Peter May - Freeze Frames

White plaster dust showered down over Gueguen and the two gendarmes who accompanied him, before Alain Servat was pushed up against the wall and handcuffed.

Enzo realised how rapidly he was breathing, and it took him a moment to find his voice as Gueguen turned toward him. “Jesus,” he said. “You left that late. What if he’d pulled the trigger while the gun was pointing at me?”

Gueguen managed a pale smile. He, too, was shaken. “Then I guess, monsieur, that Doctor Servat would have been charged with three murders instead of two.”

Enzo looked beyond him, catching a glimpse of Alain’s white face as he was led away, and he wondered if there could possibly be something in the genetic code that predisposed a man to kill so easily. Or was it simply, as the bible had said, that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son a thousand times?

A movement at the broken window caught his attention, and he saw the luminous green eyes of a cat glowing in the dark as it sat on the sill watching Killian’s murderer being taken away.

It was hardly any time after the ferry had slipped out from the comparative shelter of the harbour and into the grey swell of the strait that separated the island from the mainland that Port Tudy was swallowed by the rain. Vanished, like some imaginary place from celtic mythology, lost in the mists of time.

Enzo dragged himself away from the window and retook his seat in the salon. Pale winter faces huddled into the shoulders of coats beneath hats, dripping umbrellas laid below seats to send tiny rivers of water back and forth across the floor with the rolling of the boat. Celtic faces, hacked out of the gneiss by the wind and the rain and the sea.

He thought about old Fleischer sitting drooling in his wheelchair, lost in some world beyond reach. A man who had taken the lives of others without conscience, who had delivered pain and misery and death in equal measure. A man who would never face the justice he so richly deserved.

And he thought about his son. A man prepared to kill rather than face the shame visited upon him by his father. A man who, unlike his father, would face the judgment of his peers but leave behind him a wife and children who deserved better.

And Adam Killian, a man who had survived the Nazi death camps, only to die at the hands of the next generation. And his son, Peter, who had never had the chance to unravel his father’s final message.

Fathers and sons, he reflected. A sad end. And he wondered how things might end up for this father and his son in the years that lay ahead.