Peter May - Freeze Frames

With the tips of fingers spread wide, he pushed the door to Killian’s study, and it swung slowly inwards. The shutters were still open, and the gloomy light that filtered through the trees in the garden fell through the window and cast dark shadows in every corner. Until he flicked the light switch and flooded the room with cold, harsh light.

Somewhere in here was the final piece of the Killian jigsaw. And he was determined to find it. He walked to the window and stared out into the garden, the trees black with rain, the lawn sodden and patchy. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see the cat that had been haunting him since his arrival. It was sauntering across the grass, tail high, the end of it curled round at the highest point and quivering. Almost as if sensing his eyes on it, the cat stopped and stared at the window. Enzo could see its black coat glistening in the wet. What a miserable life, he thought. Always shut out in the cold and rain. And he wondered whose it was and why it had chosen the Killian garden as its home turf.

On an impulse he went back into the hall and opened the outside door. The cat was no more than eight or ten feet away. He left the door wide, and stood back, an invitation made by body language alone. The animal stood stock still, staring at him, but made no move. Enzo waited for several minutes before the cat finally sat down and continued to stare, clearly unprepared to accept his offer of truce.

“Okay, stay out in the rain, then,” he said, and immediately felt foolish for talking to it.

He left the door open and went back into the study. For a moment he stood gazing at the bookcase, then rounded the desk to look at the Post-its he had left lying on it, the message pad, the open diary, the poem propped against the lamp.

What was missing?

He answered his own question immediately.

The letters sent to Killian by Gerard Cohen. His killer must have found and taken them. But Killian would have wanted Peter to see them, surely? For without them his clues would have been almost impossible to decipher.

Enzo had got there without the letters, but there was something else missing. The sample of Fleischer’s DNA that Enzo was certain Killian had somehow obtained. He lifted up the post-it from the fridge. A fit of the blood will foil the beast. What else could he have meant? A fit of the blood, a matching of the DNA. But where was it?

He slumped into Killian’s captain’s seat and let his eyes wander over the desk in front of him. They came to rest on Ronald Ross’ framed poem. What in God’s name did the poem have to do with anything? And even as he posed the question in his head, the answer came thundering back to him, loud and clear. Mosquitoes! He pulled open the top right-hand drawer and saw there what Jane had called a pooter, a home-made contraption of plastic tubing inserted into each end of a clear plastic film container. Made for capturing and transferring insects. There, too, were the insect repellent and the bottle of lactic acid which he knew, in combination with carbon dioxide, was a recognised mosquito attractant. Damn! Like the tumblers of the combination lock on a safe, everything was suddenly dropping into place.

He stood up and began running his eyes along the shelves of books behind him. There was a whole section on entomology, subdivided into various primary insect species. There were long runs of old journals published by various British entomological societies, The Entomologist’s Record, The Entomologist. There was a small subsection dedicated to the mosquito. Enzo pulled out the first in the row, a slim volume of only eight pages. Collecting Mosquitoes, by Eric Classey. It was subtitled AES Leaflet 11 and had been published in 1945 by the British Amateur Entomologists’ Society. Next to it was a series of slender green paperbacks on the life of the mosquito. Five volumes. With trembling fingers he lifted them one by one from the shelf and riffled through their pages, certain that his eye would be caught by a yellow Ppost-it. But there was nothing, and he rapidly felt his excitement subside into disappointment.

It was only as he lay the last of them on the desk that he noticed its full title, The Life of the Mosquito, Part 6. But there were only five books. He checked each volume in turn. Part four was missing. He lifted his eyes and ran them quickly around the room as if he somehow expected to see the missing volume there in front of him where he had never noticed it before. Stupid! He turned back to the bookshelves. Was it filed somewhere else, out of sequence? It would take some time to check.

A noise made him turn his head, and he saw the black cat sitting in the doorway watching him. It held his eye for nearly a minute, before lifting its right paw to drag across its head from behind the ear, lick, and drag again, cleaning itself, wiping the raindrops from its fur. Even as he looked at it, Enzo found himself jumping focus, his gaze settling on the Post-it that had been stuck to the desk lamp. P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget.

“Boil my icicles.” Enzo’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but it seemed to reverberate around the room. The cat paused mid-lick and looked at him. And suddenly Enzo’s face split into a grin. “You clever old bastard!” he shouted, and the cat turned and fled.

Jane heard him calling from the kitchen and came to the top of the stairs. “I’m still up here.”

After a moment he appeared in the downstairs hall. His eyes were wide and shining with excitement. “Jane, I need a hair drier, do you have one?”

She looked at his hair, neatly tied back in its ponytail and frowned. He had told her he was going to the annex to unravel the final pieces of Killian’s message for Peter. She frowned and said, “You’re going to wash your hair now?”

He almost laughed. “No. It’s not for my hair. Do you have one?”

“Of course. But what’s it for?”

“Just bring it over to the annex. You’ll see.”

By the time she got there, clutching her travel hair drier, Enzo was in the tiny kitchen. The door of the refrigerator was open wide. He took the drier from her and plugged it into the wall socket above the worktop. He had already unplugged the fridge. “You said you’d never defrosted this in all the years since your father-in-law’s death.”

“It was never very high on my list of priorities. The thing must be thirty years old if it’s a day. And I never kept anything in it.”

Enzo pulled open the door of the tiny icebox at the top of the fridge. It was choked, almost to bursting, with ice and frost, folds of frozen condensation formed over the years sealing it completely closed. He switched on the hair drier and directed its blast of hot air directly on to the ice.

She looked at him as if he were mad. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Just what Adam asked Peter to do. I’m boiling his icicles.” He smiled at her consternation. “ P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget. My guess is that this icebox was probably already pretty furred up, even then. But not entirely. I reckon there was maybe just enough of an opening for your father-in-law to push something past the ice, so that it would be hidden from casual view. And who would think to defrost it to see if there was anything there?”

The ice was already starting to melt and drip down through the fridge.

“You’d better get a basin or something to catch the melt water, and a chisel or a big screwdriver.”

When she returned with a bucket, and a large, flat-headed screwdriver, water was already starting to pour from the freezer. Jane placed the bucket beneath it and took the hair drier from Enzo, allowing him to start prising the melting ice from the roof of the icebox. But it was nearly fifteen minutes before a large slab of it finally released it’s twenty-year grip and allowed him to start easing it free with burning cold fingers.