by Peter May
“Wet. But I’ve been a little further afield than that.”
She turned to look at him. “Oh? Where?”
“Agadir.”
She seemed surprised at first, then nodded slowly. “The entry Papa marked in the encyclopedia. What did you find there?”
“A man called Yves Vaurs who was supposed to have died in 1960, but didn’t.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You actually met him?”
“No. But I talked to someone who knew him. And saw his photograph, a photograph of the same man whose picture I also saw in Paris. A man called Erik Fleischer.”
She stared at him, consternation drawing together frown lines between her brows. “None of this is making very much sense to me, Enzo.”
He hesitated, turning for a moment to gaze from the window across a dripping wet garden toward the annex. Then he turned back to her. “Why didn’t you tell me that Adam Killian spent time in a concentration camp during the war?”
She turned almost instantly pale, before a blush of pink appeared high on her cheeks, just below the eyes. “How do you know that?”
“I’m guessing. Am I right?”
She drew her lips into a tight line and nodded. “Yes. But no one in the world knew about that. Except Adam himself, and Peter. And, of course, me. Although Papa never knew that Peter had told me.”
“Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, in Poland, right?”
Her eyes opened wider. “How can you possibly know all this?”
He ignored her questions. “Why was it such a secret?”
“Oh… I don’t know.” She waved her hand vaguely through the air. “All part of Papa’s denial of his past, I guess. Of his Polish origins. Although Peter knew about it, he said Papa would never speak of it. Never. And he made Peter promise not to tell anyone.”
“But he told you.”
“We were husband and wife.” There was a defensive tone in her voice. “We had no secrets between us. But I kept my promise of silence to Peter. That’s why you’ll find no reference to it or record of it anywhere.” Her eyes were troubled, confused. “But I don’t understand… If you found out about it, does that mean it has something to do with his murder?”
Enzo nodded. “It has everything to do with his murder, Jane.”
***
The same chill as always permeated the annex. Enzo’s depression deepened as he pushed open the door and stood under the naked electric light bulb that hung in the stairwell. He dropped his overnight bag on the floor, not sure how much longer he would be here, but reluctant to take it upstairs, as if to do so was committing him to another cold, lonely night in the attic bedroom.
With the tips of fingers spread wide, he pushed the door to Killian’s study, and it swung slowly inwards. The shutters were still open, and the gloomy light that filtered through the trees in the garden fell through the window and cast dark shadows in every corner. Until he flicked the light switch and flooded the room with cold, harsh light.
Somewhere in here was the final piece of the Killian jigsaw. And he was determined to find it. He walked to the window and stared out into the garden, the trees black with rain, the lawn sodden and patchy. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see the cat that had been haunting him since his arrival. It was sauntering across the grass, tail high, the end of it curled round at the highest point and quivering. Almost as if sensing his eyes on it, the cat stopped and stared at the window. Enzo could see its black coat glistening in the wet. What a miserable life, he thought. Always shut out in the cold and rain. And he wondered whose it was and why it had chosen the Killian garden as its home turf.
On an impulse he went back into the hall and opened the outside door. The cat was no more than eight or ten feet away. He left the door wide, and stood back, an invitation made by body language alone. The animal stood stock still, staring at him, but made no move. Enzo waited for several minutes before the cat finally sat down and continued to stare, clearly unprepared to accept his offer of truce.
“Okay, stay out in the rain, then,” he said, and immediately felt foolish for talking to it.
He left the door open and went back into the study. For a moment he stood gazing at the bookcase, then rounded the desk to look at the Post-its he had left lying on it, the message pad, the open diary, the poem propped against the lamp.
What was missing?
He answered his own question immediately.
The letters sent to Killian by Gérard Cohen. His killer must have found and taken them. But Killian would have wanted Peter to see them, surely? For without them his clues would have been almost impossible to decipher.
