Peter May - Freeze Frames

“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.

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At his command,

Seeking his secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save,

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave?

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!”