Peter May - Freeze Frames

“That doesn’t sound very English.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well, that’s because he wasn’t.”

And now it was Enzo’s turn to be surprised. “I thought your father-in-law was British.”

“He was. Well, at least, he took British nationality. But he was born in Poland, and didn’t come to Britain until 1951. In the end, he was more English than the English. Not even the hint of an accent. I think he worked very hard at not being Polish anymore.”

This was news to Enzo. There had been no mention of it in Raffin’s book. “Tell me.”

“Not much to tell, really. He began his university education in Warsaw before the German invasion. Finished it after the war, and came to do a post-grad at London University in ’51.”

“In tropical medical genetics.”

“Yes. Over the years he spent a lot of time in the tropics, as well as other parts of the world. I think that’s where he got the entomology bug.” She smiled. “So to speak.”

Enzo ran his eyes over the lines of insect display cases hanging on the wall. Jane followed his glance.

“Not an interest he passed on to his son, I’m happy to say.”

“What was it Peter did?”

“He worked for a charity. Spent a lot of time overseas, just like his father.”

Enzo looked at her carefully. “It’s almost twenty years since he died.”

“Yes.” If there were still emotional scars, she kept them well hidden.

“But you never remarried.”

“No.”

He waited for more, but there was nothing forthcoming. Instead she changed the subject.

“I’ve prepared the bedroom directly above Papa’s study. You can stay as long as you like, or for as long as it takes. I’ll be here, in the main house, for about two weeks, so if there’s anything you need to know…”

Enzo took a large swallow of whisky. “You can tell me how the local newspaper knew I was coming.”

“Oh, God, did they?” She flushed with embarrassment. “I haven’t seen the paper, but I’m afraid it was probably my fault. There’s a woman in the village who looks after the house for me when I’m not here and gets it ready for me coming.” She sighed. “When I asked her to prepare the guest bedroom, stupidly I told her why.” She shrugged her apology. “Impossible to keep a secret here. I’m sorry, I should have known better.” She drained her glass. “Would you like to see the study?”

At the back door she took an umbrella from the rack. The door led straight from a large kitchen into the garden. Oddly the kitchen seemed cold and empty. Jane said, “I’d have had a meal prepared for you, but I only arrived today myself. Haven’t had a chance to do a shopping yet. I thought we might eat out in town, if that’s okay with you.”

“Sure.” Enzo groaned inwardly at the prospect of having to go out again into the night. It was fully dark now, and by the light of an outside halogen lamp illuminating the back garden, he could see the rain driving almost horizontally across the lawn.

They huddled together under the shelter of the umbrella and hurried over the grass to where the annex sat brooding darkly among the trees. He was aware of her slight, soft body pressed into his side, as he crooked his arm around her shoulders to support the umbrella against the wind.

She unlocked the door, and they scrambled out of the wet into the small square of entrance hall, shaking the umbrella behind them. The flick of a switch caused a single, naked bulb to cast light down into the hall from the narrow stairwell. She pushed open the door in front of them.

“Bathroom in there. Bedroom up the stairs. And this…” she turned to her right and opened a door, “… was Papa’s study.” She leaned in and turned on a light, and Enzo found himself gazing back twenty years into the past.

He felt a strange thrill of anticipation, all his instincts on suddenly heightened alert. Here was the room where Killian had died. The room in which he had somehow created a message for his son. A message that the young man had never seen and which had never been deciphered by anyone since. He laid his overnight bag down in the hall and took three steps back in time to an early fall

night in September, 1990.

The large, square room had a high ceiling. To the right, a tall, shuttered window opened on to what Enzo imagined would be a view across the garden to the house. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the facing wall and the wall to the left. A thousand volumes or more stood side by side, silent witnesses to the murder of the man who had placed them there. Their multicoloured facade lent a warmth to this otherwise cold room.

Killian’s desk faced the door, an austere, uncomfortable-looking guest chair set an an angle on the nearside. Against the door wall stood a wooden filing cabinet, and next to it a work table where, Jane said, Killian spent hours preserving and mounting species of insect gathered from the surrounding countryside. Each one was photographed and annotated in leather-bound volumes. Beyond that, another door led to a small kitchen with little more than a sink and draining board, an old refrigerator, a small electric oven, and a shelf with an electric kettle, teapot and tea caddy.

Enzo’s first impression was of an almost obsessive sense of order. The desk was set at right angles to the window, carefully aligned with run of the floorboards. The books on the shelves behind it were perfectly perpendicular, each spine meticulously lined up with the edge of the shelf it stood on. Enzo crossed the room and ran the tips of his fingers lightly along one of the rows, following the regularity of its contours. And he noticed that the books were all arranged in alphabetical order, first by author, then by title.

On the desk itself two wire trays were placed one at each side. An in tray, an out tray. Each was empty. The brass desk lamp was set at a ninety-degree angle on the far left-hand corner of the desk. The only incongruity was a curled and faded yellow Post-it stuck to its glass shade with Scotch tape. On a pristine, unmarked blotter, a desk diary lay open at the week beginning September 23, 1990. A pen nestled where the pages curled into the line of its spine.

“It didn’t look quite this way when I got here,” Jane said. “Whoever shot him had been searching for something. Whether it was anything specific, or just valuables, we’ll maybe never know.” She sighed. “Anyway, I straightened it up as best I could, trying to remember the way he kept things. Nothing has been moved or removed. And nothing introduced. Everything is exactly as it was then.”

She couldn’t resist a glance toward the floorboards beneath the window, and Enzo was quick to spot it. Although it had faded with time, the blood that had seeped from Killian’s fatal wounds had left an indelible, dark stain in the wood.

“I washed the bloodstains from the wall once the police were finished. There were two exit wounds, and you can see where the bullets pitted the plaster. The third lodged in his spine.”

Enzo wondered whether it was simply time and the no doubt oft-repeated phrasesthat lent the mechanical, emotionless quality to her voice. He nodded and lowered himself into Killian’s captain’s chair. Its leather seat had become dry and brittle after all this time, and the chair groaned beneath his weight. Perhaps by placing himself in the man’s seat he could find someway into his mind.

There were four drawers in the desk. The deep one on the left contained a box of A4 printing paper. The drawer above it revealed an arrangement of open cardboard boxes filled with various items of stationery. Paperclips, drawing pins, staples, a Post-it pad, pens, pencils, erasers. The deep drawer on the right held a box of clear plastic sleeves for filing documents in clip folders. Lying on top of it was an aerosol can with a hand-written label. N, N-diethyl-3-methylbenzamide. Enzo lifted it out and examined it. He held it in the air, expelled a tiny blast and sniffed, wrinkling his nose. “Mosquito repellent.”