Enzo had got there without the letters, but there was something else missing. The sample of Fleischer’s DNA that Enzo was certain Killian had somehow obtained. He lifted up the post-it from the fridge. A fit of the blood will foil the beast. What else could he have meant? A fit of the blood, a matching of the DNA. But where was it?
He slumped into Killian’s captain’s seat and let his eyes wander over the desk in front of him. They came to rest on Ronald Ross’ framed poem. What in God’s name did the poem have to do with anything? And even as he posed the question in his head, the answer came thundering back to him, loud and clear. Mosquitoes! He pulled open the top right-hand drawer and saw there what Jane had called a pooter, a home-made contraption of plastic tubing inserted into each end of a clear plastic film container. Made for capturing and transferring insects. There, too, were the insect repellent and the bottle of lactic acid which he knew, in combination with carbon dioxide, was a recognised mosquito attractant. Damn! Like the tumblers of the combination lock on a safe, everything was suddenly dropping into place.
He stood up and began running his eyes along the shelves of books behind him. There was a whole section on entomology, subdivided into various primary insect species. There were long runs of old journals published by various British entomological societies, The Entomologist’s Record, The Entomologist. There was a small subsection dedicated to the mosquito. Enzo pulled out the first in the row, a slim volume of only eight pages. Collecting Mosquitoes, by Eric Classey. It was subtitled AES Leaflet 11 and had been published in 1945 by the British Amateur Entomologists’ Society. Next to it was a series of slender green paperbacks on the life of the mosquito. Five volumes. With trembling fingers he lifted them one by one from the shelf and riffled through their pages, certain that his eye would be caught by a yellow Ppost-it. But there was nothing, and he rapidly felt his excitement subside into disappointment.
It was only as he lay the last of them on the desk that he noticed its full title, The Life of the Mosquito, Part 6. But there were only five books. He checked each volume in turn. Part four was missing. He lifted his eyes and ran them quickly around the room as if he somehow expected to see the missing volume there in front of him where he had never noticed it before. Stupid! He turned back to the bookshelves. Was it filed somewhere else, out of sequence? It would take some time to check.
A noise made him turn his head, and he saw the black cat sitting in the doorway watching him. It held his eye for nearly a minute, before lifting its right paw to drag across its head from behind the ear, lick, and drag again, cleaning itself, wiping the raindrops from its fur. Even as he looked at it, Enzo found himself jumping focus, his gaze settling on the Post-it that had been stuck to the desk lamp. P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget.
“Boil my icicles.” Enzo’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but it seemed to reverberate around the room. The cat paused mid-lick and looked at him. And suddenly Enzo’s face split into a grin. “You clever old bastard!” he shouted, and the cat turned and fled.
***
Jane heard him calling from the kitchen and came to the top of the stairs. “I’m still up here.”
After a moment he appeared in the downstairs hall. His eyes were wide and shining with excitement. “Jane, I n
eed a hair drier, do you have one?”
She looked at his hair, neatly tied back in its ponytail and frowned. He had told her he was going to the annex to unravel the final pieces of Killian’s message for Peter. She frowned and said, “You’re going to wash your hair now?”
He almost laughed. “No. It’s not for my hair. Do you have one?”
“Of course. But what’s it for?”
“Just bring it over to the annex. You’ll see.”
By the time she got there, clutching her travel hair drier, Enzo was in the tiny kitchen. The door of the refrigerator was open wide. He took the drier from her and plugged it into the wall socket above the worktop. He had already unplugged the fridge. “You said you’d never defrosted this in all the years since your father-in-law’s death.”
“It was never very high on my list of priorities. The thing must be thirty years old if it’s a day. And I never kept anything in it.”
Enzo pulled open the door of the tiny icebox at the top of the fridge. It was choked, almost to bursting, with ice and frost, folds of frozen condensation formed over the years sealing it completely closed. He switched on the hair drier and directed its blast of hot air directly on to the ice.
