Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  He turned and looked back along the beach. Tall chestnut trees were shedding the last of their leaves around the stone benches that overlooked it. The houses sharing the rise sat square and solid, cheek by jowl, facing the sunrise like old friends greeting the day. Across the shining waters, the Breton coast smudged the horizon. It was a magical spot. Sheltered and private. There was an intimacy about it, spoiled only by the stain of a man’s murder. The thought jarred, like a discordant note in a dreamy symphony. Enzo turned and walked briskly back to the house.

  When he got to the annex, he sat once again behind Killian’s desk and surveyed the clues laid out before him. He had brought through the Post-it and message pad from the fridge and laid them out alongside the diary and the Post-it from the desk lamp. The encyclopaedias were all open at the relevant pages. And against the desk lamp itself he had propped Ronald Ross’ framed poem about mosquitoes. His eyes were drawn to a line of it which made sense now in the context of Ross’ discovery. But somewhere, far away in the back of his brain, sparking neurons were making almost subliminal connections. I find thy cunning seeds, O million-murdering death. The plasmodium found in the mosquito’s stomach, of course. But with Killian’s fondness for wordplay, might there be some hidden meaning here? O death, where is thy sting? Thy victory, O Grave?

  Whatever connections he was making deep in his sub-conscious, they were, for the moment, eluding his conscious mind. As a distraction, he went online to check his email and saw that there was one waiting for him. It was from someone called Gérard Cohen. He opened it up.

  Professor Macleod,

  Your email was forwarded to me by the Wiesenthal Center first thing this morning . Although retired now, I worked there as an investigator in the late eighties and most of the nineties. I can confirm that I did, indeed, have correspondence with a certain Adam Killian in the spring of 1990. I am very sorry to hear that he was murdered. This must have occurred not long after I met him in Paris in July of that year. I am intrigued to know more.

  Gérard Cohen

  Enzo felt his excitement mounting. He immediately composed his response.

  My Dear Monsieur Cohen,

  Thank you for your prompt response. I will, of course, be only to happy to share with you everything I know about Monsieur Killian’s murder. However, I would be most grateful if first you could tell me what it was that you and Monsieur Killian were discussing?

  Thanking you in advance,

  Enzo Macleod

  Within a matter of minutes his laptop alerted him to Gérard Cohen’s response. He must have been sitting at his computer waiting for a reply.

  Professor Macleod,

  The subject of my correspondence with Monsieur Killian, and our subsequent meeting is, as far as I am concerned, confidential. I do not feel at liberty to discuss the details by email with an unseen, unverified correspondent. If, however, you are prepared to come to Paris to meet me face to face, I will make a judgment then on the question of how much, if anything, to reveal.

  With best wishes,

  Gérard Cohen.

  Enzo sat thoughtfully tapping his right index finger on the edge of the desk before reaching a decision. He hit the reply key again, suggesting a meeting the following afternoon. Cohen’s response was, again, almost immediate. He would meet Enzo, he said, at the door of the Wiesenthal Center at four.

  Enzo immediately pulled up the SNCF website to book a rail ticket from Lorient to Paris the following morning, then sat staring at the screen. Vague thoughts were beginning to take form and coagulate in his stream of consciousness. Any correspondence between Killian and Cohen would have been by conventional mail in 1990. So where was Killian’s end of that correspondence? Jane had made no mention of any such letters being found among his belongings. And surely they would have been significant enough to mention.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of his cellphone. He fished in his pocket to find it.

  “Hello?”

  “Enzo, hi. It’s Elisabeth Servat. How are you recovering from your ordeal the other night?”

  In truth, Enzo had almost forgotten about it. He laughed. “Fine. Thanks to you and Alain.”

  “Good.” She paused. “I got up this morning and saw the sun shining and thought this would be a good day to take Enzo to Port Lay. You said wanted to see it in the sunshine.”

  Enzo hesitated for only a moment. “I would like that very much.”

  “Great. I’ve just packed the girls off to school, and Alain has a surgery this morning, so I’m free any time you are. Shall I come and pick you up at Port Mélite?”

  “Sure.”

  “And afterwards we can go into Port Tudy and hook up with Alain. We quite often meet for lunch at the Café de la Jetée when the girls are lunching at school. Would that be okay?”

  “Sounds perfect, Elisabeth.”

  He could hear the pleasure in her voice. “Géniale. I’ll see you in about half an hour, then.”

  For a long time after he had hung up, Enzo sat thinking before finally getting up and crossing the lawn to the house. The black cat was sitting at the base of one of the trees washing its face. It paused mid-wipe, one paw poised behind its right ear, to watch as Enzo knocked on the back door. When Jane opened it, dressed now, her face softened by freshly applied make-up, he said, “Whose cat is that over there?”

  She peered across the garden and shrugged. “No idea. I’ve never seen it before.” She held the door open, and he stepped up into the kitchen. “Any developments?”

  “I’m going to Paris tomorrow to meet a man from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Apparently he and your father-in-law exchanged letters in the spring of 1990, and met in Paris in July of that year.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Really? He never mentioned anything about that to us.”

  “There were no letters among his belongings?”

