Peter May - Freeze Frames

“Right here. Sharing the responsibility.”

“Oh? Just like you were with Kirsty?”

Of all the wounds inflicted on him on this dark November night, that was the deepest, and hurt the most. Not least because it was so unfair. “I never turned my back on Kirsty,” he said. “Never. It was her mother who closed that door on me. Used her own daughter as a stick to beat me with.” But no matter how many times he told himself this simple truth, he still couldn’t shake off his sense of guilt.

They lay in bed, not touching, both of them awake in the dark for a very long time. Enzo lay on his back, staring blindly at the ceiling. Everything that had happened to him tonight was somehow overshadowed by Charlotte’s situation. For the first time in his life he wished he were twenty years younger, regretted the wasted years and the passage of time. Time that was against him. Charlotte’s bald statement of fact that by the time their son had reached adulthood Enzo would be seventy had stunned him. He still saw himself as the young man he had been thirty years before. The idea that he would be seventy in the not too distant future was shocking. Seventy! How was it possible? Where had his life gone? And yet to think like that, he knew, was to throw away all the good years to come, to accept the mantle of old age and discard his youth as spent, like the greater part of a dwindling fortune.

He was not quite sure when it was that he finally drifted off into an uneasy slumber, but when he awoke with a start from some disturbing dream, the digital read-out on the bedside clock showed 2.43. He lay for several minutes, listening to his own breathing, before becoming aware that Charlotte was no longer in the bed beside him. He turned his head and saw the light from the stairwell in cracks around the door, and reluctantly he slipped from the warmth of the sheets to find his dressing gown and slippers.

Charlotte was sitting in the captain’s chair behind Killian’s desk, the black cat curled up on her lap. She ran gentle fingers back through its long fur, and Enzo could hear it purring from the door.

“I heard him meowing outside and let him in. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Would it matter if I did?”

She smiled. “No.” Then, “I couldn’t sleep.”

He nodded.

“I spent some time looking at Killian’s notes.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps if they were in French. But I can make no sense of them.”

He moved into the study, closing the door behind him, and sat in the chair facing her. “So what did you talk about tonight, you and Jane?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. She’s a sad creature, Enzo.”

“How so?”

“Her parents split up at an early age, and she never really bonded with either of them. It was one of the reasons she was so drawn to Peter. His relationship with his father. The first time, she said, she’d known a real family. Like being a part of something special. I think she was as much in love with Adam as with Peter.”

Enzo shook his head. “My God, you never stop playing the psychologist, do you?”

“I don’t play at it, Enzo. It’s what I do. People find it easy to talk to me. You did once, too.”

“Don’t project your faults on to me. You’re the one who never talks, never telling me what’s in your head. I’m a damned open book.”

She scratched the cat under its chin, ignoring Enzo’s jibe. Whatever thoughts they had provoked, she wasn’t about to divulge them. The cat stretched its head back, eyes closed. “Killian himself would have made an interesting subject. The immigrant who sees his heritage as a stain on his new nationality. A Pole who wanted to be more English than the English, and when he couldn’t quite achieve it for himself, invested all the time and effort in his son. He turned Peter into the archetypal Englishman, baptised in the Church of England, sent to public school.”

Enzo chuckled. “And educated at a Scottish university.”

“I don’t think Adam Killian saw any difference. Only the Scots see themselves as different from the English. To the rest of the world British, English, Scottish, it’s all same thing.” She cocked an eyebrow and tilted her head, expecting a challenge. When none came, she just shrugged. “Anyway, Adam made sure that no one would ever know that Peter’s roots couldn’t be traced all the way back to the Norman conquest. They played word games together when Peter was still a boy. All designed to expand his vocabulary, provide him with an unassailable grasp of the language, mould him into the Englishman Adam had always aspired to be.” She gazed thoughtfully off into the middle distance. “Jane’s tragedy was that she lost them both within a few weeks of each other. No sooner had she found her family than she lost it.” She looked up. “A little like you, I suppose, with Pascale.”

Enzo nodded. The thought had not escaped him.

The cat stretched and stood up, before stepping gingerly on to the desk top and looking cautiously at Enzo from a safe distance.

“And what did any of it matter? That search for an identity, a nationality. With both of them dead, the family line ended there.” She paused. “Just as mine will end with me, unless I have a child. I guess that’s the thing about being the daughter of adoptive parents. With no surviving blood relatives that I know of, I feel a certain responsibility. A certain reluctance to let my passing be the end of a whole thread of human history. But that is a decision I have yet to make.” She examined Enzo in the cold, harsh light of Adam Killian’s study. “Not a problem for you, of course. With two daughters that we know of, and God knows how many other progeny that we don’t.”

Air exploded from Enzo’s lips in exasperation. “That’s completely unfair, Charlotte. I’ve made mistakes in my life, sure. Who hasn’t? But I’m not the one who’s kept our relationship at arm’s length. And I’m certainly not going to walk away from the responsibility of our child.”

Charlotte ran the flat of her hand back over the cat’s head, following the curve of the spine to its tail. “Maybe. But I’ll tell you this. Whether or not I have the baby is a decision I will be making on my own.”

And Enzo felt a chilling sense of finality in this.

The landscape through which he had trudged in the dark looked very different in the sunshine of the following morning. Picture postcard clouds, like tufts of cotton wool, tumbled across a watercolour wash of pale blue, and the insipid yellow November sunshine brought the warmth of the south with it on the edge of a brisk wind.

The mechanic from Coconut’s said little as he navigated his Land Rover among clusters of cottages, winding through rolling countryside toward the flat, open clifftops of the southern elevation. Before leaving the garage he had listened to Enzo’s tale of tyre-slashing vandalism with an ill-concealed scepticism, passing thoughtful eyes back and forth over the Scotsman’s bruised and battered face. Whatever he believed, he merely muttered oaths and imprecations. Then he threw four spare wheels in the back of the Land Rover.

They would, he said, have to report this to the gendarmes, and Enzo’s insurance would be picking up the tab.

In the parking area at the Trou de l’enfer, the mechanic examined each of the tyres and shook his head in disbelief. “Never saw anything like it,” he said. “Not here, not on the island. It could only have been an incomer that did this, monsieur.”

“You’ve been here a long time, then?”

“All my life.”

“Always worked at Coconut’s?”

His laugh was sour. “No, monsieur. I used to have my own garage in Port Tudy. Service and repair. It was a good going business until that damned trial.” He opened his tool box and prepared to start jacking up the jeep.