She looked at him as if he were mad. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Just what Adam asked Peter to do. I’m boiling his icicles.” He smiled at her consternation. “P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget. My guess is that this icebox was probably already pretty furred up, even then. But not entirely. I reckon there was maybe just enough of an opening for your father-in-law to push something past the ice, so that it would be hidden from casual view. And who would think to defrost it to see if there was anything there?”
The ice was already starting to melt and drip down through the fridge.
“You’d better get a basin or something to catch the melt water, and a chisel or a big screwdriver.”
When she returned with a bucket, and a large, flat-headed screwdriver, water was already starting to pour from the freezer. Jane placed the bucket beneath it and took the hair drier from Enzo, allowing him to start prising the melting ice from the roof of the icebox. But it was nearly fifteen minutes before a large slab of it finally released it’s twenty-year grip and allowed him to start easing it free with burning cold fingers.
He dropped it into the sink and unplugged the hair drier, and stooped to peer into the darkness of the icebox. It was still partially obscured by ice. There was something there, but he couldn’t see what it was. Carefully, he slid his right hand beyond the remaining ice until his fingers made contact with cold, wet plastic. It crinkled at his touch. After several attempts, he managed to catch a corner of it between his index and middle fingers, and slowly eased it out.
Jane peered over his shoulder at the opaque plastic bag in his hands. “What is it?”
“Looks like one of those Ziploc food bags.” He grabbed a dish towel and wiped it dry, then pinched the plastic tab and unzipped it before reaching in to lift out the missing Life of the Mosquito, Part 4. It was icy cold to the touch, but perfectly dry. Taking great care not to damage it in any way, Enzo laid it on the worktop and let it fall open where it would. Between pages 57 and 58 lay the perfectly preserved squashed corpse of a mosquito, its last blood meal rust brown now, staining the page in a small irregular patch the size of the nail on his little finger.
Jane looked at it, utterly mystified. “I don’t understand.”
But Enzo was smiling. “A clever man, your father-in-law,” he said. “Ingenious. He must have wondered how on earth to get a DNA sample from him.”
“From who?”
“Erik Fleischer. A Nazi war criminal hiding here on the Île de Groix. Killian must have recognised him from his time in Majdanek concentration camp. Or at least, thought he did. He hadn’t seen the man for forty-seven, forty-eight years. He needed to be sure. A DNA sample would do it, something to match with the lock of Fleischer’s hair that the German authorities still possessed.”
“How would a mosquito help him do that?”
“Because the last thing it must have done on this earth was feed on the blood of Erik Fleischer. Not a big enough sample in 1990 to extract sufficient DNA. But Killian would have known that the PCR process of amplification was just months away. And that if he kept it cool for long enough, it would provide the damning evidence to prove Fleischer’s identity. Even if Killian died in the meantime, the evidence would still be there. Dammit, it’s still here twenty years later.” He closed the book and slipped it back into its Ziploc bag. “We need to continue to keep it cool. It’s now evidence in a murder case.”
He plugged the fridge back into its wall socket, closed up the freezer compartment and took away the bucket of melt water. Then he placed the plastic bag containing the book on the middle shelf and closed the door.
He turned to find himself trapped in Jane Killian’s penetrating gaze. She said, “Do you know who he is? This Erik Fleischer. Or, at least, who he’s been pretending to be all this time?”
Enzo’s face clouded, and the lights dimmed in his eyes. “Yes, Jane. I’m pretty sure I do.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Guéguen’s blue Citröen van with its red and white flashes on the hood and blue light on the roof rocked in the strength of the unrestrained wind that lashed the south coast. It was the only vehicle in the gravel parking area at the foot of the hill as Enzo drove down, peering through his rain-streaked windscreen to see the breakers smashing over the rocky outcrops at the point.
The rendezvous at the Pointe des Chats had been the gendarme’s idea. Since acquiring the autopsy report and the shell casing, he had been paranoid about being seen with Enzo. Hence his choice of meeting place. No one was likely to stumble upon them by accident on a stormy November afternoon by the unmanned lighthouse on this exposed south-west point of the island.
