A pure black cat stood on the top step glaring down at him, back arched, hackles raised, a quivering tail pointing straight up behind it.
“Damn cat!” Enzo shouted at the night, both relieved and annoyed. Where in hell had it come from? He could only imagine it had slipped in unnoticed when Jane opened up earlier in the evening. An escape from the rain. But from its demeanour, it seemed to regard Enzo as the intruder. He waved his stick at it and hissed and called, but it stood staring implacably back at him as if he were mad. If he could have seen himself in his black silk dressing gown and tangle of hair waving a walking stick around in the stairwell, shouting names at a dumb animal in the middle of the night, he might have been forced to agree.
It was, perhaps, some fleeting, out-of-body image of himself that made him stop to consider his tactics. And it took him only a moment to decide on a course of action. He shut both the study and bathroom doors and opened the entrance door wide, feeling the rush of cold air from the outside. Then he began up the stairs, holding the stick in front of him.
The cat watched his approach, first wary, then alarmed, but waiting until almost the last moment, before turning and sprinting into the bedroom. Enzo followed it in, chasing it around the room until finally it escaped back down the stairwell, and he arrived at the top step in time to see it vanishing out into the night. He hurried down the stairs and slammed the door shut.
He stood, breathing hard, leaning with his back against the door, glad that there had been no one around to witness the debacle. But there was no point, he knew, in going back to bed now. He was wide awake, with a slight headache from too much whisky and wine, and his exertions of the last few minutes. He opened the study door and turned on the light, and was struck again by the room’s almost suffocating atmosphere. It seemed filled, somehow, by the personality of the man who had lived and died there. Even all these years later. And he allowed himself a fleeting, fanciful moment to wonder whether the black cat had come like the spirit of the deceased man to draw him down into this room in the reflective small hours of the morning. Or maybe it had been some demon sent to scare him off, Death’s messenger bearing a warning, a harbinger of inevitable failure.
Enzo went through to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of cold water, and as he drank it in small sips, wandered back through the study. The account of the murder in Raffin’s book suggested that there had been no break-in. The intruder had simply entered through an unlocked door and lain in wait for his victim.
Killian had ended his call to Jane abruptly. Had he heard something? Enzo still held the dead man’s walking stick in his hand, the stick that had been found on the floor beside the body. Had he hung up on Jane and lifted his walking stick to come downstairs and investigate? If so, his assailant hadn’t hidden himself for long. Killian’s body was found against the window wall, just to the right of the door as you came into the room. The position of the body, and the trajectory of the bullets, suggested that his killer had fired on him from the direction of the kitchen. Is that where he had been hiding?
The bloodstained floorboards were evocative somehow. Enzo could visualise the body lying there, twisted and broken, blood seeping from the exit wounds in his back, drained from his body by the force of gravity. The heart would no longer have been pumping. He looked around the study. If you were searching for something, where would you look? The desk drawers, the filing cabinet, the kitchen cupboard. You would barely notice a scribbled shopping list, or a post-it, or a hurried diary entry that made no sense. Did Killian’s murderer even speak English?
The best place to hide something, Enzo knew, was in plain view. How often people failed to see what was right in front of them.
What else might his killer have failed to see? Enzo ran his eyes around the room again. Over the rows of books on their shelves, Killian’s workbench, his desk, and through the open door to the fridge in the kitchen Of course, it would depend on what he was looking for. Something, Enzo was sure, that Killian had hidden, leaving clues that would lead his son to its hiding place.
What could possibly have so spooked Killian that he feared for his life? For it was fear and a sense of desperation that had been conveyed by Jane’s account of his phone call. Killian had believed that something was going to happen to him, that he was in danger. And was afraid that some course of action upon which he had embarked would remain unfinished. What was it he had said to Jane? It’s ironic that it is Peter who will finish the job. What job?
And what it is that a dying man fears?
Enzo wandered back through to the kitchen and rinsed his glass in the sink, then turned to the fridge door. The cooks have the blues, Killian had written on his shopping list. And on the post-it, A bit of the flood will boil the feast. A Post-it that jumped out at Enzo for the simple reason that it did not line up with anything else that Killian had placed on the door.
Killian must have had no doubts that Peter would instantly understand. Some code, perhaps, that they had contrived or shared during Peter’s childhood, the significance of which only they would understand. Father and son. Jane had spoken of how close they were.
Enzo shivered and went back through to the study. The cold was creeping into his bones now. He crossed the room and sat once more in Killian’s chair, surveying the desk in front of him. His eye fell upon the Post-it stuck to the desk lamp. P, One day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget! Addressing himself directly to his son. And again in the diary. 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. Enzo closed his eyes and turned the phrases over and over again in his mind, as if the simple act of repetition might bring revelation, or clarity. Neither came, and he opened his eyes again to flip back a page of the diary to the previous week. Dr. S, 2:30 pm, Tuesday. And again at the same time on Thursday. He flipped back several more pages. Twice a week from the early summer.
Enzo knew he had to start somewhere, and this seemed as good a place as any. Tomorrow he would seek a consultation with Killian’s physician. Dead men don’t talk. But sometimes their doctors know more than they could ever tell while their patients were still alive.
Chapter Ten
The Maison Medicale stood at the end of a long, straight road heading east out of Le Bourg, surrounded by modern suburban houses and lush, tree-filled gardens. It was an angular building of cream-painted concrete and steeply sloping slate roofs, a relic of the utilitarian architecture of the 1970s. As Enzo pulled into the gravel parking area in front of it, he saw from the panneau that there were three general practitioners, a dentist, and two nurses based in the centre.
A middle-aged receptionist looked up at him from behind her desk, and indifference immediately gave way to smiles. “ Ah. C’est Monsieur Macleod, n’est-ce pas? Vous etes malade?”
Enzo produced a patient smile. He was not yet sure if it would be a help or a hindrance that everyone on the island seemed to know who he was. “No, madame. I’m not ill. I wondered if I might make an appointment to see whichever of the doctors at the clinic was treating Adam Killian before his death.”
The receptionist could barely conceal her excitement. “Well, of course, I don’t have to ask why it is you want to see him.” She got her smile under control. “But I’m afraid Doctor Servat senior retired a good many years ago now.”
“Oh.” Enzo wondered why he should be surprised. Many things would have changed in the passing of twenty years. “Doctor Servat senior… Does that mean there is a Doctor Servat junior?”
“Yes, of course. His son, Alain.”
“And he consults here?”
“He does.”
“Then do you think I might be able to talk to him?”
She raised an index finger, pointing it toward the ceiling. “One moment please.” And she picked up the phone to punch in two digits. “Doctor Servat, there’s a Monsieur Macleod here to see you in relation to the murder of Adam Killian.” She raised an eyebrow in Enzo’s direction as if to seek confirmation. Enzo released a long breath and nodded, resigned to the fact that everyone on this island would either know or want to know his business. She hung up. “You can go in as soon as he’s finished with his patient.” She pointed toward a row of plastic chairs in the waiting area, and he took a seat to wait.
Although he avoided her eye, he was aware that she was looking at him. He could feel her impatience, and
