Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  When she had shown them to their table and taken Charlotte’s coat, Charlotte looked at him across the flowers that sat on the table between them. “Madame Killian?”

  “It’s her father-in-law’s death that I’m investigating. She inherited the house where he was murdered. That’s where I’m staying.”

  “With her and her husband?”

  “She’s a widow.”

  “Ah. That would explain why you dined alone with her the other night.”

  “He died almost twenty years ago.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Okay. A well-practised widow, then. Do you want to tell me about the case?”

  “Are you really interested?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  So he told her. About Killian’s call to Jane the night of his murder. The study preserved intact since his death. The notes he had left for his son that made no sense. And about the man whom everyone believed was guilty, but who had been tried and acquitted. She listened intently. Dark eyes wide with genuine interest, intelligent eyes absorbing detail that he knew she would be silently processing, analysing. He had never known anyone with a more analytical mind. And she went straight to the question which had troubled Enzo from the start. “Why would anyone bother to kill a dying man?”

  “It depends on whether or not he knew Killian was dying.”

  “But as you describe the situation, he was a man with only a few weeks to live. And must have looked like it. Even his killer would have seen that.”

  Enzo nodded. “It has always bothered me. The only reason I can think of for anyone wanting to kill him…”

  “Would be to shut him up.” Charlotte finished for him. “So when he called his daughter-in-law, he wasn’t afraid of dying. He was scared of what would die with him.”

  “Which is why he left the coded notes for his son.”

  “Which nobody can decipher. Will you let me see them?”

  “Of course.”

  “And this man, Kerjean. What might Killian have known about him that he would have wanted kept secret?”

  “Nothing, as far as I can see. The only thing that anyone knows for sure he knew about Kerjean was that he was having an affair with the wife of a town hall official. But by the time Killian was murdered, everyone on the island knew about that. The motive that the police attributed to Kerjean was revenge.”

  “For which he would only have needed to wait a few weeks.”

  “Death by natural causes is hardly revenge. Besides which, he might have been drunk, or simply out of control. He is reputed to have a fearsome temper.”

  “You seem particularly anxious to follow the Kerjean line. Do you think he did it?”

  “Actually…” Enzo thought about it. It was good to have someone question him like this, force him to crystallise his thoughts. “I don’t think I do. But there is something about him, and his story, that doesn’t ring true. It didn’t then, it doesn’t now.

  For the first time, Charlotte smiled. And a little of the tension she had brought with her seemed to slip away. “It’s an interesting case. Maybe you’ll be forced to apply reason this time, rather than science.”

  “Or both.”

  She tilted her head in smiling acquiescence. “Or both.”

  The waitress brought the slate menu to the table and placed it on a chair. “The special today is roasted monkfish,” she said, and drifted off, leaving them to make their choice.

  Charlotte ran her eye over the long list of choices. “Where am I staying?”

  “Killian’s study is in an annex to the house. I have a room above it.”

  “Just the one bed?”

  He looked at her. “Is that a problem?”

  “I suppose not. I won’t be staying long.”

  He nodded toward her overnight bag on the floor next to the table. “I gathered that.” He hesitated. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here?”

  She shook her head. “No. There’ll be time for that.” The tension had returned. “I think I’ll go for the special.”

  ***

  The afternoon sunlight was mellow as it slanted across the ocean from the south west, losing its strength now, admitting defeat finally to the flow of cold air being dragged by an anti-cyclone straight down from the arctic. Charlotte gazed from the window of Enzo’s Jeep across flat, fallow fields and trees shedding their leaves. “How do people pass their time in a place like this?”

  “Like people pass their time anywhere. At home or at work. As you do. You might live in Paris, but you hardly ever set foot over the door.”

  She turned a cold look toward him. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you hardly ever set foot over your door. You live, work, eat, sleep, all in the same place. You might as well live on the moon for all the difference it would make.”

  “Except that moon people are notoriously well-balanced and hardly ever need a therapist.”

  Enzo grinned. This was more like the old Charlotte. “That’s true. I suppose you need to live in a place like Paris to keep your practice supplied with paranoids and psychotics.”

  “Oh, I’m sure there are quite a few in a place like this as well.”

  “Yes, but probably not enough to keep you in business.”

  At the end of a long, straight stretch, the road dipped down toward the beach at Port Mélite, and Enzo drew his Jeep in under the trees. Charlotte got out and walked past the stone benches to look down over the crescent of sand. The breeze from the sea blew her hair back from her face, and Enzo saw her fine, sculpted cheekbones, the line of her jaw, the slightly quizzical upturn of her lips. And he remembered why he had first found her so attractive. “It’s a beautiful spot.” She turned and looked toward the white Killian cottage with its blue shutters. “Is that it?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Then I suppose it would be only polite to introduce me to Madame Killian before you go dragging me off to your bedroom.”

  ***

  Jane opened the front door and held it open for them to enter. There was a stiff, oddly formal quality in her demeanour, her smile a little too fixed, slightly strained. “Come in. Have a seat. Can I get you tea? Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.” Charlotte sat in the armchair that Jane had waved her to, crossed her legs and leaned back as if she were visiting an old friend.

