A Darker God (36 page)

Laetitia had been reading the letter out loud to Montacute and Gunning, who had uttered not a single word as she proceeded. She paused and looked questioningly at the pair.

“Our old friend’s here in the room with us,” murmured
the inspector. “Don’t you feel it? Better do as Andrew says. He doesn’t take kindly to disobedience.”

“He’s still playing Director.” Gunning smiled. “I think we should obey the stage directions. If you can bear it, Letty? Pretty emotional stuff! Is this something you’d rather do by yourself?” He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, which she did not refuse.

“No. No. Please, both of you—stay. This letter is personal, yet not so personal that it may not be read out loud. I know he’s written it in the expectation that at least William would be present. He sort of says hello, doesn’t he? Did I imagine that?”

“More than hello … There was a distinct dig in the ribs aimed at me in there, I think,” murmured Gunning.

“No,” said Montacute. “I’m sure you’re right. He loved an audience. The professor is playing to the crowd. An invited crowd. And I, for one, intend to have a front seat in the stalls. Not often the investigating officer manages to get a
victim’s
-eye view of events leading to a murder. And it’s happened to me twice in twenty-four hours. He’s going to spin out the suspense but in the end he’ll give it to me—the name of his murderer! But first, this is—and I do need to remind all of us of this at this point—a crime scene. I’m going to ask you both to put any wrappings or envelopes into this wastepaper basket and any precious items onto … um … this velvet cloth.” He took a length of dark blue cloth from the top of a piano and spread it on the floor by Letty’s side. “Now. Where do you want to start?”

“Here. With this.” Letty picked up the topmost wrapped object. It was flat and thin, the size of a pudding plate, and surprisingly heavy in her hand. “Wait a moment, there’s a label stuck over the seam, a sort of seal.”

“And there’s something written on it.” Gunning was already reaching for it. He looked at Letty in surprise. “It says: ‘No jammy fingers!’”

Letty made a soft sound and looked aside. The men caught each other’s eye and decided it would be kinder not to notice her emotion. It was left to Gunning to strip away the tissue paper. They each nervously warned the others to take care and not to expect too much and then all held their breath as the object came sparkling out into the light.

    No one spoke as Letty took the diadem from Gunning’s fingers and very gently shook it. Tiny oak leaves trembled, individually fixed and gathered into natural clumps around a central twisted band. Here and there amongst the thickets of leaves glinted perfectly formed acorns nestling in their striated cups. The whole had the wild exuberance and freshness of a wreath hastily put together by a child playing under forest trees in the autumn. And yet the natural form was inspired and controlled by the delicacy and precision of a master goldsmith.

“Golly! Eat your heart out, Fabergé!” Gunning murmured. “It’s gold. Thracian gold. So dark it almost has a bronze tinge to it. Are you going to try it on, Letty? I’ll fetch a mirror.”

“No!” She stopped him with a gesture. “I wouldn’t have the impudence. What queenly head last wore it? I look for but I don’t see a hair trapped amongst the foliage … Besides, on
my
hair, you wouldn’t even notice it. Same colour. You’d just think I’d been rolling in the hay and offer me a brush. No one should wear this but Demeter herself or … a dark-haired girl. I can imagine it gleaming amongst black tresses …”

She caught the inspector’s eye and knew without words that he was seeing it around the shining head of Thetis. He took it from her gently and laid it on the velvet cloth.

The second offering was encased in a red leather jewel box. Letty held up two objects to glimmer in the afternoon
sunshine. Pendant earrings, again of dark gold, they trailed from central discs in swags of blossoms, fruit, and berries. Letty held them up on either side of her face, where they dangled from ear down to shoulder, and she smiled. “Lovely! But something else I can’t wear … unless I have my ears pierced.”

She passed one to each man and they gasped and exclaimed over the stunning workmanship and then put them down alongside the diadem.

“Percy, your turn, I think,” she invited, and the inspector eagerly chose a package.

