Authors: Peter May
The school was housed in a long, low shed with windows all along one side and sat in the valley beyond the nearest plantation. Built at a time when the island population might well have been double its present number, Sime doubted if it was attended by more than a handful of children these days.
They turned off on a rough track before they got to the school, and strained up the slope to a purple-painted house on the rise. A white picket fence enclosed an overgrown garden, and they found Clarke in a breeze-block hut at the far end of it, directed there by an elderly lady who answered their knock on the front door. Not his wife, Sime thought.
Piles of lobster creels lay around the hut like seaweed washed up on the shore. They were piled six or seven deep, a hundred or more of them, linked by rope and pegged to the ground to keep them from being carried off by the winter gales.
There were no windows in the hut, the only light provided
by a single naked bulb hanging from the darkness of the roof space. The air was filled with cigarette smoke and the hum of a large chest freezer that stood against the rear wall, and Sime detected a background perfume of stale alcohol. The walls were hung with nets and tools and ropes, batons of wood two metres long stacked up along one wall. A profusion of white and pink buoys hung from the roof like fungus growing from its timbers.
Clarke was hunched over on a stool at a workbench beneath the light bulb, eyes screwed up against the smoke from the brown-stained cigarette that burned in the corner of his mouth. A half-drunk bottle of beer stood at one end of the bench, and Clarke was attaching netting to the frame of a newly built lobster trap. The table and floor were covered in sawdust, and a rusted fretsaw hung from a vice bolted to the bench next to the beer.
He laughed when they told him why they were there. A laugh that seemed filled with genuine mirth. ‘And you think I killed him? Goddamnit, I wish I had. He sure had it coming.’ He sucked smoke into his lungs and blew it at the light bulb, momentarily clouding its glare. Most of his lower front teeth were missing, and he hadn’t shaved in at least a week. A cat watched them with studied disinterest, curled up inside a cardboard box that stood on an old wooden cabinet cluttered with the detritus of a chaotic life.
Blanc deferred to Sime, since they were back in English-language territory. But he used Clarke’s cigarette as a pretext
for lighting one himself, and the air grew thicker. The three men eyed each other warily like so many faces peering through fog. ‘What exactly was it that you had against Mr Cowell, sir?’
Clarke guffawed. ‘Sir? Hah!’ Then his smile faded, the fleeting light in his eyes replaced by a dark hatred. ‘I’ll tell you what I had against the bastard. He stole my father’s boat and killed him in the process.’
‘How so?’
Clarke dropped his cigarette on the floor and extended a foot to crush it. Then he took a swig of beer and held the bottle in his hand as he leaned forward into the light. ‘This is a hard fucking life, man. You spend your winters cooped up here, months on end with nothing better to do than listen to the goddamn womenfolk chewing your ear off. Drives you stir-crazy. Snow and cold. Endless damn darkness, and days on end sometimes when the ferry doesn’t come ’cos of ice in the bay, or winter storms.’
He took a long pull from the neck of his bottle.
‘When the spring comes you gotta prep the boat, then you’re out fishing. Short lobster season here, too. Two months only, from May first. Out at 5 a.m. for the flare going up, and then you’re off. Long hard days, and dangerous too. When those creels leave the boat they’re linked by rope. Long damn coils of the stuff. Get your feet tangled up in that and you’re in the water in a heartbeat. Those things are heavy, and they pull you right down. Man, you’re drowned before you know
it.’ For a moment he couldn’t meet their gaze. ‘Brother went that way. There one minute, gone the next. Not a damn thing I could do about it.’
And Sime saw in shining eyes a hint of tears that were quickly blinked away.
‘We spend three, four months up in Nova Scotia most years. See, it’s a small window of earning opportunity we got, and you have to make it last through long idle winters. That’s why it was important to my old man to have his own boat. To work for himself. Sell at the best price. He spent his whole damn life out there fishing, just so he could pass that boat on to me.’ He paused. ‘Well, me and Josh. Only Josh is gone. Near broke my old man’s heart, too. So it was just me. And I was everything to him, you know? I was the reason he did it. Then Cowell goes and takes it all from him. In the blink of an eye.’ His lips curled as he spoke, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.
‘How did he do that?’ Sime said.
Clarke thrust out his bristled jaw defiantly, as if challenging them to contradict him. ‘You have bad years, you know? It happens. And we had two of them. One after the other. No way to make it through the next winter. So the old man borrows money from Cowell. The boat’s his security. But he knows he’ll pay it off next season. Trouble is Cowell charged twice as much as the banks.’
