Freeze Frames

Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Five

Unable to face an evening alone with Jane, Enzo had spent the afternoon driving round the island, walking the sands of the long inlet at Port St. Nicolas and leaving his tracks in the deserted sandbank at Les Grands Sables, before washing down fresh seafood with a chilled chardonnay in Le Bourg.

It was dark when he got back to the house. There were still lights on, but he went around the side and headed straight for the annex. For once, Jane did not come to the door. Perhaps she was as anxious as he was now to wrap this whole thing up and leave the island. He had been here for some days and made no progress whatsoever, except perhaps for discounting in his mind the thought that it was Kerjean who had murdered Killian.

A drunk, an intemperate brawler, a lover who attracted women like flies to shit, he had about him, nonetheless, a certain integrity, a sense of honour that Enzo had divined from their brief, brutal encounters. It was time to re-focus.

He went up to the bedroom to drop his bag on the bed and check his e-mail on the laptop. There was an IM on MSN Messenger from Sophie. A simple, six-word message that touched his heart. “Missing you, Papa. I love you.”

He sat for some time, staring at it, before looking up through the window, across the lawn toward the house. Jane’s bedroom window was firmly shuttered. He stood up wearily and went back downstairs to the study. As he switched on the light and walked in, he recalled Charlotte’s words. Enzo, he’s talking to us. Telling us about himself. All we have to do is know how to listen. Enzo stood listening, running his eyes over everything that had become so familiar to him. The ordered rows of books on the shelves, the tidy workbench. The desktop with the open diary. The fridge door with its magnets and message list, and single, discordant Post-it. The bloodstained floorboards, the bullet holes in the wall.

He remembered asking Gueguen for a copy of the autopsy report and for one of the shell casings. But since he had heard nothing from the gendarme, he assumed that neither of these things was likely to find its way into his hands. Which was disappointing. None of this was going well.

He looked around again. If Killian was speaking, why couldn’t Enzo hear him? He closed his eyes, and the silence seemed deafening.

He shivered now, as he pushed his hands into his pockets and wandered over to the workbench to look at the upside-down poem on the wall. Canting his head to one side, he tried to read it again but gave up and lifted it down on to the desktop, propping it the right way up against the wall.

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At his command,

Seeking his secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save,

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave?

What on earth was it all about? And who was Ronald Ross? Enzo walked over to the bookshelves. Surely Killian had kept an encyclopedia. He scoured the lines of books until he found a row of twelve dark green volumes. Everyman’s Encyclopedia, A to Z. The books looked old. He lifted one down at random and checked the publication date. 1957. So they were well out of date. Still… He ran his eyes along them searching for the volume RAG to SPI, so that he could look up Ronald Ross.

It wasn’t in its place. He frowned. In its stead was the first of the twelve volumes, A to BAL. It seemed almost inconceivable to him that Killian would have filed them out of order. He checked to see if something else had replaced the first volume, and found that the missing RAG to SPI was now there. The two had been transposed. Who by? Killian? If he had done it, then it could have been no accident. For the first time, Enzo felt a sense of excitement, saw the very first chink of light, and heard perhaps the very first distant echo of Killian’s voice.

He placed the two books on the desk, and sat down in Killian’s chair to look at them, struck by the chilling sense of occupying a dead man’s space, of following in his invisible footsteps.

The first volume he opened was RAG to SPI, and he flicked through the pages to see if there was an entry for Ronald Ross. To his surprise, the search was facilitated by the presence of a blank yellow Post-it stuck on the page with the entry. And Ross’ name itself had been highlighted with a yellow marker pen. The entry was headed, Ross, Sir Ronald (1857–1932) Brit. Physician and poet.

Enzo read that Ross had been born in India, the son of a British general. He had trained as a doctor, and in collaboration with a scientist, Patrick Manson, had explored the theory that malaria was transmitted to man via the mosquito. Following years of perfecting a technique for dissecting the stomach of the mosquito, he had finally made the breakthrough which won him his Nobel Prize-on a day that he thereafter named Mosquito Day. The date was August 20, 1897, and it was the day he discovered, in the stomach wall of a dissected mosquito, the plasmodium long identified in the blood of malaria sufferers as the cause of the disease. In celebration, Ross had written his poem, supposing that his discovery would lead to a cure for malaria.

