Freeze Frame by Peter May Read Free Book Online Page A

the gloom, Enzo could just see the lights of the mainland in the far distance across the strait.
    He parked next to a white car beside two concrete benches overlooking the beach. The name of the village was painted on a stone set into the grass. An arrow pointed east.
Les Grands Sables 400m
. He found the house about twenty meters along the dirt track leading to the big sands. It stood behind a wall and blue-painted fence, 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