Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) Read online

  ‘Hello, Alex.’

  The German stood smiling, a faded Ferrari cap on his head. He gave the impression of a lost child, unsure whether to approach a stranger.

  ‘Ah, Mikkel,’ he said. ‘Good morning. On your own?’

  The older man set down the blue plastic bags of shopping he was carrying and nodded distractedly. ‘Barbara’s at the house.’ He said the words as if they were a standard response rather than one he had much faith in.

  ‘Is she working?’ Mavros asked, taking in the German’s nervous expression. He remembered Barbara’s nudge in Mikkel’s ribs when he had asked them about Rosa Ozal. Maybe this was the time to exert some pressure on the couple’s weaker link.

  ‘Yes.’ Mikkel took off his cap and smoothed down his thinning fair hair. ‘She works on her designs in the morning. I leave her on her own.’

  Mavros gave him an encouraging smile. ‘It must be difficult, submitting designs and so on from Trigono.’

  Mikkel shrugged. ‘It’s all right now. We have a computer, e-mail and so on. It wasn’t so easy in the past.’ He looked away, lower lip between his teeth. ‘But she has her reasons for living on the island.’

  Mavros was pretty sure that, whatever those reasons were, they weren’t all shared by her husband. ‘It must be tricky for foreign women in a small community like this.’

  Mikkel’s eyes jerked back on to him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ Mavros said, nodding towards a pair of muscle- bound young islanders in cement-stained clothes, ‘the local men view foreign women as easy targets, don’t they?’

  The German’s face flushed. ‘I…I don’t know where you get that idea from,’ he said, turning his head away again. ‘Anyway, Barbara is quite capable of looking after herself when I’m not here.’

  ‘Oh, you aren’t here all the time?’

  Mikkel shook his head. ‘I am required to attend board meetings and finalise the accounts every month. I’m going to Hamburg next week.’

  ‘So were you actually on the island in the first half of June?’ Mavros asked, keeping up the attack. ‘When my friend Rosa was here.’ He was watching the German carefully and noticed that his eyes widened when the name was spoken.

  ‘Em, yes, yes, I think so.’ Mikkel glanced at him anxiously, as if he might have given something away. ‘We told you, we didn’t meet her.’

  Mavros took out the photo and held it up in front of him. ‘Are you quite sure? Only, Rinus told me she was in the Bar Astrapi several times. You go there often, don’t you?’

  Mikkel gathered up his shopping bags. ‘I have to get home now. Barbara will be wondering what’s happened to me.’ He looked at Mavros, the lines on his face taut. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything Rinus tells you,’ he said in a low voice. Then he moved quickly away across the square.

  Mavros watched him go. Was Mikkel just a jealous husband or was there something more disturbing beneath the timorous exterior? No, Barbara Hoeg was obviously the strong one in that couple. He had the feeling the world- famous designer was capable of anything if she put her mind to it. But she was a troubled person beneath the hard shell, and he had the feeling that she drank to escape.

  At the corner the German almost collided with Aris Theocharis. They spoke for a few seconds, the big man shooting a glance at Mavros and then heading towards him. He was wearing loose cream chinos and boating shoes, the green eyeshade he favoured splitting his egg-like head in two horizontally.

  ‘You again,’ Aris said as he approached the table. He sat down opposite Mavros without waiting for an invitation. ‘How did you get on with my father last night? I’ll bet the old man dazzled you with his precious possessions, didn’t he?’ He gazed across the table with a belligerent grin that faded slightly when Mavros didn’t answer. Leaning forward, he lowered his voice. ‘Someone told me you’re a friend of a woman called Rosa.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mavros replied, wondering who that ‘someone’ was. Rinus the barman? ‘Her full name’s Rosa Ozal. Do you know her?’

  Aris shook his head. ‘Not personally.’ The grin widened. ‘Not carnally.’ He paused to see Mavros’s reaction, but there was none. ‘I wasn’t here when she was. But I heard a lot about her.’

  ‘Really? You’ve got a bit of an American accent. Have you spent time in the USA?’

  Aris looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, I have. Office in Manhattan. Why?’

