Sime looked at him, startled. ‘Why?’
Crozes shrugged. ‘That’s what we need to find out.’ He turned and nodded down the hill towards a green-painted house not a hundred yards away. ‘While she’s with Marie-Ange and the nurse it might be an idea if you and Blanc interviewed the neighbours. According to Aucoin they were the first ones on the scene.’
Fine spits of rain stung their faces.
II
The McLeans were an odd couple. They sat nervously in the Cowells’ summerhouse. No doubt they had been in it many times, but today they were like fish out of water. Uncomfortable and uncertain in foreign surroundings. Agnes, as near as Sime could guess, was around seventy. Harry a little older. She had an abundance of white hair like cotton wool, crimped around the sides of her head and piled up on top of it. He had almost none, a bald brown head spattered by age. They seemed very small to Sime, like little shrunken people.
‘I couldn’t say exactly what time it was.’ Agnes had a shrill voice that dipped and dived like a butterfly on a summer’s day. ‘We were asleep.’
‘What time do you normally go to bed?’
‘About ten usually.’ Harry’s nicotine-stained fingers turned his wedding ring around as his hands lay in his lap. He would doubtless have been happier to have a cigarette in them.
‘So it was after ten, and sometime before midnight?’
Agnes said, ‘It was about ten past twelve when I first noticed the time. And that was after we’d called the nurse.’
‘And it was the nurse who called the police?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me what happened when Mrs Cowell came to your door.’
The elderly couple glanced at each other as if to reach agreement on who would speak first. It was Agnes who did so. ‘She came hammering at the door in the dark. It was like World War Three. I’m surprised she didn’t do damage to her hands.’
‘So that’s what woke you?’
‘Me, not him.’ Agnes snatched a quick look at her husband. ‘It would take more than a world war to rouse him from his slumbers. I had to shake him out of his sleep.’ He glared back at her. ‘But he was awake soon enough when we opened the door to her.’
‘Like an apparition, she was,’ Harry said, his beady blue eyes opening wide with recollection, like flowers in sunlight. ‘Just in her nightdress. All white and insubstantial-like, nearly see-through. I mean, with the moon up behind her like that it was plain she was buck naked beneath it.’
Now it was Agnes who glared at him. But he was oblivious, still reliving the moment.
‘And she was just covered in blood. Man, I’ve never seen anything like it. On her hands and face and all over her nightdress.’
‘She was hysterical,’ Agnes butted in. ‘Just kept screaming, help me, help me, he’s dead, he’s dead.’ She cast a withering glance at her husband. ‘And, of course, he has to ask who. As if it wasn’t blindingly obvious.’
‘Wasn’t obvious at all.’ Harry frowned. ‘Could have been anyone.’
Sime said, ‘So what happened then?’
‘We followed her up to the house,’ Agnes said. ‘In our dressing gowns. Harry got a flashlight and his shotgun. And we found Mr Cowell lying in all that blood in the middle of the floor.’
‘She said she was attacked and Cowell tried to save her.’ Harry couldn’t hide his scepticism, and Sime was quick to pick up on it.
‘But you didn’t believe her?’
Harry said, ‘No,’ and Agnes said, ‘Yes.’ Both at the same time. She glared at him again.
‘Why didn’t you believe her, Mr McLean?’
‘Harry …’ There was a clear warning in his wife’s tone.
But he just shrugged. ‘Well, who could blame her? The man was a cheat and a liar, and everyone knew it.’
Sime frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he up and left her just a week ago, didn’t he? For some floozy over on Grindstone.’ And as an afterthought he added, ‘That’s Cap aux Meules to you.’
III
They sat in the minibus on the crest of the hill, looking down on the Cowell house and the lighthouse beyond. L’île du Havre Aubert, the nearest of the islands in the archipelago, was almost obscured by the flurries of rain that blew in across the bay. Blanc sat in the front passenger seat, the window down, his cigarette smoke whisked away by the wind. Lapointe was hunched over the steering wheel munching on a sandwich that left crumbs clinging to his moustache. Crozes, Marie-Ange and Sime sat in the back. Two of the team were still out, tramping door to door and no doubt getting soaked. Marie-Ange’s crime scene assistant was taking photographs before they moved the body.
‘As soon as the Cowell woman is washed and changed I want you to ask her why she didn’t tell us she’d just split with her husband.’ Crozes was chewing absently on a fingernail.
Sime washed down a mouthful of baguette with coffee from a plastic cup and nodded. For some reason it was almost a source of comfort for him to know that Kirsty Cowell’s had not been a happy marriage either. It gave them something in common. It also gave her a motive for murder.
‘You should maybe have a word with the nurse first.’ All heads turned towards Marie-Ange. She shrugged. ‘She’s not a local, but she’s familiar enough with the island and everyone on it to know where most of the bodies are buried.’ She smiled wryly. ‘So to speak.’
‘Are you thinking of any bodies in particular?’ Crozes said.
She trapped him in the gaze of her green eyes and he looked momentarily discomfited. ‘We got to talking after she examined Mrs Cowell. Seems there’s a fisherman lives somewhere up near the school had a real grudge against Cowell. Claims he stole his father’s boat.’
Crozes made a thoughtful moue with his lips and turned to Sime. ‘You and Thomas better talk to him, then, Sime. If you think it’s worth it we can bring him in for formal interview.’
Thomas Blanc flicked his cigarette out into the early afternoon and saw it snatched away by the elements. He scratched his tonsure. ‘Suppose Mrs Cowell was telling the truth,’ he said. ‘Why would this guy attack her if it was Cowell he had the grudge against?’
The minibus rocked as a sudden gust of wind lifted up over the cliffs and hit the side of it with the force of a physical blow. A moment of sunlight washed across the island, as if in the stroke of an artist’s brush. And then it was gone.
‘Well maybe he had something against the wife, too,’ Crozes said. ‘That’s what you guys need to find out.’
CHAPTER SIX
I
The island health centre was located in a white-trimmed yellow hut that stood on the right-hand side of Big Hill Road fifty metres up from the island grocery store. To call it a road was a misnomer. It was an unmetalled track full of potholes. The sign outside the centre read Centre de santé et de services sociaux des Îles, even although no one on the island spoke French. Further evidence of the schizophrenic nature of the province to which the island belonged was to be found in street names preceded by the French Chemin, and followed by the English Road.
The nurse was in her late thirties, an embodiment of that schizophrenia. She was a native French-speaker from Cap aux Meules, but spent every other week living and speaking English on Entry Island. Sime noticed that there was no ring on her wedding finger. She perched on the edge of her desk and looked worried. ‘You won’t tell anyone I told you this, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ Blanc said. He was more comfortable now that they were speaking French again. ‘Anything you tell us is in complete confidence.’