Freeze Frames

Chapter Seventeen

He had forgotten it was Hallowe’en and only remembered when he stepped out of the cold and dark of the Place Leurhe into the noisy ambience of Le Triskell. The first partygoers in masks and costumes were already gathering for a party. It seemed surreal, somehow, steeped as he was in real life tragedy and murder, to slip into this make-believe world of ghosts and ghouls.

Black drapes hung around walls festooned by skeletons and skulls, giant spiders, and pumpkin lanterns. Copious clouds of spider’s web tumbled in wreaths from the ceiling, and windows were plastered with x-rays of body parts, backlit to project the images into the bar. A row of deathheads dangled above the counter, and a skeleton peered out from behind the smoked glass door of a chill cabinet.

On the drive back from Quelhuit, Enzo had called Jane on his cellphone to say that he would be eating in town. He had heard the disappointment in her voice and was relieved that he was spared the prospect, at least for tonight, of succumbing to temptation and indulging in something he would almost certainly regret.

A figure in a witch’s mask and black, pointed hat ballooned into his face. He smelled fresh alcohol on breath that issued from holes in the plastic. A woman’s voice said, “Not getting dressed up for us tonight, Monsieur Macleod? You could have come as Sherlock Holmes.”

A couple of pirates jostled him toward the bar. “What will you have to drink, me hearty? Get the man a whisky, Devi. Or should it be a tot of rum?”

“What will it be, Monsieur Macleod?” Devi was a plump girl in her thirties, with a black moustache painted above ruby red lips, and blond, curly hair beneath a bowler hat. She wore a black suit and waistcoat, several sizes two small, and a white shirt and bow-tie. Charlie Chaplin, Enzo guessed.

“Whisky’ll be fine.”

“I can offer you a Black Bush, if you don’t mind a touch of the Irish.”

Enzo grinned. “I don’t mind slumming it for once,” he said. He reached into his pocket for some cash, but a hand held his arm to stop him. It was one of the pirates.

“No, no, that’s all right, Monsieur Macleod, this one’s on us.”

The three musketeers burst in from the terrace, ushering a blast of cold air in with them. “All for one, and one for all!” One of them thrust his sword toward the ceiling and brought a loop of cobweb cascading down over their heads. A great roar of laughter went up.

“Hey, watch it!” Devi shouted. “It took me hours to put that stuff up.” She pushed Enzo’s Black Bush across the counter.

He leaned toward her, raising his voice above the hubbub. “I don’t suppose you would have been here at the time of the Killian murder?”

She grinned. “I was sitting my bac at the time, monsieur. That was before I left for university on the mainland.” Her smile turned wry. “A worthwhile interlude in my life.” She waved an arm vaguely around her. “You can see where my doctorate in philosophy got me.”

Enzo grinned back. A Celt almost never missed the opportunity to indulge in self-abasement. “They say that the answers to some of the world’s greatest philosophical questions can be found in a bottle.”

“In my experience, the only thing to be found in a bottle is oblivion.” Which was her recognition of yet another Celtic trait, that great capacity for self-destruction. The Celts, it seemed, were obsessed with the self.

Enzo nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d know if any of your regulars were around at that time. Several gave evidence at the trial.”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. But I know that old Robert Kerber has been a regular here for years. He might know.” She nodded toward the end of the bar nearest the door. A man in his sixties, with a cloth cap pulled low over a forehead with lines like scars, sat on a high stool nursing a glass of beer. He wore a checked jacket with leather patches at the elbow and a pair of frayed, baggy jeans. This was no fancy dress, and the man wore an expression of ill-concealed irritation, cocooned in his own world, making no attempt to participate in the celebrations. Enzo recognised the name at once. Kerber was one of those witnesses.

“Thanks.” Enzo lifted his glass and pushed his way along the bar, managing to squeeze in beside him. More revellers arrived: a very fat man dressed as Madame Defarge, clutching knitting needles and a meter of hand-knitted scarf; a thinner man with a beard in the role of Marie-Antoinette; and a zombie with an axe buried in his head. “Can I refill your glass?” Enzo asked Kerber.

The old islander turned dead eyes on the Scotsman. “You can,” he said. “But it’ll not get you anything.”

