The Pleasure Seekers (19 page)

‘I waited up for Kirios Mark to come home that night and when he did he didn’t want to talk to me. He seemed angry with me. All he said was he would be gone in the morning, I was to take care of things while he was away, he would talk to me on his return. Maybe he was going to get rid of me because of Kirios Arnold, who was to know? He was very drunk and then he had one more drink and went to sleep.

‘I saw you drag Kirios Arnold home.’ And she pointed to Dimitrios. ‘I saw you leave the house. I waited for a
couple of hours, until all of Livakia was asleep. Then I stole into Kirios Arnold’s house. I took his straw bag and found another and filled that with food and vodka, a bottle of wine. I took all the money in the house, his passport, and placed the baskets at the door. Then I undressed and slipped into bed with him.

‘The truth is that he liked the power I had over him, though he pretended that it was he who had sexual power over me. I let him think that because it suited me. He felt guilty and generous because of the sex. Because a young, underage girl could excite him with sex, could satisfy him as no other man or woman had been able to before. I could get anything I wanted out of him once I had seduced him. You see, the things I did with him, in sex he would rather have died than have people find out about. I could drive him crazy with sexual desire, but it had to be at the right point of drunkenness, when he was still functioning but all inhibitions were gone.

‘That was how he was when I woke him. We did it once in bed, just the way I knew would drive him crazy for more. He always wanted more. He had a lot of strength, a lot of stamina in that department. I usually tortured him by not letting him have sex with me except once. It was so easy to make him crawl for what he wanted, but not this time. This time I promised that if he took me to the grotto, we would do it there, all the rest of the night and for the next two days. I was free, no one would miss me because Kirios Mark was in Athens. I seduced him by telling him I had arranged sexual surprises and they would be waiting for us there. I knew how to tease him. He was lost, would have gone anywhere with me. It was easy, so
easy. You see, he never remembered anything about the incident that had taken place only hours before.

‘It was still dark but dawn was coming up by the time we had walked here and placed our things in the cave, that cave over there.’ At that she pointed to a not very deep cave with a wide opening not three hundred yards from where they were standing. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

The three men followed her. They each of them had known that place, had been there with Arnold, it had been his shelter from the sun. To be there without him was to see it differently. He had made the place so much his own that without him it reverted to the rugged landscape of Crete, nature, powerful and pure. There was not a trace of his presence anywhere, it had died with his body on the beach.

She was so matter-of-fact about what had happened there, so detached from it, it was chilling to listen to her, to watch the cool satisfaction on her face. She might have been giving a tour of coastal Crete to three tourists. And the more she spoke about what had happened, the more sinister and dark a picture of events was etched in their minds. Could there have been a more sad, more tragic end to a life? It became increasingly clear that they had both been victims of one sort or another who had used each other, one to the death.

Max had had enough, heard enough, but he knew there was no turning back now. True he was with two friends, but he was with two policemen and a murderer and they were on a case. Ordinarily he had a fascination about other people’s sex lives. He rarely found anything too bizarre, too decadent or depraved. A man’s preferences were a
man’s right so long as they harmed no one. But these had, and he was revolted by what this teenage girl was telling him about her sexual games with his friend. She had never done one thing with Arnold for erotic pleasure, it had all been for power, to victimise, and for money. He would never forgive her or forget her for her evil. Nor forget Arnold for being a most civilised human being, kind of heart, if weak of flesh. He had been no more, no less than that.

They investigated the cave. Manoussos and his team had done that before and had not found a clue as to what might have happened there. They found none now.

They walked from the cave and Melina continued without even having to be prompted by the police chief or his assistant. She went into great detail as to how she had kept Arnold sodden with vodka to the point where his body still functioned but his mind was clouded with drink. ‘You know, to just before the point when his legs turned to rubber and he would awkwardly, clumsily, slip off his chair into a heap on the floor – still babbling. You know the way that Kirios Mark could talk him forcibly to his feet? I could do that. I did do that, hour after hour, and then I would let him fall asleep, and then I would wake him and begin again. He never really recovered from one alcoholic haze to the next. He simply regained enough control to function on a minimal level for sex. Close to the end he had no mind left at all. All he was capable of was following my orders, and doing anything I demanded that would give him a greater sexual thrill. He was a pig for sex like all the men I’ve ever known.