‘Why didn’t he just borrow from the bank, then?’
Clarke scowled. ‘Bad risk. No choice. Cowell or nothing.
Then just before the spring season my old man goes and has a heart attack. Doc tells him he can’t go to sea, so it’s just me. And I can’t bring in as much as we did together. So we don’t have enough to pay off the loan and Cowell calls it in. And when we can’t cough up he takes the boat. Thinks he’s doing me a favour by letting me skipper it, too.’ He blew his contempt through loosely puckered lips. ‘Took away everything my old man worked for all his days. That boat was his pride and joy. And he wanted it to be mine.’ He pulled up phlegm from his throat to his mouth and spat it on to the floor. ‘He was dead within the month.’
He drained his bottle and then stared at it, as if seeking inspiration in its emptiness.
‘If that boat was mine now, I’d have something to hand on to my own son. And maybe he wouldn’t want to leave.’
A long silence hung as heavy as the smoke that moved in slow, shifting strands around the light bulb. Finally Sime said, ‘Where were you last night, Mr Clarke?’
Clarke raised dangerous eyes to fix Sime in their glare. He spoke slowly, suppressing his anger. ‘I was at home. All night. You can ask my wife, or my mother.’
‘We will.’
He pushed himself back from the bench and sat up straight. ‘I guess the good thing is that when you people go, you’ll take Cowell with you, and he won’t be back. See, I really don’t care who killed him. As long as he’s dead.’ He smiled grimly at the expression on the faces of the detectives.
‘There’s no law nor nothing on this island. People make their own justice. We’re free.’ He took a roll-up from a tin and lit it. ‘This our place. And you can all go to hell.’
Old Mrs Clarke sat at the dining-room table, her downturned mouth and sad eyes reflected in its polished surface. Entering the Clarke household had been like stepping back in time. Frilly yellow net curtains gathered around the windows. Floral striped wallpaper covering the walls above dark wood panelling. The floor laid with a dull green linoleum. Plastic ivy with red flowers draped around a profusion of mirrors that somehow seemed to light the room even in the fading afternoon. Every surface and every shelf groaned with ornaments and framed family photos.
The old lady herself wore a long red blouse over a straight blue skirt that modestly covered her knees. Bloated feet at the end of corned-beef legs were squeezed into shoes that must once have fitted but now looked painfully small. Her face behind thick round glasses was pale, almost grey, and looked as if it had been moulded from putty.
‘I was just making up the message list,’ she said, indicating a printed sheet of grocery items and a scrap of lined paper covered with shaky scribbles. The wind outside whistled around the windows and door frames.
‘Message list?’ Sime said.
The old lady chuckled. ‘Messages we call them. Shopping you would say. I phone in my grocery list to the Co-op on Grindstone every two weeks and they send them over on the ferry next day. That’s my job. Chuck’s job is to go and fetch them. Not much to ask a grown boy, but it doesn’t stop him complaining.’
‘You live here with your son and daughter-in-law then?’
‘No. They live here with me. Though you’d not know it to hear the way her ladyship calls the shots around the place. Not that I pay a blind bit of notice. They’ll get the house soon enough. I’m not long for this world.’
Sime glanced at Blanc, who seemed confused. ‘You look well enough to me, Mrs Clarke.’
‘Appearances can be deceptive, son. Don’t believe everything you see.’
The door from the hall flew open and a small, square woman in her forties with cropped, red-dyed hair stood glaring at them. Sime glanced from the window and saw a car at the gate where there hadn’t been one earlier. They had not heard it arrive above the clatter of the wind. Mary-Anne Clarke, he presumed.
‘What the hell do you want?’ she said.
‘Mrs Clarke?’
‘My house, I’ll ask the questions.’
Sime began to understand why Owen Clarke hated the winters. He showed her his Sûreté ID and said, ‘Detectives Mackenzie and Blanc. Just trying to establish the where abouts of your husband yesterday evening.’
‘He didn’t kill that weasel Cowell, if that’s what you’re thinking. Wouldn’t have the balls for it unless he had half a pint of whisky in him. And then he wouldn’t be capable of it.’
‘Do you know where he was?’
‘He was right here at home. All night.’ She glanced at her mother-in-law. ‘That right, Mrs Clarke?’
‘If you say so, dear.’
Mary-Anne swung her gaze back towards the two policemen. ‘Satisfied?’
