Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  “Hello?” His voice sounded dully in the silence of the house. He heard the tick of a clock, saw oak embers glowing in the cheminée, smelled wet dog hair, and from the kitchen something simmering on the cooker. Soup or a stew. “Hello?” Still nothing.

  He pulled the door closed, and walked back up the path to the gate. The tiny patch of lawn was bald in places, overgrown in others, flowerbeds choked with weeds. He supposed that when you were in your nineties, caring for your garden slipped down the list of priorities.

  Then, in the distance, his eye was caught by a flash of red scarf, and the sound of a dog barking carried on the wind. He saw the familiar blue peaked hat of the old doctor just above the line of the thicket and realised he must be out walking his dog. Enzo set off along the still frozen mud track to greet him. They met a few hundred meters from the house.

  “How are you, Monsieur Macleod?” Gassman grinned to show off his too white, too even dentures and grasped Enzo’s hand firmly in his. His golden Labrador was old, too, and walked stiffly like his master. He looked up at Enzo with sad, world-weary eyes and sat down to wait patiently until the two men would finish talking. “What on earth have you done to your face?”

  Enzo’s hand went instinctively to the bruising below his eye. “A nasty fall.”

  Gassman regarded him thoughtfully for some moments. “It’s a fine morning.”

  “It is.”

  “Old Oscar likes nothing better than to take me out for a walk on a morning like this.” He ruffled the dog’s head. “That right, boy?” He grinned. “It’s thanks to Oscar I’m still alive.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “The walking, Monsieur Macleod. Out every day in all weathers. Four, five kilometers sometimes. I would prescribe it to anyone with a dodgy heart or ambitions for longevity.” He grinned. “That and the odd glass of whisky.”

  They turned and started walking, by unspoken consensus, back toward the house. The two men and the dog.

  “You’ve not been out this way before?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll not have seen the monument to your fellow countrymen.”

  Enzo looked around, surprised, seeing nothing but empty moorland. “Monument?”

  Old Gassman smiled. “Well… a commemoration. But a well-kept one. They’re not forgotten, those men that died here.”

  The monument turned out to be two dark blue plaques bolted to a rock in a tiny clearing in the thicket. A short path led to it from the main track. There was a representation of a twin-engined airplane painted with the markings of the RAF. Inscribed in white beneath it was the legend, They saw Groix for the last time—12 August, 1945. And the names of four British airmen who had died when their plane crashed on the island. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to twenty-six.

  “Such a waste of young lives,” Gassman said. “Even although it was the British who bombed Lorient to oblivion, the locals preferred them to the Germans. It takes a long time for a nation to live down the humiliation of occupation. The Germans were still hated here when I arrived in the sixties.” He chuckled. “I should know. I was mistaken for one by a few folk when I came at first.”

  Enzo turned curious eyes on the old man. “Why?”

  “My accent, monsieur. And, I suppose, my name. It’s a little Germanic.”

  “So where are you from, originally?”

  “Alsace.” He chuckled. “Over the years, it has been German as much as it has been French. So it’s probably not surprising that my accent made me sound a bit like one of the boches. And it was just over fifteen years since the Germans had left, so the hatred was still fresh in the memory.”

  “Was it hard, then, to be accepted here, as an incomer?”

  “No, no. A doctor is very quickly at the heart of any community, Monsieur Macleod. Folk forget all about where you’re from when you’re prescribing something to take away their pain.” He laughed. “Or draining a carbuncle.”

  They retraced their steps toward the track that led back to the house.

  “So what it is that brings you away out here, then?” the old man said. “Not the pleasure of my company, I’m quite sure.”

  Enzo smiled. “Just a couple of questions, doctor, that I thought you might be able to answer for me. Regarding one of your former patients.”

  The old doctor flicked sharp eyes toward the younger man. “I’m still bound by the Hippocratic oath, you know.”

  “I understand that. And I wouldn’t dream of asking you to breach it.”

