Enzo recalled the vision of her in the window the previous night, undressing to her bra and panties, almost as if she had been putting on a show for him. She was a good-looking woman, signalling a sublimated sexuality. And he wondered why he didn’t feel more attracted to her. Perhaps, he thought, the bitterness he perceived in her was muting his usually healthy appetite. He decided to change the focus of their conversation. “I’m meeting someone tomorrow at the Ford de Grognon. Do you have a map I could take with me, so I don’t get lost?”
She laughed. “It’s not easy to get lost on this island, Enzo. There are only a handful of roads.” She got up and crossed to the bureau where she found a creased and dog-eared trifold tourist plan of the island. She came and crouched by his chair and watched as he opened it up on his thighs. “There.” She stabbed a finger at the northwest corner of the island. A small, white square marked the position of the fort. “Just follow the main road out toward the lighthouse at Pen Men, then take the turn-off for Quelhuit and follow the road toward Beg Melen. There’s a military signalling station out there. But there’s a turn-off to the fort on the right before you reach it.”
“The fort belongs to the military, too?”
“Not any longer. It’s nineteenth-century, I think, but abandoned now. And comes under the control of the mairie, I believe. You’ll see there’s a smaller fort right down on the coast below it. Predates it by a hundred years or so. They were built originally to protect the entry to the harbour at Lorient. Which is exactly what the Germans used them for during the Occupation. They had huge guns mounted up there to provide cover for the submarine base on the mainland. Didn’t do much to protect the town from the Allied bombing raids, though.”
“Is it open to the public?”
“No, it’s usually kept locked up. But I think the mairie uses it as a base for youth activities from to time.” She paused. “Who are you meeting there?”
“I’m afraid that’s confidential, Jane.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed that he wasn’t prepared to share with her.
“But I understand it’s an important location in terms of your father-in-law’s relationship with Kerjean.”
“Yes.” She looked thoughtful. “They met there for the first time. And the last, according to Kerjean.”
“They had arranged to meet?”
“No. It was pure chance. Engineered by fate, perhaps.” And she laughed, a laugh soured by that ever-present edge of bitterness. “Fate again. But it was a meeting that might very well, in the end, have led to his death.”
Moonlight laid the dark shadows of trees across the lawn toward the annex. Enzo was almost at the door when a movement, caught in the corner of his eye, made him turn sharply to his right. He stood stock still for a moment, but saw nothing, straining in the dark to give shape to whatever had passed through his peripheral vision. He scanned the imposing form of the trees standing black against the night and saw leaves that fell like snowflakes through the light of the moon, detached by the slight breeze that stirred amongst the branches overhead. Frost- brittle leaves, lying now in drifts on the grass.
He was about to turn back toward the door when this time a sound made him stop dead in his tracks. A sound like footsteps among the leaves. Soft, cautious footfalls. And then suddenly, out of the shadows, a silhouette emerged, green eyes glowing in the night, to stop and stare at him, resentment or anger burning in their gaze.
Enzo breathed more easily again. “Damn cat!” he muttered under his breath. It was the second time the creature had startled him. He waved an arm at it. “Shoo!” But it stood, defiant and still, watching from what it clearly felt was a safe distance. Enzo unlocked the door and went into the annex, shutting it quickly behind him again, and stood in the silence of the hall, washed by the cold, harsh light in the stairwell.
The door of the study stood ajar, as he had left it, a finger of light from the hall reaching across the floorboards to touch the books on the shelves beyond. He was almost tempted to go in, to sit with Killian in his long empty chair, and try to find a way inside his head. But he was tired, and somehow Killian seemed to have made greater inroads into Enzo’s mind than the Scotsman had made into his. So he made a conscious effort to free his thoughts of both Killian and his killer, to empty his mind, and climb the stairs to a cold bed, and the oblivion of sleep.
As on the previous evening, the little bedroom was awash with moonlight, and he refrained from turning on the electric light. But as he turned to drape his jacket over the chair, he saw, once more, the light in the window opposite framed clearly by the black of the night. Jane Killian was again engaged in the process of undressing herself in full view.
She had already removed her top, and was wearing only her black bra and jeans. Reflexively, Enzo turned away. He could have stood and watched, in the certain knowledge that she could not possibly have seen him. But he was discomfited by the thought that she was undressing herself in the full glare of electric light to make him do just that. He felt manipulated, as if she were testing his male libido, sensing his lack of sexual interest in her from the start.
He stripped down to his boxers and threw back the bed covers. But, as before, he could not resist a final look. And this time saw her standing completely naked in the window, gazing out across the grass toward the annex. To his intense annoyance, he felt the first stirrings of sexual desire in his loins, and he slipped quickly between the cold sheets to douse them. He shivered and curled up on his side, pulling the blanket tight around his chin.
He closed his eyes and conjured up an image of Charlotte, with her shining, black eyes and her long, curling locks tumbling across square shoulders. Then recalled with dismay his last meeting with her at the Boneparte in Paris. Let me know when you’re in town again, and I’ll apply for an audience, she had said, as if he were the one who made it difficult for them to be together.
He flipped over on to his other side and screwed his eyes tight shut, trying to expunge the memory from him mind. As sleep descended like an angel of the night, the space it left was immediately filled by Killian’s ghost. He drifted off into restless dreams of half-warmed fish.
Chapter Twelve
The island was green and yellow and burnt sienna in the strong autumn sunlight that slanted across it from the south, great banks of fern turning rust-red and bleeding into the crimson leaves of the briar thicket that rose almost two meters high on every side.
Enzo eased his four-wheel drive along a bumpy mud track, ridged and pitted with holes, and turned into a metalled parking area by the gates to the fort. Earlier, he had missed the turn off, and was almost at Beg Melen when he noticed the high stone walls rising above the thicket away to his right. He had pulled up next to a sign that read, DANGER-TROUS PROFONDS. Deep holes on the road ahead. An abandoned white cottage, defaced by graffiti, shimmered in the sunlight beyond a stand of dark trees. Enzo managed a five-point turn on the single-track road before finding his way back to his missed turn.
There was one other vehicle in the parking area. A dark grey Renault Scenic. The morning frost had long since melted in the warm sun, and the air hummed with the sound of insects and the call of unseen birds. Ten-foot overgrown earthen banks ran off north and south, and in the distance, where the thicket fell away toward the shore, the line of the mainland was clearly visible across the shimmer of water that separated the island from the coast.
Green-painted metal gates stood open, and Enzo walked through them, following a narrow path between high walls overhung with tumbling wild growth. A low bridge spanned an outer moat to more gates, set this time into the wall of the fort. On the far side of the wall, another bridge took him across an inner moat, then through a stone tunnel in a second bank of earth. Stone watchtowers were raised at intervals all along the wall. Whoever had commissioned this fort had been taking no chances with its defences.
The tunnel opened onto a large grassy area lined with low buildings characterised by a series of arched doors and windows. Almost every available wall space was scarred and disfigured by cheap, colourful graffiti, island yobs aping their more sophisticated mainland cousins. The buildings to the right were set into mud banks and covered with grass, presumably to make them less obvious from the air. To the left stood tin-roofed barracks of more recent origin. There was no sign of anyone.
“Hello!” Enzo raised his voice and called into the silence. No response. He peered into several darkened rooms, where further archways led through stone walls to an impenetrable black beyond. Everywhere the smell of urine and damp and decay.
