Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  And it occurred to Enzo that if keeping her promise is what had motivated her to get through that time, the fulfilment of it might leave a hole in her life that could be very hard to fill. And that while desperate to be free, finally, of what she had earlier described as a curse, that freedom might also steal away her only raison d’être. She was an intelligent woman. And it was a dichotomy, he was sure, of which she was only too aware.

  Enzo’s fish arrived. Pan-fried whole dorade. Soft, moist flesh, butter, garlic, crumbling floury potatoes. And it took all his attention, separating white flakes from fine bones, as they ate in silence until looking up to exchange smiles of shared pleasure.

  “That was great,” Enzo said. And after the cold and the rain, he felt almost restored. But he waited until their coffees arrived before asking the question that had been on his mind for some days. “The thing,” he said, “that has bothered me most since I first read about this case, was why anyone would bother to murder a terminally ill man.”

  But Jane just shrugged. “I’m not sure that many people knew he was dying. Relatives and close friends, really. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you advertise.”

  “No.” Enzo knew only too well from his brief experience of being diagnosed with a terminal illness, that it was not something you wanted to share. It was almost as if by acknowledging it, you were accepting it. “Who did know, then?

  “I don’t know exactly. His doctor, obviously. Peter and I. And I don’t know who else he might have told. Certainly not Kerjean. Papa didn’t really have what you would call close friends on the island. People knew him. He was regarded as something of an eccentric, I think. But he wasn’t a man with an active social life, and after the diagnosis, he went out less and less.”

  ***

  To Enzo’s surprise, when they stepped out into the street, the rain had stopped. It had seemed as if it were set to last for days. But unexpectedly the sky had cleared, and stars crusted its inky firmament like frost on black ice. Jane had loaned him one of Killian’s scarves, and he tightened it around his neck as they walked down the hill toward the harbour, breath billowing around their heads. The soft feel of it brought him in contact once again with the man whose death he had come to resolve. There was a smell from the scarf that he had noticed when she first gave it to him. A slightly stale, slightly perfumed smell. But masculine. Something that spoke of body sweat and aftershave. A long, lingering reminder of a man whose life had been so brutally taken all those years before. A presence that he had left on this earth, long after his passing. And in an odd way, it connected him to Enzo. Made it personal somehow. As if the old man had bequeathed a message to him, too.

  As they passed the Eco-Museum on their right, the harbour opened up below them, bathed in a wash of moonlight that shone on every wet surface, as if all had been newly painted and the paint had not yet dried.

  Rows of sailing boats tethered along the quay clunked and bumped and rocked on the gentle swell of the inner harbour, the air filled with the sound of metal cables clattering against steel masts. Lights from the hotels and cafés that lined the harbour row reflected on the black waters of the bay, broken by its ruffled surface into myriad splinters that flashed and vanished, moments in eternity only fractionally less brief than the lives of men.

  But although the rain had gone, the air was cold. A sharp, biting cold, laden with the portent of overnight frost and icy roads. Enzo was surprised to feel Jane slide her arm through his, and wondered at how natural it felt. Two people sharing warmth on a cold night, tragic lives that had led them to this place and time, and a mystery that had already begun to wrap its icy fingers around him after haunting her for half a lifetime.

  He felt a sense of destiny in this, that he had not experienced in previous cases. And he wondered if, perhaps, it was his destiny this time to fail.

  “You must have been over thirty, then, when you met your French lady,” Jane said suddenly out of the blue.

  “Yes. Just past my thirtieth birthday. We met at an international convention on forensic science at Nice.”

  “And you’d been single up until then?”

  “No. I was married when I met Pascale.”

  “Oh. So you left your wife for her.”

  “Yes.” Enzo half turned to catch her expression out of the corner of his eye, wondering if she disapproved. But if she did, there was nothing in her face, or her voice, to betray it.

  “A good thing there were no children, then.”

  Enzo hesitated almost imperceptibly. “I had a seven-year-old daughter. Kirsty.” Without taking his eyes from the street ahead, he was aware of her head turning to look at him.”

  “And?”

  “She spent most of the next twenty years of her life hating me for it.”

  “Still?”

  “No. In the end we managed to put it behind us.” And he deftly changed the focus of their conversation. “How about you? Did you and Peter not have any children.”

  “We were too busy.” And he heard that bitterness creeping once again into her voice. “He with his charity work. Me with my career. We were still young. Had our whole lives ahead of us, after all. Plenty of time for children.” He turned his head to meet her gaze directly as they reached her car. “It’s the biggest regret of my life, Enzo. I could have had children with someone else, of course. But I didn’t want to. I wanted Peter’s children.” She pressed the remote on her key ring and unlocked the car. “You’re a lucky man.” And she opened the driver’s door and slipped behind the wheel.

  ***

  The annex felt even colder than when Jane had shown him around earlier. The light thrown out by the naked bulb in the stairwell seemed more depressing that he remembered it, devoid of any warmth. He lifted one weary leg after the other to climb the stairs. They had sat talking for nearly an hour in the house when they got back, and two large whiskies later Enzo could barely keep his eyes open. And so he had said goodnight and walked across the sodden lawn, feeling the ground squelch beneath his weight, wetting his shoes and chilling his feet.

