by Peter May
From somewhere out in the garden he heard the deep-throated yowling of a cat. It came chillingly out of the night, penetrating the dark and the quiet. Enzo stood up and crossed to the window, opening it and pushing out the shutters. Light from the room washed across the lawn. In the shadow of the trees at the far side, he saw the black cat pacing restlessly in silhouette, howling at the night. For a moment it stood still, to turn luminous green eyes in his direction.
For several seconds it seemed to Enzo as if he were trapped, a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, before he closed the window. Ruffled, he remembered Charlotte’s playful allusion to the cat as being perhaps Killian’s ghost. Absurd, of course, but still he could not shake off the sense of another presence in the room, of eyes watching his every move, of a voice whispering silent encouragement that he couldn’t hear.
He went back and stood at the desk to open the volume NYA to RAG with trembling fingers. He drew his thumb across the open pages of the book and let them flick past it, until his eye caught the flash of yellow he had been hoping for. He flipped back until he found it. Once more, the Post-it was blank. But on the opposite page, the entry for Paris had been marked with the same yellow pen. The entry was five pages long, and Enzo flipped slowly through them all looking for a highlighted passage, something that would guide him to more specific information. But there was nothing. All that had been singled out was the word Paris right at the head of the entry. So perhaps, he thought, Paris itself was the clue. The city. The place. But why?
He set the open book on the desk and lifted the volume SPI to ZYM. This time he found the Post-it among the W entries, and highlighted on the opposite page was the name Simon Wiesenthal. Enzo stood staring at it, his skin prickling all over his skull. He looked up and saw his reflection in the window. The black robe with the red dragons, the tangle of dark hair tumbling wildly over his shoulders, the silver streak running back from his forehead. A sudden movement startled him. He refocused, and saw the black cat on the outside window ledge, staring in at him.
He turned his eyes down again to the page. Wiesenthal, he knew, was the most famous of the post-war Nazi hunters, responsible for tracking down dozens of fugitives so that they could be brought to justice for crimes against humanity. Although this 1957 entry was long out of date, Enzo read it anyway.
Wiesenthal was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer and holocaust victim who had survived four and a half years in the German concentration camps of Janowska, Plaszow, and Mauthausen. After the war he had begun working for the US army, gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremburg. Then, in 1947, he and thirty other volunteers had founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, to gather information for future trials.
In the same way that Enzo had made the assumption that the entries on Ronald Ross and Agadir were somehow linked, he felt there had to be some connection between Wiesenthal and Paris. But what? There was nothing in this old entry that gave any clue as to what it might be.
And so, as before, he turned to the computer, rebooting it and connecting again to the Internet. For a moment he paused to take in Killian’s desktop. His laptop sitting on it at an angle, four open volumes of the Everyman encyclopedia, the desk diary pushed to one side. Killian’s sense of order would have been grossly offended. Google popped up on his screen, and he turned his concentration back to the search, typing in Simon Wiesenthal and hitting the return key. There were more than half a million entries. Again, he went to Wikipedia and began reading.
The man had written three books on his experiences and opened numerous centres around the world before dying in 2005 at the age of ninety-six. Still, Enzo could not find any logical connection to Paris. He clicked on a link to the entry on the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and read its mission statement describing it as an international Jewish human rights organisation dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time. Quite a task, Enzo thought.
He scrolled down the entry until he came to the section on Office Locations. There were five other centres around the world. New York, Miami, Toronto, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires. And Paris. Enzo held his breath. Perhaps this was the link he had been looking for.
He went back to Google and tapped in Simon Wiesenthal Center Paris. More than thirty-two thousand links appeared. But the third from the top took him directly to the website of the Wiesenthal organisation’s European operation. The office was in the seventeenth arrondissement, in the rue Laugier, and had been established there in 1988. Before Killian’s death. Had he been in contact with them for some reason? If so, surely they would have a record.
Enzo scrolled down the home page until he reached the contact details at the foot of it. There was an email address and a link that opened up his emailer. He tapped in a subject line, KILLIAN CONTACT, and composed a short mail.
Sirs,
I am conducting an investigation into the death of a British citizen in France in the year 1990. I have reason to believe that he may have been in contact with you around this time. His name was Adam Killian. I would be most grateful if you could tell me if you have any record of such contact. My bone fides can be checked by following the link (below) to my page on the website of the University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, where I head up the faculty on forensic science.
With best wishes,
Professor Enzo Macleod.
He hit the send button and off it went, carrying with it more hope than expectation.
For a long time he sat then, just staring at the screen, until it almost burned out on his retinas. He leaned his elbows on the desk and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, and then blinked them, bloodshot, in the direction of the window. The cat was still there, pressing itself against the glass, still staring in at him.
For the second time that night, Enzo was startled awake. This time, it was sunlight streaming through the unshuttered windows of Killian’s study that woke him. At some point in his deliberations, he had cleared a space on the desk in front of him and folded his arms on the dekstop to create a pillow for his head. He had closed his eyes, intending simply to rest them while he thought. And now, three hours later, he wakened almost rigid with the cold.
Pale yellow light slanted in at a low angle, falling across the chaos that was now Killian’s desktop. He straightened himself stiffly, painfully, and stretched his arms above his head as he yawned. The cat was gone, along with the still of the night. Enzo shivered. He stood up and stamped several times to try to get the blood back into his feet.
He replayed everything he had learned, everything he now knew. About Ronald Ross and his mosquito poem. About the earthquake in Agadir, the man who had not died, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris. More than ever, he was convinced that none of this connected to to Thibaud Kerjean. The man had been a blinding red herring, both then and now. He had stolen the focus of every investigation into this case, when all the time the clues had been in the books.