From a plain brown cardboard box he shook two matching medallions into his hand and held them up between finger and thumb. “Exquisite! Do we have any idea of the subjects?” he asked. A kindly schoolmaster who already knows the answer to his question.

“So that’s where he got them!” Gunning exclaimed. “Andrew was showing me the illustrations for his work on Alexander last winter and these two featured—as line drawings. Perhaps he took a rubbing! I know who they are. The gentleman with the handsome profile and jutting beard is Philip, King of Macedon and Alexander’s redoubtable father. And who knows? The lady with the deceptive simper and aristocratic Greek hairdo may well be his mother, snake-worshipping, murdering Queen Olympias.”

Gunning placed the two images side by side on the cloth. Ignoring each other, the faces stared out in opposite directions.

“In life as in art!” he commented. “If this is indeed Olympias, poor old Philip finds himself head to head once again with his killer! With the wife he feared and hated. And who shall blame him! Can’t exactly have been conducive to marital bliss—having to kick the snakes out of the marriage bed every time you wanted to exercise your conjugal rights. I think we can be certain it was she who arranged her husband’s
assassination. And who arranged for the tidying up of loose ends afterwards. The killer, having put a dagger into Philip’s ribs, was caught fleeing the scene, according to the ancient sources. He was hacked to death by elements of the pursuing royal bodyguard—conveniently before a confession could be wrung out of him—and his body was ceremonially exhibited in public. The reaction of the bereaved queen to all this was interesting! It was blatantly to place a golden crown on the head of the assassin as he hung dead on his stake of shame. Pausanias, his name was. And he was a royal bodyguard, ironically. The queen gave Pausanias a magnificent send-off: She had him cremated and buried with all honours. Hard to make a clearer statement than that!”

“‘Thanks, mate. Job well done. So sorry you had to die in the process,’” said Montacute.

“Oh, good Lord!” Gunning exclaimed, brow furrowed in concentration. “It happened in the arena at Aigai, the ancient capital! Aigai. The king was stabbed to death just before his ceremonial entrance to the theatre. He was standing in the wings, waiting for the trumpet fanfare to sound.”

“An unsafe place for powerful men, it seems—the theatre,” Letty said quietly.

“Are you suggesting that the god of the place gets bored and likes to stage his own real-life impromptu dramas? Ghastly thought! Better say a few prayers, pour out a jug of bloodred Mavrodaphne to appease him before we go public with the play next week, are we thinking?”

Montacute grinned. “
I
leave all that nonsense to the superstitious—as I suspect you do, Gunning. I put my trust in Theotakis and his gun-toting squad.”

“But who guards the bodyguards?” said Letty. “The men paid to stay close by and carry arms? The trusted ones? I wonder what persuasion she used on poor, silly Pausanias. If it
was
Olympias at the bottom of it all. Can we believe that? Look at
her head! So matronly, so proper. You’d say butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth!”

Gunning shuddered. “The woman was a raging Maenad! Follower of Dionysus. Adept in the arts of poisoning and other less subtle methods of killing. She’d have made Lucrezia Borgia look like a Girl Guide. She had hundreds of her own people horribly tortured and killed. The death she prescribed for the rival for her husband’s affections, the young girl Eurydice—and her child—is too sickening for words. If this is indeed Olympias, we’re looking at the face of the most wicked woman in history.”

He picked up the medallion and held it in the palm of his hand, examining it closely, suddenly less certain. “But, I agree, this lady before us does have a certain saintlike innocence about her. I wonder if it
can
be her? Anyone like to argue that this is the rival who ousted her from the number one position at court? Young Eurydice? So briefly Queen of Macedon? Did Andrew leave us an inventory?”

“Probably in the promised envelope in the bottom. Do you have a feeling Andrew’s leading us on some sort of a wet-afternoon’s treasure hunt?” Letty poked about in the chest and extracted three small objects of equal size, shape, and hardness. “These would appear to come to hand next.”

She unwrapped them and set them up in a row.

