Peter May - Freeze Frames

“Yves lived alone then?”

“As far as any of us knew.” Khalid grinned suddenly, revealing a mouthful of gaps and yellow stumps. “Though there was a rumour about an affair with the wife of some politician.”

“Who?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know, monsieur. No one did. Maybe it was just a story. But he had a certain… mystique… about him. You know? A sort of swagger. Self-confident. Like a man who was screwing the wife of someone important.” He laughed. “He had the style of the French. You could have believed anything about him.”

“Everyone thought he was French, then?”

Khalid looked at him blankly. “Why wouldn’t they, monsieur, since that is what he was?” He opened a tin that he produced from some hidden pocket, and took out a badly rolled cigarette. He lit it and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “Come to think of it, I might just have a photograph of him somewhere at home. There was a party to celebrate someone’s retirement, and all the staff were there. There were a lot of pictures taken that night. I have a few of them. Or, at least, I did at one time.”

The taxi took them deep into the rebuilt heart of the new Agadir. Apartment blocks lined narrow streets with shops and stalls and spindly trees with dusty green leaves shading donkeys and bicycles. Khalid talked nonstop with their driver in Arabic, sitting next to him in the front seat of the battered Volkswagen, smoking profusely. Enzo sat on his own in the back, staring from the window at the blur of colour and people that smeared his vision. He wasn’t really looking, lost still in the despond into which Charlotte had plunged him.

The entrance to Khalid’s apartment block was in a shaded alleyway that climbed steeply off the main drag. Enzo paid the driver and followed the old man through an archway and up a tiny staircase to the third floor. The heat was stifling and increased as they climbed. Arab music was blasting out somewhere from a badly tuned radio, and the sound of raised voices rose with the heat from the street below. They squeezed past several bicycles padlocked together on the landing and stepped over boxes and bric-a-brac cluttering the hallway just inside Khalid’s tiny apartment. A single room served as a living, dining, kitchen area, with a curtain closing off a recess with a bed. The floor and every available laying space was littered with the detritus of this man’s life. Newspapers, books, empty food cartons, bottles, dirty plates. All the windows were open wide, and the fetid air of the apartment vibrated to the hum of countless flies.

“Have a seat,” Khalid said over his shoulder, as he searched the drawers of an old dresser.

Enzo looked around. But he could not have sat without moving things off chairs. “That’s all right,” he said.

Finally, the old man turned toward him, clutching an envelope of old photographic prints, grinning widely, his eyes screwed up against the smoke that rose into them from his cigarette. “Got them.” He started leafing through the faded prints, colours that had long since lost their lustre, chuckling and muttering to himself as he recognised forgotten faces, and dredged up long lost memories. Finally he let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. “Ahhhh.” And he held out a dog-eared print for Enzo to take. “Yves Vaurs is the one in the middle.”

Here was a group, standing awkwardly together, smiling self-consciously for the camera. Women with covered heads, a couple of men in djellabas, the rest in suits. The faces of people long dead. Enzo wondered how many of them had died in the earthquake.

The man in the middle stood taller than the rest. He had a fine head of thick, black hair and smiled more easily than the others. Although older, it was, unmistakably, the same man in the photograph Gerard Cohen had shown him. Proof, if any were needed now, that Erik Fleischer and Yves Vaurs were one and the same man. A man who had not died, as everyone believed, in the terrible earthquake of 1960. A man who was still alive and living on a tiny island off the coast of Brittany in France.

There was something a little unreal about being back on the island after the heat and the bright sunlight of North Africa. Here the air was the colour of sulphur, the sky low and bruised. He’d had some hours to acclimatise himself again to the late French fall during the long train ride from Paris and a blowy crossing on the ferry. But the wind whipping rain into his face as he disembarked at Port Tudy still came as a shock, stinging his skin red and soaking his jacket and trousers as he struggled with his umbrella to cross the street to Coconut’s car rental.

The rain had eased by the time he drove down the hill into Port Melite, and a dark cloud of depression descended on him as he prepared to unravel the last of Adam Killian’s long-obscured message to his son. It would, he knew, lead him to a place he had no real desire to go.

Jane Killian was surprised to see him. “I didn’t expect you back so soon. Actually, you’re lucky you caught me. I’m just packing.” She headed back upstairs, and he followed her up and into the master bedroom. A suitcase lay open on the bed, clothes folded neatly around it. “I’m getting the ferry late afternoon. How was Paris?” She continued to lay items of clothing carefully into the suitcase.

“Wet. But I’ve been a little further afield than that.”

She turned to look at him. “Oh? Where?”

“Agadir.”

She seemed surprised at first, then nodded slowly. “The entry Papa marked in the encyclopedia. What did you find there?”

“A man called Yves Vaurs who was supposed to have died in 1960, but didn’t.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You actually met him?”

“No. But I talked to someone who knew him. And saw his photograph, a photograph of the same man whose picture I also saw in Paris. A man called Erik Fleischer.”

She stared at him, consternation drawing together frown lines between her brows. “None of this is making very much sense to me, Enzo.”

He hesitated, turning for a moment to gaze from the window across a dripping wet garden toward the annex. Then he turned back to her. “Why didn’t you tell me that Adam Killian spent time in a concentration camp during the war?”

She turned almost instantly pale, before a blush of pink appeared high on her cheeks, just below the eyes. “How do you know that?”

“I’m guessing. Am I right?”

She drew her lips into a tight line and nodded. “Yes. But no one in the world knew about that. Except Adam himself, and Peter. And, of course, me. Although Papa never knew that Peter had told me.”

“Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, in Poland, right?”

Her eyes opened wider. “How can you possibly know all this?”

He ignored her questions. “Why was it such a secret?”

“Oh… I don’t know.” She waved her hand vaguely through the air. “All part of Papa’s denial of his past, I guess. Of his Polish origins. Although Peter knew about it, he said Papa would never speak of it. Never. And he made Peter promise not to tell anyone.”

“But he told you.”

“We were husband and wife.” There was a defensive tone in her voice. “We had no secrets between us. But I kept my promise of silence to Peter. That’s why you’ll find no reference to it or record of it anywhere.” Her eyes were troubled, confused. “But I don’t understand… If you found out about it, does that mean it has something to do with his murder?”

Enzo nodded. “It has everything to do with his murder, Jane.”

The same chill as always permeated the annex. Enzo’s depression deepened as he pushed open the door and stood under the naked electric light bulb that hung in the stairwell. He dropped his overnight bag on the floor, not sure how much longer he would be here, but reluctant to take it upstairs, as if to do so was committing him to another cold, lonely night in the attic bedroom.