Peter May - Freeze Frames

He took a deep breath and allowed his eyes to close momentarily, before they snapped open again, quickly, refinding their intensity and their focus on Enzo.

“Somehow, belatedly, Killian realised that my father was killing him, not treating him. That was when he came to me and told me the whole story.” He shook his head. “You cannot for a moment imagine how I felt, Monsieur Macleod. The depths of horror and despair that revelation brought me to. Of course, I immediately confronted my father. He was already entering the early stages of senility, and he confessed to everything. Just like that. As if it these were normal memories that a father might recall for his son. I can remember going to the toilet afterwards and vomiting. I was, literally, sick to my stomach.”

And now there was something else in Alain’s eyes. Something like self-pity, an appeal for understanding that he knew was unlikely ever to to be forthcoming.

“I couldn’t let Killian tell the world that I was the son of a monster. It would have ruined my life, monsieur. Elisabeth’s life. The life of my son. A whole family forever more seen in the eyes of the world only as the progeny of Fleischer, the Butcher of Majdanek.”

Enzo felt a taste like bile rising into his mouth. “So you took your father’s old service pistol and turned into a monster yourself.”

“I was protecting my family!” Alain’s voice rose in pitch, as if by protesting more loudly he might drown out the accusation in Enzo’s tone. “My father’s life was virtually over anyway. No purpose would have been served by exposing him after all these years. No lives would have been saved.”

“Just one taken.”

Alain’s eyes flickered away from Enzo’s, unable to face the reflection of his own guilt. “Killian knew it,” he said. “Saw it in my eyes, I guess. That I would never expose my father, or my family. He knew it had been a mistake to tell me.”

Sudden anger overwhelmed guilt, and he turned burning eyes back on Enzo. “It was all history, dead and buried with Killian. And then, twenty years on, you arrive. Raking over long-cold ashes, rekindling the fire. And getting far too close to the truth for comfort.”

“So you murdered old Gassman, trying to make it look like suicide, attempting to pass him him off as Fleischer.” Enzo was almost overwhelmed by the anger and guilt that washed over him in almost equal measure. “The worst of it is, I probably put the idea in your head that day when I asked you if you knew when Gassman had first arrived on the island. And I thought I was simply deflecting you from the fact that I already suspected you.”

Alain stared resolutely back at him, making no attempt to deny it, and for a moment Enzo was almost tempted to charge him and knock him down, squeezing the life out of him with his own hands. But he knew that he would be dead before he took two paces, and that nothing, in the end, could extinguish his own sense of regret.

He found control from somewhere and spoke in a calm, even voice that belied his inner torment. “What you didn’t realise, of course, was that Killian had taken DNA from your father. And that the Wiesenthal Center had a sample of his hair. Poor old Jacques Gassman would never have been identified as Erik Fleischer. You killed him for nothing.”

“He was an old man.” The sudden callous quality in his voice provoked a spike of anger that overpowered Enzo’s guilt.

“After ninety-four years, he didn’t deserve to die like that.”

Alain said nothing for a very long time, and Enzo found his eye drawn to his finger on the trigger. It almost seemed to be caressing it, and fear returned. Then finally Alain said, “How did you know it was me that murdered Killian?”

“You left fingerprints on the shell casings. Fingerprints that couldn’t have been recovered twenty years ago. But time and technology caught up with you, Alain. I took your glass from lunch the other day so we had prints to compare them to.”

Alain frowned. “But you must have suspected me even then.”

Enzo nodded. “Something Killian said in that last phone call to his daughter-in-law and that was confirmed by the date of your father’s arrival on the island. I found that out at the mairie when I went to check on Gassman. Gassman came in May, more than two months after the earthquake in Agadir. But your father was here within three weeks.” He saw the doctor’s jaw clench and unclench

“What was the something that Killian said to his daughter-in-law?”

“He told her it was ironic that it was the son who would finish the job. I had taken that to mean that he didn’t expect to live, and that it would be up to his son, Peter, to finish his work for him, whatever that was. But it was the word ironic that troubled me. Why was it ironic?” He answered his own question. “Because he also expected Fleischer’s son to finish what his father had started. As you said, he must have seen it in your eyes. Knew that you would never let him expose your father. That you would finish the job your father had started and kill him yourself.” Enzo shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it, Alain. I really didn’t. But Killian did, which is why he set the clues for his son in a way that you would never find them, or understand them even if you did. And why he hid the sample of DNA in a place you would never think to look.”

Alain breathed his frustration through clenched teeth. “I searched everywhere for anything that might implicate my father. All I found was correspondence between Killian and someone at the Wiesenthal Center in Paris.” His eyes were a reflection of the confusion of thoughts that must have been tumbling through his head. “How on earth did he get a sample of my father’s DNA?”

“I’ll show you if you like. It’s in the kitchen.” He opened an outstretched palm toward the kitchen door. “May I?”

Alain nodded mutely and stepped aside to let Enzo past. Enzo moved cautiously into the kitchen and switched on the light. He opened the fridge door and lifted out the Ziploc bag, removing the book from inside. Alain approached the door, his gun still trained on the Scotsman. But his eyes were filled now with puzzled curiosity as Enzo opened up The Life of the Mosquito Part 4 to reveal the squashed and preserved insect with its last blood meal between pages fifty-seven and fifty-eight.

“Your father provided this little creature’s last supper. Enough blood there, with PCR amplification, to provide a perfectly acceptable sample for comparison.” He looked up to see a weary resignation pass across Alain’s face. “He knew it had to be kept cool, of course. So where better to hide it, than in the choked-up icebox in the fridge?” He slipped the book into its bag and placed it back in the fridge, turning now to face the doctor with the cold realisation that the time for talking was nearly over. There really was nothing much left to say.

Enzo saw that the hand which held the gun was trembling now, almost uncontrollably. His mouth was so dry he could barely separate his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

“So. What now? Are you going to kill again, rather than face the shame?”

Alain stared at him, his face a passive mask, hiding the kaleidoscope of emotions that must have been revolving behind it. “Yes,” he said. And although he had spoken very quietly, his voice filled the tiny kitchen. He raised the gun, and Enzo saw the nozzle from which the bullet would come. The bullet that would kill him. And it was like looking into the tunnel of his life, a tunnel where all his years were behind him and only darkness lay ahead.

Then suddenly Alain crooked his arm and pressed the barrel to his forehead.

Enzo heard his own voice shouting, “No!”, almost as if it had come from somewhere else. But out of the darkness came hands, emerging from shadows. He heard a scuffle and raised voices as Alain was pulled backward into the room, and the sound of a gunshot brought momentary deafness.