Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (15 page)

‘I don’t know why I stopped to pick him up,’ Barbara said, gulping down her wine and lighting a cigarette. ‘Why did you suggest it?’ She stood by the windows looking out towards the bare flanks of Iraklia and the smaller islands to the east. The
trata
had begun to move away to the south, its helmsman with his back to the house now. She glanced round and saw the weak smile on Mikkel’s face. She knew he would defer to her. He wouldn’t ask why she’d warned him off talking about Rosa Ozal. She didn’t care what he thought her interest in the woman had been. He always turned a blind eye to her involvement with other men. Perhaps he thought she’d been experimenting with her own sex for a change.

Barbara Hoeg pulled on her cigarette and thought about the long-haired Alex. It was undeniable that he was handsome, but there was something about him that didn’t ring true. Was he really a friend of the Turkish-American woman? She’d better ask Rinus about him tonight in the bar. Rinus was good at finding out about people. God, Rosa Ozal. Who would have thought her name would have cropped up again? And today of all days, the day Lefteris’s son was buried. Perhaps they should have attended the funeral, but she hadn’t trusted herself to remain calm.

She stubbed out her cigarette in a swift movement, then unbuttoned her blouse and dropped her trousers. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She ran forward and dived into the pool, her heavy breasts and thighs lit up for a moment by the sun.

As the sweat was dashed from her skin, she let out a silent scream as Rosa’s face and lustrous hair loomed up before her like a water nymph hungry for prey.

M
AVROS
woke before his alarm clock went off. The birds were shuttling across Rena’s courtyard, their wings vibrating like miniature fans. He lay in the cool room and focused on the lines of light that were coming through the slats of the shutter. Lines that led nowhere. They cast themselves on to the white wall, beginning and ending in space, never connecting with each other.

He was thinking about Rosa Ozal. Her line started here, in this very room. All he knew was that she’d sent a postcard from Trigono and that she’d subsequently gone to Turkey, where the line ended. Was there another one leading back? Although Trigono wasn’t one of the major holiday islands, it still received thousands of visitors during the season. By this time of year the locals were suffering from tourist blight and all visitors looked the same to them. That had been obvious when he’d shown the photograph in Ayia Marina and in the cafés on the beaches down the east coast. No one remembered her, no one showed a flicker of recognition. The only people so far who had done were the furniture designer Barbara Hoeg and her man Mikkel, and they hadn’t meant to.

Mavros got up and pulled on shorts. For all the hair on them, his legs had started to burn yesterday. Fortunately a
periptero
in Ayia Marina still had high-factor lotion in stock. He was intending to ask Rena about Rosa and then head out into the Kambos. He reckoned that Faros would still be in deep mourning and information would be hard to come by in the village. He also wanted to talk to Eleni the archaeologist. The Bar Astrapi had been closed yesterday evening so he’d missed her. Deniz Ozal’s business interest in antiquities had been nagging him. The police commander Kriaras hadn’t called him back, so presumably Ozal had no recorded involvement in the black market. He wondered if there could be a connection between the Turkish-American and Panos Theocharis. It seemed unlikely, given the Greek’s reputation as a museum benefactor who had never been involved in any illicit dealings, but Eleni might be persuaded to divulge information— she didn’t seem to be the old man’s number-one admirer. There was also the fact that Rosa Ozal worked in a gallery in New York. Could she have been acting on behalf of her brother? He reined in his imagination. Creative thinking was a bad idea before the first coffee of the day.

He made it on the gas ring in his small kitchen, having borrowed some Greek coffee from Rena when he returned the previous evening. He’d said that he wanted to try it and she gave him a quick lesson on how to use the
briki
, which he tried to look engrossed in. Taking his cup out to the table under the pergola, he heard Rena moving about in her kitchen. This was his chance. He went back into his room to pick up Rosa’s photo and postcard, then walked over to the rear of the house.

His landlady was standing with her back towards him.

‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully.

Rena seemed to freeze, her hands rising quickly to her face. She didn’t turn round.

‘Are you all right?’ Mavros asked uncertainly.

‘Yes,’ she replied in a low voice. ‘Good morning, Alex.’ The words were muffled by her hands. She swallowed a sob.

He stepped forward, sticking the photo and card into the waistband of his shorts under his T-shirt. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked. ‘Can I help?’

Rena lowered her hands and looked over her shoulder at him, displaying reddened eyes and damp cheeks. ‘No…no,’ she said. ‘I did not sleep so much. Thinking about the boy…the boy and the girl who—’ She broke off and sobbed again.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mavros said, raising a hand to touch her shoulder but then holding back. She would probably be even more traumatised if a tourist laid hands on her.

