In the end their laughter had forced the owner of the restaurant to ask them to leave. They were annoying the other customers.
They had gone back to Sime’s apartment, and that night had the best sex of their future relationship. Pure lust, like Sime had never known before. They had been married within six months.
But the truth he had learned since then was that you can’t build a whole relationship on the basis of one night. And that what might seem like a good match to a computer doesn’t always work in life.
CHAPTER FIVE
I
The wind was gathering strength out of the south-west, sweeping up over the clifftops and flattening every growing thing in its path. The sun, veiled at first by high cloud, had now been swallowed by storm clouds rapidly approaching across the slate-grey swell of the ocean. But the air was warm, soft on the skin, and Sime sat among the tall grasses bowing all around him, just metres from the edge of the cliff. He could hear the waves breaking below, and had a sense of being fully exposed to the power of nature. Both at one with it, and completely at its mercy. He felt almost ghostlike, insubstantial, lost somewhere in a life gone wrong.
How was it possible that his relationship with Marie-Ange had been so easily found and so painfully lost? Affection exchanged for enmity. The fulfilment he had felt in those heady early days replaced by an aching emptiness. It occurred to him that neither of them had ever really loved the other. It had been need more than love. And that like a hunger satisfied, the need had simply passed.
At the start she had filled a gaping hole in his life. He had known from his early teens that he was somehow different from others. That there was something missing from his life. Something he had never quite identified or understood. And for a few short years it seemed that Marie-Ange had fitted into that missing piece of him, making him complete in some way. For her part, he suspected she had been driven by some mothering instinct, wrapping arms around the little boy lost. Which was no basis for a relationship. And so it had proved.
For a moment he closed his eyes and let the wind caress him. If only he could sleep, he was sure that much of this torture would pass. He was so tempted simply to lie down in the grass, with the sound of the wind and the ocean in his ears, the sense of coming storm still some way distant. But as his lids shut out the light, the face of Kirsty Cowell came to him in the dark. As if she had always been there. Just waiting for him.
‘You all right, Sime?’
The voice, raised above the wind, startled his eyes open and he looked up, heart pounding, to see Lieutenant Crozes standing over him. ‘Sure,’ Sime said. ‘Just listening to the wind.’
Crozes stared out over the ocean. ‘The forecasters say there’s one helluva storm coming.’
Sime followed his gaze to the accumulation of clouds, black, contused and devouring the sky as they approached. ‘Certainly looks like it.’
‘The remnants of Hurricane Jess, apparently.’
Sime had been only vaguely aware of TV news items about the hurricane that had torn up the eastern seaboard of the United States. ‘Really?’
‘Downgraded to storm status now. But they’re calling it a superstorm. It’s going to be touch and go whether we get off the island tonight.’
Sime shrugged. He didn’t much care one way or another. Wherever he laid his head for the night he knew he wouldn’t sleep. ‘How’s the door-to-door going?’
Crozes expelled air through pursed lips. ‘Like getting blood out of a stone, Sime. Oh, everyone’s nice enough. Lots to say but nothing to tell. Not to us, anyway. And no one’s got a bad word about Kirsty Cowell.’
Sime got to his feet, brushing dead grasses from his trousers. ‘Why would they?’
‘Well, they wouldn’t. She’s one of them. An islander born and bred. But although no one’s saying it, seems clear they all think she killed him.’
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.