Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) Page 18

  The scene gradually composed itself again, the torch beam back on the woman’s naked, motionless form. Resting against her darkly bruised knee was a square of cardboard on which the words ‘One week’ had been written in large red letters. The image faded then re-formed, this time with a sign saying ‘Two weeks’ to the fore. And so it continued until the final image with the board marked ‘Seven weeks’.

  The captive woman’s skin was now black and distended. The camera moved in closer and substantial insect life became apparent, green blowflies clustering around the facial orifices.

  Then the image disappeared.

  ‘All right, Alex,’ Eleni said as the two of them walked down the road to her house. ‘It’s time you told the truth.’

  Mavros felt his stomach somersault. ‘What do you mean?’ He glanced over his shoulder at the terrace beneath the tower. The lights were still bright but there was no sign of Panos Theocharis. He had retired soon after dinner, leaving his wife to pass around liqueurs. Dhimitra had made a substantial hole in a decanter of cognac, her hands trembling as if the evening air were chill. She had made little effort at conversation and obviously wanted Mavros and the archaeologist to leave.

  ‘What do I mean?’ Eleni laughed and shook her head. ‘You aren’t who you say you are, I’m sure of that.’

  Mavros was running through the events of the evening, trying to remember when he might have given himself away. After the viewing of his host’s collection, they’d been served dinner on the terrace. Dhimitra had been difficult, directing a series of complaints in Greek at her husband and the waiters as well as complaining about Aris’s continued absence, but Mavros was pretty sure he hadn’t shown any understanding of what had been said. He also made sure that he didn’t eat the head of the grilled bream he’d been served. Few Greeks would pass up the opportunity of gnawing and sucking that part of the fish, but a bona fide Scotsman would be much more reticent.

  Eleni stopped outside her house and turned to face him. ‘You’re in the antiquities trade, aren’t you?’ she said, her tone unequivocal. ‘The criminal side of it.’

  ‘What?’ Mavros responded, relief rushing through him. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  She stood there with her hands on her hips. ‘No, I’m not. Theocharis knows your sort better than anyone and he was convinced. Why do you think he showed you the contents of his cellar? He was laughing at you, my friend. He was saying, “See what I’ve got—and you can’t have it.”’ She frowned at him. ‘Didn’t you understand the threat, Alex? He’s daring you to take him on, to try to steal from him. He’s like that. But not all his people are as careless as Mitsos up at the site. Theocharis has this island in his pocket. Don’t even think of trying to get your hands on any of his pieces. Even if you manage to get past the alarm system, the locals will tear you apart before you can get off the island.’

  As Mavros stood listening, Deniz Ozal came into his thoughts. Unlike him, his client really was an antiquities dealer, one who was possibly involved with Tryfon Roufos, the most notorious smuggler and fence in the country. He wondered why he hadn’t heard from the Turkish-American.

  ‘Look,’ he said, opening his arms wide. ‘I’m not a dealer. How can I prove it? Try out my knowledge of ancient pots or statues, if you want. I don’t know a red-figure vase painter from a black-figure one.’

  The archaeologist turned towards the house. ‘I think you’re an expert at concealing things, Alex,’ she said over her shoulder.

  Mavros followed her in and caught sight of the photograph album above the desk. It struck him that asking Eleni about Rosa would be a good way to distract her, but he would have to find the right moment—and calm her down first. ‘I’m not concealing anything,’ he said, going into the main room after her. ‘But I admit I am interested in your work.’ In his experience, nobody could resist talking about their ruling passion for long. Maybe that would make Eleni more amenable to questioning.

  The archaeologist laughed. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Then she turned towards him, her expression suddenly avid. ‘You don’t know how important these excavations might be. If I can establish a pattern, a systematic mode of burial that matches the style of the Cycladic sculptures, it will be a major breakthrough.’

  Mavros was trying to keep up. ‘A breakthrough in what way?’ he asked.

