‘Shit!’
He waited for several moments for the pain to subside before climbing the stairs, his hands touching the walls on either side to help him feel his way up. Still he could see nothing. And then at the top of the steps, another flash of lightning lit up the whole house. Again he used the lingering image it left to guide himself through to the main room.
There he stopped, and for the first time became aware of an alarm bell ringing distantly in his mind. Through the windows of the conservatory he could see across to the summer-house where the table lamp he had switched on earlier still burned in the living room. He turned around, and through other windows saw the twinkle of distant lights in other houses. Only Cowell’s house had lost electricity. Either the fuses had tripped, or someone had switched off the power. Even if he could find his way to it he had no idea where the fusebox was.
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.