Enzo was puzzled. He read and reread the entry. But there was nothing in it that seemed in any way connected with what had happened here on this tiny Breton island off the northwest coast of France. Of course, Killian was interested in insects, which might explain his admiration of Ross and his poem. But how was it relevant, if at all?

He sat thinking for some time before absently picking up the volume, A to BAL, and riffling through its pages, almost without thinking. Something caught his eye and made him stop. A flash of yellow. Another Post-it. He flipped back through the pages until he found it. It was stuck to the left-hand page, and written on it, in a bold, tidy hand, in capital letters, were the words, HE DID NOT DIE. The blue ink of the pen was as crisp and clear as the day it had been applied to the paper, never having been exposed to light until now.

Enzo stared at it wondering who Killian was referring to, before his eye was drawn to a yellow highlighted entry on the opposite page. Agadir. He found himself frowning again. Agadir, he knew, was the southernmost port on the Atlantic coastline of Morocco, at one time regarded as the sardine capital of the world. He read through the entry, most of which involved itself with a dispute between France and Germany over territorial claims on the North African country.

Again he was mystified. What possible relevance could this have to Killian’s murder? And yet the words, HE DID NOT DIE, lingered in his consciousness, as if lasered into it.

He closed both volumes again and sat looking at them. There had to be, he felt, some connection between the earthquake in Agadir and the poem by Ronald Ross. And yet, if there was some correlation there, he could not for the life of him imagine what it might be. He touched the books with tactile fingers, as if hoping something might transmit itself to him simply through contact. And then it occurred to him that a more up-to-date entry for Agadir might prove more illuminating. He searched the shelves once more, looking for a more modern encyclopedia but found nothing, and almost gave up before remembering that he could do an Internet search from his laptop.

Enzo brought the computer down to the study and set it up on Killian’s desk. He moved the diary to one side and placed his laptop in front of him, plugging in his USB stick and dialing into his cellphone provider’s high-speed Internet connection. Up came his Google homepage, and he typed in AGADIR. It produced more than six million links, the first of which was the Wikipedia entry on the Moroccan seaport.

Reading through it, nothing immediately struck him as significant. Located near the foot of the Atlas mountains, where the Souss River flows into the Atlantic ocean, Agadir was, he read, still regarded as the first sardine port in the world. It was also an important commercial port and tourist town, with its long strip of sandy beach. It wasn’t until he reached the section on the city’s history that he found his interest suddenly piqued. The entry read:

At 15 minutes to midnight on February 29, 1960, Agadir was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake that lasted 15 seconds, burying the city and killing thousands. The death toll is estimated at 15,000. The earthquake destroyed the ancient Kasbah.

Of course, Enzo realised, the entry in the Everyman encyclopedia had predated the earthquake by three years. If Killian had possessed a more recent edition, might he have marked out the section on the earthquake? Fifteen thousand had been killed by it. And Killian had written on the Post-it, HE DID NOT DIE. Had someone thought to have died in the quake actually survived it?

He spent some time then browsing through accounts of the earthquake. Some gave the death toll at over 16,000, others gave the time of the quake at anything between fifteen and twenty minutes before midnight. What was clear was that most people had been indoors, and that buildings with structures hopelessly inadequate to withstand even a minor earthquake had simply collapsed killing almost everyone inside. In fact, a third of the population of the city had perished in that brief fifteen seconds.

There were entire sites dedicated to photographs of the disaster. Graphic images of a city reduced to rubble. Twisted and mangled buildings whose roofs hung in suspended animation just inches from the ground. An aerial shot of the original walled kasbah, utterly devastated, only a handful of buildings in the old, medieval hilltop city left standing. Bodies buried beneath tons of masonry had never been recovered, and the kasbah had never been rebuilt. It was almost inconceivable to Enzo that so much damage could have been done in such a short space of time, so many lives taken without warning.

