Freeze Frame

by Peter May

  “Oh?” Enzo raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Following me, were you?”

  “I saw your rental Jeep up the road. A good thing I stopped by. Kerjean would have murdered you.”

  “Like he murdered Killian?”

  “I was speaking figuratively.”

  Enzo grinned. “I know. And you’re right. He would have. But I have my own personal guardian angel.” He craned to peer over Guéguen’s shoulder. “How the hell do you get your wings tucked in there?”

  “I had them clipped. I don’t work for the big man any more, you see. The pay was better downstairs.”

  “I didn’t think gendarmes earned that much.”

  “They don’t. The reward is that you get to be part of one of the most feared and hated institutions in France.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s why we have no friends, monsieur. Only colleagues.”

  Enzo smiled. There was something likeable about this man. A fine, dry humour, and a sense of resolve and fair play that made you feel he was someone you could depend on in a crisis. “The other day, you said to me you would help me in any way you could. Unofficially.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I’d like to know a bit more about Thibaud Kerjean, adjudant. The circumstances surrounding his arrest, exactly why investigating officers at the time thought he was their man. You were here. Uniquely placed to see it all first-hand. I’d appreciate your insights.”

  For the first time Guéguen seemed uneasy. He glanced up the road and then down toward the harbour. “Not here. I don’t really want to be seen talking to you, Monsieur Macleod. You can bet there are eyes on us right now.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I’ll meet you tomorrow. Two o’clock, at the Fort de Grognon. Do you know where that is?”

  “I saw it signposted this afternoon when I was driving out to Pen Men.”

  “You’ll find it on any of the tourist maps. We’re not likely to be disturbed there. And it’s a place with an important bearing on the telling of the story.” His breath billowed around his head like smoke in the light of the streetlamps. He flexed frozen cheeks to bare his teeth in a grin. “It’s an interesting tale.”

  ***

  Lights fell out from the house across the dirt track leading along the coast to Les Grands Sables, and the gate squeaked on its hinges as Enzo pushed it open. He felt obliged to call in to say goodnight before heading across the lawn to the cold of the annex.

  As he closed the gate again, he turned and looked out across the strait toward the mainland. An almost full moon hung low in a clear, black sky, reflecting in coruscating shards across the silvered surface of the ocean. The coastline between Lorient and Vannes was delineated by a line of lights like tiny glowing beads on a taut thread stretched along the horizon.

  “Admiring the view?”

  He turned, surprised, to see Jane Killian standing in the open doorway, light tumbling out around her and into the garden. He hadn’t heard her open the door.

  “It’s a stunning night.”

  “In the summer, on a night like this, you can light a fire on the beach and sit out with a bottle of wine, talking into the small hours. You can even go in bathing if you feel like it. We get the full benefit of the gulf stream here. The water’s always warm.”

  “Not right now, I’ll bet.”

  She laughed. “No.” Then her smile faded. “I was expecting you back earlier. I prepared a meal. But I guess you’ve probably eaten by now.”

  “Oh.” Enzo felt suddenly guilty. And at the same time annoyed. He didn’t want to feel obliged to spend his evenings with her. He wasn’t a house guest, after all. But perhaps he should have called to say he was eating in town. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.”

  “It’s okay. It was a casserole. It’ll keep till tomorrow.”

  Which trapped him into eating with her then. Enzo succumbed to a sudden sense of claustrophobia. For all that the Île de Groix was a flat stretch of rock set in an open sea, he felt cornered by its insularity, by his ability to escape it only when the ferry timetable allowed, and by the social obligations to his hostess that it seemed were impossible to avoid.

  “Come in and have a drink,” she said. And he didn’t see how he could politely refuse.

  They went into the house, and she poured him a large whisky, and refilled a glass sitting on a small table beside her chair. Enzo wondered how many times she’d filled it already this evening. It was clear that she had been drinking. She was not drunk, or even mellow in the way that a few whiskies can sometimes affect you, but she held herself stiffly, with a kind of brittle self-control. She sat down, her legs folded up beneath her on the chair, and turned a penetrating gaze in Enzo’s direction. “You’d think,” she said, “that after twenty years you’d get used to being lonely.”

