The Green Lady Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Titles by Paul Johnston

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A Selection of Titles by Paul Johnston

  The Alex Mavros Series

  DEEPER SHADE OF BLUE

  (also known as CRYING BLUE MURDER)

  THE LAST RED DEATH

  THE GOLDEN SILENCE

  THE SILVER STAIN *

  THE GREEN LADY *

  The Quint Dalrymple Series

  BODY POLITIC

  THE BONE YARD

  WATER OF DEATH

  THE BLOOD TREE

  THE HOUSE OF DUST

  The Matt Wells Series

  THE DEATH LIST

  THE SOUL COLLECTOR

  MAPS OF HELL

  THE NAMELESS DEAD

  * available from Severn House

  THE GREEN LADY

  An Alex Mavros Mystery

  Paul Johnston

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  First published in the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Paul Johnston.

  The right of Paul Johnston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Johnston, Paul, 1957-

  The green lady.

  1. Mavros, Alex (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Private investigators–Greece–Fiction. 3. Missing

  persons–Investigation–Greece–Fiction. 4. Suspense

  fiction.

  I. Title

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-353-2 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-034-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-534-3 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To

  Sofka Zinovieff and Vassilis Papadhimitriou

  with thanks and love

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I retain a modicum of Modern Greek vocabulary and grammar, so please take note of the following before complaining about poor proofreading:

  Masculine names ending in –is, –os, and –as lose the final –s in the vocative case: ‘Akis, Yiorgos and Nondas are watching the Olympics’; but, ‘Aki, Yiorgo and Nonda, turn the bloody TV off!’ Some names ending in –os, such as Telemachos, retain the older form –e, as in ‘Telemache’.

  Feminine surnames end differently from masculine ones: Paschos Poulos, but Angie Poulou.

  The consonant transliterated as ‘dh’ (e.g. Livadheia, Paradheisos) is pronounced ‘th’ as in English ‘these’.

  PROLOGUE

  The girl, fourteen and blonde, her slim form enveloped in a blue polo shirt and tight jeans, was in the middle of a meadow. May Day was warm and the flowers – crown daisies, gladioli, anemones and poppies – were bright and tall in the sea of grass. On the edge of the forest beyond, blossom shivered in the breeze, almond and the brighter pink of koutsoupia, the Judas tree. In the distance she could hear the voices of her schoolmates, squealing and shrieking as they discussed boys and how much they hated their parents. She found them dull, not least because she loved her mother deeply.

  The girl put the wreath of wild flowers she’d fashioned around her neck then sat down, her head beneath the level of the grass. No one could find her here, she was safe. If they came, she could crawl away and escape. The idea excited her, but there was her mother. She couldn’t leave her to face her father. No, she had to go back.

  She heard her name being called, first by the other girls and then by the woman who was in charge of the day out in the valley of Mount Elikonas. Her own mother had wanted to come, but her presence had been required at one of the numerous official functions she hated so much. The temptation to disappear overwhelmed the girl again; what would it be like to start her life again? What would it be like to mould your own future? No, she would wait until she’d taken all she could from her father; do as well as she could in her exams; go to university in England or America. She would never come back to Greece, the country where she’d lost everything before she had even begun to grow up.

  She got to her feet and put her hand over her eyes as she scanned the meadow and its tree-lined edges. Where were they? The voices were fainter now. Was she going to have to run to catch them up? She started to push through the grass and flowers but found that, even though she was a decent sprinter in the school athletics team, she couldn’t make much speed. She breathed in the mingled scents of spring, both from the wreath round her neck and from the still-living blooms among the grass. They were beautiful. Why couldn’t she stay here forever?

  And then a dark shape reared before her. She felt strong arms fold her up and carry her out of the meadow. She raised her eyes to the sky but she didn’t scream. At that point, she didn’t know that the gates of hell were opening to receive her.

  ONE

  ‘Those money-grabbing sons and daughters of whores, they’ve sold the country down Excrement River in a trireme with holes in its hull, the—’

  Mavros grabbed the remote control and reduced the volume. Yiorgos Pandazopoulos, sixty-one and built like a sumo wrestler, glared at the TV and went on cursing as the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics unfolded in all its kitschy glory.

  ‘Give it a rest, Fat Man. Think of the tourist income the Games have brought.’

