Peter May - Freeze Frames

For a long time after he had hung up, Enzo sat thinking before finally getting up and crossing the lawn to the house. The black cat was sitting at the base of one of the trees washing its face. It paused mid-wipe, one paw poised behind its right ear, to watch as Enzo knocked on the back door. When Jane opened it, dressed now, her face softened by freshly applied make-up, he said, “Whose cat is that over there?”

She peered across the garden and shrugged. “No idea. I’ve never seen it before.” She held the door open, and he stepped up into the kitchen. “Any developments?”

“I’m going to Paris tomorrow to meet a man from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Apparently he and your father-in-law exchanged letters in the spring of 1990, and met in Paris in July of that year.”

Jane raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Really? He never mentioned anything about that to us.”

“There were no letters among his belongings?”

“No, there weren’t. I’d have noticed if there were. Coffee?”

“Sure.” He sat down at the kitchen table as she poured them each a cup. “Jane, I want to you to think back to the telephone conversation you had with him the night he was murdered.”

“What about it?”

“Tell me again how it went.”

She placed their cups on the table and sat down. For several moments she was lost in a distant memory. “It’s very clear to me. Still. Even after all these years. I can almost hear him.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t want me to speak, just listen. Said he knew that Peter wouldn’t be back from Africa till October, and that if anything were to happen to him in the meantime, Peter was to come straight here.”

“And he explained why.”

“Yes. He said he had left a message for Peter in his study, and that if he died before Peter got back I was to make sure nobody disturbed anything in the room. He was so insistent on that.”

“Did you ask him what kind of message?”

“I did. But he just said that no one other than Peter would understand it. And that it was ironic that he was the one who would finish it.”

“Peter?”

“Yes.”

“Finish what, exactly?”

“He didn’t say. He said…” And she thought hard, trying to recall his exact words. “It’s just ironic that it’s the son who will finish the job.” She sighed. “I wanted to know why he couldn’t tell me. And he said it was too great a responsibility. Peter would know what to do.”

But Enzo wasn’t listening anymore. Those connections his brain had been making deep down in his subconscious were fizzing upwards now, like bubbles breaking the surface of his consciousness. And he knew it wasn’t science that had made the connections. It was intuition. But it would be up to science to provide the proof and, in the end, just maybe lead to the truth.

After the cold of the last few days, the warmth in the sun was extraordinary, like a return to late summer or early fall. It laid its clear yellow light across the ocean like reflective glass and cut deep shadows into the sheltered waters of the tiny harbour at Port Lay. Boats tethered to the quayside strained and bumped and groaned on the gentle swell. An old man sat on the harbour wall with rod and line, dozing in the late morning sunshine. Anything taking his bait would have disturbed his peace. There was not another soul around.

Enzo and Elisabeth stood high on the east bank looking down on the harbour below. They had driven up past the deserted fish processing plant and parked in an overgrown patch of ground that had once been the car park. Whitewashed cottages with slate roofs and blue and pink shutters climbed the hillside among trees that clung stubbornly to yellowed leaves. The sea breathed through the throat of a harbour that sucked water in and out with the ebb and flow of the tide, and the plaintive cries of seagulls overhead were a lament for way of life long gone.

“That’s my house just up there.” Elisabeth pointed to a bungalow with a steeply pitched roof overlooking the harbour on the far side. She laughed. “Well, not my house. The house where I grew up. My mother still lives there.”

Enzo tried to picture in his mind the scene that Elisabeth had described the other day, of tuna boats in full sail plying in and out of this tiny harbour, the quayside crowded with fishermen landing their catch, seabirds clustered around the crates of fish as they lined up along the quay. But it was an image almost impossible to conjure out of this tranquil little inlet. It existed now only in photographs and in the memories of those for whom it had been a reality. If he could have seen it through Elisabeth’s eyes, then he might have pictured something quite different.

He glanced at her and saw the fondness in her gaze as she peered back through the haze of years toward her childhood. “Must have been a special place to grow up,” he said.

She smiled. “It was. Of course, like all island girls, I hoped to marry a man from the mainland and escape. When you are a child, the island is your whole world, filled with endless possibilities. But when you get older the water that surrounds you makes it feel like a prison. It shrinks, becomes confining, and you start to feel trapped by it. In the end, I had to leave.”

“But you came back.”

She laughed. “Only because I was daft enough to marry a fellow islander. Of course, Alain is still only first generation. His father’s family came from Paris. But his mother was an island girl just like me, so he has genuine island blood in him.” Her smile faded. “But all our children will leave in the end, and there’ll be no one to look after us like we looked after our parents.”

They gazed in silence for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the peace, and the comforting sound of the ocean. Enzo silently rehearsed his change of subject, before he turned his eyes toward her and said, “I wanted to ask you, Elisabeth… about your home visits to Thibaud Kerjean in the late summer of 1990, after he broke his leg.”

She didn’t move, and there was not the slightest change of expression on her face. But it drained of colour, and a glaze like cataracts crossed her eyes. It felt like a very long time before she spoke. “You know, then.” It wasn’t a question. Her voice seemed very tiny, lost in the blink of an eye on the edge of the offshore breeze that caressed their faces. Enzo said nothing, almost holding his breath. His question had been innocent enough, but Elisabeth had read more into it than he could ever have anticipated. “I’ve been dreading this for twenty years. Did Thibaud tell you?” She turned searching eyes on him, something like fear in them now. And consternation. She shook her head. “Why would he do that now, after all these years? He was prepared to go to prison back then to protect me.”

Enzo’s mind was racing. But his voice was calm, and gave no indication of the turmoil behind it. “What on earth did you see in him, Elisabeth?”

Now she looked away, her expression pained, her eyes lighting on the house where she had grown up, wishing perhaps she could be transported back there, to the innocence of childhood. “Alain and I were going through a difficult time. I’d just given birth to Primel, and after the initial joy of it, I sank into the most terrible post-natal depression. I was almost suicidal, Enzo. The baby was keeping us awake most nights. Endless, endless crying. My nerves were shot to pieces. And so was our relationship. Alain coped with it all much better than I did, but even so, things had never been worse between us.

“My mother was looking after Primel during the day, and I was still working part-time at the clinic. Alain thought it would be good for me to be out of the house, getting a break from the baby.” She drew a deep, tremulous breath. “Which is when I got to know Thibaud. After he broke his leg and Doctor Gassman assigned me to his physical re-education.”