Entry Island

The sound of her voice was almost hypnotic. Monotonous, unemotional. She recounted the events of the night before as if she were reading them off a printed account for the umpteenth time. And yet the images they painted for Sime were vivid enough, filled as they were with detail that he supplied himself from his own picture of the crime scene.

But it was a picture that came and went, in sharp focus one moment then blurred the next. Everything about her distracted him. The way her hair fell to her shoulders, limp now but still animated by a natural wave. So dark it was almost black. The strangely emotionless eyes that seemed to drill right through him, to the point where he had to break contact and pretend he was thinking about his next question. The way her hands lay folded in her lap, one inside the other, long elegant fingers pressed together with tension. And her voice with its lazy Canadian drawl, not a hint of French anywhere present in its intonation.

The clouds he had seen earlier were massing now out in the gulf to the south of the islands, and the sun came and went in fleeting moments that fired up the ocean in occasional patches of dazzling light. He felt as much as heard the wind beating against the house.

‘I was preparing for bed,’ she said. ‘Our bedroom is downstairs, at the far end of the house. French windows open on to the conservatory, but the lights were out there. James was upstairs in his study. He had arrived home not long before.’

‘Where from?’

She hesitated momentarily. ‘He’d flown over from Havre aux Maisons and picked up his Range Rover at the airfield. He always leaves it there.’ She paused to correct herself. ‘Left, I mean.’

Sime knew from professional experience how hard it was for someone to refer suddenly to a loved one in the past tense.

‘I heard a noise in the conservatory and called out, thinking it was James.’

‘What kind of noise?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember now. Just a noise. Like a chair scraping on tiles or something.’ She interlaced her fingers in her lap. ‘Anyway, when he didn’t respond I went to take a look, which is when a man lunged at me out of the darkness.’

‘Did you get a look at him?’

‘Not then, no. As I said, it was dark. He was just a shadow coming out of nowhere. He was wearing gloves, though. I knew that because one of his hands was in my face and I could feel and smell the leather.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s strange the things you’re aware of in moments of stress.’ Now it was she who broke eye contact, and her gaze seemed to drift off into the middle distance as if she were trying to reconstruct the moment. ‘I screamed and punched and kicked, and he tried to pin my arms to my side. But we fell over a chair and landed on one of the tables. Glass. It just gave way beneath us and shattered on the floor. I think I must have landed on top of him because for a moment he seemed incapable of moving. Winded, I guess. And then I saw the blade of his knife catch a reflection from the light in the living room. And I was on my feet and running for my life. Up the steps into the living room, screaming for James.’

Her breathing increased with the pace of the storytelling, and he noticed how the colour rose on her cheeks and around her eyes as she turned them back on him.

‘I could hear him right behind me. And then felt the force of his shoulder in the back of my thighs. I went down like a ton of bricks. Hit the floor with such a force it knocked all the air out of my lungs. I couldn’t catch a breath, couldn’t scream. There were lights flashing in my eyes. I tried to wriggle free, get on to my back so I could see him. And then I did. He was on his knees above me.’

‘Your first good look at him.’

She nodded. ‘Not that I can tell you much. He wore jeans, I think. And a dark jacket of some kind. And a black ski mask pulled over his head. But, really, Mr Mackenzie, my whole focus was on the knife in his right hand. It was raised high and just about to plunge down into me. In that moment I was sure I was going to die. And everything suddenly became clear, like I was watching an HD movie in slow-motion. I could see every reflected surface of the room along the length of that blade. The stitched leather fingers around the haft. A strange intensity in the eyes behind the slits.’

‘Colour?’

‘His eyes?’

Sime nodded.

‘I suppose I should remember. They just seemed dark. Black. Like maybe the pupils were fully dilated.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘And then James was there behind him, both hands around the wrist of the knife hand, pulling it back, dragging him away from me. I saw him try to pull off the mask, and the man swung a fist into his face, and they both staggered off across the floor. Then they went over with a terrible crash, and the other man was on top.’

‘What did you do?’