  Moonlight fell at an angle through the dormer, lying in a bright slab across the floor and the bed, and he resisted the temptation to put on the electric light. The room glowed in the light of the moon. He took a moment to set up his laptop computer on the dressing table, plugging in the 3G USB stick that would connect him to the Internet and allow him to check his email. Then he undressed himself hurriedly in the cold, anxious to slip beneath the blankets, even although he knew that the sheets would be frigid, possibly damp, and that sleep could be a long time coming, in spite of his fatigue.

  As he tossed the last of his clothes onto a chair and prepared himself for the icy plunge, he saw a light come on in an upstairs window of the house opposite. He could see a washed-out patterned paper on the far wall of the room it exposed, then after a moment, Jane moved through his field of vision, disappearing momentarily, before returning to stand within the frame of the window, pulling her shirt up and over her head to reveal pale skin and a black bra. She bent over now to slide her jeans down over slender thighs, stepping out of them, and straightening up to expose the skimpy black string she wore beneath them.

  She half turned, and he saw the curve of her buttocks, and felt guilty suddenly, like a voyeur, or a peeping Tom. He turned away from the window to throw back the covers on his bed, trying to keep his eyes averted. But he couldn’t resist a final glance, only to see her silhouette filling the frame as she advanced to swing the internal shutters closed, to keep in the light and shut out the night. And Enzo. Almost as if she knew he was watching. Almost as if she hoped he might be.

  Chapter Nine

  Enzo woke on full alert, heart pounding, blood pulsing through his head. He sat upright in the dark listening to the silence of the night. The moonlight which had washed his room silver when he climbed into bed was long gone. The dark seemed profound. Thick, almost tangible.

  Something had wakened him. Something
from the real world that had penetrated his dream world and triggered instinctive alarms. But he had no idea what, unable to recall or replay any sound in his head. He listened for a long time, trying to control breathing that seemed inordinately loud, before slipping from between the now warm covers of his bed to push his feet into cold slippers. He wore only boxers, and reached for the dressing gown he had draped over the chair. Black silk, embroidered with red and gold dragons. And he wondered why he had brought something so impractical for the late fall Breton climate. Shivering, he wrapped it around himself, and tightened the belt. His hair, loosened from its band, tumbled over his shoulders in ropes and curls.

  He looked around for something he might use as a weapon, and spotted Killian’s walking stick with the owl’s head, which he had left leaning against the wall. It felt stout and comforting in his hand, lending him a degree of reassurance with the sense of protection it provided. His sense of vulnerability, wearing only a dressing gown and slippers, was acute.

  He opened the door of the bedroom and peered down through the inky blackness of the stairwell, reluctant to turn on the light, knowing that it would make him only too visible to any intruder. With one hand against the wall, he inched his way down the wooden stairs, wincing with each creak that tore holes in the silence of the night, feeling always for the next step with an outstretched foot, until finally he was standing in the small, pocket handkerchief square of entrance hall. Listening. Hearing nothing.

  He reached out a hand and gently pushed open the door of the tiny bathroom, then reached in to find the light switch.

  The sudden glare of unforgiving, harsh, electric light blinded and startled him. He stood blinking, listening to the rush of blood in his ears. The bathroom was empty. Nowhere to hide. He turned toward the study. The door stood slightly ajar, and light spilled across the floor from the hall toward the far wall and the rows of books that lined it. He took two cautious steps forward, placing outstretched fingertips on the door to push it inwards, raising the walking stick in his left hand.

  He heard, more than saw, the dark shape that fell from above, and released an involuntary yell of fear and pain as something like needles sunk into his forehead and his scalp, the weight of something warm and soft pressing down on his head.

  His own voice was joined by the screech of another. A high-pitched, wailing scream that filled the room, and he stumbled forward, flailing at his head, until he felt the needles withdraw and the weight suddenly lift. He turned, gasping for breath, in time to see a dark shape darting up the stairs to the bedroom, and he fumbled for the light switch in the hall.

  A pure black cat stood on the top step glaring down at him, back arched, hackles raised, a quivering tail pointing straight up behind it.

  “Damn cat!” Enzo shouted at the night, both relieved and annoyed. Where in hell had it come from? He could only imagine it had slipped in unnoticed when Jane opened up earlier in the evening. An escape from the rain. But from its demeanour, it seemed to regard Enzo as the intruder. He waved his stick at it and hissed and called, but it stood staring implacably back at him as if he were mad. If he could have seen himself in his black silk dressing gown and tangle of hair waving a walking stick around in the stairwell, shouting names at a dumb animal in the middle of the night, he might have been forced to agree.

  It was, perhaps, some fleeting, out-of-body image of himself that made him stop to consider his tactics. And it took him only a moment to decide on a course of action. He shut both the study and bathroom doors and opened the entrance door wide, feeling the rush of cold air from the outside. Then he began up the stairs, holding the stick in front of him.

  The cat watched his approach, first wary, then alarmed, but waiting until almost the last moment, before turning and sprinting into the bedroom. Enzo followed it in, chasing it around the room until finally it escaped back down the stairwell, and he arrived at the top step in time to see it vanishing out into the night. He hurried down the stairs and slammed the door shut.