*
‘Jesus, Sime,’ Blanc said as they closed the garden gate behind them. ‘If I was Clarke I wouldn’t be able to wait till that flare went up on May first.’
Sime grinned. ‘Are you married, Thomas?’
Blanc cupped his hands around the end of a cigarette to light it, and Sime saw the smoke whipped away from his mouth as he lifted his head. ‘Tried it once and didn’t like it.’ He paused. ‘Didn’t learn my lesson, though. Second time I got snared. Three teenage kids now.’ He took another pull on his cigarette. ‘Guess there’s not much point in pulling him in for a formal interview.’
Sime shrugged, disappointed somehow. ‘Guess not. For the moment anyway.’
Blanc looked at his watch. ‘Probably just got time to interview the Cowell woman again before the ferry leaves.’ He raised his eyes to the sky. ‘If it leaves.’
They were upwind of the quad bikes and so didn’t hear them until they swung into view. Five of them, engines screaming. Sime and Blanc turned, startled at the sound of throttles opening up to give vent to pent-up horsepower. They came, almost from nowhere it seemed, up over the brow of the hill, one after the other to start circling the two police officers.
Just kids, Sime realised. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen-year-olds. Two girls, three boys. Sime raised his voice. ‘Cut it out!’ But it was lost in the wind and the roar of the engines.
Rain had begun to fall in earnest now, and Sime and Blanc were trapped by the circle of bikes, unable to reach the shelter of the minibus. The teenagers were laughing and hollering above the noise. Sime stepped into the path of the nearest bike to break the circle and for a moment thought it was going to run him down. But at the last moment it turned sharply away, overturning and sending its rider sprawling into the grass.
The others pulled up abruptly and Blanc went over to the fallen biker to take his arm and drag him to his feet. He was a sullen-faced boy who looked like the eldest of the group. His hair was shaven at the sides and gelled into spikes on top. ‘Damned idiot!’ Blanc shouted at him. ‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’
But the boy never took his eyes off Sime. Humiliated in front of his friends. ‘No, he’s the one trying to do that.’
A sharp, shrill voice cut across the noise of wind and
motors. ‘Chuck!’ Everyone turned towards the house. Mary-Anne Clarke’s dyed hair looked incongruously red in the sulphurous light. She stood in the doorway, and there wasn’t one among them, adult or adolescent, who didn’t know that she was not to be argued with. ‘Get yourself in here. Now!’
Reluctantly, and with the worst possible grace, Chuck righted his quad bike with the help of one of his friends and turned a sulky face towards Sime. ‘You leave my dad alone. He’d nothing to do with killing that fucking man.’ And he climbed back on the bike, revving its motor several times, before driving it away around the back of the house. His mother went inside and closed the door. The other kids gunned their engines and wheeled away up the hill, kicking up mud and grass in their wake.
The rain was coming in waves now, blown in on the wind. And Sime felt it burning his face.
The imminent weather event had now leached most of the light out of the sky. There was a strange ochre quality to it, and it was dark enough in the summerhouse to warrant the use of electric light to record the second interview with Kirsty Cowell.
The wind had reached something approaching storm force. Shutters were rattling and shingles lifted on the roof. It was nearly as noisy inside as out. The rain was still coming in bursts and flurries. Just an advance guard. But the main body of it was visible out across the water, like a black mist, and it was on its way.
Sime sat again with his back to the window but with his face lit now by the overhead light. It left him feeling more exposed than he would have liked. A digest of the nurse’s medical examination of Mrs Cowell lay across his knees. His face was pink from the sting of the rain. He had dried his hair with a towel, but it still felt damp.
‘Why did you not tell me that you had broken up with your husband?’
Her face remained expressionless. ‘You didn’t ask.’
‘You do yourself no favours, Mrs Cowell, by withholding information.’
She said nothing, and he examined her face. With the blood washed away, and not a trace of make-up, he saw now that she was a handsome woman without being beautiful. And oddly, even more familiar. She had a strong bone structure with slightly high cheekbones, and a full wide mouth. Her nose was a little broader than it might have been in a perfect world, but not disproportionate to the rest of her face. She had a well-defined jawline that culminated in a slightly pointed chin, but her eyes were still her most striking feature. They were fixed on him now, cool and wary. Her hair, wet from her shower, hung in limp ropes down to her shoulders, and she wore a simple pair of cut-off jeans with tennis shoes and a sweatshirt that seemed several sizes too big. There was light bruising on her left cheek and right temple.