In the end, he was overtaken by fatigue. He closed down his computer and trudged wearily upstairs to the bedroom. And as he lay between the icy sheets, aware as never before of the emptiness of his bed, he knew that somehow, in some way, he had just made a breakthrough. But Killian’s voice was still too far away. Enzo was simply unable to hear the words with sufficient clarity to make any sense of them.

It was sometime after four in the morning that he woke, sitting bolt upright, feeling cold air on hot skin. He was sweating, wide awake and staring into the darkness. Five hours of shallow sleep seemed like no more than five seconds. And yet his mind had never stopped, taking him on a restless journey through the shattered remains of Agadir, the elusive shadow of Adam Killian always just out of reach, his voice a distant call, words lost in the crashing of falling masonry and the death cries of fifteen thousand other voices.

And Enzo had only one thought in his mind. He had not checked the row of encyclopedias to see if any of the other volumes were out of place. He cursed himself out loud, and heard the dying echo of his voice swallowed by the night. He had been too tired, insufficiently focused. But, still, it should have occurred to him before now.

He swung his legs out of the bed, slid his feet into his slippers, and slipped on his silk robe. He turned on the bedside light, screwing his eyes up against its sudden brightness, and started back downstairs to the study.

The room seemed to be waiting for him. Its stillness, in this darkest hour of the night, was so dense Enzo felt he could almost touch it. He had the strangest sense of premonition, of something just beyond his grasp that would soon be his. He was uncertain whether it was that, or the cold, that made all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The bloodstain on the floor seemed darker, somehow, the bullet holes in the wall freshly made, the dust of shattered plaster hanging in the air, along with the smell of cordite.

He was, he knew, letting his imagination run away with itself, and yet he could have sworn that he was not alone in the room. Killian himself was there, somewhere in the stillness, willing him to listen, to hear his voice.

Enzo rounded the desk and ran his index finger along the line of dark green Everyman encyclopaedias.

“Damn!” His voice shattered the stillness of the night. Two further volumes had been transposed. NYA to RAG and SPI to ZYM. If he had only taken the trouble to look last night, he would have seen them immediately. He lifted them down, and as before placed them on the desk in front of him as he sat in Killian’s chair.

From somewhere out in the garden he heard the deep-throated yowling of a cat. It came chillingly out of the night, penetrating the dark and the quiet. Enzo stood up and crossed to the window, opening it and pushing out the shutters. Light from the room washed across the lawn. In the shadow of the trees at the far side, he saw the black cat pacing restlessly in silhouette, howling at the night. For a moment it stood still, to turn luminous green eyes in his direction.

For several seconds it seemed to Enzo as if he were trapped, a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, before he closed the window. Ruffled, he remembered Charlotte’s playful allusion to the cat as being perhaps Killian’s ghost. Absurd, of course, but still he could not shake off the sense of another presence in the room, of eyes watching his every move, of a voice whispering silent encouragement that he couldn’t hear.

He went back and stood at the desk to open the volume NYA to RAG with trembling fingers. He drew his thumb across the open pages of the book and let them flick past it, until his eye caught the flash of yellow he had been hoping for. He flipped back until he found it. Once more, the Post-it was blank. But on the opposite page, the entry for Paris had been marked with the same yellow pen. The entry was five pages long, and Enzo flipped slowly through them all looking for a highlighted passage, something that would guide him to more specific information. But there was nothing. All that had been singled out was the word Paris right at the head of the entry. So perhaps, he thought, Paris itself was the clue. The city. The place. But why?

He set the open book on the desk and lifted the volume SPI to ZYM. This time he found the Post-it among the W entries, and highlighted on the opposite page was the name Simon Wiesenthal. Enzo stood staring at it, his skin prickling all over his skull. He looked up and saw his reflection in the window. The black robe with the red dragons, the tangle of dark hair tumbling wildly over his shoulders, the silver streak running back from his forehead. A sudden movement startled him. He refocused, and saw the black cat on the outside window ledge, staring in at him.