  “Good. Because I wouldn’t. What patient are we talking about?”

  “Thibaud Kerjean.”

  “Ahhhh. I should have seen that coming.” He shook his head sadly. “As a doctor there’s not much I can tell you about him. It’s plain for everyone to see that the man has a problem with the drink. And the most I ever treated him for were the cuts and bruises he got from brawling in bars.” He pointedly scrutinised Enzo’s bruised and cut face.

  “I guess, as a doctor in the practice, you must have known that Adam Killian was terminally ill?”

  “Yes, I did. But I don’t see what that has to do with Kerjean.”

  “I just wondered, if there was any way that Kerjean might have known about it, too.”

  “Pah!” The old man waved a hand in the air, and his exclamation drew a slightly startled look from the Labrador. “He certainly wouldn’t have heard it from me. And to be honest, I never exchanged more than a few words with the man. So I wouldn’t have known what he knew or didn’t know about anything.”

  “Oh, okay.” Enzo was hardly surprised. It had always been a long shot. Sometimes doctors knew more about their patients than others. But it seemed that no one had ever got close to Kerjean, except for a handful of women.

  “You might ask Elisabeth, though. She spent more time with him than any of us.”

  Enzo turned to look at the doctor. “Elisabeth Servat?”

  “She was a nurse in the practice when Alain first joined.”

  “Yes, she told me.”

  “Specialised in physical therapy and re-education. As I recall, Kerjean had a fall on his boat and broke a leg in two places. Elisabeth went out to his place at Locmaria twice a week for a couple of months to get him walking properly again.” He chuckled once more. “Two to three hours a week in the man’s company. He wasn’t the most forthcoming I’ve ever met, but they must have talked about something.”

  ***

  Enzo stopped for a bite to eat in Le Bourg, and it was early afternoon by the time he got back to Port Mélite. Charlotte and the baby had been on his mind all morning, a constant distraction gnawing away at his concentration, like back pain or a toothache that never lets you forget it is there. He was determined to confront her.

  Jane Killian’s car was parked, as usual, beneath the trees above the beach. When he got out of his jeep he heard the tick, tick of cooling metal coming from beneath its hood. So she was recently returned from somewhere.

  He was halfway across the lawn toward the annex when he heard her voice calling to him from the house. “If you’re looking for Charlotte, she’s not there.”

  Enzo stopped and turned. “Oh. Is she with you?”

  Jane shook her head. “No, Enzo. She’s gone.”

  He stood staring at her for a moment. “Gone where?”

  “Left. The island, I mean. I took her to the ferry late this morning.”

  Enzo felt the colour rising on his cheeks, his skin stinging, as if he had been slapped. And he wondered if Jane was taking pleasure in this. “Okay. Thanks” was all he said.

  He went up to his room and felt its emptiness, a reflection of the way he felt inside. The rumpled bedsheets where they had lain together in chaste self-consciousness seemed to mock him. A reminder of just how great the gulf between them had become. That they should have spent a night together without holding, or kissing, locked in silent conflict, words expressed earlier in the evening endlessly repeati
ng in the mind, like ticker-tape headlines crossing the screen of a twenty-four hour news station.

  Choked by a sudden claustrophobia, he hurried back down the stairs and out into the garden, breathing deeply. The black cat that had taken a shine to Charlotte was stretched out on the lower limbs of the nearest tree, watching him with affected disinterest. He turned away and walked briskly around the side of the house to the gate. He couldn’t face Jane right now.

  On the far side of the parking area, three houses and a smaller cottage sat up on the bank in an elevated position, looking over the beach, and he wondered how it must feel to live this close to the sea. To feel its moods, suffer its tempers, hear its constant breathing. Like living with an unpredictable lover.