  Enzo sipped on his whisky and looked reflectively into the dying embers of the fire. “I don’t think you ever get used to it. You get to tolerate it after a while. It becomes a way of life.”

  “You’ve had other lovers, though?”

  “Oh, yes. There have been a few. Nothing that ever stuck. In a strange way, being with other women just served to remind me of what I was missing, without ever satisfying the need.” He glanced toward her, suddenly self-conscious, and wondered why he was telling her this. The whisky, perhaps. Or maybe it was simply that sharing your loneliness in some way helped to reduce it. At least for a while.

  “Yes,” she said. “Your needs never go away. Just the means of fulfilling them. Funny, isn’t it, how you fill your life with other things? Work becomes a passion. Hobbies become addictions. But at the end of the day, it’s still just you. And an empty glass.”

  “And an obsession with keeping a promise to a dead man?”

  She turned her eyes down toward her glass, as if she might find a suitable response somewhere in its gentle amber. But “yes” was all she said. She raised it to her lips and took a small sip. “So what did you find out today?”

  “Not much. Your father-in-law’s doctor is still alive. But only just, and lost in a world beyond our reach. I did see his medical records, though, but all they did was confirm what we already knew. That he was terminally ill and not long for this world.”

  “Not much return for a day’s work, then.”

  Enzo was stung. “Nothing comes fast in this job, Jane. The whole point of forensic science is the examination of everything in minute detail. Conclusions are only arrived at after careful analysis of all the evidence.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that as a criticism. You’d think I would have learned patience after all these years. The truth is, the more time passes the more impatient I become. It’s a kind of desperation, I guess, a loss of self-control. And in the end, I suppose what it really means is that I’ve lost hope.” And then, as if she had somehow accessed and replayed his thoughts of the previous evening, she added, “So relax, Enzo, you’re not my last hope. That’s long gone.” She smiled, but it was an unconvincing smile.

  Enzo recalled the vision of her in the window the previous night, undressing to her bra and panties, almost as if she had been putting on a show for him. She was a good-looking woman, signalling a sublimated sexuality. And he wondered why he didn’t feel more attracted to her. Perhaps, he thought, the bitterness he perceived in her was muting his usually healthy appetite. He decided to change the focus of their conversation. “I’m meeting someone tomorrow at the Ford de Grognon. Do you have a map I could take with me, so I don’t get lost?”

  She laughed. “It’s not easy to get lost on this island, Enzo. There are only a handful of roads.” She got up and crossed to the bureau where she found a creased and dog-eared trifold tourist plan of the island. She came and crouched by his chair and watched as he opened it up on his thighs. “There.” She stabbed a finger at the northwest corner of the island. A small, white square marked the position of the fort. “Just follow the main road out toward the lighthouse at Pen Men, then tak
e the turn-off for Quelhuit and follow the road toward Beg Melen. There’s a military signalling station out there. But there’s a turn-off to the fort on the right before you reach it.”

  “The fort belongs to the military, too?”

  “Not any longer. It’s nineteenth-century, I think, but abandoned now. And comes under the control of the mairie, I believe. You’ll see there’s a smaller fort right down on the coast below it. Predates it by a hundred years or so. They were built originally to protect the entry to the harbour at Lorient. Which is exactly what the Germans used them for during the Occupation. They had huge guns mounted up there to provide cover for the submarine base on the mainland. Didn’t do much to protect the town from the Allied bombing raids, though.”

  “Is it open to the public?”

  “No, it’s usually kept locked up. But I think the mairie uses it as a base for youth activities from to time.” She paused. “Who are you meeting there?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential, Jane.”

  “Oh.” She seemed disappointed that he wasn’t prepared to share with her.

  “But I understand it’s an important location in terms of your father-in-law’s relationship with Kerjean.”

