Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  But only the wind replied, moaning through the fissures in the rock and wrapping itself around him, cold fingers robbing him of strength. Even if he decided to trust his life to the rope, he was not certain he had the power left to pull himself out.

  Slowly he managed to get to his feet, balancing precariously, forced now to trust the rope. He yanked hard, several times, and still it remain rock solid. He stood for several moments, teeth clenched, eyes closed, summoning the courage and the strength to give it a try.

  He pulled up the end of the rope, and wrapped it several times around his waist before knotting it securely. If he fell, and the rope held, he would survive. If the roped failed to hold, he was dead. He reached up as far as he could, grasping the rope with gloved hands, and braced his legs against the face of the rock, pushing himself out. Fully committed now, he knew that his life was in the hands of whoever had secured the other end. It was not so much a question of trust, as of blind faith.

  Inch by painful inch, Enzo worked himself up the cliff face, feet searching for footholds to brace him as he moved his hands up the rope, one over the other. His arms began to ache, his legs trembling, his strength ebbing away, slowly but surely. Desperation clutched his heart with icy fingers. He gritted his teeth against the pain and kept going, never once looking up until the very last, when he felt his hand crushed between the rope and the rock, and realised he was almost there. Rock and earth was crumbling all around him, sending showers of debris down into the black. He threw an arm over the top and grasped the rope, pulling with all his might, kicking a leg over the lip of it to give himself extra purchase.

  And then he was up on the high crest of the cliffs, fully in the open, shadow and light racing to greet him as he rolled himself over and over until he was sufficiently clear of the edge to feel safe.

  He lay on his back looking up at the moon, arms and legs spread wide. And with relief, came an urge to weep. So he closed his eyes and took deep, steady breaths to calm himself, before finally getting stiffly, painfully, to his feet and untying the rope from his waist. He looked around and saw that the rope was tethered to a stout metal crowbar driven at an angle deep into a crack in the rock. It could hardly have been more secure.

  He stood shakily, the wind whipping around him, and looked all along the line of the cliffs and back toward the woods. There was no sign of either his attacker or his rescuer. And he wondered if they were one and same person, and if so, why? All he knew was that by some miracle he was still alive, and he was grateful for that.

  He stepped over the rope that delineated the supposedly safe walking area and started stiffly back toward the car park.

  ***

  It was with an enormous sense of relief that he slipped into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut. He started the engine, turned the heater up full, and laid his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. Every muscle in his body ached. He waited until the engine had warmed up and he felt the heat coming through, before slipping the Jeep into reverse gear and accelerating backward to turn. The whole vehicle shuddered and he almost stalled it. He braked, slipped into first, and tried to go forward. The same thing.

  Enzo opened the door and jumped out to see what was wrong. The offside front tyre was flat. He cursed out loud and raised his eyes to the heavens. To have to change a wheel now, after all he had been through, was the final straw. With anger fuelling determination, he stalked around to where the spare wheel was bolted to the back of the vehicle. Which is when he noticed that the rear offside tyre was flat as well. And the rear nearside tyre. Despair gave way to anger as he walked briskly to the other side of the Jeep and saw that the front nearside tyre was also flat. He crouched down to run the tips of his fingers over the deep slash cut into the tyre wall, and closed his eyes, breathing out through clenched teeth.

  Not content with almost killing him, his tormentor was determined that he would now have to walk across the island in the dark to get back to Le Bourg. Enzo stood up slowly and leaned both hands against the roof of the Jeep, his anger simmering dangerously inside him.

  There would be a reckoning.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lights burned in several windows of the doctor’s house as Enzo pushed open the gate and followed the path through the jungle that was the front garden up to the door. He heard the weary hammering of his knock echo along the hallway behind it. And after a moment, footsteps approaching. The door opened, and the Servats’ elder daughter, Oanez, peered out at him.

  For a moment her face was frozen in something like shock, or disbelief, before she let out a shriek that almost burst Enzo’s eardrums. He recoiled, startled, as Elisabeth, followed by Alan, appeared hurriedly in the hall behind her and looked at him in astonishment.

  The doctor said, “For God’s sake, man! What’s happened to you?”

  It wasn’t until he saw his reflection in the hall mirror that Enzo realised why Oanez had screamed as she had. His face was streaked with dried blood. Most of his hair had pulled itself free of the band that held it in a ponytail, and, where it wasn’t matted with blood, hung wild and unkempt over his shoulders. His jacket and trousers were blood-stained and filthy, the lower half of his right-hand trouser leg almost hanging off where it was torn open at the knee. He was pale with the cold, and shivering.

  “Come in, come in, for Heaven’s sake.” Elisabeth took his arm and led him through the dining room to the kitchen and sat him in a chair at the kitchen table. The whole family gathered round to stare at him as he described how he had been attacked at the Point de l’Enfer and fallen into the trou.

  Alain boiled up some water and poured in disinfectant, and began methodically cleaning the wounds and scrapes around his head as he talked, holding him steady as he winced from the pain of the antiseptic. He didn’t tell them who he had been expecting to meet, or why. Only that it was connected in some way with his investigation into the Killian murder.

