by Peter May
“Sure.” Enzo groaned inwardly at the prospect of having to go out again into the night. It was fully dark now, and by the light of an outside halogen lamp illuminating the back garden, he could see the rain driving almost horizontally across the lawn.
They huddled together under the shelter of the umbrella and hurried over the grass to where the annex sat brooding darkly among the trees. He was aware of her slight, soft body pressed into his side, as he crooked his arm around her shoulders to support the umbrella against the wind.
She unlocked the door, and they scrambled out of the wet into the small square of entrance hall, shaking the umbrella behind them. The flick of a switch caused a single, naked bulb to cast light down into the hall from the narrow stairwell. She pushed open the door in front of them.
“Bathroom in there. Bedroom up the stairs. And this…” she turned to her right and opened a door, “… was Papa’s study.” She leaned in and turned on a light, and Enzo found himself gazing back twenty years into the past.
He felt a strange thrill of anticipation, all his instincts on suddenly heightened alert. Here was the room where Killian had died. The room in which he had somehow created a message for his son. A message that the young man had never seen and which had never been deciphered by anyone since. He laid his overnight bag down in the hall and took three steps back in time to an early fall
night in September, 1990.
The large, square room had a high ceiling. To the right, a tall, shuttered window opened on to what Enzo imagined would be a view across the garden to the house. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the facing wall and the wall to the left. A thousand volumes or more stood side by side, silent witnesses to the murder of the man who had placed them there. Their multicoloured facade lent a warmth to this otherwise cold room.
Killian’s desk faced the door, an austere, uncomfortable-looking guest chair set an an angle on the nearside. Against the door wall stood a wooden filing cabinet, and next to it a work table where, Jane said, Killian spent hours preserving and mounting species of insect gathered from the surrounding countryside. Each one was photographed and annotated in leather-bound volumes. Beyond that, another door led to a small kitchen with little more than a sink and draining board, an old refrigerator, a small electric oven, and a shelf with an electric kettle, teapot and tea caddy.
Enzo’s first impression was of an almost obsessive sense of order. The desk was set at right angles to the window, carefully aligned with run of the floorboards. The books on the shelves behind it were perfectly perpendicular, each spine meticulously lined up with the edge of the shelf it stood on. Enzo crossed the room and ran the tips of his fingers lightly along one of the rows, following the regularity of its contours. And he noticed that the books were all arranged in alphabetical order, first by author, then by title.
On the desk itself two wire trays were placed one at each side. An in tray, an out tray. Each was empty. The brass desk lamp was set at a ninety-degree angle on the far left-hand corner of the desk. The only incongruity was a curled and faded yellow Post-it stuck to its glass shade with Scotch tape. On a pristine, unmarked blotter, a desk diary lay open at the week beginning September 23, 1990. A pen nestled where the pages curled into the line of its spine.
“It didn’t look quite this way when I got here,” Jane said. “Whoever shot him had been searching for something. Whether it was anything specific, or just valuables, we’ll maybe never know.” She sighed. “Anyway, I straightened it up as best I could, trying to remember the way he kept things. Nothing has been moved or removed. And nothing introduced. Everything is exactly as it was then.”
She couldn’t resist a glance toward the floorboards beneath the window, and Enzo was quick to spot it. Although it had faded with time, the blood that had seeped from Killian’s fatal wounds had left an indelible, dark stain in the wood.
“I washed the bloodstains from the wall once the police were finished. There were two exit wounds, and you can see where the bullets pitted the plaster. The third lodged in his spine.”
Enzo wondered whether it was simply time and the no doubt oft-repeated phrasesthat lent the mechanical, emotionless quality to her voice. He nodded and lowered himself into Killian’s captain’s chair. Its leather seat had become dry and brittle after all this time, and the chair groaned beneath his weight. Perhaps by placing himself in the man’s seat he could find someway into his mind.
There were four drawers in the desk. The deep one on the left contained a box of A4 printing paper. The drawer above it revealed an arrangement of open cardboard boxes filled with various items of stationery. Paperclips, drawing pins, staples, a Post-it pad, pens, pencils, erasers. The deep drawer on the right held a box of clear plastic sleeves for filing documents in clip folders. Lying on top of it was an aerosol can with a hand-written label. N, N-diethyl-3-methylbenzamide. Enzo lifted it out and examined it. He held it in the air, expelled a tiny blast and sniffed, wrinkling his nose. “Mosquito repellent.”
“Yes.” Jane nodded. This was clearly not news to her.
“Are you troubled by mosquitoes here?”
“Not much. There’s usually an onshore breeze that keeps us relatively insect-free.”
Enzo laid the aerosol back in the drawer and slid open the one above it. Here was a strange arrangement of clear plastic tubing exiting from either end of a transparent plastic film container of the kind that used to hold rolls of film in the pre-digital age. Enzo frowned.
“It’s called a pooter, apparently,” Jane said. “For catching single insects. You use one end as a mouthpiece, and suck the creatures in through the other end to trap them in the container.”
