Peter May - Entry Island

In the conservatory he stopped for a moment to stoop and pick up his attacker’s knife by the tip of its blade and lay it carefully on one of the chairs. There was every possibility that this was the knife used to kill Cowell.

And then he was out and into the rain and wind, the sharp pain of his shoulder wound dulling to a pervasive ache. He felt his arm stiffening up. He raised the flashlight and raked it across the clifftops. He saw nothing but the rain that drove through its beam like warp speed on Star Trek . He ran around the side of the house and swung the light back down the road towards the lighthouse. Nothing again. The man had disappeared. He turned and directed the beam up the road, and caught the briefest glimpse of a shadow disappearing over the top of the hill.

Sime drew a deep breath and started after him, his torchlight zigzagging around the hillside as he ran. When he reached the brow of the hill he stopped and swung it through an arc of 180 degrees. This was where he and Kirsty had stood just a few days earlier, when they had made some kind of connection for the very first time, and she had touched his face. Just before the call from Crozes that had led him to arrest her for murder.

There was no sign of the fugitive. Then another flash of lightning lit up the hillside, and he saw the man in the hollow below, running along the edge of the cliffs. Sime ran down the hill after him, fighting to keep his feet and his balance in the dark and the wet, buffeted face-on by the wind.

Just metres from the edge of the cliffs he stopped and focused the beam of his flashlight along their ragged contours. Aeons of erosion had eaten away at rock that glowed blood-red in the dark. Columns of it rose almost sheer out of the sea below. The noise of the storm was deafening. The wind threw mountainous seas against the base of the cliffs. Spray rose fifty feet in the air and glowed like silver mist in the light of his torch.

And then he saw him. His attacker had given up. There was nowhere to go. He was unarmed and without light. Sime was sure to catch him. Crouching in the grass to catch his breath, he had extended one arm to his right to keep his balance. And he watched as Sime approached, slow and cautious, keeping the beam of his torch fully focused on him the whole time.

‘Give it up, Briand!’ Sime shouted above the roar of the wind.

But the man neither spoke nor moved. Sime was within a metre of him now. And suddenly he sprang forward, filling the beam of light, almost snuffing it out, as he powered into Sime and grabbed his knife arm with one hand, punching his wounded shoulder with the other. Once, twice, three times. Sime yelled with pain, and his flashlight went spinning away through the grass. The other man was powerful, and with his weight on top as the two men fell, was able to twist Sime’s wrist, forcing him to unclench his fist and release the knife.

Now he had the upper hand, grabbing the knife and turning quickly to get back to his feet. Sime clutched desperately at his face as he did, fingers finding only the slick wet material of the man’s ski mask. Which tore off in his hand as the other man rolled away.

The flashlight lay tipped at an angle in the grass. But it cast enough light for Sime to see Jack Aitkens, wild-eyed, his back to the cliffs, the ocean behind him. He stood with his legs apart, slightly bent at the knees, his knife hand extended to his right. He was gasping for breath.

Sime got slowly to his feet, looking at him in astonishment. ‘Why?’ he shouted.

But Aitkens made no attempt to respond, keeping his eyes fixed on the detective.

‘For God’s sake, Aitkens!’ Sime bellowed. ‘Give it up.’

Aitkens shook his head, but still said nothing. Sime glanced towards the flashlight. If he had that, then he could at least blind the man when he came at him. He dived for it at the same time as Aitkens made his move.

Stretched out on his belly, he grasped the torch, half expecting Aitkens’s blade to sink itself between his shoulders. He rolled over and shone the light up into Aitkens’s face. But there was no one there. He scrambled to his knees and swept the beam of his torch across the clifftops. Nothing. Aitkens had vanished.

The ground beneath Sime started to move, and he scrambled backwards in a panic as the cliff began collapsing along its leading edge. And he realised what had happened. The ground had simply given way beneath Aitkens’s feet and dropped him down on to the rocks below.

Soaked and in pain, gasping for breath and sick to his stomach, Sime spread himself out, lying on his belly, and eased himself towards the precipice until he could see down on to the jumble of debris at the foot of the cliffs.

It wasn’t a sheer drop, but a steep scree slope that fell in increments to shelves and ledges, before finally plunging down to an ocean thrashing itself against lethal outcrops of rock.

Aitkens lay on his back about fifteen metres down, still some ten metres above the sea, but drenched by the spray it tossed up into the wind. He was alive, one arm reaching up to grasp a ledge of rock above him. But he didn’t seem able to move the rest of his body.

Sime wriggled back from the drop and got to his feet, training the light of his torch along the edge of the cliffs until he saw a way down. A gentle cutaway from the top, and a steep seam of rock running downwards at an angle that would lead him to Aitkens. He ran along to it, and carefully lowered himself over the edge, gingerly testing the rock underfoot in case it would give way.

It took him almost ten minutes to make the descent, battered by the explosive breath of the storm, soaked by the salt spray thrown up all along the cliffs.

Aitkens was breathing hard. Short, mechanical bursts of breath. His eyes wide and staring in fear. Sime perched precariously on the ledge beside him. ‘Can you move?’

Aitkens shook his head. ‘There’s no feeling in my legs. My whole lower body.’ His voice was feeble. He bit his lip and tears filled his eyes. ‘I think my back’s broken.’

‘Jesus,’ Sime said. ‘What the hell were you doing, Aitkens? Why would you want to kill Kirsty?’

Aitkens said, ‘I thought you already knew. When you came asking questions about our family history.’

‘Knew what?’

Aitkens closed his eyes, pained by irony and regret. ‘Obviously not.’ He opened them again and a tear ran back down the side of his head and into his hair. ‘Sir John Guthrie...’

‘Kirsty’s father?’

He nodded. ‘He was worth a damn fortune, Mackenzie. All that family wealth accumulated during the tobacco trade, and then sugar and cotton. He didn’t just own the Langadail Estate. He had property in Glasgow and London. Investments, money in the bank. And he left all of it to his daughter, since his son was dead.’ He closed his eyes again and let out a long, painful breath. He tried to swallow, then looked up at Sime once more. ‘Only they couldn’t find her. She’d run off to Canada in search of her crofter boy. His wife was dead and there was no other heir.’ He seemed to have trouble breathing and speaking at the same time. Sime waited until he found his voice again. ‘I did my research. In Scotland, in those days, when a beneficiary couldn’t be traced, it had to be reported to the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid name! It’s now the Crown Office.’ He swallowed to catch his breath. ‘In Guthrie’s case, the lawyers sold off all his assets and the money was put in the care of the Crown, until someone turned up to claim it. Only no one ever did.’

For the first time, Sime saw how greed had been the motive for everything.

Aitkens screwed up his face in what might have been either pain or regret. ‘The only people left alive with a claim on that money were me and Kirsty. Well, my father before me. But since I have power of attorney...’