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.