The ground beneath Sime started to move, and he scrambled backwards in a panic as the cliff began collapsing along its leading edge. And he realised what had happened. The ground had simply given way beneath Aitkens’s feet and dropped him down on to the rocks below.
Soaked and in pain, gasping for breath and sick to his stomach, Sime spread himself out, lying on his belly, and eased himself towards the precipice until he could see down on to the jumble of debris at the foot of the cliffs.
It wasn’t a sheer drop, but a steep scree slope that fell in increments to shelves and ledges, before finally plunging down to an ocean thrashing itself against lethal outcrops of rock.
Aitkens lay on his back about fifteen metres down, still some ten metres above the sea, but drenched by the spray it tossed up into the wind. He was alive, one arm reaching up to grasp a ledge of rock above him. But he didn’t seem able to move the rest of his body.
Sime wriggled back from the drop and got to his feet, training the light of his torch along the edge of the cliffs until he saw a way down. A gentle cutaway from the top, and a steep seam of rock running downwards at an angle that would lead him to Aitkens. He ran along to it, and carefully lowered himself over the edge, gingerly testing the rock underfoot in case it would give way.
It took him almost ten minutes to make the descent, battered by the explosive breath of the storm, soaked by the salt spray thrown up all along the cliffs.
Aitkens was breathing hard. Short, mechanical bursts of breath. His eyes wide and staring in fear. Sime perched precariously on the ledge beside him. ‘Can you move?’
Aitkens shook his head. ‘There’s no feeling in my legs. My whole lower body.’ His voice was feeble. He bit his lip and tears filled his eyes. ‘I think my back’s broken.’
‘Jesus,’ Sime said. ‘What the hell were you doing, Aitkens? Why would you want to kill Kirsty?’
Aitkens said, ‘I thought you already knew. When you came asking questions about our family history.’
‘Knew what?’
Aitkens closed his eyes, pained by irony and regret. ‘Obviously not.’ He opened them again and a tear ran back down the side of his head and into his hair. ‘Sir John Guthrie …’
‘Kirsty’s father?’
He nodded. ‘He was worth a damn fortune, Mackenzie. All that family wealth accumulated during the tobacco trade, and then sugar and cotton. He didn’t just own the Langadail Estate. He had property in Glasgow and London. Investments, money in the bank. And he left all of it to his daughter, since his son was dead.’ He closed his eyes again and let out a long, painful breath. He tried to swallow, then looked up at Sime once more. ‘Only they couldn’t find her. She’d run off to Canada in search of her crofter boy. His wife was dead and there was no other heir.’ He seemed to have trouble breathing and speaking at the same time. Sime waited until he found his voice again. ‘I did my research. In Scotland, in those days, when a beneficiary couldn’t be traced, it had to be reported to the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid name! It’s now the Crown Office.’ He swallowed to catch his breath. ‘In Guthrie’s case, the lawyers sold off all his assets and the money was put in the care of the Crown, until someone turned up to claim it. Only no one ever did.’
For the first time, Sime saw how greed had been the motive for everything.
Aitkens screwed up his face in what might have been either pain or regret. ‘The only people left alive with a claim on that money were me and Kirsty. Well, my father before me. But since I have power of attorney …’
‘And you didn’t want to share it.’
His eyes fired up with indignation. ‘Why the hell should I? She had a big house, a big divorce settlement in her future. More money than she could ever spend on her precious Entry Island. And what did I have? A subterranean life spent in the dark for a pathetic monthly wage. No life, no future. That money could have given me everything.’
And now, Sime thought, if he survived he faced a life of imprisonment, both in a wheelchair and behind bars. And that realisation was writ large all over Aitkens’s face, too.
Sime said, ‘It was you who attacked me that night.’
Aitkens found his voice again but it was just a whisper. ‘Yes.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘The ring,’ he said. ‘I’d seen Kirsty’s pendant. I knew it came from Kirsty Guthrie. I thought …’ He shook his head in despair. ‘I thought that somehow you might be family, too. Some distant damned relative that was going to come and stake his claim on the money. If you look inside the band of the ring you’ll probably find it’s engraved with the Guthrie family motto. Sto pro veritate.’ He closed his eyes, the despair in his sigh conveying all the irony of the words. ‘I stand for truth.’
Sime shook his head. ‘Jesus.’ The ring again. He took out his cellphone and punched in nine-one-one.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Aitkens said.
‘Getting help.’
‘I don’t want help. For God’s sake, it’s over. Just let me die. I want to die.’ He struggled to try and shift his body. If he could move himself just a few centimetres nearer the edge, he could fall away to the oblivion that he saw now as his only escape. But he couldn’t do it.
When Sime hung up he found Aitkens staring at him with hate in his eyes. Sime said, ‘There should be a rescue team here within an hour.’
Aitkens said nothing and closed his eyes to contemplate the future hell that would be his life.
‘One little thing, Aitkens.’
Aitkens opened his eyes.
‘You had a watertight alibi for the night that Cowell was murdered. You were on the night shift at the salt-mine.’
Something very like a smile stretched Aitkens’s lips across bloodied teeth. ‘You people are so fucking stupid. You checked with the mine, of course. And they checked their records. Yes, they told you, Jack Aitkens was on the night shift when Cowell was killed.’
‘Obviously you weren’t.’
‘I swapped with a pal. An informal arrangement. We do it all the time. But it’s never recorded. Same guy’s standing in for me tonight.’ His smile came from lips tinged with the bitter taste of irony. ‘You see? I’m not even here.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Sime opened his eyes, blinking in unexpected sunlight. He felt warm and woozy. It took some moments for him to realise that he was lying stretched out on the settee in the summerhouse, cushions at his head, a thick blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
Something had wakened him. Some noise. He struggled to remember how he had got here.
The police had arrived from Cap aux Meules on the lifeboat with a doctor and a team of medics from the hospital. But in the end they had decided to make Aitkens comfortable where he lay, and wait until the wind dropped to bring in an air — sea rescue helicopter to get him off the cliffs.
The doctor had disinfected and dressed the wound on Sime’s shoulder. Sime had been shivering, suffering from hypothermia and exposure, and they had wrapped him in a thermal blanket and laid him here on the settee.
He remembered thinking, before he went to sleep, that just as Crozes had been fixated on Kirsty, he had been so focused on Briand it had blinded him to the possibility of Aitkens. But then they’d all been blind to that possibility. How could they ever have guessed at such a motive for wanting to kill his cousin?
Sime realised that what had wakened him was the sound of laughter out on the porch, and in that same moment it came to him that he had been asleep. He was almost startled and looked at his watch. It was after 8 a.m. He must have been out for close on ten hours. The first time in weeks that he had slept properly. A long, deep, dreamless sleep.