‘When I was quite finished with him, I helped him to
dress and lay down on the beach. He was passing out from drink, the days of sex, exhaustion. His mind was gone, his body slipping away into a deep sleep. He never even moved when I placed the plastic bag over his head. I sat astride him and I held it tight round his neck with my own hands and told him how much I hated him, despised him, that he wasn’t fit to live. I had made the fool think I’d had sex with him for love, that I, Melina, loved him. And now the last thing that he would remember was that it had all been a lie. I had to shout it as loud as I could to make sure he heard me. He hardly moved for a long time but I know he heard me. He began to gasp for air, he opened his eyes and panic and fear shone in them. He was suffering but it was too late. He was over the edge and in what Kirios Mark would have called his catatonic state. It was over quite fast. It had been much easier than I thought it would be. I expected at least a little fight.’

No one said anything for a considerable time. It was a horror story, but just as horrifying was Melina. The way she had relived the telling of that story while staring down at the sand where he had lain, on the very place where she had performed Arnold’s premeditated murder. The enjoyment in her face! When had anyone seen her look that fulfilled, that happy with herself? This was beyond sick.

There were several more questions that needed answering. Melina obliged with her answers. She never asked what was going to happen to her. She never asked where they would be taking her. She had had her satisfaction and that was all she wanted, nothing else seemed to matter to her except that Mark be left out of it. She had committed a crime of passion.

‘Melina Philopopolos, as police chief of Livakia and the district of Livakia, I am officially charging you with the murder of Arnold Topper.’

Manoussos stated the time and the actual place of her arrest, the scene of the crime, that it was in the presence of his assisting police officer, naming Max de Bonn as the other witness. She showed no emotion at all.

‘Handcuff her, Dimitrios.’

No one asked if that was necessary, no one really cared. The last remark that Melina ever made to her captors was, I bet you never thought I was going to make it so easy for you?’ And then with a cocky smile she boarded the sea plane, its engines already revving up.

LIVAKIA and LONDON

Chapter 9

No one was surprised by Melina’s arrest and confession to the killing of Arnold but everyone was disturbed by it. The tension between the foreign residents and the Cretans escalated as sides were taken. And sides were taken because on Manoussos’s return to Livakia he asked the barber-cum-mayor to invite all residents to assemble in the port so that he, their police chief, could address them about the murder in order to quell all the speculation.

Manoussos had another reason for calling the meeting: he wanted to appeal to the Livakians not to discuss the case with any of the media that were bound to appear. He asked for a total blackout, no information to be given on either the victim or the murderer, and he got it. But at a price.

Demands for an explanation from the Livakians assembled in the port that evening as to why Melina had killed Arnold forced Manoussos to reveal at least part of her confession: her lack of respect for him had somehow poisoned her mind to a point where she no longer saw him as the man he was, but the man she imagined he was, and that was a man not worthy to live. She had killed Arnold because it was a matter of
honour; she had sought satisfaction for the insults he publicly humiliated her with. Her claim was that Cretan pride had demanded it. The killing had been a crime of passion.
That
the Cretans could understand. Manoussos did not go into the seamier side of what she had claimed had gone on between her and Arnold. That they would not understand. It was too base, too unreal for them to handle, and in fact there was only Melina’s word for it with no proof to back it up.

He stated his case: the less said the better. What they all wanted was justice to be done and the whole thing to go away as soon as possible. He did admit that he understood forgetting was going to be near impossible. The incident would probably taint the village with scandal forever.

