Freeze Frame (24 page)
He turned to find himself trapped in Jane Killian’s penetrating gaze. She said, “Do you know who he is? This Erik Fleischer. Or, at least, who he’s been pretending to be all this time?”
Enzo’s face clouded, and the lights dimmed in his eyes. “Yes, Jane. I’m pretty sure I do.”
Guéguen’s blue Citröen van with its red and white flashes on the hood and blue light on the roof rocked in the strength of the unrestrained wind that lashed the south coast. It was the only vehicle in the gravel parking area at the foot of the hill as Enzo drove down, peering through his rain-streaked windscreen to see the breakers smashing over the rocky outcrops at the point.
The rendezvous at the Pointe des Chats had been the gendarme’s idea. Since acquiring the autopsy report and the shell casing, he had been paranoid about being seen with Enzo. Hence his choice of meeting place. No one was likely to stumble upon them by accident on a stormy November afternoon by the unmanned lighthouse on this exposed south-west point of the island.
White spume rose high into the air, whipped away on the edge of a wind approaching gale force, obscuring for a moment the orange cowling of the lighthouse that poked up above bowed trees. Enzo drew his Jeep in beside the police van and transferred quickly through the rain from one vehicle to the other. Even in the time it took him to cover the few feet between them, he got soaked, and he sat breathing hard in the passenger seat, rain streaming down his face. He turned to see the gendarme watching him carefully. He wore his dark blue peaked
kepi
and a waterproof jacket with a single white horizontal stripe over his gendarme-issue blue pullover and pants. There was a large white envelope laid across his knees. The windows of the Citröen were already steamed up to opacity. He said, “Your friend in England responded very quickly.”
Enzo glanced at the envelope. “What did he find?”
Guéguen shook his head in pensive admiration. “You’re an amazing man, Monsieur Macleod.” He passed the envelope to Enzo, and as the big Scotsman opened it up to remove several printed sheets, added, “He emailed me a PDF of his findings.”
Enzo scrutinised the printouts of the PDF. Photographic images of digital fingerprints, brief comparison text, and a short note for Enzo.
“As you can see, he did indeed find a print on the shell casing. And, as you suspected, there were several sets of prints on the wine glass you asked me to send him. But one of them was a perfect match.”
Enzo nodded. The very final piece of this long lost puzzle finally snapped into place. But it gave him no satisfaction. His heart weighed like lead in his chest.
Guéguen could not contain his curiosity any longer. “Whose are they?”
But before Enzo could respond, a burst of white noise issued from the gendarme’s police radio. The voice of the duty officer back at Port Tudy crackled across the airwaves.
“We’ve got a suspicious death, Adjudant. Out at Quéhello. Dubois and Bonnet are already on their way. And Doctor Servat has been notified.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Old Doctor Gassman. The postman found him earlier this afternoon. Looks like suicide.”
“Damn! I’m on my way.” Guéguen turned sad eyes toward Enzo. “I have to go. We’ll need to continue this another time.”
“Would you mind if I came with you, Adjudant Guéguen?” Enzo’s voice was hushed, and barely audible above the roar of the wind and the sea outside. He had a sick feeling in his stomach.
The gendarme frowned. “Why?”
“Because I think there is a good chance that Jacques Gassman’s death is related to the murder of Adam Killian.”
***
By the time they got to Gassman’s cottage out on the moor beyond Quéhello, several vehicles had already pulled up on the patch of gravel next to the west gable: a van from the gendarmerie, Alain Servat’s dark green SUV, an ambulance from Le Bourg, and the the
facteur
’s yellow
La Poste
van, the postman himself slumped in the driver’s seat, his pale face visible through the rain-distorted side window.
Enzo ducked his head into the rain and followed Guéguen inside. He recognised the smell of the place instantly. Old age and dogs and stale cooking. But there was something new that hung in the air now. A distant whiff of gunshot and the sharp rust-like smell of dried blood. The living room seemed smaller, crowded as it was with people. Two gendarmes, Alain Servat, two ambulance men, and now Enzo and Guéguen. The air in the room was cold, the fire long dead. From upstairs came the pitiful, hoarse yelping of old Gassman’s dog, howling for the dead.
Guéguen raised his eyes toward the ceiling. “What in God’s name is that?”