  “No, there weren’t. I’d have noticed if there were. Coffee?”

  “Sure.” He sat down at the kitchen table as she poured them each a cup. “Jane, I want to you to think back to the telephone conversation you had with him the night he was murdered.”

  “What about it?”

  “Tell me again how it went.”

  She placed their cups on the table and sat down. For several moments she was lost in a distant memory. “It’s very clear to me. Still. Even after all these years. I can almost hear him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t want me to speak, just listen. Said he knew that Peter wouldn’t be back from Africa till October, and that if anything were to happen to him in the meantime, Peter was to come straight here.”

  “And he explained why.”

  “Yes. He said he had left a message for Peter in his study, and that if he died before Peter got back I was to make sure nobody disturbed anything in the room. He was so insistent on that.”

  “Did you ask him what kind of message?”

  “I did. But he just said that no one other than Peter would understand it. And that it was ironic that he was the one who would finish it.”

  “Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Finish what, exactly?”

  “He didn’t say. He said…” And she thought hard, trying to recall his exact words. “It’s just ironic that it’s the son who will finish the job.” She sighed. “I wanted to know why he couldn’t tell me. And he said it was too great a responsibility. Peter would know what to do.”

  But Enzo wasn’t listening anymore. Those connections his brain had been making deep down in his subconscious were fizzing upwards now, like bubbles breaking the surface of his consciousness. And he knew it wasn’t science that had made the connections. It was intuition. But it would be up to science to provide the proof and, in the end, just maybe lead to the truth.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  After the cold of the last few days, the warmth in the sun was extraordinary, like a
return to late summer or early fall. It laid its clear yellow light across the ocean like reflective glass and cut deep shadows into the sheltered waters of the tiny harbour at Port Lay. Boats tethered to the quayside strained and bumped and groaned on the gentle swell. An old man sat on the harbour wall with rod and line, dozing in the late morning sunshine. Anything taking his bait would have disturbed his peace. There was not another soul around.

  Enzo and Elisabeth stood high on the east bank looking down on the harbour below. They had driven up past the deserted fish processing plant and parked in an overgrown patch of ground that had once been the car park. Whitewashed cottages with slate roofs and blue and pink shutters climbed the hillside among trees that clung stubbornly to yellowed leaves. The sea breathed through the throat of a harbour that sucked water in and out with the ebb and flow of the tide, and the plaintive cries of seagulls overhead were a lament for way of life long gone.

  “That’s my house just up there.” Elisabeth pointed to a bungalow with a steeply pitched roof overlooking the harbour on the far side. She laughed. “Well, not my house. The house where I grew up. My mother still lives there.”

  Enzo tried to picture in his mind the scene that Elisabeth had described the other day, of tuna boats in full sail plying in and out of this tiny harbour, the quayside crowded with fishermen landing their catch, seabirds clustered around the crates of fish as they lined up along the quay. But it was an image almost impossible to conjure out of this tranquil little inlet. It existed now only in photographs and in the memories of those for whom it had been a reality. If he could have seen it through Elisabeth’s eyes, then he might have pictured something quite different.

  He glanced at her and saw the fondness in her gaze as she peered back through the haze of years toward her childhood. “Must have been a special place to grow up,” he said.

  She smiled. “It was. Of course, like all island girls, I hoped to marry a man from the mainland and escape. When you are a child, the island is your whole world, filled with endless possibilities. But when you get older the water that surrounds you makes it feel like a prison. It shrinks, becomes confining, and you start to feel trapped by it. In the end, I had to leave.”

  “But you came back.”

  She laughed. “Only because I was daft enough to marry a fellow islander. Of course, Alain is still only first generation. His father’s family came from Paris. But his mother was an island girl just like me, so he has genuine island blood in him.” Her smile faded. “But all our children will leave in the end, and there’ll be no one to look after us like we looked after our parents.”

  They gazed in silence for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the peace, and the comforting sound of the ocean. Enzo silently rehearsed his change of subject, before he turned his eyes toward her and said, “I wanted to ask you, Elisabeth… about your home visits to Thibaud Kerjean in the late summer of 1990, after he broke his leg.”

  She didn’t move, and there was not the slightest change of expression on her face. But it drained of colour, and a glaze like cataracts crossed her eyes. It felt like a very long time before she spoke. “You know, then.” It wasn’t a question. Her voice seemed very tiny, lost in the blink of an eye on the edge of the offshore breeze that caressed their faces. Enzo said nothing, almost holding his breath. His question had been innocent enough, but Elisabeth had read more into it than he could ever have anticipated. “I’ve been dreading this for twenty years. Did Thibaud tell you?” She turned searching eyes on him, something like fear in them now. And consternation. She shook her head. “Why would he do that now, after all these years? He was prepared to go to prison back then to protect me.”

  Enzo’s mind was racing. But his voice was calm, and gave no indication of the turmoil behind it. “What on earth did you see in him, Elisabeth?”

