Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, madame. I’m looking for the home of a lady who used to be called Arzhela Montin. I’m afraid I don’t know her new nom d’épouse.”

  The old lady seemed to lean even further out of the door, squinting up at him with beady blue eyes. “You’re that investigator,” she said. “The one they wrote about in the paper.”

  “Yes.” It seemed there was no corner of the island where he wasn’t known.

  “She’ll not talk to you, you know.”

  He was taken aback. “What makes you think that?”

  “She’s never spoken about it in all the years she’s been here. Keeps herself to herself, she does. Thinks she’s better than us, just because she married an incomer and had her face in all the newspapers once. The centre of it all.” She snorted her derision. “Hah! You wouldn’t think it to look at her now. That a woman like that could arouse so much …” she searched for the right word, “…passion.”

  Enzo followed her directions, past the church and down the slope to where a manicured lawn led toward the seashore and a solitary white bungalow was set among the trees. He made his way through a wellkept rock garden to a conservatory built along the front of the house. The distant lights of the mainland winked and twinkled in frosted air across water that lay still and grey, like slate.

  When she came through from the house to open the door and switch on the lights of the conservatory, Enzo saw what her poisonous neighbour had meant. Arzhela Leclerc, as she now was, did not fit the image of the scarlet woman at the centre of an illicit affair that had led to scandal and murder. Enzo found himself almost disappointed. She was small, no more than five-two. What might once have been a slim and willowy figure, had turned to fat, and the impression she gave was of a ball, almost completely round. Her face, though unlined, had sagged, its jawline lost in jowls, her mouth down-turned and quite unattractive.

  She stood looking at him, wearing a mantle of weary resignation. “I’ve been expecting you.” She stood aside, a silent invitation to enter. The conservatory was tiled and filled with fleshy-leafed potted plants. Cane furniture was arranged to take advantage of the view across the water, and she waved him into an armchair. “My husband will be home in about twenty minutes. I’d like you gone by then. What do you want to know?”

  So the neighbour had been wrong about one thing. Arzhela Leclerc seemed almost anxious to talk. “Everything.”

  She perched herself awkwardly on the edge of the settee and folded her hands in her lap, gently wringing them as she gazed for a long time at the floor, before looking up to meet his eye. “There are things, monsieur, that I have kept to myself for nearly twenty years. When I read about you in the paper, I thought… it’s time to tell. If he comes, if he asks me, I’ll tell him. Maybe then I’ll be rid of it, finally.”

  Enzo found himself almost frightened to breathe in case she had a change of heart. “What happened at the Fort de Grognon?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing that hasn’t been told a thousand times already. Except that I finally saw Thibaud Kerjean for the man he really was. A man barely in control of himself. A man driven by powerful urges. Sex and violence, and with a temper that released some kind of inner demon that I’d not seen before. Not like that, the way he was with that poor old man.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was like a man demented, monsieur. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see him foaming at the mouth. I’m sure he believed that being found like that was going to be the end of us. And he was right. But not in the way he thought.” She drew a deep, trembling breath. “He was obsessed with me, you see. Beyond all reason.”

  Enzo tried hard to see her as the object any man’s obsession, but found himself agreeing with her, that it was, indeed, beyond all reason. He knew, too, that no matter how painful and traumatic the experience of all that happened to her twenty years before, it was probably the high point of her life. The only moment in it when, as her neighbour had said, she was the centre of all attention.

  “I’d known for some time that it couldn’t go on. But I didn’t know how to end it. I couldn’t ever have told him. I was scared of him, you see, scared of what he might do. But when he unleashed his temper like that on poor Mister Killian, I knew the time had come. And in that moment, I saw just how it could be done.” She glanced nervously at her watch. “I would offer you a drink, monsieur. I could do with one myself. But we don’t have time.”

  She could no longer remain seated and she rose to wander through the potted plants, to fold her arms and stare out through the glass at the moon rising now over the mainland across the strait. Enzo could see her reflection in the glass, like a mirror. Had she chosen to, she could have seen his reflection too, met his eye without meeting it. But instead she gazed at, or perhaps through, her own reflected image. Dragging up thoughts from the place she had buried them many years before. A place she had never wanted to revisit but had never been able to escape. There was a sense, Enzo thought, of the confessional in all this. He as father confessor, she as the repentant seeking absolution. He wondered if it was ever that easy. “So how exactly did it all end?”

  After a long pause she said, “Mister Killian didn’t tell my husband, Monsieur Macleod. I did.” Another silence, as she struggled to find the right words. “I knew he would react, you see. That it would all come out in the open. And that Thibaud would think it was Mister Killian who’d done it. I just didn’t realise how ferocious my husband’s reaction would be. I thought, I really thought, we could have weathered the storm. We had two lovely children, too much invested in our relationship just to throw it away. But I hadn’t counted on his pride. A stubborn, utterly implacable pride, monsieur. Almost worse than Thibaud’s temper.”

  “And Kerjean?”

  He saw her mouth set in sorrow. “I’d seen the incident at the fort as my chance to break free. Mister Killian as a convenient scapegoat. I never for one moment, monsieur, thought that Thibaud would kill him.”