  He thrust his hands in his pockets and wandered down the track to the sand. The tiny bay was protected by low cliffs rising at either end, and fingers of black, shining rock that extended into the brine. A flock of seagulls floated and frolicked in the water at the far side of it. The sand was firm, compacted. The tide had withdrawn to reveal the full crescent of silver, was marred only by the arc of seaweed deposited below the high-tide mark.

  Enzo followed the line of the water, just beyond its reach, feeling the wind in his face, smelling the seaweed and the salt air. But it couldn’t blow away his depression. At his time of life, he should have been looking forward to his grandchildren. Not to being a father again. And yet there was still an ache in him, somewhere deep inside, an urge to try again. To get it right this time. To be the father he had always wanted and meant to be.

  The child that he and Charlotte had made, their son, was another chance. Certainly his last. Surely there was some course of action he could take, some power of persuasion he could exert to prevent Charlotte from doing the unthinkable.

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Unable to face an evening alone with Jane, Enzo had spent the afternoon driving round the island, walking the sands of the long inlet at Port St. Nicolas and leaving his tracks in the deserted sandbank at Les Grands Sables, before washing down fresh seafood with a chilled chardonnay in Le Bourg.

  It was dark when he got back to the house. There were still lights on, but he went around the side and headed straight for the annex. For once, Jane did not come to the door. Perhaps she was as anxious as he was now to wrap this whole thing up and leave the island. He had been here for some days and made no progress whatsoever, except perhaps for discounting in his mind the thought that it was Kerjean who had murdered Killian.

  A drunk, an intemperate brawler, a lover who attracted women like flies to shit, he had about him, nonetheless, a certain integrity, a sense of honour that Enzo had divined from their brief, brutal encounters. It was time to re-focus.

  He went up to the bedroom to drop his bag on the bed and check his e-mail on the laptop. There was an IM on MSN Messenger from Sophie. A simple, six-word message that touched his heart. “Missing you, Papa. I love you.”

  He sat for some time, staring at it, before looking up through the window, across the lawn toward the house. Jane’s bedroom window was firmly shuttered. He stood up wearily and went back downstairs to the study. As he switched on the light and walked in, he recalled Charlotte’s words. Enzo, he’s talking to us. Telling us about himself. All we have to do is know how to listen. Enzo stood listening, running his eyes over everything that had become so familiar to him. The ordered rows of books on the shelves, the tidy workbench. The desktop with the open diary. The fridge door with its magnets and message list, and single, discordant Post-it. The bloodstained floorboards, the bullet holes in the wall.

  He remembered asking Guéguen for a copy of the autopsy report and for one of the shell casings. But since he had heard nothing from the gendarme, he assumed that neither of these things was likely to find its way into his hands. Which was disappointing. None of this was going well.

  He looked around again. If Killian was speaking, why couldn’t Enzo hear him? He closed his eyes, and the silence seemed deafening.

  He shivered now, as he pushed his hands into his pockets and wandered over to the workbench to look at the upside-down poem on the wall. Canting his head to one side, he tried to read it again but gave up and lifted it down on to the desktop, propping it the right way up against the wall.

  This day relenting God

  Hath placed within my hand

  A wondrous thing; and God

  Be praised. At his command,

  Seeking his secret deeds

  With tears and toiling breath,

  I find thy cunning seeds,

  O million-murdering Death.

  I know this little thing

  A myriad men will save,

  O Death, where is thy sting?

  Thy victory, O Grave?

  What on earth was it all about? And who was Ronald Ross? Enzo walked over to the bookshelves. Surely Killian had kept an encyclopedia. He scoured the lines of books until he found a row of twelve dark green volumes. Everyman’s Encyclopedia, A to Z. The books looked old. He lifted one down at random and checked the publication date. 1957. So they were well out of date. Still… He ran his eyes along them searching for the volume RAG to SPI, so that he could look up Ronald Ross.

