Entry Island

‘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.

‘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...’