‘He hadn’t.’ She caught herself, frustrated by the contradict ion. ‘At least, not to my knowledge.’
‘You think he broke in one night when your husband was away on business and you were sleeping over here?’
‘He wouldn’t have had to break in. The door’s never locked. And he couldn’t have taken them all at once. I’d have noticed. He must have been in the house several times over a period.’ Her voice caught in her throat, and she fought to hold back tears. ‘Poor Norman.’ She looked up. ‘What on earth was he doing over here on the night of the storm?’
‘His mother said he was worried about you.’
She put her hand on her chest and closed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘I never realised the obsession ran so deep.’ She looked at Sime. ‘What happened to him, do you think?’
Sime shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he came over here to see that you were okay. Maybe he didn’t realise there was a cop in the big house. Maybe he got spooked and lost his way in the dark. It was quite a storm. Well, you know that. And he must have been walking blind in it.’
She let her head fall forward to stare in some distress at the items on the table that he had stolen from her to be a part of his secret world. ‘So sad.’
Sime reset the camera to focus on Kirsty once more and sat down facing her in what had become his usual seat. It was raining outside now, and though not dark yet, there was very little light left in the day.
She looked up with a weary expression of resignation on her face. ‘More questions?’
He nodded and plunged straight in. ‘Why didn’t you tell us that you had paid a visit to the Briand home the night before the murder?’
Colour rose on her cheeks and she took a moment to answer. ‘Because I knew it would influence your interpretation of events on the night of the murder itself.’
‘Your version of events.’
She half-lifted an eyebrow. ‘See what I mean?’
‘And you didn’t think we would find out?’
‘I wasn’t exactly thinking straight about anything. To be honest it seemed irrelevant to me. All that mattered was what happened that night. Whatever had unravelled, or been said the night before, was beside the point.’
‘Unravelled?’ Sime frowned. ‘That seems a strange word to use.’
‘Does it?’ And she thought about it herself. ‘Maybe that’s because it describes the way I felt. Like I was unravelling.’
‘You told me that you were glad to discover James was having an affair. That it brought to an end a situation with which you were deeply unhappy.’
‘I know what I told you.’
‘But that wasn’t true.’
‘It was!’ Indignation flared briefly in her eyes.
‘Then how do you explain your behaviour? Turning up at Ariane Briand’s door, rampaging about her house looking for James?’
‘Rampaging? Is that how she described it?’
‘How would you describe it?’
She let her eyes drop to her hands in her lap. ‘Pathetic,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s what it was. What I was. Sad and pathetic. Everything I told you about the way I felt was true. But I also felt hurt, and humiliated.’ She looked up again, and he thought he saw an appeal for understanding in her eyes. ‘I’d been drinking that night.’ And now he saw her shame. ‘It’s not something I’m in the habit of doing. So it didn’t take much to tip me over the edge. You know, sitting alone here in the dark, thinking about all the wasted years, remembering every little thing he’d said, all his grand gestures and promises, and wondering if Ariane Briand was the first, or just the latest in a long succession. All those business trips away. I wanted to know. I wanted to confront him.’
‘So you took the boat that you keep at the jetty below the cliffs?’
She nodded. ‘It was pure madness. I’m not great with boats at the best of times. But the alcohol had me all fired up and I didn’t really care. If the weather had been worse I’d probably never have made it. James would still be alive, and my body would have been found washed up on a beach somewhere.’ She was looking in his direction, but he doubted that she saw him. She was somewhere else, reliving the madness. ‘I was, literally, unravelling.’ And suddenly she jumped focus and her eyes seared into him. ‘I’m not proud of myself, Mr Mackenzie. God knows what was going through my mind, or what kind of emotional state I was in. I just wanted to have it out with him. Face to face. Clear the air. I just wanted to know. Everything.’
‘And when he wasn’t there you turned on the next best thing. His lover.’