He turned his eyes down again to the page. Wiesenthal, he knew, was the most famous of the post-war Nazi hunters, responsible for tracking down dozens of fugitives so that they could be brought to justice for crimes against humanity. Although this 1957 entry was long out of date, Enzo read it anyway.

Wiesenthal was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer and holocaust victim who had survived four and a half years in the German concentration camps of Janowska, Plaszow, and Mauthausen. After the war he had begun working for the US army, gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremburg. Then, in 1947, he and thirty other volunteers had founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, to gather information for future trials.

In the same way that Enzo had made the assumption that the entries on Ronald Ross and Agadir were somehow linked, he felt there had to be some connection between Wiesenthal and Paris. But what? There was nothing in this old entry that gave any clue as to what it might be.

And so, as before, he turned to the computer, rebooting it and connecting again to the Internet. For a moment he paused to take in Killian’s desktop. His laptop sitting on it at an angle, four open volumes of the Everyman encyclopedia, the desk diary pushed to one side. Killian’s sense of order would have been grossly offended. Google popped up on his screen, and he turned his concentration back to the search, typing in Simon Wiesenthal and hitting the return key. There were more than half a million entries. Again, he went to Wikipedia and began reading.

The man had written three books on his experiences and opened numerous centres around the world before dying in 2005 at the age of ninety-six. Still, Enzo could not find any logical connection to Paris. He clicked on a link to the entry on the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and read its mission statement describing it as an international Jewish human rights organisation dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time. Quite a task, Enzo thought.

He scrolled down the entry until he came to the section on Office Locations. There were five other centres around the world. New York, Miami, Toronto, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires. And Paris. Enzo held his breath. Perhaps this was the link he had been looking for.

He went back to Google and tapped in Simon Wiesenthal Center Paris. More than thirty-two thousand links appeared. But the third from the top took him directly to the website of the Wiesenthal organisation’s European operation. The office was in the seventeenth arrondissement, in the rue Laugier, and had been established there in 1988. Before Killian’s death. Had he been in contact with them for some reason? If so, surely they would have a record.

Enzo scrolled down the home page until he reached the contact details at the foot of it. There was an email address and a link that opened up his emailer. He tapped in a subject line, KILLIAN CONTACT, and composed a short mail.

Sirs,

I am conducting an investigation into the death of a British citizen in France in the year 1990. I have reason to believe that he may have been in contact with you around this time. His name was Adam Killian. I would be most grateful if you could tell me if you have any record of such contact. My bone fides can be checked by following the link (below) to my page on the website of the University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, where I head up the faculty on forensic science.

With best wishes,

Professor Enzo Macleod.

He hit the send button and off it went, carrying with it more hope than expectation.

For a long time he sat then, just staring at the screen, until it almost burned out on his retinas. He leaned his elbows on the desk and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, and then blinked them, bloodshot, in the direction of the window. The cat was still there, pressing itself against the glass, still staring in at him.

For the second time that night, Enzo was startled awake. This time, it was sunlight streaming through the unshuttered windows of Killian’s study that woke him. At some point in his deliberations, he had cleared a space on the desk in front of him and folded his arms on the dekstop to create a pillow for his head. He had closed his eyes, intending simply to rest them while he thought. And now, three hours later, he wakened almost rigid with the cold.

Pale yellow light slanted in at a low angle, falling across the chaos that was now Killian’s desktop. He straightened himself stiffly, painfully, and stretched his arms above his head as he yawned. The cat was gone, along with the still of the night. Enzo shivered. He stood up and stamped several times to try to get the blood back into his feet.

He replayed everything he had learned, everything he now knew. About Ronald Ross and his mosquito poem. About the earthquake in Agadir, the man who had not died, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris. More than ever, he was convinced that none of this connected to to Thibaud Kerjean. The man had been a blinding red herring, both then and now. He had stolen the focus of every investigation into this case, when all the time the clues had been in the books.

Enzo stood stock still.

Even as the words formed in his mind, realisation dawned. He tipped his head back and yelled at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ!” His voice reverberated around the room. Why on earth had he not seen it immediately? It was so childishly simple. And yet, how often was it that the most obvious was overlooked? That the most cunning place to hide anything was always in plain sight?