Of course the fact that Melina had killed for Cretan honour was to strike a chord in all Cretan hearts even though they knew it was wrong, against the law, and that she must be punished. It was for that reason that she gained a certain amount of sympathy she had never had before. Arnold had lost some, much of this prompted by Mark Obermann.

He publicly came to Melina’s defence. He wanted leniency for her and in order to get it he went on the attack against Arnold in every conversation he had with anyone who spoke to him about the tragedy. His favourite theme was Arnold’s ignorance of Cretan pride and the respect it demanded. His inability to communicate in proper Greek which had caused a breach between him and Melina. With public humiliation of this simple-minded, uneducated, underaged girl, who was struggling without
family and home to survive, he had brought his killing upon himself. It was the message Mark was spreading that alienated him from his friends in the foreign community and endeared him to the Cretans.

Mark knew very well that he was responsible for Arnold’s death though Melina had been the one to carry out the killing, and that was something he had to live with. Up to the time of the murder it had been Mark who had continually planted seeds of poison in Melina’s mind about the worthlessness of Arnold as a human being, until she did indeed see him as deserving death.

Mark’s insistence that he would go on the stand as a character witness for her when her trial came up sat well with no one. That decision, once made, became an obsession with him and began to backfire on him. People were now openly holding him morally responsible, not so much for Arnold’s death as for the girl’s committing a crime, and thus putting a blight on the good name of their village. The blame was not set upon him publicly but in sly looks, dark whispers. After only a few weeks it drove him to flee from Livakia to Athens. That was the day before Arnold’s family arrived in Livakia for a memorial service in the church. Duty bound to save face no matter how they might feel about where the blame lay for the tragedy that had befallen their village, most every person in Livakia who had known Arnold, and his friends from other parts of the island, attended the Greek Orthodox service where the black-clad priest officiated, assisted by the two monks.

It was all incense and chanting and candles among the icons and votives in the darkness of the church with
the brightness of the hot white sunlight outside. The Bostonian Toppers looked more aghast than mournful, more ill at ease at what must have seemed to them some pagan rite in comparison to the memorial service they might have held in their small white clapboard church, as pristine and perfect on the inside as on the out, and with not an idol or a cross to distract them from God, only a bowl of flowers at the altar – white, of course.

They were accompanied by Manoussos. Max had flown them in from Iraklion, and he flew them out two hours almost to the minute after they had arrived. They had seemed more embarrassed than anything else. They had gone to Arnold’s house and had left it with only one thing, the family bible. A request was made for Manoussos to find someone to send Arnold’s personal effects, family pictures and private papers to Boston, and someone to take over the sale of the house and its contents. They had remained in it for ten minutes.

The memorial service had been a strange event in as much as people did mourn Arnold in the church, they did feel his loss, some quite deeply, and yet once they filed out into the sun, saw Max’s plane skip over the water and angle up into the sky, taking the Toppers of Boston away, one could almost hear the sighs of relief. It was over.

It was inexplicable, but the shadow that had fallen over Livakia suddenly vanished. They had the sense that life could begin again, that it did go on, and that in some strange way Arnold would now be remembered for all the things he had been, and not the things he had not. That his life, whatever it was, had been valid, and his friends could live with that and his terrible death, as they
would live with the memory of a twisted teenager who had brought the dark side of life into Livakia and destroyed something in each of them, changing them in some way, possibly even for the better. None of them would forget that she was languishing in a prison, locked up for her sins, and yet to face trial. That too they would live with. It would be a reminder of how fragile paradise can be, how delicate and vital was every minute of one’s life.

D’Arcy was standing with Elefherakis, Rachel, Despina, a Greek neighbour, and her husband, the baker, and Jimmy Jardine – even he had come down from his house for the service. They were watching Max’s plane turn into a small white dot in the sky. Laurence joined the group and placed an arm round D’Arcy’s shoulders. In spite of herself she felt a rush of delight. Her feelings for him were still there. Still enjoying the sensation of his presence, she was distracted by Rachel tugging at her sleeve. D’Arcy gave her the attention she was seeking.