by Peter May
Enzo tried hard to see her as the object any man’s obsession, but found himself agreeing with her, that it was, indeed, beyond all reason. He knew, too, that no matter how painful and traumatic the experience of all that happened to her twenty years before, it was probably the high point of her life. The only moment in it when, as her neighbour had said, she was the centre of all attention.
“I’d known for some time that it couldn’t go on. But I didn’t know how to end it. I couldn’t ever have told him. I was scared of him, you see, scared of what he might do. But when he unleashed his temper like that on poor Mister Killian, I knew the time had come. And in that moment, I saw just how it could be done.” She glanced nervously at her watch. “I would offer you a drink, monsieur. I could do with one myself. But we don’t have time.”
She could no longer remain seated and she rose to wander through the potted plants, to fold her arms and stare out through the glass at the moon rising now over the mainland across the strait. Enzo could see her reflection in the glass, like a mirror. Had she chosen to, she could have seen his reflection too, met his eye without meeting it. But instead she gazed at, or perhaps through, her own reflected image. Dragging up thoughts from the place she had buried them many years before. A place she had never wanted to revisit but had never been able to escape. There was a sense, Enzo thought, of the confessional in all this. He as father confessor, she as the repentant seeking absolution. He wondered if it was ever that easy. “So how exactly did it all end?”
After a long pause she said, “Mister Killian didn’t tell my husband, Monsieur Macleod. I did.” Another silence, as she struggled to find the right words. “I knew he would react, you see. That it would all come out in the open. And that Thibaud would think it was Mister Killian who’d done it. I just didn’t realise how ferocious my husband’s reaction would be. I thought, I really thought, we could have weathered the storm. We had two lovely children, too much invested in our relationship just to throw it away. But I hadn’t counted on his pride. A stubborn, utterly implacable pride, monsieur. Almost worse than Thibaud’s temper.”
“And Kerjean?”
He saw her mouth set in sorrow. “I’d seen the incident at the fort as my chance to break free. Mister Killian as a convenient scapegoat. I never for one moment, monsieur, thought that Thibaud would kill him.”
“And you think he did?”
She turned at last to face him. And nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I do. And I’ve spent every moment of the last twenty years feeling the guilt. Knowing it was my fault. If I could take it all back, I would. I’d have broken it off with Thibaud and faced the consequences, whatever they might have been. It could hardly have been worse than the way it turned out.”
“Do you think that might have saved your marriage?”
She shook her head sadly. “No.” She sucked in a deep breath. “Because there was something else, monsieur. Something I never told anyone, except my husband. Until now.”
Enzo stared at her in the silence of the conservatory and realised what that something was. “You were pregnant.”
A momentary fire flickered in her eyes, then died again like embers at the end of a long night. “That’s what he couldn’t accept. My husband. His pride. I couldn’t pretend to him it was his, because we hadn’t slept together in months. And that, above all else, is what he didn’t want people to know-that I was carrying Kerjean’s child. When news of the affair broke, everyone thought he threw me out. But the truth is, we had made a deal. And I kept my end of it.”
“Which was?”
“To leave immediately. Go to the mainland and have the pregnancy terminated.”
“And his end was…?”
“To take me back, once it was done, and try to make a go of it.”
Enzo nodded. “But he didn’t keep to that.”
The fire flared again, fanned by the oxygen of her remembered anger. “He used my absence to poison the minds of my children, to turn them against me. As soon as I’d had the abortion, he filed for divorce and got the courts to ask the children who they would rather be with-him or me.”
“And they chose him.”
The recollection still hurt. “They left the island, the three of them, almost as soon as the divorce was granted, and I haven’t seen my children since. Not once.”
They heard the sound of a car on the road by the church. It stopped, idling for a moment, before the engine ceased and they heard the slamming of a car door.
Her distress was immediate. “That’s my husband. Go now. Please.”
Enzo stood. “He doesn’t know any of this?”