  ‘Well, Rosa’s from New York City too. You never ran into—’

  Aris was shaking his head. ‘I told you, I never met her.’ The grin reappeared. ‘But she got very friendly with a lot of people here, I can tell you.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Mavros said. ‘Who, for example? I can’t find many people who remember her, apart from Rinus in the Astrapi.’ He kept quiet about Rena.

  Aris suddenly looked less assured. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he mumbled, looking away.

  Mavros decided against showing any more of his hand by winkling out second-hand information from the tycoon’s son.

  ‘Hey, wanna see my boat?’ the big man asked, grabbing Mavros’s arm. ‘Come on, you’ll like it. Where are you from? The fucked-up old UK? You haven’t got anything like her there, I can tell you.’

  Mavros shook off Aris’s grip and picked up his bag. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

  The large four-by-four was parked in the street off the square. As Aris climbed in, he waved at the shopkeeper opposite. The wizened old man acknowledged the greeting, but scowled as soon as Theocharis’s back was turned. The son didn’t get anything like the degree of respect from the islanders that his father did.

  Aris drove down the narrow tiled street, ignoring the ‘No Entry’ signs and forcing pedestrians—women with buggies, a tourist with a rucksack—to press against the walls. ‘Out of the way, gria,’ he said, gesticulating at a bent old woman in black.

  Mavros said nothing. There was no shortage of loudmouthed rich men’s heirs in Athens, but they were less incongruous there. Aris Theocharis stuck out on Trigono like a slug in a salad.

  ‘There she is,’ the driver said, pointing as they swung into the port. ‘Forty feet of glory.’

  Mavros followed his arm to the kaïki that was bobbing on the light swell at the quayside. Its hull and large cabin were blue and white respectively, the mast and rigging in perfect condition. It looked like an old boat that had been expertly renovated, the general layout being that of the craft that used to carry freight between the islands before the large ferries started operating.

  ‘Artemis,’ Mavros read from the bow.

  ‘My daughter,’ Aris said, jumping down.

  ‘How old is she?’

  The big man glanced at him. ‘Thirteen, fourteen. I don’t see her much. Her mother’s a bitch who made the mistake of thinking I’d stay with her for life.’ He laughed as he hauled on the mooring rope. ‘Jump on. I’ll give you the tour.’

  Mavros made the small leap and held the rope to enable Aris to join him. He wasn’t much of an enthusiast of boats— like children and cars, they required you to lift the toilet lid and pour in your bank account—but he could see that the Artemis had unusual charm. The wood on the deck was stained a deep brown, and through the windows he made out a well-appointed cabin below.

  ‘Superb, isn’t she?’ Aris said, running his hand along the gunwale. ‘I wish I could spend more time on her.’

  Mavros was looking at the mast. ‘You don’t sail her, though?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Engine only. Beautiful new Volvo. Gives her plenty of power and range.’

  Mavros nodded. ‘I imagine. Were you on a trip a couple of days ago? She wasn’t here the day I arrived.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ the younger Theocharis said, glancing beyond him towards another boat. ‘No, I had her in the yard over on Paros. They brought her back yesterday.’

  Mavros didn’t ask what the Artemis had been in for. Before he embarked, he’d noticed a section on the waterline amidships with fresh blue paint, the wood smooth
er than the other planking. He remembered what the men on the ferry had said about the scrape along the side of the boat the young drowned couple had been on—according to them, there had been traces of blue in the wood.

  Then he saw where Aris was looking.

  The old, one-armed man Manolis was staring across the water at them from the deck of the trata Sotiria, his heavily built son, Lefteris, also fixing them with his eyes as he coiled a rope. The faces of the two islanders expressed a barely concealed hostility that made Mavros shiver in the bright sunlight.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IT DIDN’T take long for Aris to lose interest in showing off the Artemis to Mavros. His mood changed from effusive to irritable, though Mavros couldn’t be sure how much this had been brought about by the sullen stares of Manolis and his son, Lefteris. Leaving the port, he headed up the main street to the OTE to run a check on Aris’s boat.

