Freeze Frame (9 page)

“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 take 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 chimneys 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?”

“In those days he was involved with the island youth movement. And this place was used as a kind of activity centre for youngsters in the summer. He had a set of keys.”

“So Killian stumbled upon Kerjean having sex with some woman, and that was enough to motivate Kerjean to want to kill him?”

“She wasn’t just “some woman,” Monsieur Macleod. She was Arzhela Montin, the wife of the first
adjoint
of the mayor, a privileged and respected man in the island community. On the face of it, happily married, with two young children. Montin was a Parisian, regarded as being quite a catch for an island girl. For a woman like that to be having an affair with a man like Kerjean… well, it would have been the talk of the island. And it very soon was. Within a week of Killian catching the two of them together here, the story was out.”

“And Kerjean thought it was Killian who blew the whistle on him?”

“He didn’t just think it. He was convinced of it. And there were dire consequences, for both Kerjean and his lover. Kerjean worked for the council at that time. A kind of
cantonnier
, involved in island maintenance. Roads, verges, hedgerows, and clearing the kilometers of pathways that criss-cross the island for walkers and
randonneurs
. It took the administration no time at all to find a reason for sacking him. He also worked as a kind of informal stringer for the Breton newspaper,
Ouest-France
. They couldn’t get him fired from that position, but all the sources of official information that provided him with most of his copy, dried up just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“And the woman?”

“Oh, her reward was a very messy divorce. The first thing Montin did was kick her out of the family home. And by the time Kerjean went to trial, Montin had divorced her and won custody of the children.”

“Well, at least they still had each other. I mean, Kerjean and Arzhela.”

“Oh, no, monsieur. She refused to ever see Kerjean again. And when it came to his trial she gave some pretty damning evidence against him.”

Enzo turned his gaze toward the sun shimmering across the strait. Scraps of white sail caught the light, flashing against the petrol blue of the ocean, late-season sailors out catching the breeze. “So what was the consensus of opinion at the time? Was Killian really responsible for letting the cat out of the bag?”

“No one knows for sure. By the time it became an issue, Killian was dead. But to be perfectly honest, monsieur, it would have seemed very out of character to me. Adam Killian was not exactly integrated into the island community. Incomers rarely are. Particularly the English. I’m sure he knew or had met Montin at some point, but I can’t imagine for one moment that he went knocking on the man’s door to tell him that his wife was having a relationship with the
cantonnier
.”

“So why would Kerjean think he had?”

“You’d have to ask him that. Not that I’d recommend it.” The gendarme scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Although I imagine it was probably the timing of it all. Kerjean and Arzhela must have been pretty sure no one else knew about them. Then Killian chances upon them here at the fort, and in a matter of days it’s all out in the open.”

They walked along the grassy bank in silence then, to where it rose up above the line of chimneys sunk in the earth. From here they had a panoramic view across the island, and Enzo felt the comforting warmth of the sun on his face. He tried to imagine the encounter here that day. How had Kerjean reacted? He was known for his violence and his foul mouth. Had he said or done something that had prompted the reclusive Killian to seek revenge in some way? “What was it that first pointed investigators in Kerjean’s direction?” he asked.

“Well, it was a strange situation,” the adjudant gendarme said. “Killian was found by his cleaning lady the morning after the murder. She called the gendarmerie, quite hysterical. A radio call went out to a couple of officers who were down at the harbour in the van. By the time they got out to Killian’s house, Kerjean was already there.”

Enzo turned to look at him, surprised. “What was he doing there?”

“I told you that he was a stringer for the newspaper
Ouest-France
. He said that as a matter of habit he was always tuned into police frequencies and heard the radio call going out to our officers. Told us he’d driven straight out there. Murder on Groix! He could sell the story all over France.”

“So he got to Killian’s place before the police?”

“Yes.” Guéguen pulled a face. “Which provided a very convenient explanation for his fingerprints being found on the gate and a muddy footprint in the garden. And, as I told you, island officers in those days had no idea how to treat or secure a murder scene. So all sorts of people had tramped all over it before senior investigators arrived from the mainland.” He shook his head. “There was hell to pay, I can tell you. And, in the end, it probably cost us the conviction.”

“What other evidence was there against Kerjean?”

“You mean other than his lack of alibi, his murder threats against Killian, and the item of personal property we recovered from the scene?” Air exploded from between his lips in remembered frustration. “Dammit, Monsieur Macleod, if our people hadn’t been so inept there’s no way Kerjean would have got away with it.”

“Tell me.”

The gendarme removed his
kepi
and scratched his head. “About two days after the murder a pen was discovered in the grass near the annex. A very expensive, hand-crafted pen called a Montblanc. Turned out to have Kerjean’s prints all over it. He confessed that it was his, a gift, he said, and claimed that he must have dropped it when he was there to report on the murder. The boys from the mainland were already suspicious, and they really turned the spotlight on him then. Which is when they discovered that he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the night of the murder.”

“Where did he say he was?”

“At home in bed.”

“Aren’t they all?” Enzo grinned. “So there was no one to vouch for that?”

Guéguen raised a wry eyebrow. “For once it seems, he didn’t have a woman in his bed.” He raised a finger. “But here’s the thing, monsieur. His car is always parked outside his house in Locmaria. Always. But a neighbour, coming home late that night, noticed that the car wasn’t there. Even although the house was all shuttered up and in darkness.”

“So how did he account for that?”

“Said his car had broken down on the road on the drive back from Le Bourg, and he’d been forced to abandon it.”

“How did he manage to get out to Killian’s place, then, the next morning?”

Guéguen smiled. “Good question, monsieur. Of course he had an answer for it. Said he’d gone out at first light and got his car going again. Then came home and had his breakfast. Which is when he heard the police call on the radio.”

Enzo nodded. “And no one saw him?”

The gendarme smiled. “Not a soul.”

“You said Kerjean had threatened to murder Killian. How did that come about?”

“In a pub in Le Bourg, Monsieur Macleod. Le Triskell.”

“Oh, yes, I know it.” Enzo recalled the bar with its small deserted terrace opposite the doctor’s house in the Place du Leurhé.

“One of Kerjean’s favourite haunts. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d got drunk there. The regulars knew him well and usually gave him a wide berth. But that night, about a week before the murder, he was in drowning his sorrows over his fractured relationship with Arzhela. He was very vocally, very loudly, telling anyone who’d listen, what a bastard that Englishman, Killian, was. How you could never trust an incomer, and a foreigner to boot. Killian had ratted on him, he said. Ruined his life. And if their paths ever crossed again he’d strike the old bastard down and dispatch him to the cemetery, where he belonged.”

They climbed down mossy and overgrown steps to the old parade ground and headed back toward the gate at the far side.

“The thing is,” the gendarme said. “Kerjean had motive and opportunity. He had threatened to kill the victim, was first at the scene, and had left traces everywhere. The evidence was circumstantial, sure, but the
juge d’instruction
at Vannes decided there was enough of it to proceed with a prosecution.”

“Which failed.”

“Yes.” Guéguen’s mouth set in a hard line. It clearly still rankled. “Largely because of our inept handling of the crime scene. Kerjean hired a good lawyer, who blew gaping holes through our case by exposing failures in procedure.”

They passed through the shadow of the entrance tunnel and Guéguen pulled the gates shut behind them, locking and securing them with a chain and padlock. Then they crossed the outer moat and followed the muddy track between high walls that led to the outside gates. Enzo found himself breathing more easily out here. There was something almost oppressive about the fort, open though it was. Something to do, perhaps, with its dark history. German occupation, a chance encounter leading to the destruction of lives, and perhaps even the death of Adam Killian.