caddy.
Enzo’s first impression was of an almost obsessive sense of order. The desk was set at right angles to the window, carefully aligned with run of the floorboards. The books on the shelves behind it were perfectly perpendicular, each spine meticulously lined up with the edge of the shelf it stood on. Enzo crossed the room and ran the tips of his fingers lightly along one of the rows, following the regularity of its contours. And he noticed that the books were all arranged in alphabetical order, first by author, then by title.
On the desk itself two wire trays were placed one at each side. An in tray, an out tray. Each was empty. The brass desk lamp was set at a ninety-degree angle on the far left-hand corner of the desk. The only incongruity was a curled and faded yellow Post-it stuck to its glass shade with Scotch tape. On a pristine, unmarked blotter, a desk diary lay open at the week beginning September 23, 1990. A pen nestled where the pages curled into the line of its spine.
“It didn’t look quite this way when I got here,” Jane said. “Whoever shot him had been searching for something. Whether it was anything specific, or just valuables, we’ll maybe never know.” She sighed. “Anyway, I straightened it up as best I could, trying to remember the way he kept things. Nothing has been moved or removed. And nothing introduced. Everything is exactly as it was then.”
She couldn’t resist a glance toward the floorboards beneath the window, and Enzo was quick to spot it. Although it had faded with time, the blood that had seeped from Killian’s fatal wounds had left an indelible, dark stain in the wood.
“I washed the bloodstains from the wall once the police were finished. There were two exit wounds, and you can see where the bullets pitted the plaster. The third lodged in his spine.”
Enzo wondered whether it was simply time and the no doubt oft-repeated phrasesthat lent the mechanical, emotionless quality to her voice. He nodded and lowered himself into Killian’s captain’s chair. Its leather seat had become dry and brittle after all this time, and the chair groaned beneath his weight. Perhaps by placing himself in the man’s seat he could find someway into his mind.
There were four drawers in the desk. The deep one on the left contained a box of A4 printing paper. The drawer above it revealed an arrangement of open cardboard boxes filled with various items of stationery. Paperclips, drawing pins, staples, a Post-it pad, pens, pencils, erasers. The deep drawer on the right held a box of clear plastic sleeves for filing documents in clip folders. Lying on top of it was an aerosol can with a hand-written label. N, N-diethyl-3-methylbenzamide. Enzo lifted it out and examined it. He held it in the air, expelled a tiny blast and sniffed, wrinkling his nose. “Mosquito repellent.”
“Yes.” Jane nodded. This was clearly not news to her.
“Are you troubled by mosquitoes here?”
“Not much. There’s usually an onshore breeze that keeps us relatively insect-free.”
Enzo laid the aerosol back in the drawer and slid open the one above it. Here was a strange arrangement of clear plastic tubing exiting from either end of a transparent plastic film container of the kind that used to hold rolls of film in the pre-digital age. Enzo frowned.
“It’s called a pooter, apparently,” Jane said. “For catching single insects. You use one end as a mouthpiece, and suck the creatures in through the other end to trap them in the container.”
Enzo pulled off the lid and saw that the mouthpiece tube had a tiny square of gauze stuck over one end. Its purpose was obvious. He put it back in the drawer, and picked up the only other item. A small bottle of clear liquid. He held it up. “Do you know what’s in this is?”
“I had it analysed. It’s lactic acid. No one seems to know what he might have used it for.”
Enzo thought about it for a long time. “Lactic acid,” he said at length, “particularly in combination with carbon dioxide, is a well-known mosquito attractant.”
“Oh.” Jane seemed surprised. “No one’s come up with that before.”
“Strange though.” Enzo turned it over in his mind. “Repellent in one drawer, attractant in another.”
“Well, he worked with insects all the time, so who knows what he might have used them for.”
Enzo closed the drawer and looked at the desk diary open in front of him. “The diary was open at this page?”
“Yes.”
Enzo flipped back several pages, screwing up his eyes to read the entries. “Doctor’s appointments,” he said. “Twice a week by the looks.”
“He was getting some kind of palliative treatment for the cancer. It didn’t seem to be doing him much good, though.”
Enzo returned to the entry for Monday, September 24, the day Killian was murdered, and reached into his canvas shoulder satchel to retrieve his half-moon reading glasses. He smiled ruefully over them at Jane. “Vanity has to take a back seat to clarity these days, I’m afraid.” And he returned his attention to Killian’s final entry. He read it out loud. “P, I was lighting a fire, but now there’s no more time, and all I’m left with is a half-warmed fish in the pouring rain.” He looked up, puzzled. “What did he mean? Is this the message?”
His dead son’s wife shrugged, and looked vaguely disappointed. “Well, that’s what I hoped you would tell me, Mr. Macleod.” She approached the desk. “If it is the message, it’s only a part of it.” He left notes all over the place.” She touched the post-it scotched to the desk lamp. “This one was attached to the lamp, but kept falling off. So I stuck it on with sticky tape so it didn’t get lost.”
Enzo leaned forward to read it, peering myopically through his half-moons at the faded scrawl. Again, he read aloud. “P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget!” He looked up at Jane. “I’m assuming that P is Peter.”
“That is the assumption everyone else has made.”
“So your father-in-law had more than one bicycle?”
“No, that’s the strange thing. He didn’t have one at all. And neither did Peter.”
Enzo looked again at the note on the lamp, then the scribbled entry in the desk diary, before flipping back for a second look at the previous entries. “All the other entries in his diary,” he said, “are written in a very tight, neat hand. Except this last one. And the note on the lamp.” He compared dots and t’s and loops. “But demonstrably the same handwriting. Just scribbled, as if done in a great hurry.”
“Yes. It was very uncharacteristic of him. He was a scrupulous and careful man.”
Enzo looked around the study again. “Very tidy, very ordered.”
Jane nodded her agreement. “Almost manically so.”
He stood up. “What other notes were there?”
She led him through to the tiny kitchen, which was filled with the hum and rattle of the old refrigerator. Its door was covered with fridge magnets collected over the years. Cartoon insects arranged in ordered patterns, badges, and flags. A scribbled pencil note was fading now on a notepad for jotting down larder items to be restocked. The telephone numbers of the medical clinic in Le Bourg had dimmed also, and several washed-out family photographs were held in place by short magnetic strips carefully angled at each corner. A yellow Post-it was browning and curled at the corners. Stuck on at an odd angle, it was held in position by what appeared to be two randomly placed magnetic strips.
“What did he keep in the fridge?”
“Cold drinks, mostly. And cheese. Stuff like that, for snacking when he felt hungry.” He opened the door and its fluorescent light flickered to illuminate yellowing empty shelves within. “It was empty when he was found.” She pulled down a flap at the top of the fridge to expose the build-up of ice and frost that choked the tiny icebox. “And this was pretty much iced up then, too. I keep meaning to defrost it, but never have.”
“I’m amazed it still works,” Enzo said.
Jane just smiled. “Actually I think it’s more than thirty years old. They must have built things to last longer then. Unlike now. What’s the catch phrase these days? Built-in obsolescence?”
Enzo grinned. “Yes. So you have to replace them more often. Keeps manufacturers in business and people in jobs.”
She shut the door and Enzo peered at the photographs, their glaze cracked in places and starting to peel. He recognised Adam Killian from the photographs in Raffin’s book. A healthy, tanned: looking man with a thick head of pure white hair grinning at the camera. And Jane Killian, looking much younger. Dark hair cascading over her shoulders. A shy smile.
“I guess the young man must be Peter.”
