Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  His head lay in a large, sticky pool of blood that had already lost its lustre. It was rapidly browning as it oxidised and would leave a permanent stain in the wood. A Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol was clutched in the retired doctor’s right hand. Enzo’s eyes dipped to the floor, where he saw a single, discarded brass shell casing.

  “Jesus,” Guéguen whispered. He had gone quite pale. Enzo knew he must have seen many dead bodies during his years in the service, but death was something you never got used to. And if you did, it was only because something had died inside of you.

  “Looks like a pretty classic suicide,” the other gendarme said. He hesitated. “Except…”

  Guéguen looked at him sharply. “Except what?”

  “Well, you know, people usually leave a note. A message, a last thought. So when we got here, I looked around to see if I could find one. I found this in his bureau.” He held up an old, worn, leather identity wallet. Enzo noticed that he had taken the precaution of wearing latex gloves before handling anything, a measure of the improved procedures that Guéguen himself had introduced.

  “What is it?”

  “Identity papers, Adjudant.”

  Guéguen frowned. “Well, his identity’s not in doubt is it?”

  “It could be now.” The gendarme opened up the wallet. “These are wartime identity papers, sir, issued by the German Reich to an SS Officer named Erik Fleischer.”

  There was a long silence, then, broken only by the howling of the wind outside and the rain driving against the windows on the south side of the house, until Enzo’s voice resonated softly around the room. “Could you show me where exactly you found that, officer?”

  All heads turned in his direction, and the gendarme flicked a look in the direction of his adjudant, seeking some indication of how to respond. Guéguen gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

  “It was in here, monsieur.” And the gendarme turned through the open door behind him. Enzo, followed by Guéguen and the second gendarme, went into Gassman’s study after him. “Just here, in this little open compartment at the top right-hand side of his writing bureau.” He laid the wallet inside it, then lifted it out again. It was where Enzo had found the pile of Gassman’s old passports held together by an elastic band. His eyes flitted over the rest of the bureau, but there was no sign of them now.

  There was a polite cough in the doorway behind them, and they turned to see Doctor Servat standing there. Enzo hadn’t paid him much attention until now. He looked wan, tired. His coat hung loose and damp on his shoulders. “Shall I tell the ambulance men to take the body away now?”

  “No.” Enzo spoke quickly, and was again aware of everyone’s eyes on him. “Nothing should be moved, or touched. This is a crime scene.”

  “How can you know that?” Guéguen said.

  Enzo pushed back through to the living room and approached the body. Guéguen followed him and turned to the two ambulance men. “Wait outside please’ And the two men cast sullen eyes at the adjudant, feeling cheated by their exclusion from this moment of high drama.

  Enzo waited until the door closed behind them. “For a start,” he said, “Jacques Gassman was left-handed.” He looked round to see all their eyes focused on the gun in the old man’s right hand. “If you were going to kill yourself, particularly by shooting yourself in the head, you would want to be sure you didn’t botch it. If you were left-handed you would take the gun in your left hand, I think.” He turned to Guéguen. “And if your ballistics people at Vannes run a check on the gun he is holding, I’m pretty sure they’ll find it was the same weapon used to murder Adam Killian.”

  It was Alain Servat who broke the silence this time. “Are you saying that Doctor Gassman murdered Killian?”

  “No, I’m saying that someone would like us to think he did.”

  Guéguen said, “You’ve lost me, Monsieur Macleod. I think you’d better explain.”

  “Well,” Enzo said reluctantly, “at the risk of incriminating myself, I will have to confess to poking about among Doctor Gassman’s private papers myself just a few days ago.”

  “You broke in?” This from one of the gendarmes.

  “No. I was here to see him about something else. He was out, so I let myself in. The door wasn’t locked. And I suppose I let my curiosity get the better of me. I had just come from the mairie, where I had established the date of the doctor’s first arrival on the Île de Groix.”