Enzo stood stock still.
Even as the words formed in his mind, realisation dawned. He tipped his head back and yelled at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ!” His voice reverberated around the room. Why on earth had he not seen it immediately? It was so childishly simple. And yet, how often was it that the most obvious was overlooked? That the most cunning place to hide anything was always in plain sight?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Strands of mist washed up all along the shore, lingering among the trees where splintered sunlight seemed suspended in long, slanting fingers. The dew on the grass, almost white, sparkled like frost in the early morning light.
Enzo felt it soak through his slippers as he crossed the lawn, leaving dark tracks in his wake. He pulled his robe tightly around himself as he banged hard on the back door of the house. He knew that Jane was up, because he had seen the smoke drifting lazily into the sunlight from the chimney on the east gable. But like Enzo, she had not yet dressed, and peered at him, dishevelled and a little bleary, through the cra
ck in the door that opened up.
“Oh!” She seemed startled to see him. “I’m still a mess.”
“So am I.”
“I can see that.”
He could barely contain his impatience. “Look, it doesn’t matter what either of us looks like, I’ve made a breakthrough.”
She opened the door a little wider, forgetting her appearance. She looked older in the cold light of day, without make-up to paper over the early morning cracks. “In Papa’s murder?”
“Yes.” He scratched his head. “Listen, you told Charlotte that when Peter was a boy, his father used to play word games with him to increase his vocabulary.”
“That’s right.”
“What games?”
She shrugged. “Peter never said. I have no idea.”
Enzo reached out his hand to take hers. “Well, I do. Come on.”
“Hey! It’s freezing out there!”
“Tell me about it.” Enzo almost dragged her across the lawn behind him. She ran to keep up. They both left wet footprints on the floor as Enzo led her into Killian’s study. She looked at the mess of open books on the desktop, and then at Enzo. “What have you found?”
“Messages. Left in the encyclopaedias. Pages marked with post-its, entries highlighted with a marker pen.”
“What messages?”
“Nothing that makes much sense to me yet. Although that’ll come, I’m sure. But the point is this. Just ask yourself. Where were the clues?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Where did I find these clues?” He waved his hand at the open volumes on the desk.
She shrugged, not fully understanding. “In the books, I guess.”
“Exactly.” He took her hand again and dragged her across the room to the tiny kitchen leading off it. He ripped the post-it off the fridge door and handed it to her. “What does it say?”
Her face was a mask of incomprehension. “You know what it says.”
“Read it out loud.”
She sighed in exasperation. “The cooks have the blues.”
He looked at her expectantly, waiting for the penny to drop. But it didn’t. “Haven’t you ever heard of Doctor Spooner?” She frowned. “Doctor William Archibald Spooner. A professor at New College, Oxford, in the nineteenth century. He was an albino, and had occasional problems with the spoken word, a nervous tendency sometimes to transpose initial letters. It used to amuse his students so much they started inventing their own transpositions, and called them Spoonerisms.” He paused, eyes shining, and she looked again at the post-it in her hand.
“The books have the clues,” she read. And she looked up, her face suddenly flushed. “Oh, my God!” Her eyes turned toward the magnetic message board and she prised it free of its grip on the fridge. This time she read, “A fit of the blood will foil the beast.” Her eyes darted toward Enzo, infected now by his excitement. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. But we’re going to find out, Jane. I know we are.” He took her hand again. “Come and look at the others.” And they crossed the study to Killian’s desk.
Jane unstuck the Post-it from the desk lamp and read it out. “P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget.” She turned puzzled eyes on Enzo. “Boil my icicles?”
He made a face that conveyed his own lack of comprehension and pulled the desk diary toward him. This time he read out the transposed message himself. “P, I was fighting a liar, but now there’s no more time, and all I’m left with is a half-formed wish in the roaring pain.”
Concentration furrowed Jane’s brow. “Fighting a liar?” She paused. “Kerjean?”
Enzo shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, if not him, who?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“And what is a half-formed wish?”
“I guess it was something he was in the process of doing, but unable to finish. Something that would help him to defeat, or unmask, the liar he was fighting.”
“And the roaring pain must have been the suffering of his illness.” The tide of emotion that had risen in Jane was visible in eyes that brimmed with tears. “Oh, God… Poor Papa.”
Enzo cast his own eyes over the open volumes on the desktop. The Post-its and highlighted entries. And he wondered what any of it had to do with Wiesenthal and Agadir and Ronald Ross. Killian had not made it easy. But, then, he must have been paranoid his killer would find and destroy the evidence after he was dead. He had been relying on his son to see the wordplay at once, and then be inside his mind to unravel the puzzle. Somehow, Enzo had to get himself inside Killian’s head, too.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dressed now and warmed by the full English breakfast that Jane had prepared for him, Enzo retraced his footsteps of yesterday along the beach at Port Melite: footsteps erased by the tide. But the tracks Killian had laid down were not lost. Just obscured. And one, by one, Enzo was uncovering them, like an archaeologist brushing away the dust of time. He still had no idea where they would lead.
How to get inside Killian’s head. That was the problem. He was missing something, he knew, and that one key would probably unlock the secret. He ran through all the clues again. Ronald Ross and his mosquitoes, Agadir and the man who had not died, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris. And the notes. What could he have meant by boiling the icicles? Who was the liar he had been fighting? Was it the same man who had not died in Agadir? He thought back to the phone call Killian had made to Jane the night of the murder. Might there have been something he said that night that Enzo had missed?
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 Gerard 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.
Gerard 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?
&nb
sp; Thanking you in advance,
Enzo Macleod
Within a matter of minutes his laptop alerted him to Gerard 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,
Gerard 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.”