  ‘What tourist income?’ Yiorgos emptied a bottle of Amstel beer, the folds of flesh around his neck wobbling. ‘The fools who’ve come for the Olympics are staying in hotels owned by multinational groups, drinking foreign fizzy drinks and eating American pizza. The ones who come to Greece for sun, sea a
nd shagging are waiting till the fiasco’s over. If anything, there’ll be less tourist income this year than last.’

  Mavros pointed to the flat boxes on the coffee table in front of them. One contained half of his four seasons pizza, but the Fat Man’s peperoni deluxe was represented only by an oily red slick.

  ‘What about those, Yiorgo? They came from a foreign franchise too. Plus the beer’s brewed under licence from Holland.’

  ‘Pshaw! We’ve got to keep body and soul together somehow, Alex.’

  In the interests of peace-keeping, Mavros refrained from pointing out that they could easily have eaten local food at the taverna down the road from his friend’s flat. On the other hand, the opening ceremony would have been blasting out even louder there, and the idea of the Fat Man spouting bile at other diners wasn’t palatable.

  ‘Look at those self-satisfied tossers,’ Yiorgos said, as the camera panned along the rows of VIPs – numerous presidents and prime ministers, Greek government representatives, the female mayor of Athens, and other figures less well known to the average viewer. The Fat Man, guardian of the ordinary citizen, as befitted a long-standing member of the Communist Party, knew them all, reeling off the names of members of the organizing committee and of the business leaders who had been involved in the construction of the stadia, access roads, new metro system and other facilities, a.k.a. white elephants. ‘Look at them!’ he repeated. ‘Savoy Road suits for the kleptomaniacs and ot kewtoor for their poxy wives.’

  ‘That would be Savile Row,’ Mavros put in. He decided against correcting his host’s French pronunciation.

  The Fat Man glowered, his default facial mode. In the past Mavros would have pressed the point, but now that he was spending most of his time in the two-level flat Yiorgos had inherited, he kept a brake on his tongue. That didn’t save him.

  ‘Piss off back to your mother’s if you don’t like how I talk, Mr Hoity-Toity.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  ‘Go on then,’ the Fat Man said, seeing the open goal. ‘It worked really well last time.’

  Mavros sighed and took a swig of beer. He’d been living in his mother’s spacious flat in up-market Kolonaki till early spring. Then she decided that she’d recovered sufficiently from her stroke and moved back from his sister Anna’s place in the suburbs. He managed two weeks with her, but it didn’t work – not least because she had a nurse in every day, who regarded him as the spawn of the devil because of his shoulder-length hair and decidedly non-designer stubble. She was also highly suspicious of his left eye, which was dark blue flecked with brown, and crossed herself frequently. Strange. The combination of his dark blue right eye with its non-identical twin usually captivated members of the other sex. Still, he couldn’t have the frail Dorothy being disturbed by the often disturbing people who came asking for his services as a missing persons specialist.

  ‘Or you could grovel to your ex-girlfriend and set yourself up in her place,’ Yiorgos said, grinning.

  Mavros grabbed a slice of pizza and bit into it. Andhroniki Glezou, known as Niki, hadn’t just been his girlfriend. They’d loved each other for over five years and had been through some dangerous escapades together. But things had begun to change after a case in Crete the previous year. Niki had been in danger there, though she stood up to it well. As the months went by she became more needy, never having been hugely self-confident in the first place. She was an orphan and her adoptive parents were dead, leaving her the flat near the sea in Palaio Faliro. Inevitably, the ticking of her biological clock had got louder after she became thirty-five. They’d had several discussions about children. Mavros wasn’t opposed to the idea, but he wasn’t enthusiastic enough for Niki. One evening, her frustration hit Chernobyl levels and he found himself on the street with his clothes flapping down on to him from the balcony. He’d tried to speak to her on the phone often, but she hung up before he could say more than a couple of words. That had been two months ago and he’d heard from a mutual friend that Niki was dating like there was no tomorrow. That worried Mavros, but he didn’t know what to do about it when she wouldn’t take his calls.

  The Fat Man stopped shouting at the parade of athletes in their curious uniforms and slapped Mavros on the thigh. ‘I didn’t mean it, Alex. Go and make things up with her if that’s what you want. I can’t stand the woman, but I know you loved her. Maybe you still do.’

  Mavros let that go unanswered. The truth was, he didn’t know what his feelings for Niki were. He had loved her even more after they came back from Crete, but months of arguing had taken their toll. Anyway, it didn’t really matter what he felt. She’d told him she hated his lack of commitment and that she never wanted to see him again.

