Freeze Frame (11 page)
The Rue du Port ran along the side of the hill, parallel with the Quai des Indes, which was a deep-water channel cut into the heart of the city of Lorient from the inner harbour. There the yachts lined up side by side, touching and nudging, almost sensually, in time with the distant pulse of the sea. The street on the hill had been pedestrianised and cobbled, and young albizia trees planted all along its centre. In time they would provide dappled shade for the whole street with their frondy foliage and pink-and-white flowers. Now they were shedding, and the fine red and yellow leaves swirled and gathered in tiny drifts in the breeze that had sprung up.
Enzo found the offices of
Ouest-France
at number 55, and settled himself at a desk to sift through the newspaper’s coverage of the trial from 1991. It was the major story of the day, achieving regular two-page spreads, with detailed reporting of evidence presented and testimony given. Enzo navigated his way through them by using subheadings as information markers, guiding him to the particular passages he was anxious to read.
Beneath the headline,
A DEADLY ENCOUNTER
, he found the evidence given by Kerjean’s lover, Arzhela Montin. The court reporter had wielded a colourful pen.
The pale and fragrant Madame Montin sat with hands clasped, a tremor in her voice as she told the court of her fear of the accused. Describing him as “brutal” and “threatening,” she nonetheless claimed that Kerjean had been a fierce and passionate lover.
“We would make love whenever and wherever we could,” she told the
procureur
.
Asked if she had been aware of his reputation for violence when she took up with him, she replied: “I had heard that he was a man with a temper and prone to violence. In the early days of our relationship I saw no sign of it. But as time went on, our sexual encounters became more violent, more… frenzied. And he became increasingly possessive. If I couldn’t see him, he demanded to know why. He insisted that I not make love to my husband, and said that he would kill any man that came between us.”
“Would you say that you were afraid of him?” the
procureur
asked.
“Yes, monsieur. In the end, I was very afraid. He was becoming totally unreasonable and quite unpredictable.”
“Then why didn’t you just leave him?”
“Two reasons,” she told the court. “I was addicted to him. He made love to me like no man had ever made love to me before.” And when the
procureur
demanded to know what the second reason was, she replied: “I was very much afraid of what he might do.”
“To you?”
“To my husband. And perhaps to me, too.”
The accused sat cold and impassive in the dock as she went on to describe to the court the events of September 9, 1990, at the abandoned Fort du Grognon on the Île de Groix. There, she and Kerjean had been engaged in a passionate bout of lovemaking when they were unexpectedly interrupted by the deceased, Adam Killian.
“Thibaud went crazy,” she said, tears brimming in her eyes from the memory. “He was just an old man, kind of skinny and pale. But Thibaud screamed and shouted at him. Accused him of spying on us, of being a dirty
voyeur
. He literally chased him from the fort. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so grave. I was terrified that word would get out about our affair. Thibaud was stark naked, pushing the old man across the old parade ground, slashing at his legs with a stick. When they disappeared into the tunnel I couldn’t see them any longer, but I could still hear Thibaud shouting.”
“Did you hear him make any direct threats toward the deceased, Madame Montin?” the
avocat de la partie civile
asked her.
Madame Montin seemed to hesitate, and only answered after a prompting from the bench. She told the procureur: “I heard him shout—
you breathe a word of this, you old bastard, and I’ll have your ****ing hide
.”
This was the lurid reporting of a tabloid journalist, and Enzo was immediately wary of putting too much store by it. The quotes were selective, feeding an unsophisticated readership’s eager appetite for sex, violence and fear. But it was clear, all the same, how Arzhela Montin’s testimony must have fed popular antagonism toward Kerjean and inflicted considerable damage on his defence. How quickly love had turned into something so destructive.
Michel Locqueneux, a mechanic from the garage at Port Tudy where Kerjean had his car serviced and repaired, had been called to give evidence for the prosecution. He had told the court that Kerjean had brought his car in for its annual
vidange
the morning of the day that Killian was murdered. His testimony was that the car was running perfectly when it left the garage and that there was not a single reason he could think of for it breaking down that night, as Kerjean claimed. He had also told the court that Kerjean had not subsequently brought the car back for examination. And so the fault that appeared, then disappeared so mysteriously in the course of one night, remained unexplained.
Kerjean’s lawyer called several rebuttal witnesses to discredit Locqueneux, disgruntled clients who told stories of oil leaks and failing brakes and engine malfunction after servicing at the Locqueneux garage.
Several customers from Le Triskell were called to describe Kerjean’s rantings in the bar the night he threatened to put Killian in the cemetery.
But as Enzo worked his way through the prosecution case, it became painfully clear that there really was no hard evidence, except for that obtained at the crime scene. The fingerprints on the gate, the footprint in the garden, the Montblanc pen. And that was simply blown out of the water by a ruthless defence
avocat
who demonstrated beyond doubt that the handling of the crime scene and the initial investigation would have been perfect fodder for the scriptwriters of an Inspector Clouseau movie. In fact, he had made the allusion more than once, eliciting considerable laughter from the public benches. It was little wonder, Enzo reflected, that Guéguen was still embarrassed by it all, even although he himself had only been a trainee at the time.