  Eleni led him over to her worktop and took a handful of photographs from a file. ‘See these?’ she asked, spreading out on the table shots of blank-faced marble figures with their arms crossed. ‘Nobody has ever been sure if they represent the dead or the culture’s deities, nor if they are lying down or standing up. I hope my work will prove that they are people who have passed away rather than gods.’ She looked up at him, her face bright with enthusiasm. ‘That would have a major effect on the way the Early Aegean Bronze Age is viewed. A concentration on real men and women rather than supernatural beings might even be said to prefigure classical Greek civilisation’s human values.’

  Mavros was following her line of argument, but he had allowed his eyes to stray from her. It had just struck him that there had been no Cycladic objects in Theocharis’s collection. Surely he must have some. But where were they? Had he consigned them all to the museum?

  Eleni’s expression lost its ardour. She presumably thought that she was boring him. She moved towards the bedroom.

  ‘That’s…that’s fascinating,’ Mavros stammered as he went after her.

  ‘Of course it is.’ Eleni’s tone was ironic. She turned as he reached the door, her dress slipping from her shoulders. She gave him a taunting smile and let it fall farther, exposing her breasts. ‘Are you sure you don’t see anything you like? You with your strange left eye?’

  Mavros gave a sigh and bit his lip.

  December 12th, 1942

  An extraordinary day. We are still waiting for the Greek contingent to land—all I’ve been told on the radio is that ‘operational delays’ have occurred. Ajax has been laid up with his leg for weeks now, though he’s apparently started to hobble around, shouting at the women in his family if they try to get him to lie down again. This I know from my beautiful messenger, my lover, my Maro. She has come every evening. She has managed to stay late by telling her mother that I am ill and need nursing, though how much longer that excuse can continue I don’t know. I don’t care. I love her so much that I have had to resist the temptation to run out of the hut in daylight and profess my infatuation to anyone I might meet in the Kambos. Fortunately the more restrained, British side of my nature prevailed. Ah, but I love her! When she is gone I feel that part of me has been ripped away. But when she is here I am whole again, lost in her soft arms and the scents of her perfect body.

  It was after midnight when Maro left and I sank into a sweet dream in which I was following her through a field of tall corn, the wind tossing the ears from side to side and the sea running away towards the neighbouring islands. It was well into the morning when I was woken, the loud cries of women jerking me out of my enchanted world. I stumbled to the slats over the window, grabbing my service revolver as I went. The noise was terrifying, the screams of agony making me think that a massacre was taking place outside the hut. I put my eye to the wood and peered out towards the source of the disturbance. About twenty yards away is a small cemetery. The church of Ayios Dhimitrios that used to serve the abandoned village of Myli is a little farther off, and in all the weeks I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anyone worship at it. But this was different. There must have been dozens of islanders inside the uneven wall of the graveyard. The majority of them were women in black clothes, their heads shrouded in scarves.

  I moved my ear to the slats and tried to understand what was going on. My Greek has improved enormously in recent weeks owing to my lengthy conversations with Maro. But there was such a confusion of cries and what sounded like discordant singing that I struggled to follow what was happening. Then the tight grouping of people moved apart and the noise grew weaker, only a few cracked voices carryi
ng on a kind of chant. Looking between the black-clad figures, I caught sight of a bent old woman. I felt my heart pound in my chest. She was holding up a human skull.

  What were they doing? Digging up a body? I watched in horror as the skull was wiped with a cloth, what looked like remnants of hair coming away in the old woman’s hand. Now there was a wild shouting, the watchers bewailing the fate of the grave’s occupant. I heard the word eirene, which means ‘peace’, being repeated over and over again, then some other words I couldn’t understand. And then a cloth was placed on the bare cranium and the old woman kissed it reverently.

  ‘My daughter, why did you leave us?’ screamed a middle- aged woman, her eyes red. ‘Why were you walking on the mountain when you should have been at home?’

