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.’