Freeze Frame by Peter May Page A

wrinkling his nose. “Mosquito repellent.”
    “Yes.” Jane nodded. This was clearly not news to her.
    “Are you troubled by mosquitoes here?”
    “Not much. There’s usually an onshore breeze that keeps us relatively insect-free.”
    Enzo laid the aerosol back in the drawer and slid open the one above it. Here was a strange arrangement of clear plastic tubing exiting from either end of a transparent plastic film container of the kind that used to hold rolls of film in the pre-digital age. Enzo frowned.
    “It’s called a pooter, apparently,” Jane said. “For catching single insects. You use one end as a mouthpiece, and suck the creatures in through the other end to trap them in the container.”
    Enzo pulled off the lid and saw that the mouthpiece tube had a tiny square of gauze stuck over one end. Its purpose was obvious. He put it back in the drawer, and picked up the only other item. A small bottle of clear liquid. He held it up. “Do you know what’s in this is?”
    “I had it analysed. It’s lactic acid. No one seems to know what he might have used it for.”
    Enzo thought about it for a long time. “Lactic acid,” he said at length, “particularly in combination with carbon dioxide, is a well-known mosquito attractant.”
    “Oh.” Jane seemed surprised. “No one’s come up with that before.”
    “Strange though.” Enzo turned it over in his mind. “Repellent in one drawer, attractant in another.”
    “Well, he worked with insects all the time, so who knows what he might have used them for.”
    Enzo closed the drawer and looked at the desk diary open in front of him. “The diary was open at this page?”
    “Yes.”
    Enzo flipped back several pages, screwing up his eyes to read the entries. “Doctor’s appointments,” he said. “Twice a week by the looks.”
    “He was getting some kind of palliative treatment for the cancer. It didn’t seem to be doing him much good, though.”
    Enzo returned to the entry for Monday, September 24, the day Killian was murdered, and reached into his canvas shoulder satchel to retrieve his half-moon reading glasses. He smiled ruefully over them at Jane. “Vanity has to take a back seat to clarity these days, I’m afraid.” And he returned his attention to Killian’s final entry. He read it out loud. “P, I was lighting a fire, but now there’s no more time, and all I’m left with is a half-warmed fish in the pouring rain.” He looked up, puzzled. “What did he mean? Is this the message?”
    His dead son’s wife shrugged, and looked vaguely disappointed. “Well, that’s what I hoped you would tell me, Mr. Macleod.” She approached the desk. “If it is the message, it’s only a part of it.” He left notes all over the place.” She touched the post-it scotched to the desk lamp. “This one was attached to the lamp, but kept falling off. So I stuck it on with sticky tape so it didn’t get lost.”
    Enzo leaned forward to read it, peering myopically through his half-moons at the faded scrawl. Again, he read aloud. “P, one day you will have to oil my bicycles. Don’t forget!” He looked up at Jane. “I’m assuming that P is Peter.”
    “That is the assumption everyone else has made.”
    “So your father-in-law had more than one bicycle?”
    “No, that’s the strange thing. He didn’t have one at all. And neither did Peter.”
    Enzo looked again at the note on the lamp, then the scribbled entry in the desk diary, before flipping back for a second look at the previous entries. “All the other entries in his diary,” he said, “are written in a very tight, neat hand. Except this last one. And the note on the lamp.” He compared dots and t’s and loops. “But demonstrably the same handwriting. Just scribbled, as if done in a great hurry.”
    “Yes. It was very uncharacteristic of him. He was a scrupulous and careful man.”
    Enzo looked around the study again. “Very tidy, very ordered.”
    Jane nodded her agreement. “Almost