  Enzo could see Charlotte’s look of assessment as she ran her eyes over the Englishwoman. Jane’s look of appraisal in the gaze that met it was very similar. Two females of the species, each sizing up the competition the other might offer for the only available male. “Charlotte’s a psychologist in Paris,” he said, hoping to deflect them from the ritual. “She has her own practice. And actually trained as a forensic psychologist in the States. So the Paris police sometimes ask for her help.”

  “Only as a last resort,” Charlotte said. “God forbid the chauvinist French police establishment should have to come to a woman for assistance.”

  Jane’s smile immediately warmed a little, as if she and Charlotte had somehow connected, found a common cause against a mutual enemy. Men. Enzo shifted uncomfortably. He stood up. “Anyway, I promised to show Charlotte Adam’s study. If that’s alright. She has a good eye.”

  “Of course.” Jane stood up and held her hand out to shake Charlotte’s. “It was nice to meet you. If you need anything over there, just let me know.”

  “Thank you, I will.” And as Charlotte and Enzo walked across the lawn through lengthening shadows she said, “She’s an attractive woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you have dinner together every evening.”

  “Actually only twice.”

  As they reached the door of the annex, a black cat appeared from the side of the building, strutting past Enzo, tail raised, to rub itself against Charlotte’s legs. It meowed softly, and a deep rumbling purr started up in its throat. “Awwww.” Charlotte stooped to stroke it, and it arched its back, pressing up agains
t her hand as she ran it back to the tail. “What’s his name?”

  “I have no idea.” Enzo glared at it, and remembered the sensation of needles in his scalp as the cat landed on his head from the top of the study door. And then, again, the scare it had given him, watching from the shadow of the trees as he returned home two nights before.

  “Is it Jane’s?”

  “I don’t know whose it is.”

  Charlotte looked up, detecting his tone. “I didn’t know you had anything against cats. You like Zeke well enough, don’t you?”

  “Zeke’s not like other cats,” he said, and meant it. Charlotte’s cat was more like an alien, with cropped cream fur on a skinny body, and saucer eyes in an over-large head. “This one’s been haunting me. Prowling around the place at all hours. Even managed to get inside once, I don’t know how.”

  She laughed and stood up. “Maybe it’s the ghost of Adam Killian.”

  But he didn’t return her laugh. Almost exactly the same thought had passed through his own mind during those darkly unreal small hours of the morning. Not a serious thought, of course. But the same one to which Charlotte had just given voice. He felt a slight shiver run through him, and wondered if it were just the cold.

  He was careful not to let the cat slip in unnoticed this time, holding it at bay with his foot until he had closed the door. He turned on the lights and pushed open the door to Killian’s study. Charlotte walked in and stood in the centre of the floor. Her eyes were everywhere, running along the shelves of books, casting their gaze across his desk, the blood stain on the floor. “Oh my,” she said. “You can feel him.”

  Enzo nodded. “You can.”

  “Such a sense of the man in this room.” She turned toward Enzo. “Undisturbed for nearly twenty years?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s like he’s still alive. Every facet of him is here. The room is like the embodiment of his spirit. A place where it still resides, still lives.” She turned, bright-eyed, toward him. “Oh, Enzo, he’s talking to us. Telling us about himself. All we have to do is know how to listen. Show me the notes.”

  So he took her on a tour of the cryptic messages left by Killian for his son. The message list and post-it on the fridge. The entry in the desk diary, the Post-it stuck to the desk lamp. The upside down poem on the wall. She shook her head, mystified. “All in English,” she said. “If you can’t make sense of it, I don’t know how I can.” She returned to the bookshelves, and wandered along them, scanning myriad titles. “What was his profession?”

  “He worked at London University. An expert in tropical medical genetics.”

  She raised her head and let her eyes wander along a colourful array of books on the subject. “Hmmm. Yes. He wasn’t English, though, was he?”

  Enzo raised his eyebrows in surprise. “How do you know that?”

  She turned and ran her fingertips along a line of books on a middle shelf. “What native English speaker would have so many books on English grammar and vocabulary? Unless he taught it, of course.”

  Enzo smiled. “Can you tell me what nationality he was?”

  “Polish, I’d say.”

  This time he raised his eyebrows in astonishment. “How do you know that?”

  She pointed to another line of books on an upper shelf. “It seems his interest in history extended to only two countries. England and Poland. One his adopted home, the other the land of his birth. That would be my guess anyway.”

  “Congratulations, Mademoiselle Roux, you’ve just won a set of steak knives and a holiday for two in sunny Warsaw.”

  Which made her smile. But it was a fleeting smile, lost as her focus returned to the room. She crossed to Killian’s work bench, touching nothing, but staring at it for a long time. Then she opened the filing cabinet and let her eyes wander along the rows of tabs on the suspension files. A, B, C…. She slid the top drawer shut and opened the one below it, fingering the files, as if something might communicate itself by touch. Then she crossed to his desk, and went through the drawers one by one, touching nothing this time. Just looking. After which she stood for a long time, arms folded, her scarf hanging down almost to her knees, eyes drifting around the room, taking in the pictures and display cases so neatly lined up on the opposite wall, one above the other.