  ‘Want some galaktoboureko?’ There was more than a hint of white-flag waving in Yiorgos’s voice. That was the good thing about living with him – no matter how much they yelled abuse at each other, they never held bad feelings for long.

  ‘OK,’ Mavros said, well aware that following pizza with the custard-filled fylo pastry would do his burgeoning belly no good. The Fat Man was a skilled cook and thought small portions were for capitalists.

  Later Mavros went up to his bedroom, his friend’s shouts audible until he put on a Nikos Papazoglou CD. He sat in the sagging armchair and looked at the walls. This had been Yiorgos’s room for his whole life, but when Kyra Fedhra died a couple of years back, he’d moved into hers. The tattered Party posters were still there, some of them from the time when the Communists had been banned. Mavros had thought about replacing them with art work of his own – he owned some good framed prints by Moralis, Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas and Tsarouchis – but he didn’t want to turn the place into home. Both he and the Fat Man knew this was a stopgap.

  Though finding somewhere else would be difficult. Greece had been going through years of unparalleled growth and property prices, both to buy and to rent, were ridiculously high. His mother and sister had both offered to lend him money, but he knew he would never be able to pay them back from his irregular private eye earnings. That adversely affected his philotimo, the often exaggerated sense of self-respect that every Greek possessed. The fact that he was half Scots complicated the matter. Dorothy had inculcated in him a Calvinist attitude towards the handling of money, despite the fact that she had been an atheist since she met his father.

  Mavros looked at the framed black-and-white photos on the bedside table. On the left was his father Spyros with the hooked nose he himself had inherited, the moustache and the intense stare. He had been a senior member of the Communist Party and had died in 1967, before the military coup that would have seen him sent to a prison island again. On the right was Andonis, Mavros’s brother eleven years his senior, who had disappeared at the age of twenty-one when he was already a leading light in the student opposition to the Colonels. He was Mavros’s only professional failure. Wherever he delved, there was no substantive trace of his handsome, smiling brother. He didn’t know how his mother had managed to bear the double loss. He had been too young at the time and only become obsessed with finding Andonis when he grew up. He would find him, he said to himself, even if it took all his life.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket.

  ‘Alexander Mavros?’ The voice was female, low and speaking English.

  ‘Alex,’ he replied. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Never mind. I have a job for you, it may be the biggest in your career.’ The woman paused but he kept quiet, unimpressed by hyperbole. ‘Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. Meet me at the top of Mount Philopappos. Come alone.’

  ‘How will I identify—’ The connection was cut.

  Mystery woman, Mavros thought, tossing his phone on to the bed. Just what he needed. Nine o’clock? He was very much not a morning person. Then again, he hadn’t had a decent job in a month and wasn’t in a position to ignore opportunities. The Fat Man didn’t want any rent, but Mavros wanted at least to pay his share of the household expenses.

  Besides, he couldn’t sit inside all th
e time, especially with the Olympics going on. Not that he wanted to attend the overpriced, often fatuous events, but there was a buzz in the city he enjoyed. Unlike Yiorgos, he hadn’t wept when it was announced that the Athens bid had been successful. ‘It’ll be the ruin of the country,’ his friend had said. ‘We’ll be stripped naked by the jackals of international capitalism, as well as by our own.’ He might be right, but why not wait and see? Maybe there would be uses found for the specially built hockey and baseball facilities, even though Greeks knew as much about those sports as Americans knew about cricket.

  Mavros set his alarm for seven-thirty, stripped off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts, and had a cold shower. The windows were open, but the temperature was still almost unbearable. The Fat Man didn’t have air conditioning, regarding it as a con instituted by big business, so Mavros had to suffer.

  That ought to have made his residual Calvinist soul feel good.

  ‘Where is she?’

  The man in the mask of burlap struggled for breath.

  ‘What?’ the Son shouted. ‘I can’t hear you!’ He poured another bucket of water over the prisoner’s head and watched as the heavy material soaked it up. Breathing was almost impossible now and the man struggled against the wire securing his wrists and ankles to the metal chair bolted to the hard earth floor.

  ‘Where is she?’ the Son repeated.

  The prisoner’s heavy head was bent forward, wrapped chin on his throat. He was trying hard to blow the burlap away from his lips.

  His captor selected a dental probe from the row lined up on the table nearby. ‘Can you feel this?’ he asked, applying the point to the naked chest.

  A squeal came through the burlap.

  ‘I thought you might. So answering my question isn’t so hard. Where is she?’ The Son pulled back the man’s head and put an ear close to where the mouth would be.