The crux of the whole case, Enzo reflected as he stepped back out into the Rue du Port, revolved around the encounter at the Fort du Grognon. Only three people knew exactly what happened that day. Killian was dead. Kerjean was unlikely to provide any enlightenment. That only left the lover, Arzhela Montin. And she was still on the island, living at Quelhuit, according to the
libraire.
Enzo checked his watch. There was just time to catch the late afternoon ferry back. He would be on the island again a little after five. Time enough to drive out to Quelhuit and talk to Kerjean’s exmistress before dinner.
Quelhuit was a disparate group of whitewashed cottages gathered around an old church and strung out along the north shore. Fading light washed the landscape as Enzo turned off the Pen Men road and nursed his Jeep along a narrow, winding track between high hedgerows and tall oaks that shed brittle, brown leaves. Ahead, the church and the cluster of houses were silhouetted on the rise against a darkening blue sky.
It wasn’t until he was almost there that Enzo realised Arzhela would no longer be Madame Montin. And he cursed himself for not stopping off at the Maison de la Presse to ask what her new married name was. But as his father had always been fond of saying, he had a good Scots tongue in his head. He would simply have to stop and ask. He pulled into a paved parking area in front of the church, drawing up next to a tractor and a digger. As he stepped out into the dusk, he felt the chill settling with the night and reached back into the jeep to retrieve Killian’s scarf.
Again he was aware of the man’s scent, and the sense of him there, at his shoulder, watching his progress, or lack of it.
He pushed open a gate and heard it squeak loudly in the still of the coming night. The birds had already fallen silent, and the only sound to be heard was the sea washing gently along the shore. His footsteps seemed disproportionately loud as he crunched down the gravel path to the back door of one of a row of terraced cottages. The door was a freshly painted royal blue, and it was hard and unyielding beneath his knuckles.
The silence that followed his knock seemed profound, until a light above the door came on and startled him. The door opened to reveal an elderly lady wearing a patterned apron over a pale blue skirt. She wiped floury hands over the pattern and peered at him in the light.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, madame. I’m looking for the home of a lady who used to be called Arzhela Montin. I’m afraid I don’t know her new
nom d’épouse
.”
The old lady seemed to lean even further out of the door, squinting up at him with beady blue eyes. “You’re that investigator,” she said. “The one they wrote about in the paper.”
“Yes.” It seemed there was no corner of the island where he wasn’t known.
“She’ll not talk to you, you know.”
He was taken aback. “What makes you think that?”
“She’s never spoken about it in all the years she’s been here. Keeps herself to herself, she does. Thinks she’s better than us, just because she married an incomer and had her face in all the newspapers once. The centre of it all.” She snorted her derision. “Hah! You wouldn’t think it to look at her now. That a woman like that could arouse so much …” she searched for the right word, “…passion.”
Enzo followed her directions, past the church and down the slope to where a manicured lawn led toward the seashore and a solitary white bungalow was set among the trees. He made his way through a wellkept rock garden to a conservatory built along the front of the house. The distant lights of the mainland winked and twinkled in frosted air across water that lay still and grey, like slate.
When she came through from the house to open the door and switch on the lights of the conservatory, Enzo saw what her poisonous neighbour had meant. Arzhela Leclerc, as she now was, did not fit the image of the scarlet woman at the centre of an illicit affair that had led to scandal and murder. Enzo found himself almost disappointed. She was small, no more than five-two. What might once have been a slim and willowy figure, had turned to fat, and the impression she gave was of a ball, almost completely round. Her face, though unlined, had sagged, its jawline lost in jowls, her mouth down-turned and quite unattractive.
She stood looking at him, wearing a mantle of weary resignation. “I’ve been expecting you.” She stood aside, a silent invitation to enter. The conservatory was tiled and filled with fleshy-leafed potted plants. Cane furniture was arranged to take advantage of the view across the water, and she waved him into an armchair. “My husband will be home in about twenty minutes. I’d like you gone by then. What do you want to know?”
So the neighbour had been wrong about one thing. Arzhela Leclerc seemed almost anxious to talk. “Everything.”
She perched herself awkwardly on the edge of the settee and folded her hands in her lap, gently wringing them as she gazed for a long time at the floor, before looking up to meet his eye. “There are things, monsieur, that I have kept to myself for nearly twenty years. When I read about you in the paper, I thought… it’s time to tell. If he comes, if he asks me, I’ll tell him. Maybe then I’ll be rid of it, finally.”
Enzo found himself almost frightened to breathe in case she had a change of heart. “What happened at the Fort de Grognon?” he said.
“Oh, nothing that hasn’t been told a thousand times already. Except that I finally saw Thibaud Kerjean for the man he really was. A man barely in control of himself. A man driven by powerful urges. Sex and violence, and with a temper that released some kind of inner demon that I’d not seen before. Not like that, the way he was with that poor old man.”
“What happened?”
