you really upset her.’

Sime didn’t know what to say, and it was Crozes who rescued him from having to respond. ‘A man is dead, Monsieur Aitkens. It’s not easy to avoid trampling on people’s sensibilities when you’re trying to find out why. We appreciate that Madame Cowell has been widowed, but she is also our only witness.’ And he closed further discussion on the subject. ‘You can come back on the boat with us.’

Aitkens gave him a long hard look, but said nothing before turning and going back into the house.

Crozes turned to Sime and Blanc. ‘If Norman Morrison hasn’t been found before dark, I’m going to have to leave one of our people to watch over Mrs Cowell. However unlikely it might be, if it was Morrison who murdered Cowell and he’s still at large, there’s a chance that Mrs Cowell could be in danger.’

Sime said quickly, ‘I’ll stay.’

Crozes seemed surprised. ‘Why?’

‘I might as well not sleep here as not sleep back at the hotel.’ He was aware of Blanc’s head turning to look at him, but he avoided his eye.

The patrolman from Cap aux Meules was in the kitchen fixing himself something to eat before going back over to the big house to stand guard for the rest of the night. Light fell into the living room from the half-open door.

Kirsty was upstairs somewhere, and Sime could hear her moving about. The staircase was lit, but the living room itself was mired in darkness, only one small reading lamp focusing its light in a circle around an armchair in the far corner.

Sime wandered among the shadows in the semi-dark simply touching things. A smiling emerald Buddha with a round fat belly; a calendar comprising two numbered cubes suspended in a brass stand. A ceramic representation of Mr Micawber with a shiny bald head.

A mahogany occasional table by one of the armchairs was covered with a circular lace doily to save it from being scored or scratched by the pewter picture frame that sat on it. Sime turned it towards him and realised that it framed a head-shot of Kirsty. He picked it up, holding it towards the light, and looked at her. She must have been in her early twenties here, a little fuller in the face, her smile infused with the candour and innocence of youth. She was not a prisoner, then. Her parents were still alive, and she had felt free to leave the island.

He gazed for some minutes at the photograph, before running his fingertips lightly over the glass and replacing it on the table. And he wondered if, like Norman Morrison, he was becoming a little obsessed with her.

The patrolman popped his head around the kitchen door to say goodnight, and Sime watched him from the window as he made his way across the grass in the dark. Although the big house was lit up like a Christmas tree and he could sit and watch TV, Sime did not envy him his job. It was a dead man’s house, and while the body was gone, his spirit remained in every item of furniture, in the clothes that still hung in his closet, in his blood that stained the floor.

‘Where do you mean to sleep?’

Sime spun around, startled. He hadn’t heard her on the stair. She was showered and changed, her hair still damp, and she wore a black silk dressing gown embroidered with colourful Chinese dragons.

‘The settee is fine,’ he said. ‘I won’t sleep.’

She padded through to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and called back through the open door. ‘I’m making tea, do you want any?’

‘What kind?’

‘Green tea with mint.’

‘Sure.’

She came through a couple of minutes later with two steaming mugs and placed one on the coffee table next to the settee for Sime. She took hers to the armchair in the pool of light and folded her legs beneath her as she cradled her mug in her hands, as if cold.

‘Well, this is strange,’ she said.

He sat down on the settee and took a sip of his tea, nearly scalding his lips. ‘Is it?’

‘The hunter and his prey calling a truce for the night and sharing a nice cup of tea.’

Sime was stung. ‘Is that how you see me? As a hunter?’

‘Well, I certainly feel hunted. Like you’ve already decided I’m guilty and it’s only a matter of time before you’ll wear me down and catch me out. I have a picture in my mind of a lion and a gazelle. Guess which one I am.’

‘I’m just—’

‘I know,’ she interrupted him. ‘Doing your job.’ She paused. ‘And I’m just someone who saw her husband stabbed to death. I haven’t slept since.’

‘Well, then, we have that in common at least.’

She cast him a curious glance. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I haven’t slept in weeks.’ As soon as he spoke he regretted it, but it was too late to take it back.

‘Why?’

He just shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Something to do with the break-up of your marriage?’ She had gone straight to it and he felt almost guilty. Losing your wife did not fall into quite the same category as seeing your husband brutally murdered.