by Peter May
Alain stared resolutely back at him, making no attempt to deny it, and for a moment Enzo was almost tempted to charge him and knock him down, squeezing the life out of him with his own hands. But he knew that he would be dead before he took two paces, and that nothing, in the end, could extinguish his own sense of regret.
He found control from somewhere and spoke in a calm, even voice that belied his inner torment. “What you didn’t realise, of course, was that Killian had taken DNA from your father. And that the Wiesenthal Center had a sample of his hair. Poor old Jacques Gassman would never have been identified as Erik Fleischer. You killed him for nothing.”
“He was an old man.” The sudden callous quality in his voice provoked a spike of anger that overpowered Enzo’s guilt.
“After ninety-four years, he didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Alain said nothing for a very long time, and Enzo found his eye drawn to his finger on the trigger. It almost seemed to be caressing it, and fear returned. Then finally Alain said, “How did you know it was me that murdered Killian?”
“You left fingerprints on the shell casings. Fingerprints that couldn’t have been recovered twenty years ago. But time and technology caught up with you, Alain. I took your glass from lunch the other day so we had prints to compare them to.”
Alain frowned. “But you must have suspected me even then.”
Enzo nodded. “Something Killian said in that last phone call to his daughter-in-law and that was confirmed by the date of your father’s arrival on the island. I found that out at the mairie when I went to check on Gassman. Gassman came in May, more than two months after the earthquake in Agadir. But your father was here within three weeks.” He saw the doctor’s jaw clench and unclench
“What was the something that Killian said to his daughter-in-law?”
“He told her it was ironic that it was the son who would finish the job. I had taken that to mean that he didn’t expect to live, and that it would be up to his son, Peter, to finish his work for him, whatever that was. But it was the word ironic that troubled me. Why was it ironic?” He answered his own question. “Because he also expected Fleischer’s son to finish what his father had started. As you said, he must have seen it in your eyes. Knew that you would never let him expose your father. That you would finish the job your father had started and kill him yourself.” Enzo shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it, Alain. I really didn’t. But Killian did, which is why he set the clues for his son in a way that you would never find them, or understand them even if you did. And why he hid the sample of DNA in a place you would never think to look.”
Alain breathed his frustration through clenched teeth. “I searched everywhere for anything that might implicate my father. All I found was correspondence between Killian and someone at the Wiesenthal Center in Paris.” His eyes were a reflection of the confusion of thoughts that must have been tumbling through his head. “How on earth did he get a sample of my father’s DNA?”
“I’ll show you if you like. It’s in the kitchen.” He opened an outstretched palm toward the kitchen door. “May I?”
Alain nodded mutely and stepped aside to let Enzo past. Enzo moved cautiously into the kitchen and switched on the light. He opened the fridge door and lifted out the Ziploc bag, removing the book from inside. Alain approached the door, his gun still trained on the Scotsman. But his eyes were filled now with puzzled curiosity as Enzo opened up The Life of the Mosquito Part 4 to reveal the squashed and preserved insect with its last blood meal between pages fifty-seven and fifty-eight.
“Your father provided this little creature’s last supper. Enough blood there, with PCR amplification, to provide a perfectly acceptable sample for comparison.” He looked up to see a weary resignation pass across Alain’s face. “He knew it had to be kept cool, of course. So where better to hide it, than in the choked-up icebox in the fridge?” He slipped the book into its bag and placed it back in the fridge, turning now to face the doctor with the cold realisation that the time for talking was nearly over. There really was nothing much left to say.
Enzo saw that the hand which held the gun was trembling now, almost uncontrollably. His mouth was so dry he could barely separate his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
“So. What now? Are you going to kill again, rather than face the shame?”
Alain stared at him, his face a passive mask, hiding the kaleidoscope of emotions that must have been revolving behind it. “Yes,” he said. And although he had spoken very quietly, his voice filled the tiny kitchen. He raised the gun, and Enzo saw the nozzle from which the bullet would come. The bullet that would kill him. And it was like looking into the tunnel of his life, a tunnel where all his years were behind him and only darkness lay ahead.
Then suddenly Alain crooked his arm and pressed the barrel to his forehead.
Enzo heard his own voice shouting, “No!”, almost as if it had come from somewhere else. But out of the darkness came hands, emerging from shadows. He heard a scuffle and raised voices as Alain was pulled backward into the room, and the sound of a gunshot brought momentary deafness.
White plaster dust showered down over Guéguen and the two gendarmes who accompanied him, before Alain Servat was pushed up against the wall and handcuffed.
Enzo realised how rapidly he was breathing, and it took him a moment to find his voice as Guéguen turned toward him. “Jesus,” he said. “You left that late. What if he’d pulled the trigger while the gun was pointing at me?”
Guéguen managed a pale smile. He, too, was shaken. “Then I guess, monsieur, that Doctor Servat would have been charged with three murders instead of two.”
Enzo looked beyond him, catching a glimpse of Alain’s white face as he was led away, and he wondered if there could possibly be something in the genetic code that predisposed a man to kill so easily. Or was it simply, as the bible had said, that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son a thousand times?
A movement at the broken window caught his attention, and he saw the luminous green eyes of a cat glowing in the dark as it sat on the sill watching Killian’s murderer being taken away.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was hardly any time after the ferry had slipped out from the comparative shelter of the harbour and into the grey swell of the strait that separated the island from the mainland that Port Tudy was swallowed by the rain. Vanished, like some imaginary place from celtic mythology, lost in the mists of time.
Enzo dragged himself away from the window and retook his seat in the salon. Pale winter faces huddled into the shoulders of coats beneath hats, dripping umbrellas laid below seats to send tiny rivers of water back and forth across the floor with the rolling of the boat. Celtic faces, hacked out of the gneiss by the wind and the rain and the sea.
He thought about old Fleischer sitting drooling in his wheelchair, lost in some world beyond reach. A man who had taken the lives of others without conscience, who had delivered pain and misery and death in equal measure. A man who would never face the justice he so richly deserved.
And he thought about his son. A man prepared to kill rather than face the shame visited upon him by his father. A man who, unlike his father, would face the judgment of his peers but leave behind him a wife and children who deserved better.
And Adam Killian, a man who had survived the Nazi death camps, only to die at the hands of the next generation. And his son, Peter, who had never had the chance to unravel his father’s final message.
Fathers and sons, he reflected. A sad end. And he wondered how things might end up for this father and his son in the years that lay ahead.
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