“His dog,” one of the gendarmes said.
“Oscar,” Enzo said, and everyone turned to look at him. There was a momentary hiatus when it was clear that everyone else was wondering why he was there.
“Yes. Oscar.” The gendarme acknowledged the name. “It was Oscar’s barking that alerted the postman to something being wrong. He came in and, well…” He moved to one side. The others followed his lead, clearing a space to reveal the body of the old man slumped over the table at the far side of the room, the table where he had taken his solitary meals and where he had ended up, it seemed, taking his own life. It did not take the presence of a doctor to tell that he was dead.
His head lay in a large, sticky pool of blood that had already lost its lustre. It was rapidly browning as it oxidised and would leave a permanent stain in the wood. A Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol was clutched in the retired doctor’s right hand. Enzo’s eyes dipped to the floor, where he saw a single, discarded brass shell casing.
“Jesus,” Guéguen whispered. He had gone quite pale. Enzo knew he must have seen many dead bodies during his years in the service, but death was something you never got used to. And if you did, it was only because something had died inside of you.
“Looks like a pretty classic suicide,” the other gendarme said. He hesitated. “Except…”
Guéguen looked at him sharply. “Except what?”
“Well, you know, people usually leave a note. A message, a last thought. So when we got here, I looked around to see if I could find one. I found this in his bureau.” He held up an old, worn, leather identity wallet. Enzo noticed that he had taken the precaution of wearing latex gloves before handling anything, a measure of the improved procedures that Guéguen himself had introduced.
“What is it?”
“Identity papers, Adjudant.”
Guéguen frowned. “Well, his identity’s not in doubt is it?”
“It could be now.” The gendarme opened up the wallet. “These are wartime identity papers, sir, issued by the German Reich to an SS Officer named Erik Fleischer.”
There was a long silence, then, broken only by the howling of the wind outside and the rain driving against the windows on the south side of the house, until Enzo’s voice resonated softly around the room. “Could you show me where exactly you found that, officer?”
All heads turned in his direction, and the gendarme flicked a look in the direction of his adjudant, seeking some indication of how to respond. Guéguen gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head.
“It was in here, monsieur.” And the gendarme turned through the open door behind him. Enzo, followed by Guéguen and the second gendarme, went into Gassman’s study after him. “Just here, in this little open compartment at the top right-hand side of his writing bureau.” He laid the wallet inside it, then lifted it out again. It was where Enzo had found the pile of Gassman’s old passports held together by an elastic band. His eyes flitted over the rest of the bureau, but there was no sign of them now.
There was a polite cough in the doorway behind them, and they turned to see Doctor Servat standing there. Enzo hadn’t paid him much attention until now. He looked wan, tired. His coat hung loose and damp on his shoulders. “Shall I tell the ambulance men to take the body away now?”
“No.” Enzo spoke quickly, and was again aware of everyone’s eyes on him. “Nothing should be moved, or touched. This is a crime scene.”
“How can you know that?” Guéguen said.
Enzo pushed back through to the living room and approached the body. Guéguen followed him and turned to the two ambulance men. “Wait outside please’ And the two men cast sullen eyes at the adjudant, feeling cheated by their exclusion from this moment of high drama.
Enzo waited until the door closed behind them. “For a start,” he said, “Jacques Gassman was left-handed.” He looked round to see all their eyes focused on the gun in the old man’s right hand. “If you were going to kill yourself, particularly by shooting yourself in the head, you would want to be sure you didn’t botch it. If you were left-handed you would take the gun in your left hand, I think.” He turned to Guéguen. “And if your ballistics people at Vannes run a check on the gun he is holding, I’m pretty sure they’ll find it was the same weapon used to murder Adam Killian.”
It was Alain Servat who broke the silence this time. “Are you saying that Doctor Gassman murdered Killian?”
“No, I’m saying that someone would like us to think he did.”
Guéguen said, “You’ve lost me, Monsieur Macleod. I think you’d better explain.”
“Well,” Enzo said reluctantly, “at the risk of incriminating myself, I will have to confess to poking about among Doctor Gassman’s private papers myself just a few days ago.”
“You broke in?” This from one of the gendarmes.
