Crozes flashed a quick look at Sime then turned back to the nurse. ‘No way he was alive last night, then?’
‘Not a chance.’
‘What in God’s name was he doing over here during a storm?’ Marie-Ange said.
No one had any answers. Crozes was grim. ‘Better get him bagged up and over to the airport. The sooner we get an autopsy the better.’ And he turned to Marie-Ange. ‘I want to take apart that room of his up in the attic. Piece by piece.’
II
The stillness of Mrs Morrison’s sitting room was broken only by the wind whistling around the windows and the sound of a mother softly sobbing for her dead child. The sky outside had grown heavy and the only light in the room, as before, was reflected off all its polished surfaces.
On the drive over, Blanc briefed Crozes on their interview with Ariane Briand, and the lieutenant almost smiled. He looked at Sime. ‘I’ll sit in with Thomas at the monitors when you interview her,’ he said. ‘Be interesting to hear how the lamenting widow talks her way out of this one.’ But first there was the matter of the man-boy found dead in the water below her house.
Mrs Morrison sat wringing her hands in her armchair by the cold of the dead fire. ‘I don’t understand,’ she kept saying. ‘I just don’t understand.’ As if understanding might somehow bring back her son.
Sime and Crozes sat uncomfortably on the settee, and Blanc emerged from the kitchen with a cup of tea for the grieving mother. He set it down on the coffee table beside her, on top of the book she was reading. ‘Here you are, Madame Morrison,’ he said. But Sime doubted if she was even aware of him. He sat in the armchair opposite.
Upstairs, Marie-Ange and her crime scene assistant were making a forensic examination of Norman Morrison’s bedroom.
Sime said, ‘You told us he’d never run off like this before.’
‘Never.’
‘But he was in the habit of wandering around the island?’
‘He went walking a lot. He liked the open air, and he told me once he loved the sting of the rain in his face when it blows in on a strong south-westerly.’
‘Did he have any friends?’
She stole a glance at him through her tears. ‘Not since the children stopped coming. Folk his own age tended to avoid him. Embarrassed, I suppose. And some of the teenagers used to tease him. He got upset when they did that.’
‘He was upset, you said, the night he went missing.’
She nodded.
‘Because of Mr Cowell’s murder.’
‘He didn’t care about Mr Cowell. It was Mrs Cowell he was concerned about.’
‘Do you think he might have gone to try and see her?’
She tensed at the question, and avoided Sime’s eye. ‘I have no idea where he went, or why.’
‘But he was found at the foot of the cliffs below her house. So he must have gone there for a reason.’
‘I suppose he must.’
Sime thought for a moment. To discover the motivation of a man with the mind of a twelve-year-old was not an easy thing, and his mother, he felt, was being less than helpful. ‘Did he ever go out at night? After dark, I mean.’
Mrs Morrison turned towards the cup of tea that Blanc had made, as if aware of it for the first time. She lifted it to her lips to take a sip, holding it in both hands, and made the slightest shrug of her shoulders. ‘He wasn’t in the habit of asking my permission.’
‘You mean he did go out after dark?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I am in my bed at ten sharp every night, Mr Mackenzie. And Norman at times had trouble sleeping. I know he worked on his ceiling into the small hours some nights. He might have gone out for a breath of air from time to time.’ She sucked in her lower lip to stop it trembling and fight back more tears. ‘But I wouldn’t know.’
Crozes said, ‘Was Norman depressed, Mrs Morrison?’
She seemed puzzled. ‘Depressed?’
‘You said when the children stopped coming he retreated into the world of his little universe upstairs.’
‘He wasn’t depressed, sir. He just refocused his life. As you do. As I did when my husband died.’
‘So when you say he was upset, you wouldn’t describe him as suicidal?’
Now she was shocked. ‘Good God, no. Norman would never have taken his own life. Such a thing would never have entered his mind!’
A soft knocking at the door brought all their heads around. Marie-Ange stood tentatively in the hall at the open door. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something you should see.’
‘Excuse me, madame,’ Crozes said, and he got up to go out to the hall.