Freeze Frame (5 page)

“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 forget!” 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.

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.

A brass bed was pushed against the gable end and flanked by two, small, marble-topped bedside tables with matching lamps. On the left-hand table stood a telephone next to an old-fashioned answering machine. A smoked plastic lid protected the cassette inside. A pinpoint of green light glowed next to the rewind button. Jane crossed the room and switched cassettes. “You’ll probably want to hear this.” She rewound the cassette and hit the play button.

Enzo dropped his overnight bag on to the bed and perched on the edge of it, reaching for a stout walking stick that leaned against the wall, and listened in surprise as he heard what was unmistakably Jane’s voice.

Papa? Papa, are you there? For God’s sake, Papa, call me back. You’ve got to tell me what’s going on. You must.

There was a long silence, during which it was possible to hear her rapid breathing. Then,

Oh, God, Papa, please!

Another silence, then the line went dead, and Jane leaned over to switch off the machine. He noticed how pale she had become.

She said, “You can’t know how it feels to listen to that. And I must have done it a hundred times. Like listening to a ghost. The me I was in a former life, when I still had a husband and a life ahead of me.” She turned toward Enzo. “That was about two minutes after his call to me. For some reason I couldn’t get through again straight away. And then it rang and rang, before the answering machine cut in.” He heard the tremor in her voice as she drew her breath. “You can hear my distress. I’ve always thought I must have been uttering those words at the very time he was being murdered. That perhaps the killer himself heard them, and maybe even wondered what it was that Papa had told me.”

“What exactly did he say in that call, your father-in-law?”

“Just that he couldn’t tell me what was wrong. But that if anything happened to him, Peter was to come here as soon as he returned from Africa. He’d left a message in the study that only Peter would understand. And he said it was ironic that it was Peter who would finish the job. Then he made me promise that if something happened to him before Peter got back, I was to make sure that nothing in the study got disturbed.”

“What did you think when he meant by something happening to him?”

“That he was going to die.”

“He was terminally ill, of course.”

“Lung cancer, yes. I thought his condition must have deteriorated. But then, as things turned out, it wasn’t that at all. He believed that someone was going to kill him. He must have.” Enzo heard the same distress in her voice that he had heard on the phone. “Why didn’t he just tell me? Oh, God, he was so old-fashioned! Some things you could only confide in another man. A woman had her place, and that was in the home. God forbid you should trust her with anything more than a shopping list!”