“No. I was here to see him about something else. He was out, so I let myself in. The door wasn’t locked. And I suppose I let my curiosity get the better of me. I had just come from the
mairie
, where I had established the date of the doctor’s first arrival on the Île de Groix.”
“Which was when?” Alain Servat asked.
“May, 1960. About two months after an earthquake that killed around sixteen thousand people in the Moroccan seaport of Agadir. I didn’t really believe there was any link between Gassman and events there, but as it happened, I was able to satisfy myself that I was right.” He looked around the faces watching him. Faces that were a study in fascinated incomprehension. Nobody knew quite what to ask next. So he pressed on.
“In that same compartment, officer, where you found Fleischer’s identity papers, there was a bundle of Gassman’s old passports dating back to the 1950s. If Gassman had been in Morocco in 1960, there would have been immigration stamps in his passport to show that. Entry and exit.” He paused. “There weren’t.” He waved a hand toward the identity wallet still clutched by the gendarme who found it. “There was no identity wallet in that compartment. Just the passports. But I’m willing to bet that if you look for those passports now, you’ll not find them.”
“Meaning?” Guéguen’s concentration was completely focused on Enzo’s face.
“Meaning that someone took them and replaced them with Fleischer’s identity papers, so we would think that Gassman was really Fleischer. The same person who killed him. The same person who murdered Killian. The same person whose fingerprint we recovered from the shell casing in Killian’s study.” He stooped to the floor and took a pencil from an inside jacket pocket. Carefully, he slipped the pointed end of it inside the spent shell casing and stood up again, holding it up for them all to see. “The same person whose fingerprint, I am sure, we will also find on this one.”
The wind outside was gusting now to gale force and beyond. They heard it whining in the rafters and rattling the window frames and blowing cold air around their feet. Upstairs, poor Oscar still barked and yelped, his voice almost completely gone now.
“I think you’d better tell us a little more about this Fleischer,” Guéguen said.
Enzo drew a deep breath. “Erik Fleischer is a Nazi war criminal. Investigators on his trail thought he had been killed in the 1960 earthquake in Agadir. But Fleischer didn’t die in the quake. He escaped and ended up here under an assumed identity on the Île de Groix, a place he thought he would be safe, where no one would ever recognise him in a million years. Except that someone did. A former inmate of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where Fleischer had experimented on prisoners with poisons and surgery.”
“Adam Killian was that inmate?” Guéguen’s eyes were wide now in amazement.
Enzo nodded. “Killian was a Polish national who spent nearly two and a half years at Majdanek. By some miracle he survived both the camp and the war, to end up in England taking British citizenship and retiring finally to this quiet Breton island to pursue his hobby of studying insects. I guess the last thing he expected was to come face-to-face with the man he knew as The Butcher.” He laid the shell casing carefully on the table top. “But he wasn’t sure. So somehow he obtained a sample of Fleischer’s DNA for comparison with some of the man’s hair still held by investigators in Germany.”
“So,” Guéguen said, “Fleischer realised that Killian knew who he was and murdered him.”
The gendarme with the identity wallet was getting excited. “And if Doctor Gassman was killed to make us think he was Fleischer, that must mean that the real Fleischer is still alive.”
“Oh, yes,” Enzo said. “Erik Fleischer is still very much alive.”
“Who is he?” Guéguen said.
Enzo turned toward him and gave him a long, hard look. Finally he said, “We won’t know that for sure until we match up the DNA sample that Killian obtained.”
“You mean you have it?”
“I mean that Killian hid it somewhere in his study, preserved somehow until such times as a comparison could be made. Proof positive of Fleischer’s identity.”
“Where in his study?”
“Well, that’ll be a job for your forensics people when they arrive from the mainland tomorrow to start the investigation into poor Doctor Gassman’s murder. They are going to have to take Killian’s room apart brick by brick, until they find it. And find it they will, of that I am absolutely certain.” He drew a deep breath. “Meantime, you had better seal off the crime scene here. And I’ll make sure that nobody tampers with anything at Killian’s place until the
police scientifique
arrive.”
Guéguen stared at him for a long time, and Enzo could almost see the thought processes passing before his eyes. Finally, the adjudant said, “You told us you came here to see Gassman about something else, the day you found his passports.”
“That’s right.”
“Related to the Killian case?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind telling us what that was?”