“I’m not after anything.” He signalled Devi to refill Kerber’s glass.

“No?”

“Just a few minutes of your time.”

“At my age, monsieur, every moment is precious.”

“Life is precious at any age.”

“That’s true.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What do you want?”

“You were here the night Thibaud Kerjean was telling anyone who’d listen how he was going to put Adam Killian in the cemetery.”

“I was, and he did.”

“Was he drunk?”

“I never knew the man, monsieur, when he didn’t have a drink in him.” Kerber took a sip from his replenished glass. Enzo looked at the roadmap of broken veins across his nose and cheeks, and it occurred to him that the same could very probably be said of Kerber. But drunks rarely saw themselves as drunks, and Kerber appeared to see no irony in his words. He doubtless had the same capacity for self-deception as he had for alcohol. Another Celtic self.

“Kerber,” Enzo said, as if trying the name out for size. And then, “Kerjean. There are a lot of Ker names on the island.”

Kerber turned to look at him as if he were an idiot. “And a lot of Mac names in Scotland, monsieur. Son-of, right?”

“Right.”

“Ker is house-of. You people got named after the man who impregnated your mother. We got named after the house we grew up in. Kerber, house of Peter. Kerbol, house of Paul.” He paused. “Kerjean, house of Jean.” He took another pull at his beer. “Anything else I can tell you? The tonnage of tuna caught in 1933? The number of Germans billeted on Groix during the occupation?”

“You can tell me why you think Kerjean carried out his threat to murder Killian.”

“Because he’s a drunk and a brute. A man who would put his fist in your face if you so much as looked at him sideways. He might have been the worse for wear that night, but his anger didn’t come out of a bottle. It was real enough. And Kerjean is nothing if not a man of his word. There’s not a soul who knows him, monsieur, who wouldn’t think him capable of doing exactly what he said he would.”

Enzo stepped out into plunging temperatures. The night was clear and sharp, the sky newly painted black and spattered with silver. His breath billowed around his head like wreaths of mist. From inside the bar, the noise of the party followed him out onto the terrace, where the parasols, wrapped and tied, stood among the tables like guests awaiting an invitation that would never come. Across the square, the lights of an ATM glowed in the wall of the Credit Agricole. And he could see lights on in the doctor’s house.

A narrow street led off darkly from the near corner of the square, and Enzo figured it might lead directly through to the church, where he had parked his Jeep. He threw one end of Killian’s scarf over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his jacket, his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets to keep them warm. The darkness seemed to swallow him as soon as he entered the alleyway, and he had not gone ten meters before he began to regret taking the short-cut. There were no streetlights here, and the moon was still low in the sky, casting the shadows of houses to darken his path. He slowed to take measured, cautious steps into a dark that seemed so profound it was almost tangible. His fingertips detected a wall to his right, and he followed it until almost walking into the side of a house. The street had taken a sharp left without warning, and he found himself with hands pressed up against a shuttered window. He tripped and almost fell over a doorstep, and stumbled forward into a deeper darkness. He cursed under his breath and his voice echoed back at him from hidden walls. Back the way he had come, he could just see the glow of lights from the square, and he was tempted simply to head back and take the long way round. But he couldn’t be that far from the church now. Surely. Another turn in the street and he would see the lights of the church ahead of him. Of that he was certain.

He heard a cough. A single, muffled human bark, somewhere off to his left. And he froze. There was someone there. Now the scrape of a shoe. Leather on tarmac, and the crunch of gravel underfoot. The whisper of voices seemed to rise up into the night, but it might have been his imagination. He felt suddenly very vulnerable, and a tiny knot of fear tightened in his stomach. Spurred to find the safety of a streetlight, he increased his pace, keeping his hand on the wall, following it straight ahead, until it turned sharply to the right. He turned with it, expecting to see the lights of the church square ahead of him. But there was nothing but more black. He looked up and saw a narrow strip of sky above him, illuminated by the stars, almost bright somehow compared to this endless darkened street.

