He stood absolutely still, listening in the dark, hearing nothing more than the sound of the storm outside. But something else had every nerve-end tingling. A very powerful sense that he was not alone. Only minutes before the lights went out he had been spooked by the imagined presence of the dead. Now, whether he sensed the warmth of a body or some faint odour, all of his instincts told him there was someone else in the house. Boudreau aside, only a handful of people knew he was here. Aitkens and Briand. The fishermen he’d seen at the harbour, Owen Clarke among them. And was it Chuck he had seen on the quad bike by the cemetery? Of all of them, it seemed to Sime, only Briand had motive. Take away his wife’s alibi and he’d also had the opportunity.
Sime cursed himself suddenly for his own stupidity. Just half an hour earlier he had guided himself to Kirsty Guthrie’s grave using his cellphone. And he had spent the last several minutes stumbling about in the dark when he had a perfectly usable source of light in his pocket. He fumbled to retrieve it and switch it on.
To reveal a masked face less than half a metre away, a blade rising through the dark.
A startled cry released itself from his throat, and in reaching out to grab the knife hand of his attacker, his phone went clattering away across the floor, its light with it. All that he was left with was the imprint in his mind of two dark eyes glinting behind the slits of a ski mask.
He felt the blade strike his shoulder, cutting through flesh and glancing off the bone. Pain seared through his neck and arm, but he had a hold of the man’s wrist with one hand and swung a fist blindly through the dark. He felt the jarring contact of bone on bone and the other man gasped in pain. Sime swivelled side-on and threw all his weight forward, pushing his attacker back until he lost his footing on the two steps leading to the conservatory. Both men fell down into it, Sime on top, the sound of the knife rattling away across the floor. Sime’s weight expelled all the air from the other man’s lungs, like a long deep sigh, and Sime felt a blast of bad breath in his face.
But he wasn’t prepared for the hand that searched for and found his mouth and eyes, fingers like steel tearing at him in the dark. He released his grip on the man’s wrist and rolled away, crashing into a reclining chair.
Lightning spiked through the sky outside, and in that moment he saw his opponent stagger to his feet. Sime rolled over on to his knees, trying to control his breathing and steady himself for another attack. But all he felt was the rush of wind and rain that burst into the house as the door of the conservatory slid open. The crack of thunder that exploded overhead made him duck involuntarily.
The fleeting shadow of his would-be killer darted through the light of the summerhouse across the way and vanished into the night. Sime stumbled back up the steps and slithered across the floor, trying to find his phone. Lightning flashed again and he saw it just a few feet away. He dived to get it before the lightning map left his memory, fumbling then with shaking fingers to switch it on, hoping that it wasn’t broken. To his relief, it shed an amazing amount of illumination around him. He staggered to his feet and ran over to the kitchen, grabbing a knife from the block. How he wished he still had his Glock. He turned away to pursue his attacker, but stopped suddenly as he saw a flashlight clipped to an electric wall-charger by the door. He tore it free of its charger and with shaking fingers flicked the on-switch. It released a powerful beam of light into the kitchen. He thrust his phone back into his pocket and ran across the room, armed now with blade and light to chase the killer into the storm.
In the conservatory he stopped for a moment to stoop and pick up his attacker’s knife by the tip of its blade and lay it carefully on one of the chairs. There was every possibility that this was the knife used to kill Cowell.
And then he was out and into the rain and wind, the sharp pain of his shoulder wound dulling to a pervasive ache. He felt his arm stiffening up. He raised the flashlight and raked it across the clifftops. He saw nothing but the rain that drove through its beam like warp speed on Star Trek. He ran around the side of the house and swung the light back down the road towards the lighthouse. Nothing again. The man had disappeared. He turned and directed the beam up the road, and caught the briefest glimpse of a shadow disappearing over the top of the hill.
Sime drew a deep breath and started after him, his torchlight zigzagging around the hillside as he ran. When he reached the brow of the hill he stopped and swung it through an arc of 180 degrees. This was where he and Kirsty had stood just a few days earlier, when they had made some kind of connection for the very first time, and she had touched his face. Just before the call from Crozes that had led him to arrest her for murder.
There was no sign of the fugitive. Then another flash of lightning lit up the hillside, and he saw the man in the hollow below, running along the edge of the cliffs. Sime ran down the hill after him, fighting to keep his feet and his balance in the dark and the wet, buffeted face-on by the wind.
Just metres from the edge of the cliffs he stopped and focused the beam of his flashlight along their ragged contours. Aeons of erosion had eaten away at rock that glowed blood-red in the dark. Columns of it rose almost sheer out of the sea below. The noise of the storm was deafening. The wind threw mountainous seas against the base of the cliffs. Spray rose fifty feet in the air and glowed like silver mist in the light of his torch.
And then he saw him. His attacker had given up. There was nowhere to go. He was unarmed and without light. Sime was sure to catch him. Crouching in the grass to catch his breath, he had extended one arm to his right to keep his balance. And he watched as Sime approached, slow and cautious, keeping the beam of his torch fully focused on him the whole time.
‘Give it up, Briand!’ Sime shouted above the roar of the wind.
But the man neither spoke nor moved. Sime was within a metre of him now. And suddenly he sprang forward, filling the beam of light, almost snuffing it out, as he powered into Sime and grabbed his knife arm with one hand, punching his wounded shoulder with the other. Once, twice, three times. Sime yelled with pain, and his flashlight went spinning away through the grass. The other man was powerful, and with his weight on top as the two men fell, was able to twist Sime’s wrist, forcing him to unclench his fist and release the knife.
Now he had the upper hand, grabbing the knife and turning quickly to get back to his feet. Sime clutched desperately at his face as he did, fingers finding only the slick wet material of the man’s ski mask. Which tore off in his hand as the other man rolled away.
The flashlight lay tipped at an angle in the grass. But it cast enough light for Sime to see Jack Aitkens, wild-eyed, his back to the cliffs, the ocean behind him. He stood with his legs apart, slightly bent at the knees, his knife hand extended to his right. He was gasping for breath.
Sime got slowly to his feet, looking at him in astonishment. ‘Why?’ he shouted.
But Aitkens made no attempt to respond, keeping his eyes fixed on the detective.
‘For God’s sake, Aitkens!’ Sime bellowed. ‘Give it up.’
Aitkens shook his head, but still said nothing. Sime glanced towards the flashlight. If he had that, then he could at least blind the man when he came at him. He dived for it at the same time as Aitkens made his move.
Stretched out on his belly, he grasped the torch, half expecting Aitkens’s blade to sink itself between his shoulders. He rolled over and shone the light up into Aitkens’s face. But there was no one there. He scrambled to his knees and swept the beam of his torch across the clifftops. Nothing. Aitkens had vanished.