Rena took a deep breath, raised a handkerchief to her eyes and turned round. She gave him a brave smile. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Time is a good doctor, is he not? The only doctor.’

Mavros nodded dumbly.

‘You are going to the beach today?’ his landlady asked, nudging him gently out of the way. She started running water over crockery.

‘Em, no,’ he replied. ‘I’m going to explore the Kambos.’

Rena glanced at him. ‘Be careful out there, Alex,’ she said, her voice concerned. ‘Strange people live in the Kambos.’

Initially he took this as a reference to Eleni, but then he wondered if she meant the Theocharis family. He considered asking her about Rosa Ozal now that she seemed less upset, then decided to put it off. She obviously needed to get over the first shock of grief. She looked as devastated as anyone in the village, even though she’d said she wasn’t a close relative of the dead.

As he walked into the shaded yard, he wondered about that again. She was a couple of decades older than the drowned kids, so she probably wouldn’t have kept company with them. Then he remembered Rena’s reference to Eleni making love with people she shouldn’t. Was that what had upset her? Could Eleni, a city-born outsider with different standards of behaviour, have been involved with Yiangos? On the other hand, Eleni said that Rena had a reputation. He wondered what for. She seemed to be punctilious in observing the demands of widowhood and she didn’t strike him as the sexually frustrated figure of popular myth, although there was something about the way she looked at him—he had caught her observing him surreptitiously from her bedroom window.

Mavros went back to his room and put the computer diskette he’d found in his bag, along with his Greek mobile phone—he didn’t want his landlady to find that. His ID card was in the back pocket of his jeans where he always kept it. So far his cover as a foreigner was intact. He went out into the street and headed down to the public library, remembering the book about Trigono during the war that he’d been unable to locate. Going up the steps and across the shaded space to the door, he noticed that the key wasn’t in the lock. He tried the handle to no avail. Today the library wasn’t open to the public.

Heading across the square towards the Internet café he’d noticed the day he arrived, Mavros felt a change in the atmosphere. There were more people around, islanders as well as tourists, and voices were not as restrained as they had been. It was almost as if the village had done its duty, had registered its grief for the passing of the young couple and was now starting the long haul back to normality. Shops on the long street leading down to the port were open and small children, who had been kept indoors until now, were playing in the sun. But the faces of the adults still showed the burden they were carrying, their eyes raw and ringed.

Outside Themis’ Place— ‘Drinks for Hackers,’ according to the crudely painted sign—a couple of tables were occupied by bronzed tourists. Mavros went in, trying to keep his eyes off the ugly web patterns in silver paint that were on the black walls. There was a row of computers to the left. He inclined his head to the lugubrious, short-haired guy at the bar.

‘You want Internet?’ The English was rough but comprehensible.

Mavros shook his head, glad that his body language had made it clear he wasn’t Greek. He held up the diskette.

‘Okay,’ the barman said. ‘Fifteen hundred an hour. You want something to drink?’

Mavros didn’t really want another coffee but it might be an idea to keep the guy sweet. He ordered a frappé and turned on the machine. It was a recent model, in good condition. Unfortunately it was no good to him. Whatever he tried, he couldn’t get into the numbered files that were on the diskette marked ‘GL 1’. A password was required and none of his attempts worked, nor did his efforts to get round it.

The barman arrived with his chilled coffee.

‘Are you Themis?’ Mavros asked.

‘Yes.’ The Greek nodded at the screen. ‘Problem?’

‘Stupid,’ Mavros replied. ‘I forgot the password.’

‘I try.’

After ten minutes of swearing in Greek that Mavros tried not to show his amusement at, Themis gave up. ‘Sorry. Sometimes is possible, but not with this disk.’ He started to move away.

‘Wait a minute,’ Mavros said, determined to get his money’s worth. ‘The public library. Who’s in charge?’

The Greek looked at him blankly.

‘Who is number one? The boss?’

Themis raised his eyes. ‘Why you want to know?’

‘There’s a book I’d like to see but the library is closed.’

The barman licked his lips as if there was suddenly something sour on them. ‘One woman, name Rena,’ he said, glancing away. ‘
Poutana
,’ he said under his breath. ‘Lives after square. Blue and…
kitrino
…how say? Yellow? Yes, blue-and-yellow door.’