Gunning began to laugh. “I think he’s just answered your previous question on identity, Letty! Here we have the family portrait gallery, no less! Exquisite ivory carving!” He took in his hands in turn each of the three ivories, the heads no larger than the average doorknob, yellowed with age and somewhat pitted but clear representations of the subjects in life. “Look at the detail and the liveliness of expression! Some Michelangelo of the ancient world produced these. But they’re not idealised! We’re seeing these characters warts and all, you’d say! And the artist solves the problem of identity. Here is Philip, and no
mistake! Impressive, shrewd, a bearded warrior. And do you see the nick in the brow over his right eye? It’s not an accidental chip—it’s his famous old war wound! And the younger man … I was wondering when
he’d
make an appearance. Handsome, clean-shaven—and that’s very unusual for a man in his early twenties, which this one appears to be. Who in the world wouldn’t know
his
face? The unruly hair, the arrogant tilt of the head, the eyes gazing always over the horizon, the sensuous lips slightly parted in some emotion—”

“What a modern face! He could be my brother!” Letty interrupted. “I’ve seen his double many times. Chaps like him tend to row at stroke in the Cambridge boats—humming a little Bach as they swish along.”

“It’s Alexander,” Montacute said, mesmerised by the little carving. “And look here, if I place the third one right next to him—”

“Oh, goodness! Yes! That’s where he got his looks! The artist’s seen it … the resemblance. She has the same arrogance, the same wide eyes—though hers are focussed, clever eyes—the same full lips … It could only be his mother, Olympias. And yes—view her in profile and it’s the lady on the medallion,” Letty confirmed.

Montacute chortled. “I could draw up a suspect identification sheet from these! Monsieur Bertillon could get out his measuring tapes and, citing nose length, distance between eyes, width of brow, pronounce with certainty on identity! A shared identity. Philip, from this evidence, could well not have been the father—but this was certainly his mother!”

“After all these centuries we’re looking at them again: the world’s wickedest woman and her egomaniac of a son,” murmured Letty. “And they have the faces of angels.”

More coins—silver tetradrachms and gold staters—and more medallions joined the earlier ones on the velvet and were followed by intact and ravishingly beautiful pieces, all small: a
painted funeral vase; a slender
lekythos
in which Letty could almost persuade herself she could still smell the heady eastern perfume, long diffused; and, the last object to surface, a golden wine cup. It was decorated with the graceful form of the young Dionysus, who, with enigmatic half-closed eyes, was about to take in marriage the hand of Ariadne, princess of Crete, abandoned by her Athenian hero, Theseus, and here modestly hiding her lower face with her veil. Their wedding guests, satyrs and nymphs, posed lasciviously in the background, anticipating the drunken revelry, their limbs entwining with the wandering tentacles of ivy and grapevine as well as with each other’s.

Stunned by the glitter and glory of the workmanship crowding the velvet cloth, Letty leaned over the chest and took hold of the last of the packages. Small and light. As she removed the last layer of tissue paper, she almost dropped it in her shock and instinctive shudder of revulsion.

Chapter 31

R
ecovering herself, Letty held it out, cupped in her hand, and managed to speak in a reasonably calm voice. “Ah. If these are what I think they are, then they may be part of the original contents of the chest.
‘Larnax’
was my first thought and I say again: funeral receptacle. Similar in purpose to the ones we encountered in Crete, William. Andrew was telling us: The Macedonians cremated their royal dead and buried them in the mounds that still dot the landscape—perhaps these burnt fragments were what he found in this particular chest?”

“Looks awfully like the stuff I periodically dig out from the bottom of my toaster.” Montacute looked at it, unimpressed. “But what’s that larger piece?”

Letty stroked the slender brown object gently with a trembling forefinger and smiled in wonder. “That’s as near as I shall ever get to shaking hands with Macedonian royalty. It’s a finger bone.”

“Proximal phalanx,” Gunning specified, peering at it. “There are some more quite large fragments but that’s the clearest. I wonder who it belonged to?”