As hard as he tried he couldn’t banish from his mind the wounded animal look in Kirsty’s eyes when she’d told him that the lion had just got the gazelle. It had left him feeling ruthless and predatory.
He no longer knew what to believe about her. But the fact that she had told him the truth about the pendant was no longer in any doubt, and it left him feeling hugely unsettled. How did they come to possess the same family crest engraved in the same semi-precious carnelian? One a ring, one a pendant. Clearly pieces of a matching set.
Crozes had been dismissive. Nothing to do with the case, he’d said. And Sime was unable to find any grounds with which to challenge that assessment. There was no obvious link to the murder.
And yet still Sime was haunted by that moment he’d first set eyes on the widow and been convinced he knew her. Somehow in that light the arm-and-sword crest seemed less of a coincidence. But he could not for the life of him imagine what it was that connected them.
If there was a connection, and the matching ring and pendant had some significance beyond coincidence, then he could only think that the answer must lie in the diaries. Something in all of this had sparked his dreams and recollections of them. And Annie had thought there was some mention of the ring in them, though he had no memory of that himself. Of course, he knew that his grandmother had not read them everything from the journals. And he vaguely recalled his parents expressing concern about one of the stories. Not suitable for young children, they had said.
He needed to get his hands on those diaries.
‘Another one of those, monsieur?’ The barman nodded towards his empty glass on the bar. But Sime couldn’t face another. He shook his head. It was time to face the night, with all its sleepless demons, and lie on his back to watch the TV screen send its shadow dancers around the walls.
On the walk down the hall he felt as if he were pulling each foot free of treacle. He closed the door of his room behind him and leaned back against it. When he shut his eyes the ground shifted beneath his feet and for a moment he thought he was going to fall over. He opened them again quickly.
He found the remote for the TV in the dark and turned it on. Better to have something meaningless to shut out, than to lie listening to reproachful silence. He kicked off his shoes and lay gingerly on the bed. His ribs were less painful than before. The nurse was right, he thought. Just bruised. And he wondered again who had attacked him the previous night. Not Norman Morrison. And certainly not Kirsty. So who? He spread his hands on the bed on either side of his hips, as if some unseen pressure were bearing down on him and pressing him into the mattress.
His throat felt rough and his eyes were on fire. He closed them and saw flickering red light through the lids. His breathing was slow but laboured, as if each breath took a conscious effort. His whole body was screaming out for sleep.
The hours passed in an almost fevered delirium, not always fully conscious, but never quite asleep. The passage of time was punctuated by frequent, involuntary glances at the clock. The last time he’d looked it was 1.57. Now it was 2.11. The TV channel had reverted to its nightly diet of teleshopping special offers. Tonight, a kitchen device capable of chopping any vegetable into a dozen different shapes or sizes.
Sime swung his legs off the bed and stood up. He walked stiffly into the bathroom, avoiding the mirror, and ran the cold tap. Cupped hands splashed icy water on to his face. The shock of it brought momentary relief from the fatigue that numbed him, and he rubbed himself vigorously dry with a towel. In the bedroom he slipped his feet back into their shoes.
Beyond the curtain he slid open the inner glass door, then the fly screen, and unlocked the outer window, sliding it aside and slipping out into the darkness of the car park. The wind blew in across the bay in cold gusts. He zipped up his hoodie, pushed his hands deep into his pockets and started walking. Anything to avoid the excruciating boredom that came with insomnia.
The yellow light of street lamps fell in gloomy patches on the tarmac, reflecting off the roofs of cars in the car park. The main north — south highway was deserted. Lights shining from the windows of the hospital across the way were the only sign of life. Lights that shone for the sick and the dead, and for those who had to deal with both.
He had walked no more than fifty metres when he heard a woman cry out. And then a man’s voice. At first he thought that perhaps the woman was being attacked, and he spun around looking for the source of the voices. And then it came to him that these were the sounds of people making love. Voices that drifted out into the night from one of the hotel rooms, issuing from behind curtains drawn across doors left open for air.
Sime closed his eyes. Other people’s lives, he thought, and felt the ache of lost love, of moments once shared and now misplaced. Although his marriage was dead and hopelessly beyond resuscitation, he missed the warmth and comfort that comes with being close to another human being.
He stood for a self-conscious moment, listening to the shared experience of the strangers beyond the curtain, almost wallowing in his own misery. Before an ugly thought wormed its way through his self-pity. He looked back along the row of glass doors to his own and made a quick count. And then a moment of pure, incandescent jealousy seared his soul.
Without even thinking, he strode towards the lovers’ room and slid the screen door roughly aside, dragging the curtains out of his way. Pale light washed into the room from the street lamps outside, spilling across the bed and startling the man and woman mid-passion. The man rolled to one side, and the woman sat up, wide-eyed and staring towards the figure who stood silhouetted in the doorway. The bedside light snapped on, and Sime gazed in disbelief at the dishevelled figures of Marie-Ange and Daniel Crozes, their nakedness only half hidden by a tangle of sheets.
‘Sime!’ There was both disbelief and alarm in Marie-Ange’s almost involuntary evocation of his name.
So many things passed through his mind in a single moment that not one of them achieved any clarity. His wife and his boss were making love in her hotel room. Two people having sex. People he knew. One he respected, the other he used to love. And when suddenly the fog of confusion cleared he realised with a sickening sense of betrayal that this was not a one-night stand. He saw the half-empty bottle of champagne that stood on the dresser, the two empty glasses. The clothes discarded carelessly on the floor.
‘How long?’ he said.
Marie-Ange clutched the sheets to her chest to hide her breasts, as if he might never have seen them before. ‘It’s none of your business. We are no longer an item, Sime. Our marriage is over.’
‘How long?’
But she could not maintain her facade of righteous indignation, and turned her head to avoid his eyes, the accusation in them and all his hurt.
Sime switched his focus toward Crozes. ‘Lieutenant?’ he said, his voice laden with irony, and Crozes couldn’t look him in the eye.
‘I’m sorry, Sime,’ he said.
And Sime went from stillness to fury before his brain could engage in reason. He crossed the room in several long strides and grabbed his superior officer by the shoulders, pulling him from the bed and slamming him hard back against the wall. All the air escaped Crozes’s lungs in a single breath, almost at the same moment as Sime’s bunched fist sank into his gut, causing him to double up. Without any predetermination, Sime’s knee came up into his face, bursting Crozes’s lip on his front teeth and spraying blood all over his naked chest and thighs. He heard Marie-Ange screaming, and Crozes’s voice gurgling through the blood in his mouth. But Sime was gripped by a rage that wouldn’t let him go and he swung Crozes through three hundred and sixty degrees to smash up against the wall again. A chair went flying. The champagne bottle toppled and smashed one of the glasses. Sime swung a fist and caught Crozes on the side of his head. The lieutenant fell to his knees, and only the low, threatening imperative in Marie-Ange’s voice stopped him from going for the kill.