Peter May - Entry Island

Lighting concealed around the conservatory and up into the living area and kitchen flickered and cast warm light among the shadows. Dried blood still stained the floor, and Marie-Ange had stuck down white tape to trace the outline of where the body had lain.

Sime stood dripping on the wooden floor and gazed at it for a long time. He was trying to replay the scene exactly as Kirsty had described it. The clear impression her story had given was that she and not James was the intended target. The intruder had attacked her in the dark of the conservatory, and then chased her across the floor of the living area and tried to stab her.

Which meant that if James were not the object of the attack, it couldn’t have been Briand. Because what possible motive could he have had for killing Kirsty?

But then, she had stumbled upon the intruder by accident while James was upstairs. Wasn’t it possible that he had simply tried to shut her up, to stop her from raising the alarm? That it only appeared she was the victim?

On the other hand, if she were the target, and her attacker wasn’t Briand, he would not have anticipated Cowell being there. As far as anyone knew he had left her and moved in with a woman across the water. His presence would have come as a huge surprise.

Sime turned away from the crime scene, spooked suddenly by a sense of being alone with ghosts, and frustrated by the lack of any real clarity. He headed along the passage that ran towards the far end of the house, and found a light switch on the stairs that led down to the basement.

Here in the bowels of the house you wouldn’t have known there was a storm raging outside. Only the occasional deep thudding vibration, as the building soaked up a particularly heavy gust of wind, betrayed the fact that the storm had well and truly arrived.

Sime found a panel of light switches and flicked them all up, flooding the entire basement with the glare of fluorescent light. He went straight to the storeroom he had discovered on his previous visit. It was full of cardboard boxes, a couple of old trunks, a set of leather suitcases. The shelves that lined the walls were bowed with the weight of books and papers and box files.

And everything went dark.

Sime stood stock-still, his heart pounding. He could even have sworn he heard his pulse in the thick black silence. The darkness was profound. He couldn’t see his hands in front of his face. For several moments he stood hoping that his eyes would accustom themselves to the dark and he could at least discern something. But still it enveloped him, soft and sightless, and he felt completely blind.

He reached out to touch the wall and made his way back to the door by touch, reaching it sooner than expected and almost bumping into it. Now he could feel the architrave and the doorframe and stepped cautiously out into what he knew was a large open space with the stairs at the far side of it. He cursed the storm, which seemed louder now, penetrating the layers of insulation that cocooned the house. The chances were that the whole island had lost power, or at least part of it if cables had come down.

A sudden flash of light left an imprint on his retinas of everything around him. Lightning. It had flooded through windows high up on the walls. And vanished again just as suddenly. But with an image in his mind of exactly where he stood, Sim moved quickly in the remembered direction of the stairs. He tripped over the bottom step and gashed his knee on the one above it.

‘Shit!’

He waited for several moments for the pain to subside before climbing the stairs, his hands touching the walls on either side to help him feel his way up. Still he could see nothing. And then at the top of the steps, another flash of lightning lit up the whole house. Again he used the lingering image it left to guide himself through to the main room.

There he stopped, and for the first time became aware of an alarm bell ringing distantly in his mind. Through the windows of the conservatory he could see across to the summer-house where the table lamp he had switched on earlier still burned in the living room. He turned around, and through other windows saw the twinkle of distant lights in other houses. Only Cowell’s house had lost electricity. Either the fuses had tripped, or someone had switched off the power. Even if he could find his way to it he had no idea where the fusebox was.

He stood absolutely still, listening in the dark, hearing nothing more than the sound of the storm outside. But something else had every nerve-end tingling. A very powerful sense that he was not alone. Only minutes before the lights went out he had been spooked by the imagined presence of the dead. Now, whether he sensed the warmth of a body or some faint odour, all of his instincts told him there was someone else in the house. Boudreau aside, only a handful of people knew he was here. Aitkens and Briand. The fishermen he’d seen at the harbour, Owen Clarke among them. And was it Chuck he had seen on the quad bike by the cemetery? Of all of them, it seemed to Sime, only Briand had motive. Take away his wife’s alibi and he’d also had the opportunity.

Sime cursed himself suddenly for his own stupidity. Just half an hour earlier he had guided himself to Kirsty Guthrie’s grave using his cellphone. And he had spent the last several minutes stumbling about in the dark when he had a perfectly usable source of light in his pocket. He fumbled to retrieve it and switch it on.

To reveal a masked face less than half a metre away, a blade rising through the dark.

A startled cry released itself from his throat, and in reaching out to grab the knife hand of his attacker, his phone went clattering away across the floor, its light with it. All that he was left with was the imprint in his mind of two dark eyes glinting behind the slits of a ski mask.

He felt the blade strike his shoulder, cutting through flesh and glancing off the bone. Pain seared through his neck and arm, but he had a hold of the man’s wrist with one hand and swung a fist blindly through the dark. He felt the jarring contact of bone on bone and the other man gasped in pain. Sime swivelled side-on and threw all his weight forward, pushing his attacker back until he lost his footing on the two steps leading to the conservatory. Both men fell down into it, Sime on top, the sound of the knife rattling away across the floor. Sime’s weight expelled all the air from the other man’s lungs, like a long deep sigh, and Sime felt a blast of bad breath in his face.

But he wasn’t prepared for the hand that searched for and found his mouth and eyes, fingers like steel tearing at him in the dark. He released his grip on the man’s wrist and rolled away, crashing into a reclining chair.

Lightning spiked through the sky outside, and in that moment he saw his opponent stagger to his feet. Sime rolled over on to his knees, trying to control his breathing and steady himself for another attack. But all he felt was the rush of wind and rain that burst into the house as the door of the conservatory slid open. The crack of thunder that exploded overhead made him duck involuntarily.

The fleeting shadow of his would-be killer darted through the light of the summerhouse across the way and vanished into the night. Sime stumbled back up the steps and slithered across the floor, trying to find his phone. Lightning flashed again and he saw it just a few feet away. He dived to get it before the lightning map left his memory, fumbling then with shaking fingers to switch it on, hoping that it wasn’t broken. To his relief, it shed an amazing amount of illumination around him. He staggered to his feet and ran over to the kitchen, grabbing a knife from the block. How he wished he still had his Glock. He turned away to pursue his attacker, but stopped suddenly as he saw a flashlight clipped to an electric wall-charger by the door. He tore it free of its charger and with shaking fingers flicked the on-switch. It released a powerful beam of light into the kitchen. He thrust his phone back into his pocket and ran across the room, armed now with blade and light to chase the killer into the storm.