Freeze Frames

Chapter Twenty-Four

Doctor Jacques Gassman’s cottage stood at the end of a long, narrow, pot-holed road that cut through the banks of gorse and broom that smothered the moor between Quehello and the sea. Its freshly whitewashed walls contrasted sharply against the crisp, clean blue of the ocean beyond. The shadows of clouds passed across the moor like riderless horses, and Enzo saw smoke whipped away from Gassman’s chimney top by the stiff sea breeze.

As he parked at the side of the house and stepped out into the freshening sou’westerly, he smelled the wood smoke. The bitter sweet smell of oak, not dissimilar to the smell of the peat they burned in the Scottish northwest.

He went around to the front garden, pushing open a rickety green gate, and knocked on the door. They was no response. He knocked again, and saw the doctor’s Range Rover parked in the shelter of a lean-to on the far side of the house. So the old boy was at home. He tried the door handle and found that the door was not locked. He pushed it open, and leaned in to a gloomy living room with a staircase at the far side. Several doors led off from it. The only one that was open revealed a tiny kitchen, sunlight streaming into it from a south-facing window.

“Hello?” His voice sounded dully in the silence of the house. He heard the tick of a clock, saw oak embers glowing in the cheminee, smelled wet dog hair, and from the kitchen something simmering on the cooker. Soup or a stew. “Hello?” Still nothing.

He pulled the door closed, and walked back up the path to the gate. The tiny patch of lawn was bald in places, overgrown in others, flowerbeds choked with weeds. He supposed that when you were in your nineties, caring for your garden slipped down the list of priorities.

Then, in the distance, his eye was caught by a flash of red scarf, and the sound of a dog barking carried on the wind. He saw the familiar blue peaked hat of the old doctor just above the line of the thicket and realised he must be out walking his dog. Enzo set off along the still frozen mud track to greet him. They met a few hundred meters from the house.

“How are you, Monsieur Macleod?” Gassman grinned to show off his too white, too even dentures and grasped Enzo’s hand firmly in his. His golden Labrador was old, too, and walked stiffly like his master. He looked up at Enzo with sad, world-weary eyes and sat down to wait patiently until the two men would finish talking. “What on earth have you done to your face?”

Enzo’s hand went instinctively to the bruising below his eye. “A nasty fall.”

Gassman regarded him thoughtfully for some moments. “It’s a fine morning.”

“It is.”

“Old Oscar likes nothing better than to take me out for a walk on a morning like this.” He ruffled the dog’s head. “That right, boy?” He grinned. “It’s thanks to Oscar I’m still alive.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“The walking, Monsieur Macleod. Out every day in all weathers. Four, five kilometers sometimes. I would prescribe it to anyone with a dodgy heart or ambitions for longevity.” He grinned. “That and the odd glass of whisky.”

They turned and started walking, by unspoken consensus, back toward the house. The two men and the dog.

“You’ve not been out this way before?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll not have seen the monument to your fellow countrymen.”

Enzo looked around, surprised, seeing nothing but empty moorland. “Monument?”

Old Gassman smiled. “Well… a commemoration. But a well-kept one. They’re not forgotten, those men that died here.”

The monument turned out to be two dark blue plaques bolted to a rock in a tiny clearing in the thicket. A short path led to it from the main track. There was a representation of a twin-engined airplane painted with the markings of the RAF. Inscribed in white beneath it was the legend, They saw Groix for the last time-12 August, 1945. And the names of four British airmen who had died when their plane crashed on the island. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to twenty-six.

“Such a waste of young lives,” Gassman said. “Even although it was the British who bombed Lorient to oblivion, the locals preferred them to the Germans. It takes a long time for a nation to live down the humiliation of occupation. The Germans were still hated here when I arrived in the sixties.” He chuckled. “I should know. I was mistaken for one by a few folk when I came at first.”

Enzo turned curious eyes on the old man. “Why?”

“My accent, monsieur. And, I suppose, my name. It’s a little Germanic.”

“So where are you from, originally?”

“Alsace.” He chuckled. “Over the years, it has been German as much as it has been French. So it’s probably not surprising that my accent made me sound a bit like one of the boches. And it was just over fifteen years since the Germans had left, so the hatred was still fresh in the memory.”

“Was it hard, then, to be accepted here, as an incomer?”

“No, no. A doctor is very quickly at the heart of any community, Monsieur Macleod. Folk forget all about where you’re from when you’re prescribing something to take away their pain.” He laughed. “Or draining a carbuncle.”

They retraced their steps toward the track that led back to the house.

“So what it is that brings you away out here, then?” the old man said. “Not the pleasure of my company, I’m quite sure.”

Enzo smiled. “Just a couple of questions, doctor, that I thought you might be able to answer for me. Regarding one of your former patients.”