  It wasn’t in its place. He frowned. In its stead was the first of the twelve volumes, A to BAL. It seemed almost inconceivable to him that Killian would have filed them out of order. He checked to see if something else had replaced the first volume, and found that the missing RAG to SPI was now there. The two had been transposed. Who by? Killian? If he had done it, then it could have been no accident. For the first time, Enzo felt a sense of excitement, saw the very first chink of light, and heard perhaps the very first distant echo of Killian’s voice.

  He placed the two books on the desk, and sat down in Killian’s chair to look at them, struck by the chilling sense of occupying a dead man’s space, of following in his invisible footsteps.

  The first volume he opened was RAG to SPI, and he flicked through the pages to see if there was an entry for Ronald Ross. To his surprise, the search was facilitated by the presence of a blank yellow Post-it stuck on the page with the entry. And Ross’ name itself had been highlighted with a yellow marker pen. The entry was headed, Ross, Sir Ronald (1857–1932) Brit. Physician and poet.

  Enzo read that Ross had been born in India, the son of a British general. He had trained as a doctor, and in collaboration with a scientist, Patrick Manson, had explored the theory that malaria was transmitted to man via the mosquito. Following years of perfecting a technique for dissecting the stomach of the mosquito, he had finally made the breakthrough which won him his Nobel Prize—on a day that he thereafter named Mosquito Day. The date was August 20, 1897, and it was the day he discovered, in the stomach wall of a dissected mosquito, the plasmodium long identified in the blood of malaria sufferers as the cause of the disease. In celebration, Ross had written his poem, supposing that his discovery would lead to a cure for malaria.

  Enzo was puzzled. He read and reread the entry. But there was nothing in it that seemed in any way connected with what had happened here on this tiny Breton island off the northwest coast of France. Of course, Killian was interested in insects, which might explain his admiration of Ross and his poem. But how was it relevant, if at all?

  He sat thinking for some time before absently picking up the volume, A to BAL, and riffling through its pages, almost without thinking. Something caught his eye and made him stop. A flash of yellow. Another Post-it. He flipped back through the pages until he found it. It was stuck to the left-hand page, and written on it, in a bold, tidy hand, in capital letters, were the words, HE DID NOT DIE. The blue ink of the pen was as crisp and clear as the day it had been applied to the paper, never having been exposed to light until now.

  Enzo stared at it wondering who Killian was referring to, before his eye was drawn to a yellow highlighted entry on the opposite page. Agadir. He found himself frowning ag
ain. Agadir, he knew, was the southernmost port on the Atlantic coastline of Morocco, at one time regarded as the sardine capital of the world. He read through the entry, most of which involved itself with a dispute between France and Germany over territorial claims on the North African country.

  Again he was mystified. What possible relevance could this have to Killian’s murder? And yet the words, HE DID NOT DIE, lingered in his consciousness, as if lasered into it.

  He closed both volumes again and sat looking at them. There had to be, he felt, some connection between the earthquake in Agadir and the poem by Ronald Ross. And yet, if there was some correlation there, he could not for the life of him imagine what it might be. He touched the books with tactile fingers, as if hoping something might transmit itself to him simply through contact. And then it occurred to him that a more up-to-date entry for Agadir might prove more illuminating. He searched the shelves once more, looking for a more modern encyclopedia but found nothing, and almost gave up before remembering that he could do an Internet search from his laptop.

  Enzo brought the computer down to the study and set it up on Killian’s desk. He moved the diary to one side and placed his laptop in front of him, plugging in his USB stick and dialing into his cellphone provider’s high-speed Internet connection. Up came his Google homepage, and he typed in AGADIR. It produced more than six million links, the first of which was the Wikipedia entry on the Moroccan seaport.

  Reading through it, nothing immediately struck him as significant. Located near the foot of the Atlas mountains, where the Souss River flows into the Atlantic ocean, Agadir was, he read, still regarded as the first sardine port in the world. It was also an important commercial port and tourist town, with its long strip of sandy beach. It wasn’t until he reached the section on the city’s history that he found his interest suddenly piqued. The entry read: