Enzo. “No,” he said. It was a simple, and very final, statement.
Enzo placed his glass carefully on the table. “In that case, as far as I’m concerned you stay right in the frame for Killian’s murder, Kerjean. Until, or unless, I find out different.”
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
