Peter May - Freeze Frames

She could no longer remain seated and she rose to wander through the potted plants, to fold her arms and stare out through the glass at the moon rising now over the mainland across the strait. Enzo could see her reflection in the glass, like a mirror. Had she chosen to, she could have seen his reflection too, met his eye without meeting it. But instead she gazed at, or perhaps through, her own reflected image. Dragging up thoughts from the place she had buried them many years before. A place she had never wanted to revisit but had never been able to escape. There was a sense, Enzo thought, of the confessional in all this. He as father confessor, she as the repentant seeking absolution. He wondered if it was ever that easy. “So how exactly did it all end?”

After a long pause she said, “Mister Killian didn’t tell my husband, Monsieur Macleod. I did.” Another silence, as she struggled to find the right words. “I knew he would react, you see. That it would all come out in the open. And that Thibaud would think it was Mister Killian who’d done it. I just didn’t realise how ferocious my husband’s reaction would be. I thought, I really thought, we could have weathered the storm. We had two lovely children, too much invested in our relationship just to throw it away. But I hadn’t counted on his pride. A stubborn, utterly implacable pride, monsieur. Almost worse than Thibaud’s temper.”

“And Kerjean?”

He saw her mouth set in sorrow. “I’d seen the incident at the fort as my chance to break free. Mister Killian as a convenient scapegoat. I never for one moment, monsieur, thought that Thibaud would kill him.”

“And you think he did?”

She turned at last to face him. And nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I do. And I’ve spent every moment of the last twenty years feeling the guilt. Knowing it was my fault. If I could take it all back, I would. I’d have broken it off with Thibaud and faced the consequences, whatever they might have been. It could hardly have been worse than the way it turned out.”

“Do you think that might have saved your marriage?”

She shook her head sadly. “No.” She sucked in a deep breath. “Because there was something else, monsieur. Something I never told anyone, except my husband. Until now.”

Enzo stared at her in the silence of the conservatory and realised what that something was. “You were pregnant.”

A momentary fire flickered in her eyes, then died again like embers at the end of a long night. “That’s what he couldn’t accept. My husband. His pride. I couldn’t pretend to him it was his, because we hadn’t slept together in months. And that, above all else, is what he didn’t want people to know-that I was carrying Kerjean’s child. When news of the affair broke, everyone thought he threw me out. But the truth is, we had made a deal. And I kept my end of it.”

“Which was?”

“To leave immediately. Go to the mainland and have the pregnancy terminated.”

“And his end was…?”

“To take me back, once it was done, and try to make a go of it.”

Enzo nodded. “But he didn’t keep to that.”

The fire flared again, fanned by the oxygen of her remembered anger. “He used my absence to poison the minds of my children, to turn them against me. As soon as I’d had the abortion, he filed for divorce and got the courts to ask the children who they would rather be with-him or me.”

“And they chose him.”

The recollection still hurt. “They left the island, the three of them, almost as soon as the divorce was granted, and I haven’t seen my children since. Not once.”

They heard the sound of a car on the road by the church. It stopped, idling for a moment, before the engine ceased and they heard the slamming of a car door.

Her distress was immediate. “That’s my husband. Go now. Please.”

Enzo stood. “He doesn’t know any of this?”

She shook her head. “Only what was known at the time. And, of course, I had my own slant on it for him. But I have a new life now, monsieur. And I won’t ever speak of this again. Please go.”

Enzo nodded and let himself out, feeling how the temperature outside had dropped as he turned through the rock garden at the side of the house and saw the shadow of a man coming across the grass toward him. By the light at the corner of the house, Enzo saw that he was tall. A middle-aged man losing his hair. He wore a long coat and carried a briefcase. Enzo passed him without stopping, meeting his eye only fleetingly, and offering the merest nod of acknowledgment. Without looking round, he was aware that the man had stopped, and could almost feel his eyes on his back.

What would she tell him? That Enzo had come knocking at the door, trying to rake over the ashes of the past and that she had sent him packing? Or having finally lanced the boil that had been slowly poisoning her for twenty years, would she now tell him the truth?

Enzo saw the last streaks of red in the western sky as he reached his car and knew that he would never know.

He had forgotten it was Hallowe’en and only remembered when he stepped out of the cold and dark of the Place Leurhe into the noisy ambience of Le Triskell. The first partygoers in masks and costumes were already gathering for a party. It seemed surreal, somehow, steeped as he was in real life tragedy and murder, to slip into this make-believe world of ghosts and ghouls.

Black drapes hung around walls festooned by skeletons and skulls, giant spiders, and pumpkin lanterns. Copious clouds of spider’s web tumbled in wreaths from the ceiling, and windows were plastered with x-rays of body parts, backlit to project the images into the bar. A row of deathheads dangled above the counter, and a skeleton peered out from behind the smoked glass door of a chill cabinet.

On the drive back from Quelhuit, Enzo had called Jane on his cellphone to say that he would be eating in town. He had heard the disappointment in her voice and was relieved that he was spared the prospect, at least for tonight, of succumbing to temptation and indulging in something he would almost certainly regret.

A figure in a witch’s mask and black, pointed hat ballooned into his face. He smelled fresh alcohol on breath that issued from holes in the plastic. A woman’s voice said, “Not getting dressed up for us tonight, Monsieur Macleod? You could have come as Sherlock Holmes.”

A couple of pirates jostled him toward the bar. “What will you have to drink, me hearty? Get the man a whisky, Devi. Or should it be a tot of rum?”

“What will it be, Monsieur Macleod?” Devi was a plump girl in her thirties, with a black moustache painted above ruby red lips, and blond, curly hair beneath a bowler hat. She wore a black suit and waistcoat, several sizes two small, and a white shirt and bow-tie. Charlie Chaplin, Enzo guessed.

“Whisky’ll be fine.”

“I can offer you a Black Bush, if you don’t mind a touch of the Irish.”

Enzo grinned. “I don’t mind slumming it for once,” he said. He reached into his pocket for some cash, but a hand held his arm to stop him. It was one of the pirates.

“No, no, that’s all right, Monsieur Macleod, this one’s on us.”

The three musketeers burst in from the terrace, ushering a blast of cold air in with them. “All for one, and one for all!” One of them thrust his sword toward the ceiling and brought a loop of cobweb cascading down over their heads. A great roar of laughter went up.

“Hey, watch it!” Devi shouted. “It took me hours to put that stuff up.” She pushed Enzo’s Black Bush across the counter.

He leaned toward her, raising his voice above the hubbub. “I don’t suppose you would have been here at the time of the Killian murder?”