Enzo pulled off the lid and saw that the mouthpiece tube had a tiny square of gauze stuck over one end. Its purpose was obvious. He put it back in the drawer, and picked up the only other item. A small bottle of clear liquid. He held it up. “Do you know what’s in this is?”
“I had it analysed. It’s lactic acid. No one seems to know what he might have used it for.”
Enzo thought about it for a long time. “Lactic acid,” he said at length, “particularly in combination with carbon dioxide, is a well-known mosquito attractant.”
“Oh.” Jane seemed surprised. “No one’s come up with that before.”
“Strange though.” Enzo turned it over in his mind. “Repellent in one drawer, attractant in another.”
“Well, he worked with insects all the time, so who knows what he might have used them for.”
Enzo closed the drawer and looked at the desk diary open in front of him. “The diary was open at this page?”
“Yes.”
Enzo flipped back several pages, screwing up his eyes to read the entries. “Doctor’s appointments,” he said. “Twice a week by the looks.”
“He was getting some kind of palliative treatment for the cancer. It didn’t seem to be doing him much good, though.”
Enzo returned to the entry for Monday, September 24, the day Killian was murdered, and reached into his canvas shoulder satchel to retrieve his half-moon reading glasses. He smiled ruefully over them at Jane. “Vanity has to take a back seat to clarity these days, I’m afraid.” And he returned his attention to Killian’s final entry. He read it out loud. “P, I was lighting a fire, but now there’s no more time, and all I’m left with is a half-warmed fish in the pouring rain.” He looked up, puzzled. “What did he mean? Is this the message?”
His dead son’s wife shrugged, and looked vaguely disappointed. “Well, that’s what I hoped you would tell me, Mr. Macleod.” She approached the desk. “If it is the message, it’s only a part of it.” He left notes all over the place.” She touched the post-it scotched to the desk lamp. “This one was attached to the lamp, but kept falling off. So I stuck it on with sticky tape so it didn’t get lost.”
Enzo leaned forward to read it, peering myopically through his half-moons at the faded scrawl. Again, he read aloud. “P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t fo
rget!” He looked up at Jane. “I’m assuming that P is Peter.”
“That is the assumption everyone else has made.”
“So your father-in-law had more than one bicycle?”
“No, that’s the strange thing. He didn’t have one at all. And neither did Peter.”
Enzo looked again at the note on the lamp, then the scribbled entry in the desk diary, before flipping back for a second look at the previous entries. “All the other entries in his diary,” he said, “are written in a very tight, neat hand. Except this last one. And the note on the lamp.” He compared dots and t’s and loops. “But demonstrably the same handwriting. Just scribbled, as if done in a great hurry.”
“Yes. It was very uncharacteristic of him. He was a scrupulous and careful man.”
Enzo looked around the study again. “Very tidy, very ordered.”
Jane nodded her agreement. “Almost manically so.”
He stood up. “What other notes were there?”
She led him through to the tiny kitchen, which was filled with the hum and rattle of the old refrigerator. Its door was covered with fridge magnets collected over the years. Cartoon insects arranged in ordered patterns, badges, and flags. A scribbled pencil note was fading now on a notepad for jotting down larder items to be restocked. The telephone numbers of the medical clinic in Le Bourg had dimmed also, and several washed-out family photographs were held in place by short magnetic strips carefully angled at each corner. A yellow Post-it was browning and curled at the corners. Stuck on at an odd angle, it was held in position by what appeared to be two randomly placed magnetic strips.
“What did he keep in the fridge?”
“Cold drinks, mostly. And cheese. Stuff like that, for snacking when he felt hungry.” He opened the door and its fluorescent light flickered to illuminate yellowing empty shelves within. “It was empty when he was found.” She pulled down a flap at the top of the fridge to expose the build-up of ice and frost that choked the tiny icebox. “And this was pretty much iced up then, too. I keep meaning to defrost it, but never have.”
“I’m amazed it still works,” Enzo said.
Jane just smiled. “Actually I think it’s more than thirty years old. They must have built things to last longer then. Unlike now. What’s the catch phrase these days? Built-in obsolescence?”
Enzo grinned. “Yes. So you have to replace them more often. Keeps manufacturers in business and people in jobs.”
She shut the door and Enzo peered at the photographs, their glaze cracked in places and starting to peel. He recognised Adam Killian from the photographs in Raffin’s book. A healthy, tanned: looking man with a thick head of pure white hair grinning at the camera. And Jane Killian, looking much younger. Dark hair cascading over her shoulders. A shy smile.
“I guess the young man must be Peter.”
“Yes.”
Peter was taller than his father. Thin. With an open smile and warm eyes. Fair hair tumbled over his forehead, and he seemed very young.
Almost as if she could read his thoughts, Jane said, “These were taken just before he graduated. His father was so proud of him.”
Now he turned his attention to the shopping list, and recognised the same hurried hand. “The cooks have the blues,” he read out, and glanced up at Jane. “Was he much of a cook?”
“Oh, not at all. His wife fed him all his life. I think he was terribly lost after she died. He seemed to live on convenience foods. Anything out of packets and tins.”