“He was like a man demented, monsieur. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see him foaming at the mouth. I’m sure he believed that being found like that was going to be the end of us. And he was right. But not in the way he thought.” She drew a deep, trembling breath. “He was obsessed with me, you see. Beyond all reason.”
Enzo tried hard to see her as the object any man’s obsession, but found himself agreeing with her, that it was, indeed, beyond all reason. He knew, too, that no matter how painful and traumatic the experience of all that happened to her twenty years before, it was probably the high point of her life. The only moment in it when, as her neighbour had said, she was the centre of all attention.
“I’d known for some time that it couldn’t go on. But I didn’t know how to end it. I couldn’t ever have told him. I was scared of him, you see, scared of what he might do. But when he unleashed his temper like that on poor Mister Killian, I knew the time had come. And in that moment, I saw just how it could be done.” She glanced nervously at her watch. “I would offer you a drink, monsieur. I could do with one myself. But we don’t have time.”
She could no longer remain seated and she rose to wander through the potted plants, to fold her arms and stare out through the glass at the moon rising now over the mainland across the strait. Enzo could see her reflection in the glass, like a mirror. Had she chosen to, she could have seen his reflection too, met his eye without meeting it. But instead she gazed at, or perhaps through, her own reflected image. Dragging up thoughts from the place she had buried them many years before. A place she had never wanted to revisit but had never been able to escape. There was a sense, Enzo thought, of the confessional in all this. He as father confessor, she as the repentant seeking absolution. He wondered if it was ever that easy. “So how exactly
did
it all end?”
After a long pause she said, “Mister Killian didn’t tell my husband, Monsieur Macleod. I did.” Another silence, as she struggled to find the right words. “I knew he would react, you see. That it would all come out in the open. And that Thibaud would think it was Mister Killian who’d done it. I just didn’t realise how ferocious my husband’s reaction would be. I thought, I really thought, we could have weathered the storm. We had two lovely children, too much invested in our relationship just to throw it away. But I hadn’t counted on his pride. A stubborn, utterly implacable pride, monsieur. Almost worse than Thibaud’s temper.”
“And Kerjean?”
He saw her mouth set in sorrow. “I’d seen the incident at the fort as my chance to break free. Mister Killian as a convenient scapegoat. I never for one moment, monsieur, thought that Thibaud would kill him.”
“And you think he did?”
She turned at last to face him. And nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I do. And I’ve spent every moment of the last twenty years feeling the guilt. Knowing it was my fault. If I could take it all back, I would. I’d have broken it off with Thibaud and faced the consequences, whatever they might have been. It could hardly have been worse than the way it turned out.”
“Do you think that might have saved your marriage?”
She shook her head sadly. “No.” She sucked in a deep breath. “Because there was something else, monsieur. Something I never told anyone, except my husband. Until now.”
Enzo stared at her in the silence of the conservatory and realised what that something was. “You were pregnant.”
A momentary fire flickered in her eyes, then died again like embers at the end of a long night. “That’s what he couldn’t accept. My husband. His pride. I couldn’t pretend to him it was his, because we hadn’t slept together in months. And that, above all else, is what he didn’t want people to know—that I was carrying Kerjean’s child. When news of the affair broke, everyone thought he threw me out. But the truth is, we had made a deal. And I kept my end of it.”
“Which was?”
“To leave immediately. Go to the mainland and have the pregnancy terminated.”
“And his end was…?”
“To take me back, once it was done, and try to make a go of it.”
Enzo nodded. “But he didn’t keep to that.”
The fire flared again, fanned by the oxygen of her remembered anger. “He used my absence to poison the minds of my children, to turn them against me. As soon as I’d had the abortion, he filed for divorce and got the courts to ask the children who they would rather be with—him or me.”
“And they chose him.”
The recollection still hurt. “They left the island, the three of them, almost as soon as the divorce was granted, and I haven’t seen my children since. Not once.”
They heard the sound of a car on the road by the church. It stopped, idling for a moment, before the engine ceased and they heard the slamming of a car door.
Her distress was immediate. “That’s my husband. Go now. Please.”
Enzo stood. “He doesn’t know any of this?”
She shook her head. “Only what was known at the time. And, of course, I had my own slant on it for him. But I have a new life now, monsieur. And I won’t ever speak of this again. Please go.”
Enzo nodded and let himself out, feeling how the temperature outside had dropped as he turned through the rock garden at the side of the house and saw the shadow of a man coming across the grass toward him. By the light at the corner of the house, Enzo saw that he was tall. A middle-aged man losing his hair. He wore a long coat and carried a briefcase. Enzo passed him without stopping, meeting his eye only fleetingly, and offering the merest nod of acknowledgment. Without looking round, he was aware that the man had stopped, and could almost feel his eyes on his back.
What would she tell him? That Enzo had come knocking at the door, trying to rake over the ashes of the past and that she had sent him packing? Or having finally lanced the boil that had been slowly poisoning her for twenty years, would she now tell him the truth?
Enzo saw the last streaks of red in the western sky as he reached his car and knew that he would never know.