The thrum of the generators at the top of the road was barely audible above the roar of the wind that he fought against all the way up the hill until he reached the church. A couple of pickups passed him on the road, bumping and lurching through the puddles. Headlights picking him out against the black of the night, then passing with the growl of an engine to be swallowed by the dark. Lights shone in the windows of the few houses dotted around the hillside, but there was not a soul in sight. Sime opened the gate of the church and by the light of his cellphone found his way back to the grave of Kirsty McKay, whom he now knew to be Kirsty Guthrie.
He stood in the wind and rain looking down at her headstone, knowing that her bones lay beneath his feet.
Just as he had done that morning, Sime knelt in front of the stone and laid both hands upon it. The wet of the earth soaked into the knees of his trousers. The stone felt cold and rough in his hands. And he had a powerful sense of somehow bridging the gap between these ill-fated lovers, bringing them together at last after all these years.
He felt, too, a strong sense of grief. He had lived through passionate moments in the skin of his ancestor. In his dream he had sacrificed everything to try to be with his Ciorstaidh. And here she lay, dead in the earth, as she had done for a very, very long time. He stood up quickly.
Impossible, he knew, to tell tears from rain.
The hoarse revving of a motor reached him above the howl of the wind, and he turned in time to see the shadow of a figure on a quad bike vanishing over the lip of the hill.
By the time he got to the big yellow house on the cliffs it was pitch-dark. He had struggled all the way against the wind, stumbling through the potholes that pitted the road. His clothes were soaked through and he was shivering from the cold.
But he did not go in straight away. He circled the big house and crossed the grass to the summerhouse, the house which had originally belonged to the McKays. The house where Kirsty Guthrie had grown up and in all probability later lived with her husband. The house where, several generations later, Kirsty Cowell had been born and raised. Walking in the footsteps of her ancestor, seeing all the same things that she had seen. Entry Island, almost unchanged in two hundred years. The sun coruscating across the bay towards the other islands of the archipelago stretched out along the horizon. She would have felt the same wind in her face, picked the same flowers from the same hills.
The front door was not locked, and Sime let himself in. He switched on a table lamp and wandered around in the half-dark just touching things. Things that belonged to Kirsty Cowell. An ornamental owl sculpted out of a piece of coal, an old clock that ticked slowly on the mantel. A book she had been reading, laid aside on a coffee table. A mug of tea never returned to the kitchen. And with every touch, the connection between them seemed to grow stronger until he could hardly bear it.
He pushed through the screen door and back out onto the porch, and ran across to the house that James Cowell had built. The last shredded remnants of crime scene tape clung to a wooden stake, fluttering wildly in the wind. The door to the conservatory was not locked and he slid it open to step inside and fumble for a light switch.
Lighting concealed around the conservatory and up into the living area and kitchen flickered and cast warm light among the shadows. Dried blood still stained the floor, and Marie-Ange had stuck down white tape to trace the outline of where the body had lain.
Sime stood dripping on the wooden floor and gazed at it for a long time. He was trying to replay the scene exactly as Kirsty had described it. The clear impression her story had given was that she and not James was the intended target. The intruder had attacked her in the dark of the conservatory, and then chased her across the floor of the living area and tried to stab her.
Which meant that if James were not the object of the attack, it couldn’t have been Briand. Because what possible motive could he have had for killing Kirsty?
But then, she had stumbled upon the intruder by accident while James was upstairs. Wasn’t it possible that he had simply tried to shut her up, to stop her from raising the alarm? That it only appeared she was the victim?
On the other hand, if she were the target, and her attacker wasn’t Briand, he would not have anticipated Cowell being there. As far as anyone knew he had left her and moved in with a woman across the water. His presence would have come as a huge surprise.
Sime turned away from the crime scene, spooked suddenly by a sense of being alone with ghosts, and frustrated by the lack of any real clarity. He headed along the passage that ran towards the far end of the house, and found a light switch on the stairs that led down to the basement.
Here in the bowels of the house you wouldn’t have known there was a storm raging outside. Only the occasional deep thudding vibration, as the building soaked up a particularly heavy gust of wind, betrayed the fact that the storm had well and truly arrived.
Sime found a panel of light switches and flicked them all up, flooding the entire basement with the glare of fluorescent light. He went straight to the storeroom he had discovered on his previous visit. It was full of cardboard boxes, a couple of old trunks, a set of leather suitcases. The shelves that lined the walls were bowed with the weight of books and papers and box files.
And everything went dark.
Sime stood stock-still, his heart pounding. He could even have sworn he heard his pulse in the thick black silence. The darkness was profound. He couldn’t see his hands in front of his face. For several moments he stood hoping that his eyes would accustom themselves to the dark and he could at least discern something. But still it enveloped him, soft and sightless, and he felt completely blind.
He reached out to touch the wall and made his way back to the door by touch, reaching it sooner than expected and almost bumping into it. Now he could feel the architrave and the doorframe and stepped cautiously out into what he knew was a large open space with the stairs at the far side of it. He cursed the storm, which seemed louder now, penetrating the layers of insulation that cocooned the house. The chances were that the whole island had lost power, or at least part of it if cables had come down.
A sudden flash of light left an imprint on his retinas of everything around him. Lightning. It had flooded through windows high up on the walls. And vanished again just as suddenly. But with an image in his mind of exactly where he stood, Sim moved quickly in the remembered direction of the stairs. He tripped over the bottom step and gashed his knee on the one above it.
‘Shit!’
He waited for several moments for the pain to subside before climbing the stairs, his hands touching the walls on either side to help him feel his way up. Still he could see nothing. And then at the top of the steps, another flash of lightning lit up the whole house. Again he used the lingering image it left to guide himself through to the main room.
There he stopped, and for the first time became aware of an alarm bell ringing distantly in his mind. Through the windows of the conservatory he could see across to the summer-house where the table lamp he had switched on earlier still burned in the living room. He turned around, and through other windows saw the twinkle of distant lights in other houses. Only Cowell’s house had lost electricity. Either the fuses had tripped, or someone had switched off the power. Even if he could find his way to it he had no idea where the fusebox was.