Peter May - Freeze Frames

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.

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 Gueguen 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.

Gueguen 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 Gueguen 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?”

Gueguen 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.”