Peter May - Entry Island

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.’

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...’