half obscured by tall, overgrown shrubs and bushes. It was a square, white bungalow with blue shutters, a light burned in one of the windows at the front, warm and welcoming in the cold and wet of the approaching night.
He’d had no real sense of what to expect of Jane Killian, and yet Enzo found himself taken by surprise. She was petite, five-two or three, and slim built. Curling brown hair with blond highlights was cut short, tight into the nape of her neck, giving her an almost boyish appearance, an illusion aided by the way she dressed. Loose-fitting jeans, a pale blue, open-necked shirt out over narrow hips, well-worn high tops. But there was nothing masculine about her. She had full, almost sensuous lips, and below dark eyebrows large, bright eyes, brown flecked with orange, almost amber. She was, he knew from Raffin’s book, forty-five years old, but looked ten years younger and had an air of fragility about her. As if she might easily be broken. She held out a small, elegant hand to shake Enzo’s. “Come in. You must be frozen dressed like that.”
Enzo followed her into the living room, where split logs glowed on a grate in an open fire, throwing out their warmth, and filling the room with the smoky sweet smell of burning oak.
“Here, let me take that jacket. It’s soaking.” She took his coat and draped it over the back of a chair in front of the fire. “You could probably do with a drink. Whisky?”
“Perfect.” Enzo knew already that he liked her. Any woman who hung up his coat and offered him whisky went right to the head of the queue for his affections. He noticed the open book on the coffee table next to the armchair where the impression her body had left in the soft cushions still showed. Chocolat. So although she had never remarried, she hadn’t lost her sense of romance. Or perhaps her dreams of it.
She handed him a whisky and refilled her own glass. “Sit down.” She curled herself up in the armchair she had occupied before his arrival. “It’s nice to be talking English. My French isn’t that great, I’m afraid.” Enzo had fallen back into his native language without even thinking about it, but realised now that there was a comfort in it. “I suppose your French must be pretty good.”
Enzo shrugged modestly. “It’s okay. Although I think my Scottish accent sometimes bamboozles the French.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“About twenty-three years now.”
“Almost a native, then.”
“Well, my daughter is. One hundred percent French. Although she speaks English with my Scottish accent.”
Jane smiled and tipped her head slightly, sipping her whisky, and looking at him over her glass with an appraising eye. “She had a French mother then, I guess.”
“Yes.” Enzo wasn’t about to volunteer any more just yet. He looked around the small living room, made smaller by the clutter of soft furnishings. Pushed up against one wall stood a scarred French buffet, no doubt acquired at a local brocante. A gate-leg table was folded against the back wall. Mounted above it a dozen framed cases displayed preserved insects pinned to white backboards. Ageing brown and cream floral-patterned paper covered the walls and the door, and a scatter of rugs protected polished oak floorboards. “So… this is where it all happened?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “Papa’s study is out in the annex across the lawn. I’m sorry… I should say Adam. I always called him Papa, because Peter did.”
“That doesn’t sound very English.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well, that’s because he wasn’t.”
And now it was Enzo’s turn to be surprised. “I thought your father-in-law was British.”
“He was. Well, at least, he took British nationality. But he was born in Poland, and didn’t come to Britain until 1951. In the end, he was more English than the English. Not even the hint of an accent. I think he worked very hard at not being Polish anymore.”
This was news to Enzo. There had been no mention of it in Raffin’s book. “Tell me.”
“Not much to tell, really. He began his university education in Warsaw before the German invasion. Finished it after the war, and came to do a post-grad at London University in ’51.”
“In tropical medical genetics.”
“Yes. Over the years he spent a lot of time in the tropics, as well as other parts of the world. I think that’s where he got the entomology bug.” She smiled. “So to speak.”
Enzo ran his eyes over the lines of insect display cases hanging on the wall. Jane followed his glance.
“Not an interest he passed on to his son, I’m happy to say.”
“What was it Peter did?”
“He worked for a charity. Spent a lot of time overseas, just like his father.”
Enzo looked at her carefully. “It’s almost twenty years since he died.”
“Yes.” If there were still emotional scars, she kept them well hidden.
“But you never remarried.”
“No.”
He waited for more, but there was nothing forthcoming. Instead she changed the subject.
“I’ve prepared the bedroom directly above Papa’s study. You can stay as long as you like, or for as long as it takes. I’ll be here, in the main house, for about two weeks, so if there’s anything you need to know…”
Enzo took a large swallow of whisky. “You can tell me how the local newspaper knew I was coming.”
“Oh, God, did they?” She flushed with embarrassment. “I haven’t seen the paper, but I’m afraid it was probably my fault. There’s a woman in the village who looks after the house for me when I’m not here and gets it ready for me coming.” She sighed. “When I asked her to prepare the guest bedroom, stupidly I told her why.” She shrugged her apology. “Impossible to keep a secret here. I’m sorry, I should have known better.” She drained her glass. “Would you like to see the study?”
At the back door she took an umbrella from the rack. The door led straight from a large kitchen into the garden. Oddly the kitchen seemed cold and empty. Jane said, “I’d have had a meal prepared for you, but I only arrived today myself. Haven’t had a chance to do a shopping yet. I thought we might eat out in town, if that’s okay with you.”
“Sure.” Enzo groaned inwardly at the prospect of having to go out again into the night. It was fully dark now, and by the light of an outside halogen lamp illuminating the back garden, he could see the rain driving almost horizontally across the lawn.
They huddled together under the shelter of the umbrella and hurried over the grass to where the annex sat brooding darkly among the trees. He was aware of her slight, soft body pressed into his side, as he crooked his arm around her shoulders to support the umbrella against the wind.
She unlocked the door, and they scrambled out of the wet into the small square of entrance hall, shaking the umbrella behind them. The flick of a switch caused a single, naked bulb to cast light down into the hall from the narrow stairwell. She pushed open the door in front of them.
“Bathroom in there. Bedroom up the stairs. And this…” she turned to her right and opened a door, “… was Papa’s study.” She leaned in and turned on a light, and Enzo found himself gazing back twenty years into the past.
He felt a strange thrill of anticipation, all his instincts on suddenly heightened alert. Here was the room where Killian had died. The room in which he had somehow created a message for his son. A message that the young man had never seen and which had never been deciphered by anyone since. He laid his overnight bag down in the hall and took three steps back in time to an early fall
night in September, 1990.
The large, square room had a high ceiling. To the right, a tall, shuttered window opened on to what Enzo imagined would be a view across the garden to the house. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the facing wall and the wall to the left. A thousand volumes or more stood side by side, silent witnesses to the murder of the man who had placed them there. Their multicoloured facade lent a warmth to this otherwise cold room.
Killian’s desk faced the door, an austere, uncomfortable-looking guest chair set an an angle on the nearside. Against the door wall stood a wooden filing cabinet, and next to it a work table where, Jane said, Killian spent hours preserving and mounting species of insect gathered from the surrounding countryside. Each one was photographed and annotated in leather-bound volumes. Beyond that, another door led to a small kitchen with little more than a sink and draining board, an old refrigerator, a small electric oven, and a shelf with an electric kettle, teapot and tea