  The lament was taken up by other women, some of whom were putting coins into the rectangular metal box that was being filled with the earth-stained bones. Then a larger gap appeared in the crowd and a priest walked forward. The smell of incense drifted across to my hut through the still air. I heard the divine pronounce words in ecclesiastical Greek. These I could mostly make sense of as that form of the language is closer to the ancient Greek that I studied.

  ‘May your memory be everlasting, sister,’ he recited. ‘May the holy, the mighty, the immortal God have mercy.’ Then he upturned a bottle of wine over the box containing the bones, making the shape of the cross three times. ‘You shall wash me and I shall be whiter than white,’ he said, taking on the dead woman’s voice. ‘Dust are you, and to dust you will return,’ he concluded, reverting to the role of priest.

  I watched as the crowd began to break up, the old woman carrying the box off to a small building at the corner of the cemetery. People moved towards the church and I could see wine and food being handed out. To my relief no one came towards the hut, and soon I was on my own again. I was surprised to find myself quivering, my eyes damp. Who was the dead woman and what had happened to her? The emotions displayed by the islanders, the heart-rending screams they’d let out, had shaken me badly.

  This evening Maro came again and I asked her about the ceremony. She apologised that she hadn’t warned me about it and told me that it is the Orthodox ritual to dig up the bones of the dead after some five years and to transfer them to the ossuary. As I witnessed in part, people run through a mixture of sentiments. Initially they are almost joyful to be in close proximity to the departed one, and then they are torn apart by the ravages of a grief even worse than that they experienced after the burial as they realise that bones are now all that remain.

  ‘Who was the deceased?’ I asked.

  Maro looked at me with wide eyes, her expression one of great tenderness. ‘She wasn’t a close relative of mine,’ she replied, ‘but I remember her very well. She was twenty when she died. She was beautiful, her hair jet-black and curled, her eyes bright. Everyone loved her, she was the village’s favourite daughter.’ She stifled a sob. ‘And then one evening she followed a stray goat up the slopes of Vigla. They found her the next day at the bottom of a cliff, her neck broken. Poor Eirene.’

  I held her tighter, wiping the tears from her cheeks. I realised my mistake. Eirene is also a name. There is so much I have to learn about the modern country I am fighting for. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. The irony of exhuming the bones of a woman whose name meant ‘peace’ during times of war also struck me, but I kept that to myself. ‘That must have been terrible for the island.’

  Maro looked at me and then nodded solemnly. ‘It was. Not just because a young woman had died before her time, but because her father was maddened by grief. He wouldn’t let her be buried in the village cemetery, saying that she’d invited her fate.’ Maro raised her shoulders and shook her head. ‘He got it into his head that Eirene had gone to meet a boy. But no one else thought that, at least not at the beginning. Eirene hadn’t been interested in any of the young men’s approaches. She…she was her own mistress.’ She bit her lip. ‘That’s why my father and my brother wouldn’t let me come to the rite today. Like a lot of the men they think Eirene is a bad example. The fools.’

  The sudden strength of her voice and her unaccustomed criticism of the males in her family took me aback. I kissed her tear-stained cheek and she huddled closer to me. But this evening, for the first time, we didn’t make love. It was as if the loss of the young woman and the brief exposure of her remains to the sun for the last time had diminished our happiness.

  Maro went back to the village earlier than usual and I climbed up to the ridge to make the scheduled call on the radio to base. Things are moving at last. I was told to expect the detachment of men tomorrow night.

  So the war is about to intrude into my Cycladic idyll. I am still enthusiastic about the action that lies ahead, desperate to strike a blow for my adopted fatherland, but I am also nervous because now I have Maro to think about. There is so much more to lose. I will have to steel myself, put the struggle before my beautiful lover.

  Have I the strength to do that?

  Mavros felt his cheeks redden. ‘I’m…I’m sorry, Eleni,’ he said. ‘Like I told you, I’ve got a partner back home.’