She shook her head. “Only what was known at the time. And, of course, I had my own slant on it for him. But I have a new life now, monsieur. And I won’t ever speak of this again. Please go.”
Enzo nodded and let himself out, feeling how the temperature outside had dropped as he turned through the rock garden at the side of the house and saw the shadow of a man coming across the grass toward him. By the light at the corner of the house, Enzo saw that he was tall. A middle-aged man losing his hair. He wore a long coat and carried a briefcase. Enzo passed him without stopping, meeting his eye only fleetingly, and offering the merest nod of acknowledgment. Without looking round, he was aware that the man had stopped, and could almost feel his eyes on his back.
What would she tell him? That Enzo had come knocking at the door, trying to rake over the ashes of the past and that she had sent him packing? Or having finally lanced the boil that had been slowly poisoning her for twenty years, would she now tell him the truth?
Enzo saw the last streaks of red in the western sky as he reached his car and knew that he would never know.
Chapter Seventeen
He had forgotten it was Hallowe’en and only remembered when he stepped out of the cold and dark of the Place Leurhe into the noisy ambience of Le Triskell. The first partygoers in masks and costumes were already gathering for a party. It seemed surreal, somehow, steeped as he was in real life tragedy and murder, to slip into this make-believe world of ghosts and ghouls.
Black drapes hung around walls festooned by skeletons and skulls, giant spiders, and pumpkin lanterns. Copious clouds of spider’s web tumbled in wreaths from the ceiling, and windows were plastered with x-rays of body parts, backlit to project the images into the bar. A row of deathheads dangled above the counter, and a skeleton peered out from behind the smoked glass door of a chill cabinet.
On the drive back from Quelhuit, Enzo had called Jane on his cellphone to say that he would be eating in town. He had heard the disappointment in her voice and was relieved that he was spared the prospect, at least for tonight, of succumbing to temptation and indulging in something he would almost certainly regret.
A figure in a witch’s mask and black, pointed hat ballooned into his face. He smelled fresh alcohol on breath that issued from holes in the plastic. A woman’s voice said, “Not getting dressed up for us tonight, Monsieur Macleod? You could have come as Sherlock Holmes.”
A couple of pirates jostled him toward the bar. “What will you have to drink, me hearty? Get the man a whisky, Devi. Or should it be a tot of rum?”
“What will it be, Monsieur Macleod?” Devi was a plump girl in her thirties, with a black moustache painted above ruby red lips, and blond, curly hair beneath a bowler hat. She wore a black suit and waistcoat, several sizes two small, and a white shirt and bow-tie. Charlie Chaplin, Enzo guessed.
“Whisky’ll be fine.”
“I can offer you a Black Bush, if you don’t mind a touch of the Irish.”
Enzo grinned. “I don’t mind slumming it for once,” he said. He reached into his pocket for some cash, but a hand held his arm to stop him. It was one of the pirates.
“No, no, that’s all right, Monsieur Macleod, this one’s on us.”
The three musketeers burst in from the terrace, ushering a blast of cold air in with them. “All for one, and one for all!” One of them thrust his sword toward the ceilin
g and brought a loop of cobweb cascading down over their heads. A great roar of laughter went up.
“Hey, watch it!” Devi shouted. “It took me hours to put that stuff up.” She pushed Enzo’s Black Bush across the counter.
He leaned toward her, raising his voice above the hubbub. “I don’t suppose you would have been here at the time of the Killian murder?”
She grinned. “I was sitting my bac at the time, monsieur. That was before I left for university on the mainland.” Her smile turned wry. “A worthwhile interlude in my life.” She waved an arm vaguely around her. “You can see where my doctorate in philosophy got me.”
Enzo grinned back. A Celt almost never missed the opportunity to indulge in self-abasement. “They say that the answers to some of the world’s greatest philosophical questions can be found in a bottle.”
“In my experience, the only thing to be found in a bottle is oblivion.” Which was her recognition of yet another Celtic trait, that great capacity for self-destruction. The Celts, it seemed, were obsessed with the self.