  “Which was when?” Alain Servat asked.

  “May, 1960. About two months after an earthquake that killed around sixteen thousand people in the Moroccan seaport of Agadir. I didn’t really believe there was any link between Gassman and events there, but as it happened, I was able to satisfy myself that I was right.” He looked around the faces watching him. Faces that were a study in fascinated incomprehension. Nobody knew quite what to ask next. So he pressed on.

  “In that same compartment, officer, where you found Fleischer’s identity papers, there was a bundle of Gassman’s old passports dating back to the 1950s. If Gassman had been in Morocco in 1960, there would have been immigration stamps in his passport to show that. Entry and exit.” He paused. “There weren’t.” He waved a hand toward the identity wallet still clutched by the gendarme who found it. “There was no identity wallet in that compartment. Just the passports. But I’m willing to bet that if you look for those passports now, you’ll not find them.”

  “Meaning?” Guéguen’s concentration was completely focused on Enzo’s face.

  “Meaning that someone took them and replaced them with Fleischer’s identity papers, so we would think that Gassman was really Fleischer. The same person who killed him. The same person who murdered Killian. The same person whose fingerprint we recovered from the shell casing in Killian’s study.” He stooped to the floor and took a pencil from an inside jacket pocket. Carefully, he slipped the pointed end of it inside the spent shell casing and stood up again, holding it up for them all to see. “The same person whose fingerprint, I am sure, we will also find on this one.”

  The wind outside was gusting now to gale force and beyond. They heard it whining in the rafters and rattling the window frames and blowing cold air around their feet. Upstairs, poor Oscar still barked and yelped, his voice almost completely gone now.

  “I think you’d better tell us a little more about this Fleischer,” Guéguen said.

  Enzo drew a deep breath. “Erik Fleischer is a Nazi war criminal. Investigators on his trail thought he had been killed in the 1960 earthquake in Agadir. But Fleischer didn’t die in the quake. He escaped and ended up here under an assumed identity on the Île de Groix, a place he thought he would be safe, where no one would ever recognise him in a million years. Except that someone did. A former inmate of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where Fleischer had experimented on prisoners with poisons and surgery.”

  “Adam Killian was that inmate?” Guéguen’s eyes were wide now in amazement.

  Enzo nodded. “Killian was a Polish national who spent nearly two and a half years at Majdanek. By some miracle he survived both the camp and the war, to end up in England taking British citizenship and retiring finally to this quiet Breton island to pursue his hobby of studying insects. I guess the last thing he expected was to come face-to-face with the man he knew as The Butcher.” He laid the shell casing carefully on the table top. “But he wasn’t sure. So somehow he obtained a sample of Fleischer’s DNA for comparison with some of the man’s hair still held by investigators in Germany.”

  “So,” Guéguen said, “Fleischer realised that Killian knew who he was and murdered him.”

  The gendarme with the identity wallet was getting excited. “And if Doctor Gassman was killed to make us think he was Fleischer, that must mean that the real Fleischer is still alive.”

  “Oh, yes,” Enzo said. “Erik Fleischer is still very much alive.”

  “Who is he?” Guéguen said.

  Enzo turned to
ward him and gave him a long, hard look. Finally he said, “We won’t know that for sure until we match up the DNA sample that Killian obtained.”

  “You mean you have it?”

  “I mean that Killian hid it somewhere in his study, preserved somehow until such times as a comparison could be made. Proof positive of Fleischer’s identity.”

  “Where in his study?”

  “Well, that’ll be a job for your forensics people when they arrive from the mainland tomorrow to start the investigation into poor Doctor Gassman’s murder. They are going to have to take Killian’s room apart brick by brick, until they find it. And find it they will, of that I am absolutely certain.” He drew a deep breath. “Meantime, you had better seal off the crime scene here. And I’ll make sure that nobody tampers with anything at Killian’s place until the police scientifique arrive.”