  Now she looked away, her expression pained, her eyes lighting on the house where she had grown up, wishing perhaps she could be transported back there, to the innocence of childhood. “Alain and I were going through a difficult time. I’d just given birth to Primel, and after the initial joy of it, I sank into the most terrible post-natal depression. I was almost suicidal, Enzo. The baby was keeping us awake most nights. Endless, endless crying. My nerves were shot to pieces. And so was our relationship. Alain coped with it all much better than I did, but even so, things had never been worse between us.

  “My mother was looking after Primel during the day, and I was still working part-time at the clinic. Alain thought it would be good for me to be out of the house, getting a break from the baby.” She drew a deep, tremulous breath. “Which is when I got to know Thibaud. After he broke his leg and Doctor Gassman assigned me to his physical re-education.”

  She turned a look toward Enzo that pleaded for understanding.

  “I can’t even begin to explain to you what the attraction was. I hardly know myself. People knew he was a womaniser. He had a terrible reputation. The first time I went to his house I was really quite nervous.” She breathed in deeply, eyes closed, reliving some distant memory. “But there was something about him. I… I never saw the side of him that other people talked about. I never saw the temper that woman described in court. He was gentle and sensitive. And unexpectedly intelligent. And…” She searched for the words. “He gave me something I needed then, Enzo. Something I wasn’t getting from Alain. I can’t even tell you what that was. Understanding, reassurance maybe.”

  She was ringing her hands in nervous distress, watching herself doing it, unable to bring herself to look at him again.

  “It didn’t last long. But it was very intense. Very passionate.”

  “And the night of the murder?”

  “He was with me. My mother was looking after the baby here at Port Lay, and I telephoned Alain to say I would stay over, too. As far as he ever knew, that’s where I was. But I was with Thibaud. A holiday cottage that he looked after for some Parisians. It’s where we always met. Right out on the point, near Kervedan. No neighbours.” She sighed deeply, shaking her head. “Then over the next few days, when suspicion began to fall on Thibaud for the Killian murder, I was in a panic. You have no idea. I was his only alibi.”

  Silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “I knew that to speak up would mean the end of my marriage. I was prepared to do it, Enzo, I really was. But Thibaud wouldn’t let me. Point-blank refused. And in the end he was cleared, thank God. It restores a little of your faith in our system of justice.”

  “And if he’d been convicted?”

  She turned to face him now, brushing the tears from her face. “I wouldn’t have let him go to prison, Enzo. Even although he was prepared to do that. I couldn’t have lived with myself. I would have had to come forward then.”

  Enzo thought about everything he had read and heard about Thibaud Kerjean. He was a drunk, a brawler, a womaniser who beat up his women. He had the temper of a madman. Not one person had a good word to say about him. It was hard to reconcile that with the picture Elisabeth painted. A man of honour and integrity, who had been prepared to sacrifice his own freedom to protect her reputation and her marriage. And yet, hadn’t Enzo himself experienced that other side of him, too? The human face behind the gorilla mask. Kerjean had attacked and assaulted him. But he had also saved his life. He was no more a murderer than Enzo or Elisabeth. Just a deeply flawed, deeply troubled man.

  Almost as if reading his thoughts, Elisabeth said, “I see him sometimes in the street now, and it is shocking to see how drink has reduced him. He’s the merest shadow of the man he was. He doesn’t acknowledge me. Won’t even meet my eye. I think, in a way, he knows what he has become and is ashamed of it.”

  “And now?” Enzo said. “How are things between you and Alain?”

  She turned sad eyes on him, filled with regret. “They couldn’t be better, Enzo. I love him. I always have. What happened between Thibaud and me was… it was an aberration. I lost my way for a time, but I found my way back in the e
nd. I never really wanted to be with anyone but Alain.” The regret in her eyes dissolved into apprehension. “Are you going to tell him?”

  Enzo shook his head. “No. Your secret is in safe hands, Elisabeth. You have my word on that. I never really believed that Kerjean had done it.” He turned a thoughtful gaze out across the water. “But there have been developments now. And I’m looking in another direction altogether.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Elisabeth dropped him off at Port Mélite to pick up his Jeep. She had said little on the drive back from Port Lay, and Enzo guessed that she was now dreading the lunch with Alain at the Café de la Jetée. How could either of them behave naturally with her husband after the revelations that had passed between them? Enzo almost suggested calling it off, but it might have seemed unnatural to cancel.

  “I’ll see you in about fifteen minutes, then,” she said, and he stood and watched as she accelerated her SUV up the hill, back toward Le Bourg. He was about to get into his Suzuki when he heard Jane calling him from the house. He turned to see her coming down the path to the gate.

  “You just missed Adjudant Guéguen,” she said. And she waved a large, manila envelope at him. “He left this for you and asked you to call him.”

  Enzo went to meet her at the gate and took the envelope.

  “You seem very close with the doctor’s wife these days.” She watched him carefully.

  “She’s a nice lady,” Enzo said. “And very happily married.”

  Jane nodded, and he saw what looked like regret in her eyes. “When you get back from Paris, I’ll probably be gone. But keep your key. Feel free to use the place.” She paused. “Any further developments?”

  Enzo hesitated for a long moment before he said, “I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. It wasn’t Thibaud Kerjean.”

  Jane searched his face with inquisitive eyes. “And do you have someone else in mind?”