Peter May - Freeze Frames

His head lay in a large, sticky pool of blood that had already lost its lustre. It was rapidly browning as it oxidised and would leave a permanent stain in the wood. A Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol was clutched in the retired doctor’s right hand. Enzo’s eyes dipped to the floor, where he saw a single, discarded brass shell casing.

“Jesus,” Gueguen whispered. He had gone quite pale. Enzo knew he must have seen many dead bodies during his years in the service, but death was something you never got used to. And if you did, it was only because something had died inside of you.

“Looks like a pretty classic suicide,” the other gendarme said. He hesitated. “Except…”

Gueguen looked at him sharply. “Except what?”

“Well, you know, people usually leave a note. A message, a last thought. So when we got here, I looked around to see if I could find one. I found this in his bureau.” He held up an old, worn, leather identity wallet. Enzo noticed that he had taken the precaution of wearing latex gloves before handling anything, a measure of the improved procedures that Gueguen himself had introduced.

“What is it?”

“Identity papers, Adjudant.”

Gueguen frowned. “Well, his identity’s not in doubt is it?”

“It could be now.” The gendarme opened up the wallet. “These are wartime identity papers, sir, issued by the German Reich to an SS Officer named Erik Fleischer.”

There was a long silence, then, broken only by the howling of the wind outside and the rain driving against the windows on the south side of the house, until Enzo’s voice resonated softly around the room. “Could you show me where exactly you found that, officer?”

All heads turned in his direction, and the gendarme flicked a look in the direction of his adjudant, seeking some indication of how to respond. Gueguen gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

“It was in here, monsieur.” And the gendarme turned through the open door behind him. Enzo, followed by Gueguen and the second gendarme, went into Gassman’s study after him. “Just here, in this little open compartment at the top right-hand side of his writing bureau.” He laid the wallet inside it, then lifted it out again. It was where Enzo had found the pile of Gassman’s old passports held together by an elastic band. His eyes flitted over the rest of the bureau, but there was no sign of them now.

There was a polite cough in the doorway behind them, and they turned to see Doctor Servat standing there. Enzo hadn’t paid him much attention until now. He looked wan, tired. His coat hung loose and damp on his shoulders. “Shall I tell the ambulance men to take the body away now?”

“No.” Enzo spoke quickly, and was again aware of everyone’s eyes on him. “Nothing should be moved, or touched. This is a crime scene.”

“How can you know that?” Gueguen said.

Enzo pushed back through to the living room and approached the body. Gueguen followed him and turned to the two ambulance men. “Wait outside please’ And the two men cast sullen eyes at the adjudant, feeling cheated by their exclusion from this moment of high drama.

Enzo waited until the door closed behind them. “For a start,” he said, “Jacques Gassman was left-handed.” He looked round to see all their eyes focused on the gun in the old man’s right hand. “If you were going to kill yourself, particularly by shooting yourself in the head, you would want to be sure you didn’t botch it. If you were left-handed you would take the gun in your left hand, I think.” He turned to Gueguen. “And if your ballistics people at Vannes run a check on the gun he is holding, I’m pretty sure they’ll find it was the same weapon used to murder Adam Killian.”

It was Alain Servat who broke the silence this time. “Are you saying that Doctor Gassman murdered Killian?”

“No, I’m saying that someone would like us to think he did.”

Gueguen said, “You’ve lost me, Monsieur Macleod. I think you’d better explain.”

“Well,” Enzo said reluctantly, “at the risk of incriminating myself, I will have to confess to poking about among Doctor Gassman’s private papers myself just a few days ago.”

“You broke in?” This from one of the gendarmes.

“No. I was here to see him about something else. He was out, so I let myself in. The door wasn’t locked. And I suppose I let my curiosity get the better of me. I had just come from the mairie, where I had established the date of the doctor’s first arrival on the Ile de Groix.”

“Which was when?” Alain Servat asked.

“May, 1960. About two months after an earthquake that killed around sixteen thousand people in the Moroccan seaport of Agadir. I didn’t really believe there was any link between Gassman and events there, but as it happened, I was able to satisfy myself that I was right.” He looked around the faces watching him. Faces that were a study in fascinated incomprehension. Nobody knew quite what to ask next. So he pressed on.

“In that same compartment, officer, where you found Fleischer’s identity papers, there was a bundle of Gassman’s old passports dating back to the 1950s. If Gassman had been in Morocco in 1960, there would have been immigration stamps in his passport to show that. Entry and exit.” He paused. “There weren’t.” He waved a hand toward the identity wallet still clutched by the gendarme who found it. “There was no identity wallet in that compartment. Just the passports. But I’m willing to bet that if you look for those passports now, you’ll not find them.”

“Meaning?” Gueguen’s concentration was completely focused on Enzo’s face.

“Meaning that someone took them and replaced them with Fleischer’s identity papers, so we would think that Gassman was really Fleischer. The same person who killed him. The same person who murdered Killian. The same person whose fingerprint we recovered from the shell casing in Killian’s study.” He stooped to the floor and took a pencil from an inside jacket pocket. Carefully, he slipped the pointed end of it inside the spent shell casing and stood up again, holding it up for them all to see. “The same person whose fingerprint, I am sure, we will also find on this one.”

The wind outside was gusting now to gale force and beyond. They heard it whining in the rafters and rattling the window frames and blowing cold air around their feet. Upstairs, poor Oscar still barked and yelped, his voice almost completely gone now.

“I think you’d better tell us a little more about this Fleischer,” Gueguen said.

Enzo drew a deep breath. “Erik Fleischer is a Nazi war criminal. Investigators on his trail thought he had been killed in the 1960 earthquake in Agadir. But Fleischer didn’t die in the quake. He escaped and ended up here under an assumed identity on the Ile de Groix, a place he thought he would be safe, where no one would ever recognise him in a million years. Except that someone did. A former inmate of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where Fleischer had experimented on prisoners with poisons and surgery.”

“Adam Killian was that inmate?” Gueguen’s eyes were wide now in amazement.

Enzo nodded. “Killian was a Polish national who spent nearly two and a half years at Majdanek. By some miracle he survived both the camp and the war, to end up in England taking British citizenship and retiring finally to this quiet Breton island to pursue his hobby of studying insects. I guess the last thing he expected was to come face-to-face with the man he knew as The Butcher.” He laid the shell casing carefully on the table top. “But he wasn’t sure. So somehow he obtained a sample of Fleischer’s DNA for comparison with some of the man’s hair still held by investigators in Germany.”