‘Message list?’ Sime said.
The old lady chuckled. ‘Messages we call them. Shopping you would say. I phone in my grocery list to the Co-op on Grindstone every two weeks and they send them over on the ferry next day. That’s my job. Chuck’s job is to go and fetch them. Not much to ask a grown boy, but it doesn’t stop him complaining.’
‘You live here with your son and daughter-in-law then?’
‘No. They live here with me. Though you’d not know it to hear the way her ladyship calls the shots around the place. Not that I pay a blind bit of notice. They’ll get the house soon enough. I’m not long for this world.’
Sime glanced at Blanc, who seemed confused. ‘You look well enough to me, Mrs Clarke.’
‘Appearances can be deceptive, son. Don’t believe everything you see.’
The door from the hall flew open and a small, square woman in her forties with cropped, red-dyed hair stood glaring at them. Sime glanced from the window and saw a car at the gate where there hadn’t been one earlier. They had not heard it arrive above the clatter of the wind. Mary-Anne Clarke, he presumed.
‘What the hell do you want?’ she said.
‘Mrs Clarke?’
‘My house, I’ll ask the questions.’
Sime began to understand why Owen Clarke hated the winters. He showed her his Sûreté ID and said, ‘Detectives Mackenzie and Blanc. Just trying to establish the where abouts of your husband yesterday evening.’
‘He didn’t kill that weasel Cowell, if that’s what you’re thinking. Wouldn’t have the balls for it unless he had half a pint of whisky in him. And then he wouldn’t be capable of it.’
‘Do you know where he was?’
‘He was right here at home. All night.’ She glanced at her mother-in-law. ‘That right, Mrs Clarke?’
‘If you say so, dear.’
Mary-Anne swung her gaze back towards the two policemen. ‘Satisfied?’
*
‘Jesus, Sime,’ Blanc said as they closed the garden gate behind them. ‘If I was Clarke I wouldn’t be able to wait till that flare went up on May first.’
Sime grinned. ‘Are you married, Thomas?’
Blanc cupped his hands around the end of a cigarette to light it, and Sime saw the smoke whipped away from his mouth as he lifted his head. ‘Tried it once and didn’t like it.’ He paused. ‘Didn’t learn my lesson, though. Second time I got snared. Three teenage kids now.’ He took another pull on his cigarette. ‘Guess there’s not much point in pulling him in for a formal interview.’
Sime shrugged, disappointed somehow. ‘Guess not. For the moment anyway.’
Blanc looked at his watch. ‘Probably just got time to interview the Cowell woman again before the ferry leaves.’ He raised his eyes to the sky. ‘If it leaves.’
They were upwind of the quad bikes and so didn’t hear them until they swung into view. Five of them, engines screaming. Sime and Blanc turned, startled at the sound of throttles opening up to give vent to pent-up horsepower. They came, almost from nowhere it seemed, up over the brow of the hill, one after the other to start circling the two police officers.
Just kids, Sime realised. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen-year-olds. Two girls, three boys. Sime raised his voice. ‘Cut it out!’ But it was lost in the wind and the roar of the engines.
Rain had begun to fall in earnest now, and Sime and Blanc were trapped by the circle of bikes, unable to reach the shelter of the minibus. The teenagers were laughing and hollering above the noise. Sime stepped into the path of the nearest bike to break the circle and for a moment thought it was going to run him down. But at the last moment it turned sharply away, overturning and sending its rider sprawling into the grass.
The others pulled up abruptly and Blanc went over to the fallen biker to take his arm and drag him to his feet. He was a sullen-faced boy who looked like the eldest of the group. His hair was shaven at the sides and gelled into spikes on top. ‘Damned idiot!’ Blanc shouted at him. ‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’
But the boy never took his eyes off Sime. Humiliated in front of his friends. ‘No, he’s the one trying to do that.’
A sharp, shrill voice cut across the noise of wind and motors. ‘Chuck!’ Everyone turned towards the house. Mary-Anne Clarke’s dyed hair looked incongruously red in the sulphurous light. She stood in the doorway, and there wasn’t one among them, adult or adolescent, who didn’t know that she was not to be argued with. ‘Get yourself in here. Now!’
Reluctantly, and with the worst possible grace, Chuck righted his quad bike with the help of one of his friends and turned a sulky face towards Sime. ‘You leave my dad alone. He’d nothing to do with killing that fucking man.’ And he climbed back on the bike, revving its motor several times, before driving it away around the back of the house. His mother went inside and closed the door. The other kids gunned their engines and wheeled away up the hill, kicking up mud and grass in their wake.