Peter May - Freeze Frames

The child that he and Charlotte had made, their son, was another chance. Certainly his last. Surely there was some course of action he could take, some power of persuasion he could exert to prevent Charlotte from doing the unthinkable.

Unable to face an evening alone with Jane, Enzo had spent the afternoon driving round the island, walking the sands of the long inlet at Port St. Nicolas and leaving his tracks in the deserted sandbank at Les Grands Sables, before washing down fresh seafood with a chilled chardonnay in Le Bourg.

It was dark when he got back to the house. There were still lights on, but he went around the side and headed straight for the annex. For once, Jane did not come to the door. Perhaps she was as anxious as he was now to wrap this whole thing up and leave the island. He had been here for some days and made no progress whatsoever, except perhaps for discounting in his mind the thought that it was Kerjean who had murdered Killian.

A drunk, an intemperate brawler, a lover who attracted women like flies to shit, he had about him, nonetheless, a certain integrity, a sense of honour that Enzo had divined from their brief, brutal encounters. It was time to re-focus.

He went up to the bedroom to drop his bag on the bed and check his e-mail on the laptop. There was an IM on MSN Messenger from Sophie. A simple, six-word message that touched his heart. “Missing you, Papa. I love you.”

He sat for some time, staring at it, before looking up through the window, across the lawn toward the house. Jane’s bedroom window was firmly shuttered. He stood up wearily and went back downstairs to the study. As he switched on the light and walked in, he recalled Charlotte’s words. Enzo, he’s talking to us. Telling us about himself. All we have to do is know how to listen. Enzo stood listening, running his eyes over everything that had become so familiar to him. The ordered rows of books on the shelves, the tidy workbench. The desktop with the open diary. The fridge door with its magnets and message list, and single, discordant Post-it. The bloodstained floorboards, the bullet holes in the wall.

He remembered asking Gueguen for a copy of the autopsy report and for one of the shell casings. But since he had heard nothing from the gendarme, he assumed that neither of these things was likely to find its way into his hands. Which was disappointing. None of this was going well.

He looked around again. If Killian was speaking, why couldn’t Enzo hear him? He closed his eyes, and the silence seemed deafening.

He shivered now, as he pushed his hands into his pockets and wandered over to the workbench to look at the upside-down poem on the wall. Canting his head to one side, he tried to read it again but gave up and lifted it down on to the desktop, propping it the right way up against the wall.

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At his command,

Seeking his secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save,

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave?

What on earth was it all about? And who was Ronald Ross? Enzo walked over to the bookshelves. Surely Killian had kept an encyclopedia. He scoured the lines of books until he found a row of twelve dark green volumes. Everyman’s Encyclopedia, A to Z. The books looked old. He lifted one down at random and checked the publication date. 1957. So they were well out of date. Still… He ran his eyes along them searching for the volume RAG to SPI, so that he could look up Ronald Ross.

It wasn’t in its place. He frowned. In its stead was the first of the twelve volumes, A to BAL. It seemed almost inconceivable to him that Killian would have filed them out of order. He checked to see if something else had replaced the first volume, and found that the missing RAG to SPI was now there. The two had been transposed. Who by? Killian? If he had done it, then it could have been no accident. For the first time, Enzo felt a sense of excitement, saw the very first chink of light, and heard perhaps the very first distant echo of Killian’s voice.

He placed the two books on the desk, and sat down in Killian’s chair to look at them, struck by the chilling sense of occupying a dead man’s space, of following in his invisible footsteps.

The first volume he opened was RAG to SPI, and he flicked through the pages to see if there was an entry for Ronald Ross. To his surprise, the search was facilitated by the presence of a blank yellow Post-it stuck on the page with the entry. And Ross’ name itself had been highlighted with a yellow marker pen. The entry was headed, Ross, Sir Ronald (1857–1932) Brit. Physician and poet.

Enzo read that Ross had been born in India, the son of a British general. He had trained as a doctor, and in collaboration with a scientist, Patrick Manson, had explored the theory that malaria was transmitted to man via the mosquito. Following years of perfecting a technique for dissecting the stomach of the mosquito, he had finally made the breakthrough which won him his Nobel Prize-on a day that he thereafter named Mosquito Day. The date was August 20, 1897, and it was the day he discovered, in the stomach wall of a dissected mosquito, the plasmodium long identified in the blood of malaria sufferers as the cause of the disease. In celebration, Ross had written his poem, supposing that his discovery would lead to a cure for malaria.

Enzo was puzzled. He read and reread the entry. But there was nothing in it that seemed in any way connected with what had happened here on this tiny Breton island off the northwest coast of France. Of course, Killian was interested in insects, which might explain his admiration of Ross and his poem. But how was it relevant, if at all?

He sat thinking for some time before absently picking up the volume, A to BAL, and riffling through its pages, almost without thinking. Something caught his eye and made him stop. A flash of yellow. Another Post-it. He flipped back through the pages until he found it. It was stuck to the left-hand page, and written on it, in a bold, tidy hand, in capital letters, were the words, HE DID NOT DIE. The blue ink of the pen was as crisp and clear as the day it had been applied to the paper, never having been exposed to light until now.

Enzo stared at it wondering who Killian was referring to, before his eye was drawn to a yellow highlighted entry on the opposite page. Agadir. He found himself frowning again. Agadir, he knew, was the southernmost port on the Atlantic coastline of Morocco, at one time regarded as the sardine capital of the world. He read through the entry, most of which involved itself with a dispute between France and Germany over territorial claims on the North African country.

Again he was mystified. What possible relevance could this have to Killian’s murder? And yet the words, HE DID NOT DIE, lingered in his consciousness, as if lasered into it.

He closed both volumes again and sat looking at them. There had to be, he felt, some connection between the earthquake in Agadir and the poem by Ronald Ross. And yet, if there was some correlation there, he could not for the life of him imagine what it might be. He touched the books with tactile fingers, as if hoping something might transmit itself to him simply through contact. And then it occurred to him that a more up-to-date entry for Agadir might prove more illuminating. He searched the shelves once more, looking for a more modern encyclopedia but found nothing, and almost gave up before remembering that he could do an Internet search from his laptop.

Enzo brought the computer down to the study and set it up on Killian’s desk. He moved the diary to one side and placed his laptop in front of him, plugging in his USB stick and dialing into his cellphone provider’s high-speed Internet connection. Up came his Google homepage, and he typed in AGADIR. It produced more than six million links, the first of which was the Wikipedia entry on the Moroccan seaport.