  “Yes.” She looked thoughtful. “They met there for the first time. And the last, according to Kerjean.”

  “They had arranged to meet?”

  “No. It was pure chance. Engineered by fate, perhaps.” And she laughed, a laugh soured by that ever-present edge of bitterness. “Fate again. But it was a meeting that might very well, in the end, have led to his death.”

  ***

  Moonlight laid the dark shadows of trees across the lawn toward the annex. Enzo was almost at the door when a movement, caught in the corner of his eye, made him turn sharply to his right. He stood stock still for a moment, but saw nothing, straining in the dark to give shape to whatever had passed through his peripheral vision. He scanned the imposing form of the trees standing black against the night and saw leaves that fell like snowflakes through the light of the moon, detached by the slight breeze that stirred amongst the branches overhead. Frost-brittle leaves, lying now in drifts on the grass.

  He was about to turn back toward the door when this time a sound made him stop dead in his tracks. A sound like footsteps among the leaves. Soft, cautious footfalls. And then suddenly, out of the shadows, a silhouette emerged, green eyes glowing in the night, to stop and stare at him, resentment or anger burning in their gaze.

  Enzo breathed more easily again. “Damn cat!” he muttered under his breath. It was the second time the creature had startled him. He waved an arm at it. “Shoo!” But it stood, defiant and still, watching from what it clearly felt was a safe distance. Enzo unlocked the door and went into the annex, shutting it quickly behind him again, and stood in the silence of the hall, washed by the cold, harsh light in the stairwell.

  The door of the study stood ajar, as he had left it, a finger of light from the hall reaching across the floorboards to touch the books on the shelves beyond. He was almost tempted to go in, to sit with Killian in his long empty chair, and try to find a way inside his head. But he was tired, and somehow Killian seemed to have made greater inroads into Enzo’s mind than the Scotsman had made into his. So he made a conscious effort to free his thoughts of both Killian and his killer, to empty his mind, and climb the stairs to a cold bed, and the oblivion of sleep.

  As on the previous evening, the little bedroom was awash with moonlight, and he refrained from turning on the electric light. But as he turned to drape his jacket over the chair, he saw, once more, the light in the window opposite framed clearly by the black of the night. Jane Killian was again engaged in the process of undressing herself in full view.

  She had already removed her top, and was wearing only her black bra and jeans. Reflexively, Enzo turned away. He could have stood and watched, in the certain knowledge that she could not possibly have seen him. But he was discomfited by the thought that she was undressing herself in the full glare of electric light to make him do just that. He felt manipulated, as if she were testing his male libido, sensing his lack of sexual interest in her from the start.

  He stripped down to his boxers and threw back the bed covers. But, as before, he could not resist a final look. And this time saw her standing completely naked in the window, gazing out across the grass toward the annex. To his intense annoyance, he felt the first stirrings of sexual desire in his loins, and he slipped quickly between the cold sheets to douse them. He shivered and curled up on his side, pulling the blanket tight around his chin.

  He closed his eyes and conjured up an image of Charlotte, with her shining, black eyes and her long, curling locks tumbling across square shoulders. Then recalled with dismay his last meeting with her at the Boneparte in Paris. Let me know when you’re in town again, and I’ll apply for an audience, she had said, as if he were the one who made it difficult for them to be together.

  He flipped over on to his other side and screwed his eyes tight shut, trying to expunge the memory from him mind. As sleep descended like an angel of the night, the space it left was immediately filled by Killian’s ghost. He drifted off into restless dreams of half-warmed fish.

  Chapter Twelve

  The island was green and yellow and burnt sienna in the strong autumn sunlight that slanted across it from the south, great banks of fern turning rust-red and bleeding into the crimson leaves of the briar thicket that rose almost two meters high on every side.