  “Did you get a look at who did it?” Elisabeth said.

  Enzo shook his head. “It was too dark.”

  Alain tipped his head to one side and dabbed carefully at a gash on his right temple. “But you have your thoughts?”

  “I do.”

  “And?”

  “It could only have been Kerjean.”

  Elisabeth said, “Are you sure?”

  “No. But if it wasn’t him and he didn’t murder Killian, then it must have been the real killer who attacked me out there.”

  Alain secured a dressing over the wound. “And do you have any idea who that might be?”

  Enzo breathed out his frustration. “No, I don’t.”

  Alain stood back and looked at him. “You’re going to be black and blue by tomorrow, Monsieur Macleod.” He smiled wryly. “You’ll make a pretty sight.” Then he crouched down to examine Enzo’s knee and drew a sharp breath. “Going to have to get these trousers off you, I’m afraid. That’s a terrible gash in your knee. I might have to put stitches in it.”

  The girls were sent out of the kitchen as Enzo removed his trousers with difficulty. Then he sat with eyes closed while Alain cleaned the wound and injected anaesthetic into the knee, before taking needle and thread and closing it up with four neat stitches. The doctor smeared his handiwork with disinfectant cream then placed a dressing over it.

  When Enzo opened his eyes again, he found Elisabeth there holding out a glass. He smelled the whisky immediately.

  She smiled. “Something for the pain.”

  He took the glass with still trembling fingers and sipped a mouthful of amber heaven, letting it trickle slowly back over his tongue, burning down his throat and into his chest. “I don’t know how to thank you both,” he said. “During all the walk back across the island, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of getting here. I’d never have made it back to Port Mélite.”

  “Well, I’m glad it was us you came to. Here.” Elisabeth passed him his trousers. “I’ve sewn up the knee.�
� She grinned at her husband. “A little more neatly than Alain did yours.”

  “I made a wonderful job of it,” Alain said. He smiled at Enzo. “Don’t listen to her. You’ll be left with barely a scar. But you’ll probably need a new pair of pants.”

  They each supported an arm as Enzo stood up to pull his trousers back on, and then slump into his chair again to finish his whisky.

  “Now,” Alain said, “we’d better call the police.”

  “No,” Enzo said quickly.

  Elisabeth looked at him, perplexed. “But, Enzo, someone just tried to kill you.”

  Enzo shook his head. “I don’t think so. If he’d meant to kill me, I’d have been dead by now, or still lying on that ledge. The irony of it is, he actually saved my life. Whatever his intentions, killing me wasn’t one of them.”

  Alain said, “But he attacked you, assaulted you, slashed your tyres. These things are all matters for the police.”

  But again, Enzo simply shook his head. “No. They’re between him and me.” He looked up to see their shared disapproval. “But I’d very much appreciate it if one of you could run me home.”

  ***

  Alain took the SUV right up to the gate of the Killian cottage and came around to the passenger side to help Enzo out. All of Enzo’s muscles had stiffened up, and he was finding it hard to move. The anaesthetic had also worn off, and his knee was hurting like hell.

  “Do you need a hand into the house?”

  “No I’ll be alright from here, thanks.” Enzo shook his hand. “I owe you, doctor.

  “You owe me nothing. Just take care that none of those wounds becomes infected. Come and see me if things aren’t healing properly.”

  “I will.”

  By the time Enzo had reached the door of the cottage, Alain had reversed back to the parking area and turned the SUV. Enzo watched as the headlights dwindled into the distance, and turned as the door opened.

  Jane’s initially cold expression dissolved immediately to shock, and then concern. “Oh, my God! What’s happened?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  She took Enzo’s arm as he hobbled into the warmth of the living room to find Charlotte curled up in one of the armchairs. Discarded dinner plates lay on the floor, and glasses of red wine stood on the tables beside each chair. “We were hungry and couldn’t wait for you,” she said. And then saw the state that he was in. She stood up, immediately anxious. “My God, Enzo! Are you alright?”

  “Not really. Turned out it wasn’t so much a rendezvous as a trap.”

  Charlotte said, “What happened?”

  He slumped into the settee and let his head fall back. “If you put a drink in my hand I might think about telling you.”

  “I’d better open another bottle, then,” Jane said. “And I’ll heat up something for you to eat.”

  ***

  It was almost an hour before Charlotte helped Enzo across the lawn in the dark to the annex. They heard the cat before they saw it. It emerged meowing, and running from the shadows, to press itself up against Charlotte’s legs as it had done earlier. Enzo hissed at it and it ran, startled, back into the darkness.

  “Poor thing,” Charlotte said.

  He unlocked the door, and they immediately felt the chill as they stepped inside. When they got to the bedroom, Enzo turned on the heater and glanced from the window. The shutters on Jane Killian’s windows were firmly closed tonight and would, he imagined, remain so for the rest of his stay. Which, in many ways, was a relief. He turned to find Charlotte watching him. She was slightly flushed from too much wine, her eyes almost glassy.

  “You shouldn’t be drinking,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “I’m not sure what gives you the right to care. It’s me who’s carrying him, not you. Though maybe not for much longer.”

