A voice carried on the wind seemed to call my name. At first I thought it was just my imagination. Then it came again, and I looked up to see Kirsty on the hill. This was the lowest ebb of my life, and I didn’t want her to see me like this. But she waved frantically for me to come to her and I could not just walk away.
Reluctantly I left the path and climbed the hill. As I reached her I could hardly meet her eyes, and when I did I saw the shock in them. Covered in the blood and fat of the deer, and soaked to the skin, I must have presented a ghoulish and pathetic figure. ‘My God,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. But she didn’t ask what had happened. Instead she stooped to lift a large wicker basket at her feet. A checkered cloth covered its contents and she held it out to me.
‘What’s this?’ My voice sounded strange to me, oddly disconnected.
‘Take it.’ She pushed it into my chest, and I grabbed the handle. It was unexpectedly heavy.
‘What is it?’
She said, ‘There is cheese, and eggs, and cold meat. And a quiche from the kitchen at Ard Mor.’
I had no idea what a quiche was, but all I could feel was shame. I pushed it back at her. ‘I can’t take this.’ And I saw anger fire up her eyes.
‘Don’t be stupid, Simon. It’s your responsibility to feed your family. You told me yourself. And if you knew how much I have risked to bring you this …’ She cut herself off, and I was unable to meet her eyes again. ‘There’ll be more. As and when I can get it.’
I felt her hand on my face and looked up, tears brimming along my lower lids. She leaned in to kiss me softly on the lips and turned to hurry away. I stood there watching her go, until she had dipped below the nearest horizon and disappeared from view. I felt the weight of the food in my hands and knew that I had to put my shame aside. I would not go home empty-handed after all.
As I turned to go back down the hill, my eye was caught by a movement. A figure standing at the far end of the path where it cut around the hill towards the road. Two, maybe three hundred yards away. He stood motionless, a black cutout against a grey sky. And it was not until he turned away, and I saw him in profile, that I realised it was Ciorstaidh’s brother, George.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I
It was Arseneau who met Sime and Blanc at the harbour with the minibus and the news that they had found Norman Morrison.
The wind had felt much stronger on the return crossing and now, as they turned up Chemin Mountain at the end of Main Street, they saw the crowd on the clifftop buffeted by it. A dozen or more police and civilian vehicles were clustered around the Cowell House. Arseneau parked on the road just beyond them and the three detectives walked across the grass to the fence where the crowd was gathered. Perhaps twenty islanders, and several uniformed police officers from Cap aux Meules.
Sime glanced towards the summerhouse and saw a pale-faced Kirsty watching from the porch. He felt a wave of disillusion wash over him and knew that very soon he would have to face her with her lies.
A gate opened on to narrow concrete steps set into the angle of the cliffs, an incongruous grey against the red of the stone. They led down at a steep angle to a tiny jetty, partially formed by a natural arc of rock, and augmented by the same interlocking concrete blocks that made up the breakwater at the harbour. A blue-and-white four-person Seadoo Challenger jet launch was secured to rusted iron rings by weathered ropes and covered over by canvas. It rose and fell violently on the incoming swell. A group of officers wearing orange life jackets was making its way with difficulty across the adjoining outcrop of rocks, carrying among them the lifeless form of Norman Morrison. It brought to Sime’s mind the image of his ancestor’s father being carried back from the deer hunt. When they finally got to the jetty they laid the body down on the concrete, and seawater foamed out of his mouth and back across his face into open eyes.
Sime could see Crozes down there with the nurse and Aucoin and Marie-Ange. He pushed through the silent group of spectators and started off down the steps. Blanc followed. It was exposed here and he felt the wind yanking at his jacket and trousers and flattening his curls.
The nurse was wearing jeans and a yellow anorak and was crouched over the corpse as they got to the jetty. Morrison had horrific multiple injuries. Most of the back of his head was missing. His skin was bleached white, flesh bloated and straining against what was left of his pullover and jeans. From the abnormal lie of his limbs it appeared that both of his legs and one arm were broken. One shoe was missing, revealing a distended foot that bulged through a hole in his sock.
The nurse stood up. She was unnaturally white, her skin almost blue around the eyes. She turned to Crozes. ‘Impossible for me to tell you how he died.’ She had to raise her voice above the wind and the sound of the sea breaking all around them. ‘But injuries like that … I can only think he must have fallen off the cliff. And from the state of the body I’d say he’s probably been in the water since the night he went missing.’