Enzo nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d know if any of your regulars were around at that time. Several gave evidence at the trial.”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. But I know that old Robert Kerber has been a regular here for years. He might know.” She nodded toward the end of the bar nearest the door. A man in his sixties, with a cloth cap pulled low over a forehead with lines like scars, sat on a high stool nursing a glass of beer. He wore a checked jacket with leather patches at the elbow and a pair of frayed, baggy jeans. This was no fancy dress, and the man wore an expression of ill-concealed irritation, cocooned in his own world, making no attempt to participate in the celebrations. Enzo recognised the name at once. Kerber was one of those witnesses.
“Thanks.” Enzo lifted his glass and pushed his way along the bar, managing to squeeze in beside him. More revellers arrived: a very fat man dressed as Madame Defarge, clutching knitting needles and a meter of hand-knitted scarf; a thinner man with a beard in the role of Marie-Antoinette; and a zombie with an axe buried in his head. “Can I refill your glass?” Enzo asked Kerber.
The old islander turned dead eyes on the Scotsman. “You can,” he said. “But it’ll not get you anything.”
“I’m not after anything.” He signalled Devi to refill Kerber’s glass.
“No?”
“Just a few minutes of your time.”
“At my age, monsieur, every moment is precious.”
“Life is precious at any age.”
“That’s true.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What do you want?”
“You were here the night Thibaud Kerjean was telling anyone who’d listen how he was going to put Adam Killian in the cemetery.”
“I was, and he did.”
“Was he drunk?”
“I never knew the man, monsieur, when he didn’t have a drink in him.” Kerber took a sip from his replenished glass. Enzo looked at the roadmap of broken veins across his nose and cheeks, and it occurred to him that the same could very probably be said of Kerber. But drunks rarely saw themselves as drunks, and Kerber appeared to see no irony in his words. He doubtless had the same capacity for self-deception as he had for alcohol. Another Celtic self.
“Kerber,” Enzo said, as if trying the name out for size. And then, “Kerjean. There are a lot of Ker names on the island.”
Kerber turned to look at him as if he were an idiot. “And a lot of Mac names in Scotland, monsieur. Son-of, right?”
“Right.”
“Ker is house-of. You people got named after the man who impregnated your mother. We got named after the house we grew up in. Kerber, house of Peter. Kerbol, house of Paul.” He paused. “Kerjean, house of Jean.” He took another pull at his beer. “Anything else I can tell you? The tonnage of tuna caught in 1933? The number of Germans billeted on Groix during the occupation?”
“You can tell me why you think Kerjean carried out his threat to murder Killian.”
“Because he’s a drunk and a brute. A man who would put his fist in your face if you so much as looked at him sideways. He might have been the worse for wear that night, but his anger didn’t come out of a bottle. It was real enough. And Kerjean is nothing if not a man of his word. There’s not a soul who knows him, monsieur, who wouldn’t think him capable of doing exactly what he said he would.”
Enzo stepped out into plunging temperatures. The night was clear and sharp, the sky newly painted black and spattered with silver. His breath billowed around his head like wreaths of mist. From inside the bar, the noise of the party followed him out onto the terrace, where the parasols, wrapped and tied, stood among the tables like guests awaiting an invitation that would never come. Across the square, the lights of an ATM glowed in the wall of the Credit Agricole. And he could see lights on in the doctor’s house.
A narrow street led off darkly from the near corner of the square, and Enzo figured it might lead directly through to the church, where he had parked his Jeep. He threw one end of Killian’s scarf over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his jacket, his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets to keep them warm. The darkness seemed to swallow him as soon as he entered the alleyway, and he had not gone ten meters before he began to regret taking the short-cut. There were no streetlights here, and the moon was still low in the sky, casting the shadows of houses to darken his path. He slowed to take measured, cautious steps into a dark that seemed so profound it was almost tangible. His fingertips detected a wall to his right, and he followed it until almost walking into the side of a house. The street had taken a sharp left without warning, and he found himself with hands pressed up against a shuttered window. He tripped and almost fell over a doorstep, and stumbled forward into a deeper darkness. He cursed under his breath and his voice echoed back at him from hidden walls. Back the way he had come, he could just see the glow of lights from the square, and he was tempted simply to head back and take the long way round. But he couldn’t be that far from the church now. Surely. Another turn in the street and he would see the lights of the church ahead of him. Of that he was certain.
