two places. Elisabeth went out to his place at Locmaria twice a week for a couple of months to get him walking properly again.” He chuckled once more. “Two to three hours a week in the man’s company. He wasn’t the most forthcoming I’ve ever met, but they must have talked about something.”
Enzo stopped for a bite to eat in Le Bourg, and it was early afternoon by the time he got back to Port Melite. Charlotte and the baby had been on his mind all morning, a constant distraction gnawing away at his concentration, like back pain or a toothache that never lets you forget it is there. He was determined to confront her.
Jane Killian’s car was parked, as usual, beneath the trees above the beach. When he got out of his jeep he heard the tick, tick of cooling metal coming from beneath its hood. So she was recently returned from somewhere.
He was halfway across the lawn toward the annex when he heard her voice calling to him from the house. “If you’re looking for Charlotte, she’s not there.”
Enzo stopped and turned. “Oh. Is she with you?”
Jane shook her head. “No, Enzo. She’s gone.”
He stood staring at her for a moment. “Gone where?”
“Left. The island, I mean. I took her to the ferry late this morning.”
Enzo felt the colour rising on his cheeks, his skin stinging, as if he had been slapped. And he wondered if Jane was taking pleasure in this. “Okay. Thanks” was all he said.
He went up to his room and felt its emptiness, a reflection of the way he felt inside. The rumpled bedsheets where they had lain together in chaste self-consciousness seemed to mock him. A reminder of just how great the gulf between them had become. That they should have spent a night together without holding, or kissing, locked in silent conflict, words expressed earlier in the evening endlessly repeating in the mind, like ticker-tape headlines crossing the screen of a twenty-four hour news station.
Choked by a sudden claustrophobia, he hurried back down the stairs and out into the garden, breathing deeply. The black cat that had taken a shine to Charlotte was stretched out on the lower limbs of the nearest tree, watching him with affected disinterest. He turned away and walked briskly around the side of the house to the gate. He couldn’t face Jane right now.
On the far side of the parking area, three houses and a smaller cottage sat up on the bank in an elevated position, looking over the beach, and he wondered how it must feel to live this close to the sea. To feel its moods, suffer its tempers, hear its constant breathing. Like living with an unpredictable lover.
He thrust his hands in his pockets and wandered down the track to the sand. The tiny bay was protected by low cliffs rising at either end, and fingers of black, shining rock that extended into the brine. A flock of seagulls floated and frolicked in the water at the far side of it. The sand was firm, compacted. The tide had withdrawn to reveal the full crescent of silver, was marred only by the arc of seaweed deposited below the high-tide mark.
Enzo followed the line of the water, just beyond its reach, feeling the wind in his face, smelling the seaweed and the salt air. But it couldn’t blow away his depression. At his time of life, he should have been looking forward to his grandchildren. Not to being a father again. And yet there was still an ache in him, somewhere deep inside, an urge to try again. To get it right this time. To be the father he had always wanted and meant to be.
The child that he and Charlotte had made, their son, was another chance. Certainly his last. Surely there was some course of action he could take, some power of persuasion he could exert to prevent Charlotte from doing the unthinkable.
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.
