Entry Island(41)

‘To look around.’

‘Since when did you become a crime scene expert?’

‘Not the crime scene, the house.’

She raised an eyebrow and repeated the question that Blanc had asked. ‘Why?’

‘Professional interest. They say that people and their relationships are reflected in their homes.’

‘And you think you can learn something about the Cowells from their house?’

‘I’m sure I can.’

She gazed at him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Please yourself.’

Sime walked off along the hall that led to the far end of the house. On his right, stairs descended into a basement. He went down and switched on the lights. Fluorescents flickered on overhead to reveal a guest living room and a further two bedrooms. Cowell had clearly nurtured expectations of many visitors. Sime wondered if they had ever materialised. There was a large storeroom full of files and boxes, and papers stacked on shelves. And through a double door, a sprawling workshop with a pristine workbench that looked as if it had never been used. One wall was hung with myriad tools all neatly arranged in rows and sizes.

Sime plunged the basement once more into darkness and climbed back up into daylight. Next along the corridor a door leading to a guest bedroom stood ajar. On the far side of it French windows opened into the conservatory. He wondered if any guests had ever slept here. It didn’t feel like it. There was a lack of warmth, of anything personal. It was furnished like a five-star hotel room.

Further along, another door led to the master bedroom, and Sime was surprised to find that it was just as impersonal as the guest room. There seemed to be nothing shared in here. No photographs, no mementos of happier times. No paintings on the walls. Not even clothes draped over chairs or lying on the bed, no slippers discarded at the bedside. There were no jars of face cream or make-up on the dresser, no combs or brushes with hair caught in the bristles. Just shiny, dust-free surfaces. The room was as sterile, it seemed, as the relationship it had played host to.

At the end of the hall, a door on the left led to her study, and crossing its threshold Sime at once felt a change in atmosphere. This was Kirsty Cowell’s private space and every cluttered surface and crowded bookshelf spoke of her. One entire wall was devoted to books. Everything from classical English literature to the ground-breaking American writers of the twentieth century – Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mailer, Updike; encyclopaedias, books on British and Canadian history, almost a full shelf on the history of Scotland.

There was a well-worn leather recliner with a shawl draped over it, and moccasin slippers beneath it. There were paintings on the walls, amateur efforts that made up for lack of technique in capturing the mood of the island. Crude sea views and clumsy landscapes. One was particularly striking. A line of black crows sitting along an electric cable strung between two telegraph posts, a typical island house behind them, painted a garish green and white, a sky of purple-edged clouds. And Sime realised that he hadn’t seen any seagulls on his two trips to the island. Only crows. He glanced from the window and saw them now in black huddled rows, sitting on rooftops and along fences and telephone lines, silent witnesses to an investigation of murder.

He turned back to the walls, and found his eye drawn by a framed black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged couple standing outside the summerhouse across the way. Kirsty’s parents, he assumed. Judging from their age, the picture had been taken only a dozen or so years before, yet it felt dated. Not only because it was in black and white, but the couple themselves seemed to belong to another era. The way they dressed and wore their hair. It was taken before the remodelling of the house, and the building looked older, old-fashioned, like the couple themselves.

He saw Kirsty in both of them. She was tall and willowy like her father. But she had her mother’s strong features, and her thick black hair, which here had already been invaded by a creeping grey.

He turned then to her desk. A surface cluttered with papers and bric-a-brac. A small wooden Buddha with a fat, laughing face, a mug that hadn’t been washed. Scissors, a letter-opener, innumerable pens and pencils in chipped ceramic cups, tissues, reading glasses, endless doodles on a large blotter. A reflection of idle moments of absent thinking. Whorls and stick figures, happy faces and sad. Some just lightly sketched, others worked over again and again until almost cutting through the paper. An indication, perhaps, of darker moods.

A pile of magazines testified to her interest in current affairs. Time Magazine, Newsweek, Maclean’s.

In a drawer he found an old family photo album bound in dark-green cracked leather, and sat in her captain’s chair to open it on the desk in front of him. Its pages were thick grey paper turned brittle with age. Discoloured black and white snapshots in the early pages were slipped into slits cut to hold them, captions written in faded ink beneath.