‘My tutor says if we were able to look down on them from above they would form the rough shape of a Celtic cross.’
I shrugged. ‘So?’
‘Simon, they were put here more than two thousand years before Christ was born.’
I saw her point and nodded sagely, as if the thought had occurred to me long ago. ‘Yes, of course.’
She smiled and ran the flat of her hand down the stone that she was leaning against. ‘I love the texture of the stones,’ she said. ‘They have grain running through them like wood.’ She tipped her head back and looked up towards the top of it. ‘I wonder how they moved them. They must be terribly heavy.’ She grinned then and extended her hand towards me. ‘Come on.’ I hesitated for only a moment, before grasping it, feeling it small and warm in mine. She pulled me away from the stones, and we went running down the slope together, almost out of control, laughing with exhilaration before coming to a halt where the elements had eaten away at the machair and loose, peaty earth crumbled down into a rocky hollow.
She let go of my hand and jumped down into it. I followed suit and landed beside her. Beach grass grew in tussocks and clumps, binding the loose earth and pushing up between cracks in the rock. The wind blew overhead but the air here was quite still, and there was a wonderful sense of shelter and tranquillity. No one could see us, except perhaps from a boat out at sea.
Kirsty arranged her skirts to sit down in the grass and patted the place beside her. I saw her ankle-length black boots and a flash of white calf. I knew she was younger than me, and yet she seemed possessed of so much more confidence. I did as I was bid and sat down next to her, self-conscious again, and a little scared by strange, unaccustomed feelings.
She said, ‘Sometimes I look out and wonder if on a clear day it might be possible to see America.’ She laughed. ‘Which is daft, I know. It’s far too far away. But it makes me think about all those folk who set off in boats not knowing what, if anything, lay at the end of their voyage.’
I loved to hear her talk like this, and I watched the light in her eyes as she looked out over the ocean.
‘I wonder what it’s like,’ she said.
‘America?’
She nodded.
I laughed. ‘We’ll never know.’
‘Probably not,’ she agreed. ‘But we shouldn’t limit our horizons to only what we can see. My father always says if you believe in something you can make it happen. And he should know. Everything we have, and are, is because of him. His vision.’
I gazed at her, filled for the first time with curiosity about her father and mother, the life she led, so different from mine. ‘How did your father get rich?’
‘Our family came from Glasgow originally. My great-grandfather made his fortune in the tobacco trade. But all that collapsed with the American war of independence, and it was my father who eventually restored the family’s fortunes by getting us into the cotton and sugar trade with the West Indies.’
I listened to her with a sense of amazement, as well as inferiority, aware of all the things of which I was completely ignorant. ‘Is that still what he does?’
She laughed. ‘No, not now. He’s retired from business. Since he bought the Langadail estate and built the castle at Ard Mor that’s what takes up all his time. Even if it doesn’t make him any money.’ She turned the radiance of her smile on me. ‘Or so he’s always saying.’
I smiled back, engulfed somehow by her gaze, my eyes held by hers, and there was a long silence between us. I heard the wind and the gulls, and the sound of the ocean. I could feel the pounding of my heart like the waves beating on the shore. And without any conscious decision I reached out to run my fingers back through the silky softness of her hair and cradle the back of her head in my palm. I saw her pupils dilate and felt an ache of longing deep inside me.
I remembered the little girl I had lifted into my arms from the ditch and how, as I trotted the long wet mile to the castle, I would look down and see her gazing up at me.
I found her face with my other hand, tracing the line of her cheek so softly with the tips of my fingers, before leaning in to kiss her for the very first time, guided by some instinct which had been aeons in the making. Lips cool and soft and giving. And although I knew nothing of love, I knew that I had found it, and never wanted to lose it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I
Sime returned from memories of his ancestor’s diaries to the realisation that he had been sitting staring all this time at the ghostly imprint left in the album by the missing photograph of Kirsty as a child. And he looked up, suddenly startled by the awareness of another presence in the room. Marie-Ange stood leaning against the door jamb watching him. He saw the usual contempt in her eyes, something which had become only too familiar. But there was something else. Concern? Guilt? It was hard to tell.
‘You look terrible,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’
‘When was the last time you slept properly?’
He felt grit scratching his eyes as he blinked. ‘Sometime before you left.’
She sighed. ‘Something else that’s my fault, no doubt.’ And she pushed herself away from the door and wandered over to the desk, turning her gaze on to the teenage pictures of Kirsty in the album. ‘Is that her? The Cowell woman?’
He nodded. ‘Aged about thirteen or fourteen I think.’
Marie-Ange leaned over him to flip forward through the pages, casting cold eyes over the growing Kirsty. She stopped at the final photograph. Kirsty with her mother and father, taken in bright sunlight somewhere along the cliffs. Kirsty, a young woman by then, smiling unreservedly at the camera, sandwiched between her mum and dad, an arm around each of them. As she had grown, so they had diminished somehow, and you could see that her mother was not well. ‘You’d never guess from this that she’d be capable of killing someone,’ Marie-Ange said.
Sime looked at her sharply. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘Looks more and more that way.’
‘And the evidence?’
‘Oh, that’ll come, for sure. There’s bound to be something to give her away. And you can bet I’ll find it.’ She looked around the study. ‘So what did you discover here that tells you about the Cowells?’
Sime thought about it. ‘Enough to know that they weren’t close. That it was a relationship without warmth. She sought comfort in her own company, her own interests. He found fulfilment elsewhere, and in the end with another woman.’
She gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘I wonder what conclusions someone might have come to about us if they had taken a tour through our apartment.’
‘Pretty much the same, I would have thought. Only, in reverse.’
She tutted her annoyance. ‘Same old broken record.’
‘You were never there, Marie. All those hours when I never knew where you were. And always the same old excuses. Work. A girls’ night out, a visit to your parents in Sherbrooke.’
‘You never wanted to come. Anywhere. Ever.’
‘And you never wanted me to. Always found a good reason why I shouldn’t join you. Then made it seem like my fault.’ He glared at her, remembering all the frustration and loneliness. ‘There was someone else, wasn’t there?’
‘Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? If I’d had an affair. Then it wouldn’t have been your fault. No guilt, no blame.’ She stabbed an angry finger at him. ‘But here’s the truth, Simon. If you need someone to blame for the break-up of our marriage, just look in the mirror.’
The clearing of a throat brought both their heads around. Crozes stood awkwardly in the doorway, his embarrassment clear. He chose to ignore whatever it was he might have overheard. ‘Just had a call from Lapointe,’ he said. ‘He’ll be taking off for Montreal with the body in about an hour.’ He paused. ‘The autopsy will take place first thing in the morning.’