  He stood, breathing hard, leaning with his back against the door, glad that there had been no one around to witness the debacle. But there was no point, he knew, in going back to bed now. He was wide awake, with a slight headache from too much whisky and wine, and his exertions of the last few minutes. He opened the study door and turned on the light, and was struck again by the room’s almost suffocating atmosphere. It seemed filled, somehow, by the personality of the man who had lived and died there. Even all these years later. And he allowed himself a fleeting, fanciful moment to wonder whether the black cat had come like the spirit of the deceased man to draw him down into this room in the reflective small hours of the morning. Or maybe it had been some demon sent to scare him off, Death’s messenger bearing a warning, a harbinger of inevitable failure.

  Enzo went through to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of cold water, and as he drank it in small sips, wandered back through the study. The account of the murder in Raffin’s book suggested that there had been no break-in. The intruder had simply entered through an unlocked door and lain in wait for his victim.

  Killian had ended his call to Jane abruptly. Had he heard something? Enzo still held the dead man’s walking stick in his hand, the stick that had been found on the floor beside the body. Had he hung up on Jane and lifted his walking stick to come downstairs and investigate? If so, his assailant hadn’t hidden himself for long. Killian’s body was found against the window wall, just to the right of the door as you came into the room. The position of the body, and the trajectory of the bullets, suggested that his killer had fired on him from the direction of the kitchen. Is that where he had been hiding?

  The bloodstained floorboards were evocative somehow. Enzo could visualise the body lying there, twisted and broken, blood seeping from the exit wounds in his back, drained from his body by the force of gravity. The heart would no longer have been pumping. He looked around the study. If you were searching for something, where would you look? The desk drawers, the filing cabinet, the kitchen cupboard. You would barely notice a scribbled shopping list, or a post-it, or a hurried diary entry that made no sense. Did Killian’s murderer even speak English?

  The best place to hide something, Enzo knew, was in plain view. How often people failed to see what was right in front of them.

  What else might his killer have failed to see? Enzo ran his eyes around the room again. Over the rows of books on their shelves, Killian’s workbench, his desk, and through the open door to the fridge in the kitchen Of course, it would depend on what he was looking for. Something, Enzo was sure, that Killian had hidden, leaving clues that would lead his son to its hiding place.

  What could possibly have so spooked Killian that he feared for his life? For it was fear and a sense of desperation that had been conveyed by Jane’s account of his phone call. Killian had believed that something was going to happen to him, that he was in danger. And was afraid that some course of action upon which he had embarked would remain unfinished. What was it he had said to Jane? It’s ironic that it is Peter who will finish the job. What job?

  And what it is that a dying man fears?

  Enzo wandered back through to the kitchen and rinsed his glass in the sink, then turned to the fridge door. The cooks have the blues, Killian had written on his shopping list. And on the post-it, A bit of the flood will boil the feast. A Post-it that jumped out at Enzo for the simple reason that it did not line up with anything else that Killian had placed on the door.

  Killian must have had no doubts that Peter would instantly understand. Some code, perhaps, that they had contrived or shared during Peter’s childhood, the significance of which only they would understand. Father and son. Jane had spoken of how close they were.

  Enzo shivered and went back through to the study. The cold was creeping into his bones now. He crossed the room and sat once more in Killian’s chair, surveying the desk in front of him. His eye fell upon the Post-it stuck to the desk lamp. P, One day you will h
ave to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget! Addressing himself directly to his son. And again in the diary. P, I was lighting a fire, but now there’s no more time, and all I’m left with is a half-warmed fish in the pouring rain. Enzo closed his eyes and turned the phrases over and over again in his mind, as if the simple act of repetition might bring revelation, or clarity. Neither came, and he opened his eyes again to flip back a page of the diary to the previous week. Dr. S, 2:30 pm, Tuesday. And again at the same time on Thursday. He flipped back several more pages. Twice a week from the early summer.

  Enzo knew he had to start somewhere, and this seemed as good a place as any. Tomorrow he would seek a consultation with Killian’s physician. Dead men don’t talk. But sometimes their doctors know more than they could ever tell while their patients were still alive.

  Chapter Ten

  The Maison Médicale stood at the end of a long, straight road heading east out of Le Bourg, surrounded by modern suburban houses and lush, tree-filled gardens. It was an angular building of cream-painted concrete and steeply sloping slate roofs, a relic of the utilitarian architecture of the 1970s. As Enzo pulled into the gravel parking area in front of it, he saw from the panneau that there were three general practitioners, a dentist, and two nurses based in the centre.

  A middle-aged receptionist looked up at him from behind her desk, and indifference immediately gave way to smiles. “Ah. C’est Monsieur Macleod, n’est-ce pas? Vous êtes malade?”

  Enzo produced a patient smile. He was not yet sure if it would be a help or a hindrance that everyone on the island seemed to know who he was. “No, madame. I’m not ill. I wondered if I might make an appointment to see whichever of the doctors at the clinic was treating Adam Killian before his death.”