  Guéguen stared at him for a long time, and Enzo could almost see the thought processes passing before his eyes. Finally, the adjudant said, “You told us you came here to see Gassman about something else, the day you found his passports.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Related to the Killian case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind telling us what that was?”

  Enzo shrugged, and gave a little half smile. “It’s almost irrelevant now. I wanted to ask him about Killian’s autopsy report. About something that wasn’t in it that should have been.” And it was clear from the finality of his tone, that he was not, for the moment, going to tell them what that was.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Somewhere a shutter was banging in the wind. Several times Enzo had thought about getting up to find and secure it. But he knew that would be a mistake.

  The sound of the rain pounding against the window was almost deafening, and the wind whistled and whined through every space in this old building. Even as he lay in bed, the covers pulled up tightly around his neck, Enzo could feel the draught on his face.

  Sleep had never been an option. But as the hours passed, he had found his eyes growing heavy, and he blinked fiercely now to keep himself from slipping away. And then, suddenly, there was no need. He was wide awake, sitting bolt upright in the bed, fully dressed beneath the sheets. The bedside clock told him that it was a little after two. He listened intently. There was no doubt about it. Even above the din of the elements, and the banging of the shutter, he had heard the sound of breaking glass, a sound that cut through the night, slicing its way into his consciousness. His mouth was dry, and his heart beat faster than was good for him.

  He swivelled in the bed and slipped his feet into his sneakers at the bedside, bending quickly to tie them before reaching for Killian’s old walking stick with the owl’s head handle. The same stick that Killian had taken with him the night he left this room and went downstairs to his death.

  Enzo gripped it tightly not as an aid to walking, but once more as a weapon, hoping that he would not have occasion to use it as such. He stood up and crossed to the door, wincing at the squeal of the hinges as he pulled it slowly open. The stairwell was in darkness. The door to Killian’s study, he knew, was closed at the foot of the stairs. With one hand on the wall, he felt his way down the steps one at a time. He tensed each time the wood creaked beneath his weight, hoping that the sound of the storm would drown it out.

  He had no idea how much the element of surprise might work in his favour. But it was preferable to being heard coming. Or seen. Which is why he did not switch on the light. In the tiny hall at the foot of the stairs he stopped, listening, and felt the cold air circling around his legs as it blew from under the outside door. Or was it coming from Killian’s study? Strangely, the sound of the wind and rain seemed louder from the other side of the study door.

  Enzo closed trembling fingers around the door handle and pushed it open. He felt the rush of air in his face, and was startled by the pool of light on Killian’s desk. The old man’s Post-its, his long hidden messages to his son, blew around the floor. Enzo turned his head toward the window. Splintered glass was strewn across the floorboards beneath it where the stain of Killian’s blood was a constant reminder of his murder. The wind and rain blew through the broken window, and the outside shutter swung back and forth, beating out an erratic tattoo against the sill.

  Enzo stepped into the room and felt spots of rain on his right cheek. A movement in his peripheral vision brought his head sharply around to the left as Alain Servat stepped out of the shadows. His brown eyes burned with a dark intensity. Gone was the wry amusement that normally crinkled them. His sallow skin looked bleached and stretched taut. His sandy hair seemed to have turned grey almost overnight.

  He held a small pistol in a hand raised and pointed at Enzo’s chest. Enzo had a moment of paralysing fear. It would be easy for the man simply to pull the trigger, and Enzo would be gone in a heartbeat. He caught his breath and tried to stay calm.

  “I was expecting you before now,” he said.

  Alain blinked several times, clearly struggling to contain some inner turmoil. “Monsieur Killian wasn’t surprised to see me either. Put the stick on the desk.”

  Slowly, so as not to spook him, Enzo laid Killian’s walking stick on the desktop. “Why did you kill him?”