The old doctor flicked sharp eyes toward the younger man. “I’m still bound by the Hippocratic oath, you know.”

“I understand that. And I wouldn’t dream of asking you to breach it.”

“Good. Because I wouldn’t. What patient are we talking about?”

“Thibaud Kerjean.”

“Ahhhh. I should have seen that coming.” He shook his head sadly. “As a doctor there’s not much I can tell you about him. It’s plain for everyone to see that the man has a problem with the drink. And the most I ever treated him for were the cuts and bruises he got from brawling in bars.” He pointedly scrutinised Enzo’s bruised and cut face.

“I guess, as a doctor in the practice, you must have known that Adam Killian was terminally ill?”

“Yes, I did. But I don’t see what that has to do with Kerjean.”

“I just wondered, if there was any way that Kerjean might have known about it, too.”

“Pah!” The old man waved a hand in the air, and his exclamation drew a slightly startled look from the Labrador. “He certainly wouldn’t have heard it from me. And to be honest, I never exchanged more than a few words with the man. So I wouldn’t have known what he knew or didn’t know about anything.”

“Oh, okay.” Enzo was hardly surprised. It had always been a long shot. Sometimes doctors knew more about their patients than others. But it seemed that no one had ever got close to Kerjean, except for a handful of women.

“You might ask Elisabeth, though. She spent more time with him than any of us.”

Enzo turned to look at the doctor. “Elisabeth Servat?”

“She was a nurse in the practice when Alain first joined.”

“Yes, she told me.”

“Specialised in physical therapy and re-education. As I recall, Kerjean had a fall on his boat and broke a leg in two places. Elisabeth went out to his place at Locmaria twice a week for a couple of months to get him walking properly again.” He chuckled once more. “Two to three hours a week in the man’s company. He wasn’t the most forthcoming I’ve ever met, but they must have talked about something.”

Enzo stopped for a bite to eat in Le Bourg, and it was early afternoon by the time he got back to Port Melite. Charlotte and the baby had been on his mind all morning, a constant distraction gnawing away at his concentration, like back pain or a toothache that never lets you forget it is there. He was determined to confront her.

Jane Killian’s car was parked, as usual, beneath the trees above the beach. When he got out of his jeep he heard the tick, tick of cooling metal coming from beneath its hood. So she was recently returned from somewhere.

He was halfway across the lawn toward the annex when he heard her voice calling to him from the house. “If you’re looking for Charlotte, she’s not there.”

Enzo stopped and turned. “Oh. Is she with you?”

Jane shook her head. “No, Enzo. She’s gone.”

He stood staring at her for a moment. “Gone where?”

“Left. The island, I mean. I took her to the ferry late this morning.”

Enzo felt the colour rising on his cheeks, his skin stinging, as if he had been slapped. And he wondered if Jane was taking pleasure in this. “Okay. Thanks” was all he said.

He went up to his room and felt its emptiness, a reflection of the way he felt inside. The rumpled bedsheets where they had lain together in chaste self-consciousness seemed to mock him. A reminder of just how great the gulf between them had become. That they should have spent a night together without holding, or kissing, locked in silent conflict, words expressed earlier in the evening endlessly repeating in the mind, like ticker-tape headlines crossing the screen of a twenty-four hour news station.

Choked by a sudden claustrophobia, he hurried back down the stairs and out into the garden, breathing deeply. The black cat that had taken a shine to Charlotte was stretched out on the lower limbs of the nearest tree, watching him with affected disinterest. He turned away and walked briskly around the side of the house to the gate. He couldn’t face Jane right now.

On the far side of the parking area, three houses and a smaller cottage sat up on the bank in an elevated position, looking over the beach, and he wondered how it must feel to live this close to the sea. To feel its moods, suffer its tempers, hear its constant breathing. Like living with an unpredictable lover.

He thrust his hands in his pockets and wandered down the track to the sand. The tiny bay was protected by low cliffs rising at either end, and fingers of black, shining rock that extended into the brine. A flock of seagulls floated and frolicked in the water at the far side of it. The sand was firm, compacted. The tide had withdrawn to reveal the full crescent of silver, was marred only by the arc of seaweed deposited below the high-tide mark.

Enzo followed the line of the water, just beyond its reach, feeling the wind in his face, smelling the seaweed and the salt air. But it couldn’t blow away his depression. At his time of life, he should have been looking forward to his grandchildren. Not to being a father again. And yet there was still an ache in him, somewhere deep inside, an urge to try again. To get it right this time. To be the father he had always wanted and meant to be.

The child that he and Charlotte had made, their son, was another chance. Certainly his last. Surely there was some course of action he could take, some power of persuasion he could exert to prevent Charlotte from doing the unthinkable.