Peter May - Freeze Frames

But as Enzo worked his way through the prosecution case, it became painfully clear that there really was no hard evidence, except for that obtained at the crime scene. The fingerprints on the gate, the footprint in the garden, the Montblanc pen. And that was simply blown out of the water by a ruthless defence avocat who demonstrated beyond doubt that the handling of the crime scene and the initial investigation would have been perfect fodder for the scriptwriters of an Inspector Clouseau movie. In fact, he had made the allusion more than once, eliciting considerable laughter from the public benches. It was little wonder, Enzo reflected, that Gueguen was still embarrassed by it all, even although he himself had only been a trainee at the time.

The crux of the whole case, Enzo reflected as he stepped back out into the Rue du Port, revolved around the encounter at the Fort du Grognon. Only three people knew exactly what happened that day. Killian was dead. Kerjean was unlikely to provide any enlightenment. That only left the lover, Arzhela Montin. And she was still on the island, living at Quelhuit, according to the libraire. Enzo checked his watch. There was just time to catch the late afternoon ferry back. He would be on the island again a little after five. Time enough to drive out to Quelhuit and talk to Kerjean’s exmistress before dinner.

Quelhuit was a disparate group of whitewashed cottages gathered around an old church and strung out along the north shore. Fading light washed the landscape as Enzo turned off the Pen Men road and nursed his Jeep along a narrow, winding track between high hedgerows and tall oaks that shed brittle, brown leaves. Ahead, the church and the cluster of houses were silhouetted on the rise against a darkening blue sky.

It wasn’t until he was almost there that Enzo realised Arzhela would no longer be Madame Montin. And he cursed himself for not stopping off at the Maison de la Presse to ask what her new married name was. But as his father had always been fond of saying, he had a good Scots tongue in his head. He would simply have to stop and ask. He pulled into a paved parking area in front of the church, drawing up next to a tractor and a digger. As he stepped out into the dusk, he felt the chill settling with the night and reached back into the jeep to retrieve Killian’s scarf.

Again he was aware of the man’s scent, and the sense of him there, at his shoulder, watching his progress, or lack of it.

He pushed open a gate and heard it squeak loudly in the still of the coming night. The birds had already fallen silent, and the only sound to be heard was the sea washing gently along the shore. His footsteps seemed disproportionately loud as he crunched down the gravel path to the back door of one of a row of terraced cottages. The door was a freshly painted royal blue, and it was hard and unyielding beneath his knuckles.

The silence that followed his knock seemed profound, until a light above the door came on and startled him. The door opened to reveal an elderly lady wearing a patterned apron over a pale blue skirt. She wiped floury hands over the pattern and peered at him in the light.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, madame. I’m looking for the home of a lady who used to be called Arzhela Montin. I’m afraid I don’t know her new nom d’epouse.”

The old lady seemed to lean even further out of the door, squinting up at him with beady blue eyes. “You’re that investigator,” she said. “The one they wrote about in the paper.”

“Yes.” It seemed there was no corner of the island where he wasn’t known.

“She’ll not talk to you, you know.”

He was taken aback. “What makes you think that?”

“She’s never spoken about it in all the years she’s been here. Keeps herself to herself, she does. Thinks she’s better than us, just because she married an incomer and had her face in all the newspapers once. The centre of it all.” She snorted her derision. “Hah! You wouldn’t think it to look at her now. That a woman like that could arouse so much…” she searched for the right word, “…passion.”

Enzo followed her directions, past the church and down the slope to where a manicured lawn led toward the seashore and a solitary white bungalow was set among the trees. He made his way through a wellkept rock garden to a conservatory built along the front of the house. The distant lights of the mainland winked and twinkled in frosted air across water that lay still and grey, like slate.

When she came through from the house to open the door and switch on the lights of the conservatory, Enzo saw what her poisonous neighbour had meant. Arzhela Leclerc, as she now was, did not fit the image of the scarlet woman at the centre of an illicit affair that had led to scandal and murder. Enzo found himself almost disappointed. She was small, no more than five-two. What might once have been a slim and willowy figure, had turned to fat, and the impression she gave was of a ball, almost completely round. Her face, though unlined, had sagged, its jawline lost in jowls, her mouth down-turned and quite unattractive.

She stood looking at him, wearing a mantle of weary resignation. “I’ve been expecting you.” She stood aside, a silent invitation to enter. The conservatory was tiled and filled with fleshy-leafed potted plants. Cane furniture was arranged to take advantage of the view across the water, and she waved him into an armchair. “My husband will be home in about twenty minutes. I’d like you gone by then. What do you want to know?”

So the neighbour had been wrong about one thing. Arzhela Leclerc seemed almost anxious to talk. “Everything.”

She perched herself awkwardly on the edge of the settee and folded her hands in her lap, gently wringing them as she gazed for a long time at the floor, before looking up to meet his eye. “There are things, monsieur, that I have kept to myself for nearly twenty years. When I read about you in the paper, I thought… it’s time to tell. If he comes, if he asks me, I’ll tell him. Maybe then I’ll be rid of it, finally.”

Enzo found himself almost frightened to breathe in case she had a change of heart. “What happened at the Fort de Grognon?” he said.

“Oh, nothing that hasn’t been told a thousand times already. Except that I finally saw Thibaud Kerjean for the man he really was. A man barely in control of himself. A man driven by powerful urges. Sex and violence, and with a temper that released some kind of inner demon that I’d not seen before. Not like that, the way he was with that poor old man.”

“What happened?”

“He was like a man demented, monsieur. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see him foaming at the mouth. I’m sure he believed that being found like that was going to be the end of us. And he was right. But not in the way he thought.” She drew a deep, trembling breath. “He was obsessed with me, you see. Beyond all reason.”

Enzo tried hard to see her as the object any man’s obsession, but found himself agreeing with her, that it was, indeed, beyond all reason. He knew, too, that no matter how painful and traumatic the experience of all that happened to her twenty years before, it was probably the high point of her life. The only moment in it when, as her neighbour had said, she was the centre of all attention.

“I’d known for some time that it couldn’t go on. But I didn’t know how to end it. I couldn’t ever have told him. I was scared of him, you see, scared of what he might do. But when he unleashed his temper like that on poor Mister Killian, I knew the time had come. And in that moment, I saw just how it could be done.” She glanced nervously at her watch. “I would offer you a drink, monsieur. I could do with one myself. But we don’t have time.”