She shrugged. “Peter never said. I have no idea.”
Enzo reached out his hand to take hers. “Well, I do. Come on.”
“Hey! It’s freezing out there!”
“Tell me about it.” Enzo almost dragged her across the lawn behind him. She ran to keep up. They both left wet footprints on the floor as Enzo led her into Killian’s study. She looked at the mess of open books on the desktop, and then at Enzo. “What have you found?”
“Messages. Left in the encyclopaedias. Pages marked with post-its, entries highlighted with a marker pen.”
“What messages?”
“Nothing that makes much sense to me yet. Although that’ll come, I’m sure. But the point is this. Just ask yourself. Where were the clues?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Where did I find these clues?” He waved his hand at the open volumes on the desk.
She shrugged, not fully understanding. “In the books, I guess.”
“Exactly.” He took her hand again and dragged her across the room to the tiny kitchen leading off it. He ripped the post-it off the fridge door and handed it to her. “What does it say?”
Her face was a mask of incomprehension. “You know what it says.”
“Read it out loud.”
She sighed in exasperation. “The cooks have the blues.”
He looked at her expectantly, waiting for the penny to drop. But it didn’t. “Haven’t you ever heard of Doctor Spooner?” She frowned. “Doctor William Archibald Spooner. A professor at New College, Oxford, in the nineteenth century. He was an albino, and had occasional problems with the spoken word, a nervous tendency sometimes to transpose initial letters. It used to amuse his students so much they started inventing their own transpositions, and called them Spoonerisms.” He paused, eyes shining, and she looked again at the post-it in her hand.
“The books have the clues,” she read. And she looked up, her face suddenly flushed. “Oh, my God!” Her eyes turned toward the magnetic message board and she prised it free of its grip on the fridge. This time she read, “A fit of the blood will foil the beast.” Her eyes darted toward Enzo, infected now by his excitement. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. But we’re going to find out, Jane. I know we are.” He took her hand again. “Come and look at the others.” And they crossed the study to Killian’s desk.
Jane unstuck the Post-it from the desk lamp and read it out. “P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget.” She turned puzzled eyes on Enzo. “Boil my icicles?”
He made a face that conveyed his own lack of comprehension and pulled the desk diary toward him. This time he read out the transposed message himself. “P, I was fighting a liar, but now there’s no more time, and all I’m left with is a half-formed wish in the roaring pain.”
Concentration furrowed Jane’s brow. “Fighting a liar?” She paused. “Kerjean?”
Enzo shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, if not him, who?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“And what is a half-formed wish?”
“I guess it was something he was in the process of doing, but unable to finish. Something that would help him to defeat, or unmask, the liar he was fighting.”
“And the roaring pain must have been the suffering of his illness.” The tide of emotion that had risen in Jane was visible in eyes that brimmed with tears. “Oh, God… Poor Papa.”
Enzo cast his own eyes over the open volumes on the desktop. The Post-its and highlighted entries. And he wondered what any of it had to do with Wiesenthal and Agadir and Ronald Ross. Killian had not made it easy. But, then, he must have been paranoid his killer would find and destroy the evidence after he was dead. He had been relying on his son to see the wordplay at once, and then be inside his mind to unravel the puzzle. Somehow, Enzo had to get himself inside Killian’s head, too.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dressed now and warmed by the full English breakfast that Jane had prepared for him, Enzo retraced his footsteps of yesterday along the beach at Port Melite: footsteps erased by the tide. But the tracks Killian had laid down were not lost. Just obscured. And one, by one, Enzo was uncovering them, like an archaeologist brushing away the dust of time. He still had no idea where they would lead.
How to get inside Killian’s head. That was the problem. He was missing something, he knew, and that one key would probably unlock the secret. He ran through all the clues again. Ronald Ross and his mosquitoes, Agadir and the man who had not died, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris. And the notes. What could he have meant by boiling the icicles? Who was the liar he had been fighting? Was it the same man who had not died in Agadir? He thought back to the phone call Killian had made to Jane the night of the murder. Might there have been something he said that night that Enzo had missed?
He turned and looked back along the beach. Tall chestnut trees were shedding the last of their leaves around the stone benches that overlooked it. The houses sharing the rise sat square and solid, cheek by jowl, facing the sunrise like old friends greeting the day. Across the shining waters, the Breton coast smudged the horizon. It was a magical spot. Sheltered and private. There was an intimacy about it, spoiled only by the stain of a man’s murder. The thought jarred, like a discordant note in a dreamy symphony. Enzo turned and walked briskly back to the house.
When he got to the annex, he sat once again behind Killian’s desk and surveyed the clues laid out before him. He had brought through the Post-it and message pad from the fridge and laid them out alongside the diary and the Post-it from the desk lamp. The encyclopaedias were all open at the relevant pages. And against the desk lamp itself he had propped Ronald Ross’ framed poem about mosquitoes. His eyes were drawn to a line of it which made sense now in the context of Ross’ discovery. But somewhere, far away in the back of his brain, sparking neurons were making almost subliminal connections. I find thy cunning seeds, O million-murdering death. The plasmodium found in the mosquito’s stomach, of course. But with Killian’s fondness for wordplay, might there be some hidden meaning here? O death, where is thy sting? Thy victory, O Grave?
Whatever connections he was making deep in his sub-conscious, they were, for the moment, eluding his conscious mind. As a distraction, he went online to check his email and saw that there was one waiting for him. It was from someone called Gerard Cohen. He opened it up.
Professor Macleod,
Your email was forwarded to me by the Wiesenthal Center first thing this morning. Although retired now, I worked there as an investigator in the late eighties and most of the nineties. I can confirm that I did, indeed, have correspondence with a certain Adam Killian in the spring of 1990. I am very sorry to hear that he was murdered. This must have occurred not long after I met him in Paris in July of that year. I am intrigued to know more.
Gerard Cohen
Enzo felt his excitement mounting. He immediately composed his response.
My Dear Monsieur Cohen,
Thank you for your prompt response. I will, of course, be only to happy to share with you everything I know about Monsieur Killian’s murder. However, I would be most grateful if first you could tell me what it was that you and Monsieur Killian were discussing?
Thanking you in advance,
Enzo Macleod
Within a matter of minutes his laptop alerted him to Gerard Cohen’s response. He must have been sitting at his computer waiting for a reply.
Professor Macleod,
The subject of my correspondence with Monsieur Killian, and our subsequent meeting is, as far as I am concerned, confidential. I do not feel at liberty to discuss the details by email with an unseen, unverified