  “Because he was going to expose my father as a monster. The Butcher of Majdanek. One of the most notorious Nazis never to be brought to justice.” He paused, as if somehow that was explanation enough. But Enzo’s silence drew him on. “No one, and I mean no one, was more shocked than I was to discover my father’s true identity. When Killian first came to me, it seemed so monstrous, incredible. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it.”

  “What made Killian come to you at all?”

  A shadow crossed Alain’s face. Of pain, or misery, or hatred. A shadow like death. “Because my father was poisoning him.” He almost spat out the words. “During a consultation he caught a glimpse of a tattoo inside Killian’s left armpit. The identity number given him at Majdanek concentration camp. And he realised that Killian must have been an inmate there. That was when it dawned on him why Killian was seeking so many consultations when there was, apparently, little or nothing wrong with him. He had recognised my father from his time in the camp.”

  “So your father invented an illness for him?”

  “Yes.” Alain ran a tongue over dried lips and moved toward the centre of the room, keeping his weapon trained on Enzo. His hand was trembling slightly. “He sent him for x-ray at Lorient, then falsely diagnosed lung cancer.”

  Enzo stepped slowly away from the window and the wind and rain at his back. He said. “I realised that when the pathologist made no reference in the autopsy report to a tumour in either lung. It’s why I went out to see Doctor Gassman that day. Just to confirm that if there was one, it would have been mentioned.”

  Alain nodded. “It’s what I feared most at the time. Had there been a proper investigation the enquêteurs would surely have noticed its absence. My father had been poisoning him with thallium, you see, claiming it as a treatment, but in fact inducing all the symptoms of a man in the final stages of terminal cancer. Of course, the pathologist had no reason to test for thallium in his blood or tissue. The cause of death was clear. Three bullets in his chest.”

  He took a deep breath and allowed his eyes to close momentarily, before they snapped open again, quickly, refinding their intensity and their focus on Enzo.

  “Somehow, belatedly, Killian realised that my father was killing him, not treating him. That was when he came to me and told me the whole story.” He shook his head. “You cannot for a moment imagine how I felt, Monsieur Macleod. The depths of horror and despair that revelation brought me to. Of course, I immediately confronted my father. He was already entering the early stages of senility, and he confessed to everything. Just like that. As if it these were normal memories that a father might recall for his son. I can remember going to the toilet afterwards and vomiting. I was, literally,
sick to my stomach.”

  And now there was something else in Alain’s eyes. Something like self-pity, an appeal for understanding that he knew was unlikely ever to to be forthcoming.

  “I couldn’t let Killian tell the world that I was the son of a monster. It would have ruined my life, monsieur. Elisabeth’s life. The life of my son. A whole family forever more seen in the eyes of the world only as the progeny of Fleischer, the Butcher of Majdanek.”

  Enzo felt a taste like bile rising into his mouth. “So you took your father’s old service pistol and turned into a monster yourself.”

  “I was protecting my family!” Alain’s voice rose in pitch, as if by protesting more loudly he might drown out the accusation in Enzo’s tone. “My father’s life was virtually over anyway. No purpose would have been served by exposing him after all these years. No lives would have been saved.”

  “Just one taken.”

  Alain’s eyes flickered away from Enzo’s, unable to face the reflection of his own guilt. “Killian knew it,” he said. “Saw it in my eyes, I guess. That I would never expose my father, or my family. He knew it had been a mistake to tell me.”

  Sudden anger overwhelmed guilt, and he turned burning eyes back on Enzo. “It was all history, dead and buried with Killian. And then, twenty years on, you arrive. Raking over long-cold ashes, rekindling the fire. And getting far too close to the truth for comfort.”

  “So you murdered old Gassman, trying to make it look like suicide, attempting to pass him him off as Fleischer.” Enzo was almost overwhelmed by the anger and guilt that washed over him in almost equal measure. “The worst of it is, I probably put the idea in your head that day when I asked you if you knew when Gassman had first arrived on the island. And I thought I was simply deflecting you from the fact that I already suspected you.”