  He stood stock still, staring at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t decided yet whether to go ahead with it or not.”

  The shock of her words stung him, like a slap in the face. “You wouldn’t… ’

  “The child deserves better than us, Enzo. And what kind of father would you make? Think about it. Are you someone your son could look up to? Twice married, old enough to be his grandfather. Climbing into bed with every other woman he meets, drinking too much.” She paused for emphasis. “Putting your work ahead of family and friends.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Isn’t it? Take a good look at yourself, Enzo.”

  And the words of the Scots bard, Robert Burns, came back to him. Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursel’s as others see us. He closed his eyes. After all the years of estrangement from Kirsty, they had in the end reached a kind of rapprochement. Sophie, he knew, adored him. His career in forensic science had been replaced by a new one teaching biology and forensics at a top university. He hadn’t done so badly. But after Pascale’s death he had searched, and failed, to find love. Her life—and death—had shaped his.

  “And then, what kind of mother would I make? A singular woman. Idiosyncratic, eccentric, way too independent. I’m just as brutal in my own self-analysis, Enzo. Would I be prepared to give up my work, my independence, my life? I’ve never done it for any man. If I were to do it for a child, my life as I know it would be over. By the time I got it back, you’d be seventy. And what would I have to look forward to then? Caring for you into old age?”

  “If that’s how you feel… I mean, if you’re really serious about terminating the pregnancy, why did you even tell me about it? What did you come here for?”

  She turned dark eyes on him, and he felt their intensity. “I was hoping you might give me a reason not to.” There was a long silence, then. “And what do I find? The night before I get here you’ve been drinking too much and end up in bed with another woman. You’d have slept with her if I hadn’t phoned when I did. And now you’re out getting into fights in the dark and falling off cliffs. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.”

  He held her gaze. His voice was low and steady. “I’ll give you one perfectly good reason why you shouldn’t have an abortion.”

  “Yes?”

  “We created a life together, Charlotte. But we have no right to end it.”

  She gasped in frustration and turned away. “I didn’t know you’d found religion in your old age.”

  “I haven’t. But I’ve spent a lifetime catching people who take lives. I’m not about to sanction the taking of one myself, just because it might not be convenient to you.”

  She turned back. Eyes blazing. “He’s not growing inside of you, Enzo. You don’t have to give birth to him. And where are you going to be when he’s growing up?”

  “Right here. Sharing the responsibility.”

  “Oh? Just like you were with Kirsty?”

  Of all the wounds inflicted on him on this dark November night, that was the deepest, and hurt the most. Not least because it was so unfair. “I never turned my back on Kirsty,” he said. “Never. It was her mother who closed that door on me. Used her own daughter as a stick to beat me with.” But no matter how many times he told himself this simple truth, he still couldn’t shake off his sense of guilt.

  ***

  They lay in bed, not touching, both of them awake in the dark for a very long time. Enzo lay on his back, staring blindly at the ceiling. Everything that had happened to him tonight was somehow overshadowed by Charlotte’s situation. For the first time in his life he wished he were twenty years younger, regretted the wasted years and the passage of time. Time that was against him. Charlotte’s bald statement of fact that by the time their son had reached adulthood Enzo would be seventy had stunned him. He still saw himself as the young man he had been thirty years before. The idea that he would be seventy in the not too distant future was shocking. Seventy! How was it possible? Where had his life gone? And yet to think like that, he knew, was to thr
ow away all the good years to come, to accept the mantle of old age and discard his youth as spent, like the greater part of a dwindling fortune.

  He was not quite sure when it was that he finally drifted off into an uneasy slumber, but when he awoke with a start from some disturbing dream, the digital read-out on the bedside clock showed 2.43. He lay for several minutes, listening to his own breathing, before becoming aware that Charlotte was no longer in the bed beside him. He turned his head and saw the light from the stairwell in cracks around the door, and reluctantly he slipped from the warmth of the sheets to find his dressing gown and slippers.

  Charlotte was sitting in the captain’s chair behind Killian’s desk, the black cat curled up on her lap. She ran gentle fingers back through its long fur, and Enzo could hear it purring from the door.

  “I heard him meowing outside and let him in. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Would it matter if I did?”

  She smiled. “No.” Then, “I couldn’t sleep.”

  He nodded.

  “I spent some time looking at Killian’s notes.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps if they were in French. But I can make no sense of them.”

  He moved into the study, closing the door behind him, and sat in the chair facing her. “So what did you talk about tonight, you and Jane?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things. She’s a sad creature, Enzo.”

  “How so?”

  “Her parents split up at an early age, and she never really bonded with either of them. It was one of the reasons she was so drawn to Peter. His relationship with his father. The first time, she said, she’d known a real family. Like being a part of something special. I think she was as much in love with Adam as with Peter.”

  Enzo shook his head. “My God, you never stop playing the psychologist, do you?”

  “I don’t play at it, Enzo. It’s what I do. People find it easy to talk to me. You did once, too.”

  “Don’t project your faults on to me. You’re the one who never talks, never telling me what’s in your head. I’m a damned open book.”