  “And you think he did?”

  She turned at last to face him. And nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I do. And I’ve spent every moment of the last twenty years feeling the guilt. Knowing it was my fault. If I could take it all back, I would. I’d have broken it off with Thibaud and faced the consequences, whatever they might have been. It could hardly have been worse than the way it turned out.”

  “Do you think that might have saved your marriage?”

  She shook her head sadly. “No.” She sucked in a deep breath. “Because there was something else, monsieur. Something I never told anyone, except my husband. Until now.”

  Enzo stared at her in the silence of the conservatory and realised what that something was. “You were pregnant.”

  A momentary fire flickered in her eyes, then died again like embers at the end of a long night. “That’s what he couldn’t accept. My husband. His pride. I couldn’t pretend to him it was his, because we hadn’t slept together in months. And that, above all else, is what he didn’t want people to know—that I was carrying Kerjean’s child. When news of the affair broke, everyone thought he threw me out. But the truth is, we had made a deal. And I kept my end of it.”

  “Which was?”

  “To leave immediately. Go to the mainland and have the pregnancy terminated.”

  “And his end was…?”

  “To take me back, once it was done, and try to make a go of it.”

  Enzo nodded. “But he didn’t keep to that.”

  The fire flared again, fanned by the oxygen of her remembered anger. “He used my absence to poison the minds of my children, to turn them against me. As soon as I’d had the abortion, he filed for divorce and got the courts to ask the children who they would rather be with—him or me.”

  “And they chose him.”

  The recollection still hurt. “They left the island, the three of them, almost as soon as the divorce was granted, and I haven’t seen my children
since. Not once.”

  They heard the sound of a car on the road by the church. It stopped, idling for a moment, before the engine ceased and they heard the slamming of a car door.

  Her distress was immediate. “That’s my husband. Go now. Please.”

  Enzo stood. “He doesn’t know any of this?”

  She shook her head. “Only what was known at the time. And, of course, I had my own slant on it for him. But I have a new life now, monsieur. And I won’t ever speak of this again. Please go.”

  Enzo nodded and let himself out, feeling how the temperature outside had dropped as he turned through the rock garden at the side of the house and saw the shadow of a man coming across the grass toward him. By the light at the corner of the house, Enzo saw that he was tall. A middle-aged man losing his hair. He wore a long coat and carried a briefcase. Enzo passed him without stopping, meeting his eye only fleetingly, and offering the merest nod of acknowledgment. Without looking round, he was aware that the man had stopped, and could almost feel his eyes on his back.

  What would she tell him? That Enzo had come knocking at the door, trying to rake over the ashes of the past and that she had sent him packing? Or having finally lanced the boil that had been slowly poisoning her for twenty years, would she now tell him the truth?

  Enzo saw the last streaks of red in the western sky as he reached his car and knew that he would never know.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He had forgotten it was Hallowe’en and only remembered when he stepped out of the cold and dark of the Place Leurhé into the noisy ambience of Le Triskell. The first partygoers in masks and costumes were already gathering for a party. It seemed surreal, somehow, steeped as he was in real life tragedy and murder, to slip into this make-believe world of ghosts and ghouls.

  Black drapes hung around walls festooned by skeletons and skulls, giant spiders, and pumpkin lanterns. Copious clouds of spider’s web tumbled in wreaths from the ceiling, and windows were plastered with x-rays of body parts, backlit to project the images into the bar. A row of deathheads dangled above the counter, and a skeleton peered out from behind the smoked glass door of a chill cabinet.

  On the drive back from Quelhuit, Enzo had called Jane on his cellphone to say that he would be eating in town. He had heard the disappointment in her voice and was relieved that he was spared the prospect, at least for tonight, of succumbing to temptation and indulging in something he would almost certainly regret.

  A figure in a witch’s mask and black, pointed hat ballooned into his face. He smelled fresh alcohol on breath that issued from holes in the plastic. A woman’s voice said, “Not getting dressed up for us tonight, Monsieur Macleod? You could have come as Sherlock Holmes.”

  A couple of pirates jostled him toward the bar. “What will you have to drink, me hearty? Get the man a whisky, Devi. Or should it be a tot of rum?”

  “What will it be, Monsieur Macleod?” Devi was a plump girl in her thirties, with a black moustache painted above ruby red lips, and blond, curly hair beneath a bowler hat. She wore a black suit and waistcoat, several sizes two small, and a white shirt and bow-tie. Charlie Chaplin, Enzo guessed.

  “Whisky’ll be fine.”

  “I can offer you a Black Bush, if you don’t mind a touch of the Irish.”

  Enzo grinned. “I don’t mind slumming it for once,” he said. He reached into his pocket for some cash, but a hand held his arm to stop him. It was one of the pirates.

  “No, no, that’s all right, Monsieur Macleod, this one’s on us.”

  The three musketeers burst in from the terrace, ushering a blast of cold air in with them. “All for one, and one for all!” One of them thrust his sword toward the ceiling and brought a loop of cobweb cascading down over their heads. A great roar of laughter went up.

  “Hey, watch it!” Devi shouted. “It took me hours to put that stuff up.” She pushed Enzo’s Black Bush across the counter.