  Enzo eased his four-wheel drive along a bumpy mud track, ridged and pitted with holes, and turned into a metalled parking area by the gates to the fort. Earlier, he had missed the turn off, and was almost at Beg Melen when he noticed the high stone walls rising above the thicket away to his right. He had pulled up next to a sign that read, DANGER—TROUS PROFONDS. Deep holes on the road ahead. An abandoned white cottage, defaced by graffiti, shimmered in the sunlight beyond a stand of dark trees. Enzo managed a five-point turn on the single-track road before finding his way back to his missed turn.

  There was one other vehicle in the parking area. A dark grey Renault Scenic. The morning frost had long since melted in the warm sun, and the air hummed with the sound of insects and the call of unseen birds. Ten-foot overgrown earthen banks ran off north and south, and in the distance, where the thicket fell away toward the shore, the line of the mainland was clearly visible across the shimmer of water that separated the island from the coast.

  Green-painted metal gates stood open, and Enzo walked through them, following a narrow path between high walls overhung with tumbling wild growth. A low bridge spanned an outer moat to more gates, set this time into the wall of the fort. On the far side of the wall, another bridge took him across an inner moat, then through a stone tunnel in a second bank of earth. Stone watchtowers were raised at intervals all along the wall. Whoever had commissioned this fort had been taking no chances with its defences.

  The tunnel opened onto a large grassy area lined with low buildings characterised by a series of arched doors and windows. Almost every available wall space was scarred and disfigured by cheap, colourful graffiti, island yobs aping their more sophisticated mainland cousins. The buildings to the right were set into mud banks and covered with grass, presumably to make them less obvious from the air. To the left stood tin-roofed barracks of more recent origin. There was no sign of anyone.

  “Hello!” Enzo raised his voice and called into the silence. No response. He peered into several darkened rooms, where further archways led through stone walls to an impenetrable black beyond. Everywhere the smell of urine and damp and decay.

  Stone steps cut into an earth mound at the end of the row led up to a grassy area that concealed the roofs of the buildings beneath it.

  Up here, bunkers were set into the ground and covered over with earth and grass. Concrete gun emplacements constructed along the north wall had once played host to huge German cannon that covered the strait beyond. Wide stone ch
imneys venting the fires that had once heated the offices and living quarters below pushed up through the ground and were covered by rusted sheets of curved metal.

  Enzo heard a sound behind him and turned, alarmed, to see the uniformed Guéguen emerging from one of the bunkers. The gendarme was carrying his kepi in his hand and ran a hand back through his hair before pulling it firmly back on to his head. “You startled me,” Enzo said.

  Guéguen smiled. “Pretty much as Killian must have startled Kerjean and his woman.” He turned and looked back through the arched doorway, and down the short flight of stairs he had just climbed. “They were down there. Making love, having sex. Whatever it is Kerjean does with his women.”

  And Enzo reflected that even in Guéguen he detected a hint of envy. Kerjean, it seemed, had something every man wanted. He was attractive to women. Enzo walked to the doorway and peered down into the darkness.

  “Go on in. Have a look. It’s not the most romantic of places to bring a woman. But, then, I don’t think anyone would ever have accused Kerjean of being a romantic.”

  Enzo walked down four steps into the former guard house. Here, he imagined, soldiers on surveillance duty had eaten and slept and taken turns on watch, ready to man the guns at a moment’s notice should the alarms go off. A miserable, confined existence, a hated occupier in a land far from family and home. Scarred and crumbling plaster walls revealed patches of red brick, and a large red-lettered sign read DEFENCE DE FUMER. So they had not even been allowed the comfort of a cigarette.

  “What on earth was Killian doing here?”

  Guéguen shook his head. “It was ridiculously innocent, really. He was out with a net sweeping for butterflies down near the shore. He must have seen the two cars parked out front and the open gates and wandered in. The fort is normally locked, so I imagine he was curious.”

  And Enzo visualised how that curiosity must have led him on a route very similar to the one that Enzo had followed himself just a few minutes earlier. Peering into long-deserted darkened rooms, climbing the steps to the gun emplacements. And it occurred to him that he had just inadvertently walked in a dead man’s footsteps. “How was Kerjean able to access the place?”