He heard a cough. A single, muffled human bark, somewhere off to his left. And he froze. There was someone there. Now the scrape of a shoe. Leather on tarmac, and the crunch of gravel underfoot. The whisper of voices seemed to rise up into the night, but it might have been his imagination. He felt suddenly very vulnerable, and a tiny knot of fear tightened in his stomach. Spurred to find the safety of a streetlight, he increased his pace, keeping his hand on the wall, following it straight ahead, until it turned sharply to the right. He turned with it, expecting to see the lights of the church square ahead of him. But there was nothing but more black. He looked up and saw a narrow strip of sky above him, illuminated by the stars, almost bright somehow compared to this endless darkened street.
Another cough. More footfalls. Now he was certain that he heard the whisper of muffled voices. Someone was following him. There was no longer any doubt. Two people or more. Frosted grit scraping beneath approaching feet. He turned and hurried forward into the obscurity of the alleyway ahead of him until suddenly the wall opened up to his right, where tall gates stood ajar. They led into a large overgrown garden. The shapes of trees and long grass were just visible in the starlight before the shadow of a large house that loomed out of the night swallowed them up.
Enzo slipped between the gates and into the garden. He could feel the frosted grass soaking his trousers from the the knee down, and he waded through it, as through water, certain that if he could reach the shadow of the trees, he could crouch amongst them, hidden from his pursuers until they gave up the search.
“Hey!” he heard a man’s voice shout and, startled, he began to run. The cold seemed to travel from his feet, though his legs, into his very soul, where fear closed icy fingers around his heart. It could only be Kerjean, and perhaps a couple of cronies, intent on dishing out a physical warning, doing him a little damage. Or worse. The m
an had been following him earlier in the day, and Enzo cursed his foolishness in straying away from the safety of the light.
Something caught and tore his trousers, causing him to stumble and fall to his knees. He felt thorns tearing through the skin of his calfs. But the sound of Kerjean and friends wading through the tall grass in his wake, got him quickly to his feet, and he sprinted for the far side of the garden where the shadow of the house mired it in darkness.
But now something cold and wet wrapped itself around him, a rope cutting into his arm, spinning him around and pitching him forward. He was helplessly entangled in unseen fabric, clinging and chillingly slimy. He could smell damp and decay, something rotting and rotten. There was a loud tearing sound, and from being semisuspended he was dumped suddenly through the long grass to the hard frosted earth below. It knocked all the breath from his lungs. He tried to get up but couldn’t, as if trapped in a giant, sticky spider’s web. He could hear the swish, swish, of legs running through the grass toward him, breath rasping in the night. And suddenly he was blinded by several flashlights catching him full in their glare, and he raised an arm to shade his eyes. He heard laughter. A woman’s voice. A man’s. And what sounded like a child.
In his confusion, he saw, beyond the lamplight, a human skull, a green face with black spots. A full skeleton stepped into the light, a hand rising through the dark to lift away the death mask to reveal the altogether less frightening face of a teenage girl. A face wreathed in smiles. Bright, shining blue eyes. And peals of laughter rising in the night air. It was a face he knew. But it took a moment for him to realise that it was Alain Servat’s daughter, Oanez. Her sister stepped into the light, the owner of the witch’s green face, then Alain and Elisabeth in Laurel and Hardy outfits, bowler hats above whitened faces. Alain was padded out to make him fatter, a small black moustache painted on his upper lip. All four were almost helpless with laughter.