‘Simon, too.’ Marie-Ange glanced beyond him to her estranged husband, and Sime saw the most peculiar look on her face. He stood up immediately.
They left Blanc with Mrs Morrison and climbed up into the roof of the house. Marie-Ange had brought in crime scene lights and Norman’s bedroom was lit up like a film set. Sime and Crozes slipped on plastic shoe covers and latex gloves before entering. It was stiflingly hot up here, and in the glare of the lights the colours of Norman’s little universe seemed unnaturally lurid.
The floor had been cleared, and items laid out in some kind of sequence on the bed. Soft toys and model trains, and Norman’s dismembered dolly, had been put into plastic bags.
Marie-Ange said, ‘I haven’t touched the ceiling yet. But we’ve been photographing it in some detail.’ She glanced at Sime. ‘There’s stuff here that’s only apparent when you start examining it minutely. Stuff that seems like it’s just a part of the fabric of it until you look more closely.’ She used a pair of sprung plastic tweezers as a pointer. ‘You see this little group of houses here …’ She indicated a semicircle of terraced houses around a circular area of grass, like a small park. It was fenced off from the street, and the plastic figures of several upside-down children were gathered around a bonfire. It glowed red at its centre, with a tiny circle of stones around it. 3D smoke had been created by cleverly threading puffs of cotton wool on to a piece of shaped wire that was almost invisible.
Crozes and Sime peered at it closely to try to see what it was they weren’t seeing.
Very delicately, Marie-Ange caught a length of fencing with the tips of her tweezers and gently worked it free of the Plasticine. She held it up for the two men to look at. It was a hair clasp, a small arc of comb, the teeth of which had made up the fence posts. ‘There’s more of them,’ she said, and dropped it into Crozes’s outstretched hand for him to look at. ‘Four in total. But here’s the really interesting thing …’
She turned back to the ceiling, reaching up with her tweezers to invade the embers of the bonfire with the tip of them. The stones around the glow appeared to be tiny moulded pieces of Blu-tack. She worked the tweezers, trying to catch hold of something hidden beneath the Blu-tack. Finally she found what she was looking for and moved the tweezers gently back and forth, to pull away the red glow at the heart of the fire. Revealing something much larger than the circle of it which had been exposed. An oval of semiprecious stone set in gold, its coiled-up chain concealed beneath the Plasticine. She turned, and with her free hand took hold of Sime’s right hand so that the pendant and his signet ring could be viewed side by side. The arm and sword engraved in each stone were identical. Sime felt a shiver run through him.
III
He emptied the contents of the plastic bag on to the glass tabletop in the summerhouse and looked up to see her reaction. It was clear that Kirsty was shocked. And it was evident to Sime that she was sleeping as little as he was. She seemed to have aged in just three days. The hollows of her face a little deeper, the shadows a little darker. Even the startling blue of her eyes seemed to have lost its lustre.
He leaned over to angle one of the interview cameras down to focus on the items scattered across the table. ‘Do you recognise these?’
She went straight to the pendant, lifting it up to run delicate fingers over the engraving of the arm and sword. ‘I told you it was identical. Let me see?’ And she reached for his hand and his signet ring to make the comparison. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘Are they all yours?’ Along with the pendant there were two pairs of earrings, the four hair clasps used to make the fence, a necklace of paste diamonds that Norman had set along the centre of a road like cat’s eyes, a bracelet used to contain a small lake.
She nodded. ‘Where were they?’
‘Did you ever see Norman Morrison’s little universe on his bedroom ceiling?’
‘Not personally, no. But everyone knew about it. I think a lot of people went to see it, just out of curiosity.’ She frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with my things?’
‘They were all embedded in the Plasticine, a part of his little universe, Mrs Cowell. Unrecognisable for what they were, but performing one kind of landscape function or another.’ He paused. ‘Do you have any idea how they came to be in his possession?’
Her consternation was evident. She was at a complete loss. ‘I … I don’t know. He must have taken them from the house.’
‘When we talked about the missing photograph you said he’d never been in the house.’