  He leaned toward her, raising his voice above the hubbub. “I don’t suppose you would have been here at the time of the Killian murder?”

  She grinned. “I was sitting my bac at the time, monsieur. That was before I left for university on the mainland.” Her smile turned wry. “A worthwhile interlude in my life.” She waved an arm vaguely around her. “You can see where my doctorate in philosophy got me.”

  Enzo grinned back. A Celt almost never missed the opportunity to indulge in self-abasement. “They say that the answers to some of the world’s greatest philosophical questions can be found in a bottle.”

  “In my experience, the only thing to be found in a bottle is oblivion.” Which was her recognition of yet another Celtic trait, that great capacity for self-destruction. The Celts, it seemed, were obsessed with the self.

  Enzo nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d know if any of your regulars were around at that time. Several gave evidence at the trial.”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. But I know that old Robert Kerber has been a regular here for years. He might know.” She nodded toward the end of the bar nearest the door. A man in his sixties, with a cloth cap pulled low over a forehead with lines like scars, sat on a high stool nursing a glass of beer. He wore a checked jacket with leather patches at the elbow and a pair of frayed, baggy jeans. This was no fancy dress, and the man wore an expression of ill-concealed irritation, cocooned in his own world, making no attempt to participate in the celebrations. Enzo recognised the name at once. Kerber was one of those witnesses.

  “Thanks.” Enzo lifted his glass and pushed his way along the bar, managing to squeeze in beside him. More revellers arrived: a very fat man dressed as Madame Defarge, clutching knitting needles and a meter of hand-knitted scarf; a thinner man with a beard in the role of Marie-Antoinette; and a zombie with an axe buried in his head. “Can I refill your glass?” Enzo asked Kerber.

  The old islander turned dead eyes on the Scotsman. “You can,” he said. “But it’ll not get you anything.”

  “I’m not after anything.” He signalled Devi to refill Kerber’s glass.

  “No?”

  “Just a few minutes of your time.”

  “At my age, monsieur, every moment is precious.”

  “Life is precious at any age.”

  “That’s true.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What do you want?”

  “You were here the night Thibaud Kerjean was telling anyone who’d listen how he was going to put Adam Killian in the cemetery.”

  “I was, and he did.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “I never knew the man, monsieur, when he didn’t have a drink in him.” Kerber took a sip from his replenished glass. Enzo looked at the roadmap of broken veins across his nose and cheeks, and it occurred to him that the same could very probably be said of Kerber. But drunks rarely saw themselves as drunks, and Kerber appeared to see no irony in his words. He doubtless had the same capacity for self-deception as he had for alcohol. Another Celtic self.

  “Kerber,” Enzo said, as if trying the name out for size. And then, “Kerjean. There are a lot of Ker names on the island.”

  Kerber turned to look at him as if he were an idiot. “And a lot of Mac names in Scotland, monsieur. Son-of, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Ker is house-of. You people got named after the man who impregnated your mother. We got named after the house we grew up in. Kerber, house of Peter. Kerbol, house of Paul.” He paused. “Kerjean, house of Jean.” He took another pull at his beer. “Anything else I can tell you? The tonnage of tuna caught in 1933? The number of Germans billeted on Groix during the occupation?”

  “You can tell me why you think Kerjean carried out his threat to murder Killian.”

  “Because he’s a drunk and a brute. A man who would put his fist in your face if you so much as looked at him sideways. He might have been the worse for wear that night, but his anger didn’t come out of a bottle. It was real enough. And Kerjean is nothing if not a man of h
is word. There’s not a soul who knows him, monsieur, who wouldn’t think him capable of doing exactly what he said he would.”

  ***

  Enzo stepped out into plunging temperatures. The night was clear and sharp, the sky newly painted black and spattered with silver. His breath billowed around his head like wreaths of mist. From inside the bar, the noise of the party followed him out onto the terrace, where the parasols, wrapped and tied, stood among the tables like guests awaiting an invitation that would never come. Across the square, the lights of an ATM glowed in the wall of the Crédit Agricole. And he could see lights on in the doctor’s house.

  A narrow street led off darkly from the near corner of the square, and Enzo figured it might lead directly through to the church, where he had parked his Jeep. He threw one end of Killian’s scarf over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his jacket, his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets to keep them warm. The darkness seemed to swallow him as soon as he entered the alleyway, and he had not gone ten meters before he began to regret taking the short-cut. There were no streetlights here, and the moon was still low in the sky, casting the shadows of houses to darken his path. He slowed to take measured, cautious steps into a dark that seemed so profound it was almost tangible. His fingertips detected a wall to his right, and he followed it until almost walking into the side of a house. The street had taken a sharp left without warning, and he found himself with hands pressed up against a shuttered window. He tripped and almost fell over a doorstep, and stumbled forward into a deeper darkness. He cursed under his breath and his voice echoed back at him from hidden walls. Back the way he had come, he could just see the glow of lights from the square, and he was tempted simply to head back and take the long way round. But he couldn’t be that far from the church now. Surely. Another turn in the street and he would see the lights of the church ahead of him. Of that he was certain.