  The telephone office was located in a cubby-hole in the northern wall of the kastro, a guy with a grizzled moustache behind the counter. Mavros spotted the local Golden Guide behind him and pointed to it. There were several boatyards listed on Paros, most of them under the names of their owners. There was only one with a company name, Blue Wave Dock SA in Naoussa. He wrote down all the numbers and went outside to call the first one on his mobile, looking around to check there was no one in the vicinity.

  ‘Blue Wave Dock,’ came a languid female voice.

  ‘Yes, good day,’ Mavros said in Greek. ‘This is Worldwide Marine Insurance in Piraeus. I understand that you recently undertook repair work on behalf of Mr Aris Theocharis.’ He was taking a chance that the big man would have taken his precious kaïki to what looked like the most professional operation on Paros.

  ‘That is correct,’ the woman answered after a pause, responding to Mavros’s formal language with a marked increase in courtesy. ‘How may I help?’

  ‘No doubt we’ll shortly be receiving the documents from the insured, but I would be grateful if you could give me a run-down of the work you carried out.’ Mavros moved into the centre of the square to distance himself from a pair of voluble Italian tourists.

  ‘Certainly,’ came the reply. ‘Kindly give me your fax number.’

  ‘I require an outline on the telephone,’ Mavros said in the firm tone used by business people to prevail over minor functionaries. ‘Now, if you please.’

  There was a pause and then the sound of fingers tapping on a keyboard. ‘Yes, here we are, Mr…what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Mitsotakis,’ Mavros said without hesitation. Using the family name of the country’s last right-wing prime minister would keep the woman on her toes.

  ‘Mr Mitsotakis,’ the woman repeated slowly, clearly impressed. The tactic had worked—it usually did with employees in private companies. Civil servants needed a different approach after years of socialist government. ‘The work carried out on Mr Theocharis’s boat was put in hand immediately. Remove and replace section of hull measuring one point five by nought point four metres, bond joints, seal and paint new section. The total cost—’

  ‘That does not concern me at this stage,’ Mavros interrupted. ‘I need to know how the damage to the hull occurred in case of litigation.’

  ‘Surely your client will furnish you with the relevant details,’ the woman said.

  ‘Yes, but I need your company’s appraisal,’ Mavros said coldly.

  There was another pause as the woman shouted for someone called Mikis. A conversation ensued that Mavros couldn’t make out. Finally the woman came back to the phone. ‘Apparently there had been heavy contact with another vessel. There were traces of white paint in the damaged section. If Mr Theocharis hadn’t brought the boat in promptly, the gradual influx of water would have given rise to serious danger of sinking.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mavros said. ‘I’ll make sure that your cooperation in this matter is noted.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mitsotakis. Good day, and please remember us whenever—’

  Mavros cut the connection and sat down under the mulberry tree. When he’d been on the Artemis he had managed to cast an eye over the trata the young couple had been on. Its hull had not been as seriously damaged as Aris’s, but there was enough of an abrasion to suggest there had indeed been heavy contact. The likelihood of Aris having run into a different white boat didn’t seem overwhelming. But did that mean he had some involvement in the drownings? If so, why had the men of the dead boy’s family stared at him rather than confronted him? Maybe they’d been paid off.

  Head bowed in thought, Mavros started walking. He had come to Trigono to find a missing woman, but it seemed that this was only one of several curious issues: the drownings, Aris’s damaged boat, the war memorial with the erased name, the photos linking Eleni the archaeologist to Rosa Ozal, the photos and the diskette that seemed to link Rosa to the wartime officer George Lawrence and to the dig—the dig which was on old man Theocharis’s land. Things seemed to lead back to Panos Theocharis. He even found himself wondering if his client Deniz Ozal could be tied up with everything—after all, he was an antiquities dealer and he’d visited the notorious operator Tryfon Roufos inAthens. Not only that, his sister Rosa worked in a gallery back in Manhattan. Did either of the Ozals know one or other of the Theocharis men?

  It was time Mavros found out more about the museum benefactor’s activities on the island, and he knew where he was going to start. But there was someone else he wanted to question first.

