Peter May - Freeze Frames

It was when he reached the landing below his that he first heard the voices. Whispers in the dark. Foreign tongues that he could barely discern and could not understand. But there was an urgency in the voices that conveyed itself without barrier of language. A tension in them. And he became aware that the men who owned them were on the next landing down, and on their way up.

Panic rose like bile to choke him. It was them! They were coming for him. Now. And there was nowhere he could go. He stopped, standing stock still, mid-flight. The only course open to him was to retreat to his studio, and attempt an escape across the rooftops. But the very thought paralysed him with fear. He had felt safe to always leave his windows open, because no thief in his right mind would clamber over these roofs at night. And, besides, he had absolutely no head for heights.

They were getting closer. He heard his name, and blood turned to ice in his veins. No doubt about it. It was him they had come for. And still he stood rooted to the stairs, held there by a debilitating inertia. His only other course would be to charge down through them, taking them by surprise. But what if they had flashlights, and guns? There were several of them, he could tell. He would be totally exposed.

There was no advance warning. So he was taken wholly by surprise when the world came apart around him. Suddenly, and completely. What had seemed like solid matter supporting him turned to dust, and masonry, and timber, the air filled with the screeching and rending of metal and stone. A roar that rose up out of the very bowels of the earth, the hot, rancid breath of the devil himself exploding into the night. Yves was falling, flying, turning. Interminably. Fifteen seconds that felt like fifteen hours, before something struck him on the head, and the world turned black.

He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. But the first thing that struck him, as awareness returned, was the silence. An extraordinary, deafening silence, all the more striking for the contrast with the roar of destruction still echoing in his memory. Dust was settling all around him like the finest snow, and he choked on it, before looking up to see stars where once had been his apartment. He could make no sense of the confusion of masonry and brick all around him, had no conception at all of where he was. But to his surprise he found he was still clutching his suitcase, battered and scored, but intact.

He was lying at a peculiar angle over a chunk of what appeared to be the staircase, and he manoeuvred himself with difficulty into a sitting position. Miraculously, nothing seemed broken, but he could feel blood trickling down the side of his head.

Now he could hear distant voices calling in the night. And someone screaming. Closer to hand, something that sounded like moaning. But in his confusion he was unable to identify which direction it came from. He had no idea what had just happened. An explosion?

He tried to get to his feet and, as he turned, saw an arm protruding from a jagged chunk of masonry, frozen fingers clutching at nothing. He scrambled over the rubble, and with an enormous effort managed to pull the stonework to one side, exposing the hopelessly crushed body of a bald-headed man with with a round face, white now with plaster dust, and streaked crimson with blood. The Citroen driver. There were others here, too. He saw a foot. A hand. A leg. No sound. No movement. His pursuers were dead. All of them. Just three of the sixteen thousand who died that night during fifteen seconds of hell, in what he would soon discover had been the worst earthquake in Moroccan history.

Yet Yves had survived it, and who would know? How many bodies would never be recovered? His included.

Which was the moment he realised that, with his own death, he was being given a second chance at life. No one would be looking for him ever again.

Paris, France, October 28, 2009

It was nearly a year since the bullet had punched through Raffin’s chest and almost ended his life. As far as Enzo could see he had never been the same man since.

He climbed the circular stairs to Raffin’s apartment and heard clumsy fingers practising scales on a distant piano. The same fingers, he thought, which had been playing eleven months earlier when the shots were fired. They seemed to have made little progress since.

He hesitated by the door, remembering how the journalist had lain bleeding here in the hall as Enzo tried desperately to staunch the blood. There was no trace of it left on the tiles.

Raffin looked tired when he opened the door. His usual pallor was tinged with grey, and his pale green eyes, usually so sharp and perceptive, seemed dull. He smiled wanly and shook Enzo’s hand. “Come in.” Enzo followed him through to the sitting room, noticing how he no longer moved with the fluidity of youth. Still only in his middle thirties, he had the demeanour of a man ten years older. His brown, collar-length hair seemed thinner, lank and lacking lustre.

He ushered Enzo to a seat at the table. It was strewn with documents and photographs and scribbled notes. A well-thumbed copy of his book, Assassins Caches, lay open at the chapter about Killian. A half-full bottle of 1998 Pouilly Loche, Les Franieres, stood beside an empty glass at Raffin’s place, condensation trickling down the misted bottle. “I’ll get you a glass.”

“No, thanks.” Enzo could not resist a glance at his watch. It was not yet ten in the morning. Too early, even for him. And he watched with some concern as Raffin re-filled his glass. He had never considered this fashionable young Parisian a suitable match for his daughter. Less so now. “How’s Kirsty?” She had not been in touch for several weeks.

“Fine, last time I saw her. She’s still in Strasbourg.” But he wasn’t going to be drawn on the subject. He sat down and sipped at his wine. “I’ve been going through my research notes. I’d almost forgotten how much more there was about the Killian case than ever went into the book.”

“Why was that?”

“His son’s widow, Jane Killian… she’s still haunted by the call he made to her the night of his murder. He made her promise that nothing in his study would be touched, moved or removed, until such time as his son, Peter, could get to see it. He told her he’d left Peter a message there, something only his son would understand. Sadly, the son was killed in a road accident in Addis Ababa and never got to see it.”

“So what never made it into the book?”

“Any detailed description of what was in the room. She’s had psychics, and journalists, and private investigators go over it with a fine-toothed comb but has always refused to allow publication of the details.”

“Why?”

“She’s afraid that whoever the message was about might read and interpret those details.”

Enzo shook his head. “But it’s nearly twenty years since Killian was murdered, Roger. Can it still matter?”

“It might, if it gives a clue as to who killed him.”

“She still owns the house?”

Raffin took another sip of his wine. “Yes. By law it went from father to son, but since the son was dead within a week of the father, it passed to his widow. No children involved, you see.”

“And she’s still keeping her promise to the old man?”

“Scrupulously. His study remains untouched, just as it was the day of his murder.”

Enzo felt the first rush of adrenaline. It was like a crime scene preserved in a time capsule. “Tell me a little more about Killian himself.”

“There’s not much more to tell than appeared in my book. He was sixty-eight years old. English. He’d owned the house on the Ile de Groix for almost twenty years, using it mainly for family holidays until he retired there full time in ’87, one year after the death of his wife.”