She wore jeans and a woollen jumper and folded her arms defensively across her chest. Dark hair showing the first signs of grey was drawn back severely from a high forehead and a face devoid of make-up. ‘His name’s Owen Clarke. A bit of a brawler. I mean, nice guy and all, but turns kind of sour with a drink in him. I’ve treated injuries inflicted by those big split knuckles of his often enough. Nothing serious. But these are hard men here. Some of them spend six months at a stretch fishing away from home. You can’t blame them for letting off a bit of steam now and then.’
‘What sort of age is he?’ Sime asked.
‘I guess he’s in his forties now. Got a teenage boy called Chuck. Not a bad kid, but looks to be following in his father’s footsteps. In temperament, I mean. Not on to the boats. Like most kids on the island these days, all he wants is to get off it.’
She glanced from the window, almost longingly Sime thought. On a clear day she could probably see home on Cap aux Meules from here.
‘Strangely enough it’s the mother who rules the roost in the Clarke household. Owen’s a big brute of a man and Chuck’s not far behind him, but Mary-Anne’s the pack leader.’
Blanc was playing absently with an unlit cigarette in his right hand, turning it over between three fingers like a magician performing a trick. It kept drawing the nurse’s eye as if she were afraid he might light it up. He said, ‘So what was his beef with Cowell?’
‘Something to do with his boat. I don’t know the details. But his father used to own it. And now Cowell does.’ She caught herself. ‘Did. And Owen skippered it for him.’
Sime said, ‘And you think Clarke might have been capable of killing him?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she said quickly. ‘Just that there was no love lost.’
‘You were the first on the scene,’ Blanc said. ‘After the McLeans, that is.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Cowell was dead when you got there.’
She bit her lip softly, and Sime could see the troubled recollection in her eyes. ‘He was.’
‘How did you verify that?’
‘Sergeant, nobody who’d lost that much blood could still be living.’
‘But you were able to determine what caused the bleeding?’
‘Only the pathologist can tell you that.’ She sighed and relented a little. ‘He appeared to have three stab wounds in his chest.’
‘So it must have been a pretty frenzied attack.’
She shook her head. ‘I have no idea. I treat cuts and bruises and hand out advice to pregnant moms, Sergeant. All I can tell you is that at least one of the wounds must have punctured a lung, because there was a lot of frothy, very red oxygenated blood.’
Blanc raised his cigarette as if to put it in his mouth, then seemed to think better of it and lowered it again. ‘What kind of state was Mrs Cowell in when you got there?’
She raised her eyeline and her focus drifted off to relive the moment. ‘Almost catatonic.’
‘The McLeans said she was hysterical.’
‘Not by the time I got there. She was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs in the conservatory just staring into space. I’ve never seen a face so white. It made a shocking contrast with the blood on it.’
Blanc flicked a glance at Sime then back to the nurse. ‘Do you like Mrs Cowell?’
She seemed surprised by the question. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you think she killed her husband?’
Colour rose on her cheeks and she pushed herself away from the edge of her desk and stood up. ‘I have no idea, Sergeant. That’s your job.’
Outside, the wind whipped the hair on Blanc’s head almost straight up in the air. He turned to Sime. ‘I suppose we’ll have to talk to this guy Clarke. But something tells me it’ll be a wild-goose chase.’ He turned his cigarette around one last time and it snapped in half. The tobacco it spilled in the wind disappeared into the fading afternoon.
II
The minibus bumped and rattled over the pitted and uneven surface of School Road, the twin paps of Big Hill and Cherry Hill rising up to their right above scattered plantations of stunted pine. Blanc smoked at the wheel, and Sime wound down the window to let in some air. The rain of earlier was intermittent now, and smeared in streaks across the windscreen with each passage of the wipers.
The school was housed in a long, low shed with windows all along one side and sat in the valley beyond the nearest plantation. Built at a time when the island population might well have been double its present number, Sime doubted if it was attended by more than a handful of children these days.
They turned off on a rough track before they got to the school, and strained up the slope to a purple-painted house on the rise. A white picket fence enclosed an overgrown garden, and they found Clarke in a breeze-block hut at the far end of it, directed there by an elderly lady who answered their knock on the front door. Not his wife, Sime thought.
Piles of lobster creels lay around the hut like seaweed washed up on the shore. They were piled six or seven deep, a hundred or more of them, linked by rope and pegged to the ground to keep them from being carried off by the winter gales.
There were no windows in the hut, the only light provided by a single naked bulb hanging from the darkness of the roof space. The air was filled with cigarette smoke and the hum of a large chest freezer that stood against the rear wall, and Sime detected a background perfume of stale alcohol. The walls were hung with nets and tools and ropes, batons of wood two metres long stacked up along one wall. A profusion of white and pink buoys hung from the roof like fungus growing from its timbers.
Clarke was hunched over on a stool at a workbench beneath the light bulb, eyes screwed up against the smoke from the brown-stained cigarette that burned in the corner of his mouth. A half-drunk bottle of beer stood at one end of the bench, and Clarke was attaching netting to the frame of a newly built lobster trap. The table and floor were covered in sawdust, and a rusted fretsaw hung from a vice bolted to the bench next to the beer.
He laughed when they told him why they were there. A laugh that seemed filled with genuine mirth. ‘And you think I killed him? Goddamnit, I wish I had. He sure had it coming.’ He sucked smoke into his lungs and blew it at the light bulb, momentarily clouding its glare. Most of his lower front teeth were missing, and he hadn’t shaved in at least a week. A cat watched them with studied disinterest, curled up inside a cardboard box that stood on an old wooden cabinet cluttered with the detritus of a chaotic life.
Blanc deferred to Sime, since they were back in English-language territory. But he used Clarke’s cigarette as a pretext for lighting one himself, and the air grew thicker. The three men eyed each other warily like so many faces peering through fog. ‘What exactly was it that you had against Mr Cowell, sir?’
Clarke guffawed. ‘Sir? Hah!’ Then his smile faded, the fleeting light in his eyes replaced by a dark hatred. ‘I’ll tell you what I had against the bastard. He stole my father’s boat and killed him in the process.’
‘How so?’
Clarke dropped his cigarette on the floor and extended a foot to crush it. Then he took a swig of beer and held the bottle in his hand as he leaned forward into the light. ‘This is a hard fucking life, man. You spend your winters cooped up here, months on end with nothing better to do than listen to the goddamn womenfolk chewing your ear off. Drives you stir-crazy. Snow and cold. Endless damn darkness, and days on end sometimes when the ferry doesn’t come ’cos of ice in the bay, or winter storms.’
He took a long pull from the neck of his bottle.
‘When the spring comes you gotta prep the boat, then you’re out fishing. Short lobster season here, too. Two months only, from May first. Out at 5 a.m. for the flare going up, and then you’re off. Long hard days, and dangerous too. When those creels leave the boat they’re linked by rope. Long damn coils of the stuff. Get your feet tangled up in that and you’re in the water in a heartbeat. Those things are heavy, and they pull you right down. Man, you’re drowned before you know it.’ For a moment he couldn’t meet their gaze. ‘Brother went that way. There one minute, gone the next. Not a damn thing I could do about it.’