  December 19th, 1942

  Suddenly how different it all is. Hiding from the Italians has been easy enough. They’ve only been as far as the village since I landed, and then just for a few hours each week to buy provisions at rates that are highly unfavourable to the Trigoniotes. But now I’m also having to conceal part of my activities from Ajax and from the leader of the Greek Sacred Band unit that has arrived. I’m sure that Ajax, who is limping but mobile again, suspects that I have been up to something that his family wouldn’t approve of with Maro. I’m also sure that Captain Th. would insist on my immediate replacement if he found me involved with a local woman. He is a stickler for discipline who doesn’t cut his four men any slack at all. I can tell by the way he looks at me, his eyes hooded and reserved, and by the formal way he addresses me that he resents my presence on the island.

  For it seems that Captain Th.—Agamemnon is the code- name he has been allocated—is a local of sorts himself, although he only spent the summers here when he was a boy. Apparently his father owns the large estate beneath Vigla. Its eastern extent is on the other side of the track from my hut in the Kambos. The old man is close to death in a clinic in Athens, which means that the captain, an only child, stands to inherit the wide stretch of cultivated land as well as the land above it, not that the worked-out mine shafts and the cave systems around them are worth much now. To say that Agamemnon regards the island with a seigneurial eye would be to indulge in the grossest of understatements. On the other hand, the islanders seem to respect him: even Ajax, who has never concealed his communist leanings from me.

  My life has become much more complicated with the arrival of the Greeks. The main problem is that my mission and Agamemnon’s have not been properly coordinated. Every time I call base, I am instructed to proceed with sabotage operations on Paros and the neighbouring islands. A good stock of explosives and other equipment has now been landed at Vathy, and I have lugged a fair amount of the former up to the caves on Vigla myself. The question is, what do we do with it? Ever since Agamemnon and his men set up camp in the sheltered watercourses above Vathy, Agamemnon seems to have lost his appetite for action. Maybe the good captain is set against hostilities or maybe the injury to Ajax’s leg has made him think long and hard about the potential effects of operations against the enemy—which are reprisals against the local population. My God, I’m aware of that consequence too. How could I not be? The idea of anything happening to Maro keeps me awake through the darkness after she has gone. But I was sent to Trigono to do a jo
b and I can’t ignore my orders.

  Ah, Maro, we have been unlucky to find ourselves in love at this time of blood and fury! But then, we would never have found each other in peacetime. Even if I’d stopped off on this wave- lapped, gull-haunted island, I would never have been able to get close to you. Although it is now fraught with danger because of the influx of men trained in watch-keeping and observation techniques, we have still managed to meet. Now you take your donkey to the Kambos every morning to work the isolated strips of land that are part of your dowry, and you slip away for an hour to the secret place we have taken over. They never last for long, but I live for those times when we take refuge from the hostile outside world and lose ourselves in each other. Ah, Maro, how I worship your perfect body that bursts with such a frenzy of youth when I cling to it! How I rejoice in your breasts, small but ripe, and your white thighs that press so tightly to mine when I die in you, the tears dripping from my eyes and mingling with those you are already shedding for the beauty of our love.

  But these interludes of bliss cannot continue. I saw a movement on the ridge leading to Profitis Ilias when we parted today. Whether it was one of Ajax’s men or a lookout posted by Agamemnon doesn’t matter. Sooner or later we will be seen. But I don’t care. My intentions towards Maro are honourable. I would marry her tomorrow if the custom allowed it. My love for her has made me more alive than I’ve ever been before. Passion may blind men, but I am in complete control of myself. I will push ahead with the mission I have been planning with or without the help of the Greeks.

  Outside, the night is still. The wind that has been blowing hard from the north these last few days is finally exhausted. In the distance I can hear the run of the sea and the faint clang of goat bells up on the heights.

  The blood is coursing through my veins like liquid fire. Ah, Greece! It is time for me to strike a blow against the oppressor. Everything has come together. I feel that all my life has been leading up to this glorious act. I cannot die. I shall become one of the immortals. I shall live for ever. With Maro.