Peter May - Freeze Frames

“Yes.” Jane nodded. This was clearly not news to her.

“Are you troubled by mosquitoes here?”

“Not much. There’s usually an onshore breeze that keeps us relatively insect-free.”

Enzo laid the aerosol back in the drawer and slid open the one above it. Here was a strange arrangement of clear plastic tubing exiting from either end of a transparent plastic film container of the kind that used to hold rolls of film in the pre-digital age. Enzo frowned.

“It’s called a pooter, apparently,” Jane said. “For catching single insects. You use one end as a mouthpiece, and suck the creatures in through the other end to trap them in the container.”

Enzo pulled off the lid and saw that the mouthpiece tube had a tiny square of gauze stuck over one end. Its purpose was obvious. He put it back in the drawer, and picked up the only other item. A small bottle of clear liquid. He held it up. “Do you know what’s in this is?”

“I had it analysed. It’s lactic acid. No one seems to know what he might have used it for.”

Enzo thought about it for a long time. “Lactic acid,” he said at length, “particularly in combination with carbon dioxide, is a well-known mosquito attractant.”

“Oh.” Jane seemed surprised. “No one’s come up with that before.”

“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.