  The archaeologist took the second rejection less indulgently than the first. ‘How lucky she is,’ she said acidly, dropping the dress to the floor and stepping out of it. Her thighs and the skimpy knickers she was wearing provoked a stir in Mavros’s groin before he could look away. She started pulling on her jeans. ‘I’ll take you as far as the Bar Astrapi.’ She shot him a penetrating glance. ‘If you can bear to put your arms around me.’

  Mavros shrugged weakly. ‘Can’t we just be friends?’ he asked, angry with himself for messing up. So much for getting her in the mood to answer his questions.

  ‘Acquaintances, I think,’ Eleni said. ‘Isn’t that the word?’ She smoothed a white T-shirt over her torso and pushed past him. ‘Come on.’

  He reached out a hand to stop her. ‘Eleni, there’s something I want to ask you.’ He took the folded photo of Rosa Ozal out of his pocket. ‘A friend of mine was here in the early summer. I was wondering if you’d met her.’ He opened up the photo and held it up, watching her carefully.

  There were a few seconds of silence that were broken only by the high-pitched buzzing of a mosquito, then the archaeologist shook her head and moved away.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I never saw her.’

  Mavros had seen the flicker of her eyes and the way her face had momentarily changed. What was it she’d expressed without wanting to? Wistful sorrow? Pain? Whatever the emotion was, it didn’t sit well with the firm tone of her denial. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘She had a very good time here. You didn’t see her in the Astrapi or any of the restaurants?’

  ‘I told you,’ she said, keeping her back to him as she closed the shutters, ‘I never saw her.’

  Mavros was caught in a dilemma. Either he disproved Eleni’s answer by opening up her album and confronting her with the photo of her and Rosa that he’d viewed illicitly, or he tried to discover why she was lying. He decided on the latter course. After all, the photo and his own experience suggested that Eleni was bisexual. Perhaps she was just grieving for a brief romance she’d had with Rosa. On the other hand, she was the third person on the island to mislead him about the missing woman and, like the furniture designer Barbara Hoeg and the compliant Mikkel, she was nervous about it. He didn’t have much to report to Deniz Ozal when his client took it into his head to call, but at least the case was starting to move.

  A few minutes later he was clutching on to Eleni as she drove the motorbike down the empty, unlit roads of the Kambos, past the old church and its unkempt cemetery, and then on to the farm where he’d seen the old man beating his donkey. He wondered if Theocharis used him on the estate. From what Eleni had said, it sounded like the museum benefactor had no shortage of work for hard men.

  Rena slipped into the narrow lane by the kastro, head covered by her usual black scarf. The music from one of the few bars still open in the centre of the village
was reverberating off the heavy stone walls, but there weren’t many people around. The locals were already sinking into winter habits, spending the evenings in their own or their relatives’ homes rather than parading around the streets in their best clothes with their families in tow.

  She glanced up at the wooden balcony outside Rinus’s flat and saw that there were no lights on. No doubt the bastard was at the Astrapi, selling his filth to the tourists. Yiangos had something to do with that, Rena knew it. But surely that couldn’t have led to his death and that of poor Nafsika. Merciful God, what happened to them?

  There was no answer when she knocked on Kyra Maro’s door. She swivelled the handle and found that the door was locked. Worried that something had happened to the old woman, she put down the bowl of soup that she’d covered with a cloth. She checked that the street was empty and took out the key she’d had cut on Paros for an occasion like this. Fortunately the key wasn’t in the lock on the other side. There was a single feeble light burning in the corner but she could make out no sign of the tiny flat’s occupant. She couldn’t be out at this time of night. The whole village shunned her and she kept away from the church except on major festivals. She must have gone to bed—the partition door was closed—but that was strange as well; Kyra Maro hardly slept, and when she did it was in her chair in the main room.

  Feeling a stir of disquiet, Rena retrieved the soup from outside and laid it on the table. Then she went over to the bedroom door and tapped on it, gently at first and then more urgently. There was no response. She turned the handle and pushed the flimsy panel open. And swallowed a scream.