  Enzo watched her. He had been attracted to her physically from the first moment he met her. But it was her mind that had seduced him. When they were good together it was wonderful, but that was only too rare. The distance she kept between them frustrated him to distraction. While he would have given himself to her completely, she prized her independence above all else, and had made it only too apparent that she would not give it up for him. He dragged his eyes away from her to look around the room again. “Killian had a very ordered mind,” he said.

  Charlotte looked thoughtful. “More than ordered, Enzo. Obsessive. This was a man fixated. Everything had to be in its place. A place he created for it.” She pointed. “And those display cases on the wall. Look at them. He must have measured from the ceiling. And between the frames. I bet there’s not a centimetre difference between them. I can visualise him as a man consumed by the need for routine, of doing the same things in the same way every day. Bringing order to the chaos of life.” She wandered over to look more closely at the display cases. The rows of insects neatly pinned to pristine backboards. “A man drawn to insects. Creatures that live short, unfettered lives, but lives which also revolve around rite and routine. Think of the bee, the ritual dances, the order of the hive. The organisational qualities of the ant. The apparent randomness of the butterfly. Such a short life, but compelled to spend it flying from one flower to the next—one of nature’s pollinators. The lives of insects must have seemed extraordinary to him. Compelling, but contradictory. Free but ordered. Short but intense.”

  “So what does all this tell you about him?”

  She turned pensive eyes in his direction. “It would be my guess that this man spent time in prison.”

  Of all the conclusions she might have reached, this was not one that Enzo could ever have foreseen. “Why?”

  “People who lose their freedom cling to things that give their lives meaning, Enzo, a reason to exist. Order, routine, ritual, something that marks the passing of time, gives it shape and form.” She raised an eyebrow. “Am I right?”

  “I have no idea. If he was in prison in Britain, or in Poland, Jane either doesn’t know or hasn’t told me.”

  “Better ask her, then. Over one of your dinners together.” And with a dismissive wave of her hand, she banished Adam Killian back to the grave, as if he were of no importance. She was done with him. “And now you can show me where I’m going to be spending the night.”

  He lifted her overnight bag from where he had laid it on a chair, and led her into the hall and up the stairs to the tiny attic bedroom. She looked from the window across a lawn where the last light of the day lay in long, autumn yellow strips, divided and subdivided by the trees along the west side of the garden. The dew was already settling on the grass and would soon turn white as it froze in the tumbling temperatures. She turned her back to the light and cast curious eyes around the room, settling finally on the unmade bed.

  Enzo missed the cold that clouded them suddenly. He was distracted. It was almost seven, and he knew it would take him nearly thirty minutes to drive south to the Trou de l’enfer, and his rendezvous with the writer of the note. “I’m going to have to leave you for a while,” he said. “I have a meeting in half an hour.”

  “How long have you been sleeping with her?”

  The question came straight out of left field and caught him completely off-guard. “What?”

  “You’ve only been here four nights. So either you’re a very fast worker, or you knew her already.”

  Enzo felt his face flush and wondered why he should feel any guilt. She had no right to make him feel guilty. “What are you talking about, Charlotte?”

&nb
sp; She nodded toward the bed. “Two people slept here last night. A quite separate imprint left by heads on each pillow.”

  Enzo glanced toward the rumpled sheets, and saw where Jane’s head had left a deep depression on the left-hand pillow. He had spent the night curled up alone on the right side of the bed. He was damned if he was going to defend himself, but he did. “We’ve never been mutually exclusive you and I, Charlotte. You were the one who made that the rule, right from the start.”

  “Men find love so easily,” she said. “Or, at least, sex. They always seem to confuse the two. I don’t think I want to sleep in a bed where you made love to another woman the night before.”

  He sighed his exasperation. “I didn’t. I might have. But your call put a stop to that. You want to hear it?” He crossed to the answering machine on the bedside table. “Your message will still be on the tape. A real passion killer. What was it Jane said as she left…? Oh, yes. We’d better not soil the bed. Because I really don’t feel like changing the sheets.” His finger hovered over the replay button.

  “Don’t!”

  He swung around to face her. “What do you want, Charlotte? Jane Killian doesn’t mean a damned thing to me. But I’m not made of stone. And you’re never there.” His voice stopped abruptly, cut off by the shock of seeing the silent tears that ran down Charlotte’s cheeks. Her fine, brown eyes were blurred and lost behind them. “What’s wrong?” His question sounded feeble, hopelessly inadequate in the face of her obvious distress. He stepped toward her to lay a hand of concern on her cheek.

  But she brushed him aside, crossing to the bed to sit on the very edge of it, her hands folded together in her lap. She seemed oddly crushed, and fragile in a way that belied the strength he knew she possessed. “I’m pregnant.”

  Two simple words, almost whispered, that would change his life forever. The shock of them left him bereft of something to say, and holding his breath. He stood in the silence of the room, hearing the blood pulse through his head. Finally he found his voice. “How?” And no sooner had he uttered the question than he realised how absurd it was. A thought not lost on Charlotte.