Another cough. More footfalls. Now he was certain that he heard the whisper of muffled voices. Someone was following him. There was no longer any doubt. Two people or more. Frosted grit scraping beneath approaching feet. He turned and hurried forward into the obscurity of the alleyway ahead of him until suddenly the wall opened up to his right, where tall gates stood ajar. They led into a large overgrown garden. The shapes of trees and long grass were just visible in the starlight before the shadow of a large house that loomed out of the night swallowed them up.

Enzo slipped between the gates and into the garden. He could feel the frosted grass soaking his trousers from the the knee down, and he waded through it, as through water, certain that if he could reach the shadow of the trees, he could crouch amongst them, hidden from his pursuers until they gave up the search.

“Hey!” he heard a man’s voice shout and, startled, he began to run. The cold seemed to travel from his feet, though his legs, into his very soul, where fear closed icy fingers around his heart. It could only be Kerjean, and perhaps a couple of cronies, intent on dishing out a physical warning, doing him a little damage. Or worse. The man had been following him earlier in the day, and Enzo cursed his foolishness in straying away from the safety of the light.

Something caught and tore his trousers, causing him to stumble and fall to his knees. He felt thorns tearing through the skin of his calfs. But the sound of Kerjean and friends wading through the tall grass in his wake, got him quickly to his feet, and he sprinted for the far side of the garden where the shadow of the house mired it in darkness.

But now something cold and wet wrapped itself around him, a rope cutting into his arm, spinning him around and pitching him forward. He was helplessly entangled in unseen fabric, clinging and chillingly slimy. He could smell damp and decay, something rotting and rotten. There was a loud tearing sound, and from being semisuspended he was dumped suddenly through the long grass to the hard frosted earth below. It knocked all the breath from his lungs. He tried to get up but couldn’t, as if trapped in a giant, sticky spider’s web. He could hear the swish, swish, of legs running through the grass toward him, breath rasping in the night. And suddenly he was blinded by several flashlights catching him full in their glare, and he raised an arm to shade his eyes. He heard laughter. A woman’s voice. A man’s. And what sounded like a child.

In his confusion, he saw, beyond the lamplight, a human skull, a green face with black spots. A full skeleton stepped into the light, a hand rising through the dark to lift away the death mask to reveal the altogether less frightening face of a teenage girl. A face wreathed in smiles. Bright, shining blue eyes. And peals of laughter rising in the night air. It was a face he knew. But it took a moment for him to realise that it was Alain Servat’s daughter, Oanez. Her sister stepped into the light, the owner of the witch’s green face, then Alain and Elisabeth in Laurel and Hardy outfits, bowler hats above whitened faces. Alain was padded out to make him fatter, a small black moustache painted on his upper lip. All four were almost helpless with laughter.

Alain reached out a hand help him up. “What in God’s name are you doing, man?”

Enzo, it seemed, had run straight into the rotting remains of a hammock strung between two trees. Elisabeth started to help him disentangle himself, while the girls continued to giggle. Enzo’s initial relief gave way to irritation. “I might ask you what you’re doing following folk in the dark.”

Alain laughed. “It’s Hallowe’en, Monsieur Macleod. We’re out guising.”

Elisabeth said, “I’m so sorry, we didn’t mean to scare you. We always take the girls out guising at Halloween. We were on our way home when we saw you leaving Le Triskell, and thought you might like to come in for a drink.”

“But you’re an elusive man, monsieur. Ducking into dark alleys and hiding in gardens.” Alain chuckled, still amused by the Scotsman’s unusual behaviour.

Enzo tried to regain a little of his dignity, brushing away the slime deposited on his jacket and trousers by the decaying hammock. “Oh, I’m always doing that,” he said. “There’s nothing I like better than rolling around in the freezing long grass to make myself cold and wet. It’s my party trick. Do I get an apple and some peanuts?”

This sent the girls off into another paroxysm of giggles. But Elisabeth slipped a comforting arm through his. “I’m sure we can do better than that, Monsieur Macleod. What about a nice bowl of hot soup, followed by a glass or two of whisky by a warm fire?

“Hmmm. Tough choice,” Enzo said. “Roll in the wet grass. Or glass of whisky by the fire.”

“Well, you’ve already done one of them,” Alain laughed.

“True.” Enzo was slowly recovering his sense of humour. “No choice at all, then. Soup and whisky it is.”