White spume rose high into the air, whipped away on the edge of a wind approaching gale force, obscuring for a moment the orange cowling of the lighthouse that poked up above bowed trees. Enzo drew his Jeep in beside the police van and transferred quickly through the rain from one vehicle to the other. Even in the time it took him to cover the few feet between them, he got soaked, and he sat breathing hard in the passenger seat, rain streaming down his face. He turned to see the gendarme watching him carefully. He wore his dark blue peaked kepi and a waterproof jacket with a single white horizontal stripe over his gendarme-issue blue pullover and pants. There was a large white envelope laid across his knees. The windows of the Citröen were already steamed up to opacity. He said, “Your friend in England responded very quickly.”
Enzo glanced at the envelope. “What did he find?”
Guéguen shook his head in pensive admiration. “You’re an amazing man, Monsieur Macleod.” He passed the envelope to Enzo, and as the big Scotsman opened it up to remove several printed sheets, added, “He emailed me a PDF of his findings.”
Enzo scrutinised the printouts of the PDF. Photographic images of digital fingerprints, brief comparison text, and a short note for Enzo.
“As you can see, he did indeed find a print on the shell casing. And, as you suspected, there were several sets of prints on the wine glass you asked me to send him. But one of them was a perfect match.”
Enzo nodded. The very final piece of this long lost puzzle finally snapped into place. But it gave him no satisfaction. His heart weighed like lead in his chest.
Guéguen could not contain his curiosity any longer. “Whose are they?”
But before Enzo could respond, a burst of white noise issued from the gendarme’s police radio. The voice of the duty officer back at Port Tudy crackled across the airwaves.
“We’ve got a suspicious death, Adjudant. Out at Quéhello. Dubois and Bonnet are already on their way. And Doctor Servat has been notified.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Old Doctor Gassman. The postman found him earlier thi
s afternoon. Looks like suicide.”
“Damn! I’m on my way.” Guéguen turned sad eyes toward Enzo. “I have to go. We’ll need to continue this another time.”
“Would you mind if I came with you, Adjudant Guéguen?” Enzo’s voice was hushed, and barely audible above the roar of the wind and the sea outside. He had a sick feeling in his stomach.
The gendarme frowned. “Why?”
“Because I think there is a good chance that Jacques Gassman’s death is related to the murder of Adam Killian.”
***
By the time they got to Gassman’s cottage out on the moor beyond Quéhello, several vehicles had already pulled up on the patch of gravel next to the west gable: a van from the gendarmerie, Alain Servat’s dark green SUV, an ambulance from Le Bourg, and the the facteur’s yellow La Poste van, the postman himself slumped in the driver’s seat, his pale face visible through the rain-distorted side window.
Enzo ducked his head into the rain and followed Guéguen inside. He recognised the smell of the place instantly. Old age and dogs and stale cooking. But there was something new that hung in the air now. A distant whiff of gunshot and the sharp rust-like smell of dried blood. The living room seemed smaller, crowded as it was with people. Two gendarmes, Alain Servat, two ambulance men, and now Enzo and Guéguen. The air in the room was cold, the fire long dead. From upstairs came the pitiful, hoarse yelping of old Gassman’s dog, howling for the dead.
Guéguen raised his eyes toward the ceiling. “What in God’s name is that?”
“His dog,” one of the gendarmes said.
“Oscar,” Enzo said, and everyone turned to look at him. There was a momentary hiatus when it was clear that everyone else was wondering why he was there.
“Yes. Oscar.” The gendarme acknowledged the name. “It was Oscar’s barking that alerted the postman to something being wrong. He came in and, well…” He moved to one side. The others followed his lead, clearing a space to reveal the body of the old man slumped over the table at the far side of the room, the table where he had taken his solitary meals and where he had ended up, it seemed, taking his own life. It did not take the presence of a doctor to tell that he was dead.
