As I turned to go back down the hill, my eye was caught by a movement. A figure standing at the far end of the path where it cut around the hill towards the road. Two, maybe three hundred yards away. He stood motionless, a black cutout against a grey sky. And it was not until he turned away, and I saw him in profile, that I realised it was Ciorstaidh’s brother, George.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I
It was Arseneau who met Sime and Blanc at the harbour with the minibus and the news that they had found Norman Morrison.
The wind had felt much stronger on the return crossing and now, as they turned up Chemin Mountain at the end of Main Street, they saw the crowd on the clifftop buffeted by it. A dozen or more police and civilian vehicles were clustered around the Cowell House. Arseneau parked on the road just beyond them and the three detectives walked across the grass to the fence where the crowd was gathered. Perhaps twenty islanders, and several uniformed police officers from Cap aux Meules.
Sime glanced towards the summerhouse and saw a pale-faced Kirsty watching from the porch. He felt a wave of disillusion wash over him and knew that very soon he would have to face her with her lies.
A gate opened on to narrow concrete steps set into the angle of the cliffs, an incongruous grey against the red of the stone. They led down at a steep angle to a tiny jetty, partially formed by a natural arc of rock, and augmented by the same interlocking concrete blocks that made up the breakwater at the harbour. A blue-and-white four-person Seadoo Challenger jet launch was secured to rusted iron rings by weathered ropes and covered over by canvas. It rose and fell violently on the incoming swell. A group of officers wearing orange life jackets was making its way with difficulty across the adjoining outcrop of rocks, carrying among them the lifeless form of Norman Morrison. It brought to Sime’s mind the image of his ancestor’s father being carried back from the deer hunt. When they finally got to the jetty they laid the body down on the concrete, and seawater foamed out of his mouth and back across his face into open eyes.
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.’
II
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.’