Mavros nodded slowly. Everything seemed to lead to his landlady. He was going to have to talk to her, sooner rather than later. He had noticed that Rena had been characterised as a whore, the same term she had used for Eleni the archaeologist. He swallowed his coffee, paid and headed back to the house. On the way he passed the war memorial and stopped to look at the abraded patch with the faint marks on it. He was thinking of the photo he’d found, the one of the wartime officer. George Lawrence. Could that be the name that had been erased? It was hard to tell. Were the letters Greek or English? If they were Greek, ‘PEN’ could equate to the English letters ‘REN’ in the middle of the surname. And the first and last letters of the first name— ‘T’ and ‘Z’—could come from Tzortz, the Greek transliteration of George. Who was this George Lawrence? It seemed clear that the files on the diskette also referred to him.

‘Rena?’ he called as he opened the door. ‘Are you here, Rena?’

There was no reply. The kitchen door was closed, muslin blowing in front of the window.

Crossing to his room, Mavros had another thought. When he was inside, he closed the door behind him and took out his mobile phone. The signal wasn’t good, but he didn’t want to go into the courtyard in case Rena was upstairs. He was going to be speaking Greek. After a couple of abortive attempts he managed to get through to directory enquiries. He was informed that there was only one Andhreas S. Vlastos, writer, on Paros, and was given the number. If he couldn’t track the book down on Trigono, a conversation with the author was as good a solution as any. Perhaps he would know who George Lawrence was. Then all he would have to work out was why a photo of the soldier was up the chimney in the same folder as one with Rosa Ozal’s writing on it.

He rang the number. A woman answered.

‘Could I speak to Andhreas Vlastos?’ he asked.

There was silence on the line. He repeated the question.

‘Andhreas Vlastos does not exist,’ the woman replied in a weak voice.

Mavros felt his stomach flip. ‘I’m…I’m very sorry,’ he stammered. ‘When…when did he depart this life?’

‘One month ago, God forgive him.’ The woman suddenly became loquacious. ‘It was that accursed writing that ruined him. His heart couldn’t take it, working all day in the school and writing till the middle of the night. Then he would go to Athens at the weekends to the archives, the poor fool. He should never have—’

‘There is a book he wrote about Trigono,’ Mavros interrupted. ‘I wanted to talk to him about it. Do you perhaps have a copy I could buy?’

‘Ach, that was the book that did for Andhreas,’ the woman said, her voice rising. ‘That rich man over there, he tried to stop my husband publishing it. And when Andhreas refused his money and won the court case, he bought all the copies, he made sure no one could find it, the murderer, ach…’ Her words trailed away in a bitter cry.

The murderer she was talking about—did she mean the weak old man with the sculpted beard Mavros had seen at the funeral? He hazarded a question. ‘You mean Theocharis?’ he said. ‘Panos Theocharis?’

‘Of course I mean him, you fool,’ the woman shouted. ‘Now leave me in peace, all of you!’ The connection was cut.

Mavros tossed the phone on to his bed. Eleni had told him that the museum benefactor lived in the Kambos. That was definitely the place to take a look at now. Maybe Theocharis was linked to Rosa Ozal. He seemed to have a tight grip on Trigono.

November 21st, 1942

I swore to myself a month ago that I would write no more in
this book, that it was the height of folly to leave anything that
could help the enemy if it fell into his hands. I kept my vow as
the warmth of early autumn turned to heavy rainstorms and
chill, starry nights. The worsening weather forced me to move
down to a more sound hut near a now uninhabited hamlet in
the Kambos, the central plain. Although the danger is minimal,
Ajax having ensured that the locals steer clear, I’ve had to keep
watch even more carefully and only go out after the work in
the fields is over and the people have gone back to Faros
.

And then it happened, the event that has changed everything,
the event that has driven me back to this diary because
of its monumental, glorious significance. I have fallen in love
.

It was
Ajax’s
fault. He’d been bringing me food and drink
himself: rough island bread, bean stews, the occasional
grilled fish, and sweet red wine that sent me to sleep more effectively
than any
pharmacist’s
pills. He would appear at the
hut after dark and knock twice then twice again. Although I
could never get more than a few words out of him, I gradually
came to the conclusion that he approved of me. Our
work was going well. The stock of supplies had been steadily
rising and our plans for sabotage on other islands were advancing.
All we were waiting for were the additional trained
personnel
we’d
need to carry out operations. But the Greek
unit is still being held up by the staff in Egypt. So, except when
there were stores to be moved under cover of darkness, Ajax
and I were stuck with going over our strategy every second
night when he supplied me, sharing bottles of wine in the
flickering candlelight
.