Enzo turned his eyes back to the fridge door and the scribbled Post-it. This time it was Jane who read it out, as she must have done countless times before. Perhaps she hoped that one day it would bring an unexpected revelation and suddenly make sense. “A bit of the flood will boil the feast.”
Enzo repeated it, almost under his breath. “A bit of the flood will boil the feast.” He straightened himself up and felt the tension in the muscles of his back. He placed his palms in the small of his back and stretched backward to loosen them. The cold and the damp were taking their toll. “Is there anything else I should see.” He quite deliberately wanted to avoid focusing too much on any one of these things. He would let his subconscious do the hard work while he concentrated on more mundane matters, like eating and drinking and sleeping.
“The only other thing that seemed particularly significant,” she said, “was over here, above his work bench.” He followed her over to the desk beside the filing cabinet. The scarred wooden desktop itself was empty, apart from a tray at one side laid out with entomology pins, setting needles, and forceps. Set alongside it were four grades of pencil, two six-inch rulers, a hand-held lens, and a binocular microscope. Two rows of wooden-framed glass cases hung on the wall above it displaying Killian’s butterfly collection, each specimen carefully pinned to its backboard. A neat, handwritten paper data label beneath each detailed when and where it had been obtained. Enzo noted that with Killian’s usual attention to detail, they were arranged in taxonomic order.
“What’s in the filing cabinet?”
“All his entomological records. Photographs in plastic sleeves arranged in date order in clip folders, and all his leather-bound notebooks. He noted every insect he ever caught. All described and identified. Or not. Apparently around one million insects have already been officially identified, but they think there may be as many as five million that have not. That seems to be the appeal for the amateur, that you could actually discover a previously unidentified species of insect.” He caught her eye and she smiled. “Which would leave me quivering with apathy, I’m afraid.”
Enzo laughed. “Is it worth my while going through them?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Only you can judge that. But no one else has ever found anything of interest among them.”
“Did the police look at all this stuff at the time?”
Jane sighed and folded her arms. “Well, they did. But not very carefully. I’m afraid they didn’t take my account of Papa’s phonecall very seriously. I think they just thought I was some hysterical woman, distraught by the murder of her father-in-law and the death of her husband, and that I was exercising an overactive imagination.” She blew air out through pursed lips, exasperated still after all these years. “They were so keen to pin it on Kerjean, they simply took Papa’s calls as an affirmation that he knew the man was coming for him.”
Enzo regarded her with interest. “And what do you think, Mrs. Killian?”
“Oh, God, don’t call me that. It makes me sound like some old dear. It’s Jane.”
Enzo grinned. “Okay, Jane.” He paused. “So do you believe that it was Kerjean who did it?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know. Everyone on the island seems to think so. I went to his trial. I sat in court day after day and listened to the evidence, and watched him in the dock. And I have to say, if I’d been on the jury I wouldn’t have convicted him either.” She looked down and scuffed at the floor with the toe of her high top. “But, you know, even if the evidence had been compelling, something about it wouldn’t have felt right. I don’t know how to explain that.” She looked up and met his eye very directly. “It just didn’t fit, somehow, with the call I got from Papa that night.”
Enzo nodded thoughtfully, then turned back to the work desk. “So what was it here that I should see?”
“Oh, yes.” She snapped out of a reverie that had propelled her back in time through nearly half her lifetime. “The poem.” She nodded toward the wall above the rows of display cases.
A piece of poetry, handwritten in a careful script, was pressed behind glass in a fine, black frame. Enzo canted his head to one side and looked at it in confusion. “It’s hanging upside down.”
“That’s exactly how it was when I got here. The poem’s been there for years. I never paid it much attention. But it was always hung the right way up before.”
Enzo reached for it. “May I?”
“Of course.”
He lifted the frame from the wall
and saw that it had simply been turned the other way round and re-hung, as if Killian had wanted to draw attention to it.
“It was a favourite of his. I have no idea why. He wrote it out himself to frame and hang on the wall.”
Enzo adjusted his reading glasses and scanned the lines.
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?
The credited author was Ronald Ross. Not a name with which Enzo was familiar.
“What is it about, do you know?”
She shrugged. “No idea. I do know that the last two lines are based on a quote from the bible.
“Yes.” Enzo nodded. He could pinpoint the quote almost without thinking. “First Corinthians. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Jane looked at him with naked curiosity. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a religious man.”
“Then don’t. I’m not. But being the product of an Italian Catholic and a Presbyterian Scot, religion was never far from the dinner table in our house. I was force-fed the stuff along with my mince and tatties.”
She laughed and looked at her watch. “I don’t know about you, but it’s a long time since midi and my stomach is starting to complain.”
“Oh, that’s your stomach making the noise? I thought it was mine.”
She grinned. “I’ll take you up to your room.”
It felt cold as they trudged up the narrow staircase to the tiny bedroom in the roof. Even the bulb in the ceiling cast a cold light around the room when Jane switched it on. The ceiling sloped down almost to the floor at either side. A small dormer window cut deep into the north side looked out across the lawn toward the house. On the other, a Velux window was set into the angle of the roof to capture the sunlight on the southern elevation.
