The Green Lady Read online

  ‘Not as good as you.’

  Anna didn’t rise to his attempt at flattery. ‘Your nephew and niece are fine, but you could make an effort to visit.’

  ‘OK,’ he said noncommittally.

  ‘I think she still rides and I remember hearing that she keeps bees up on Mount Elikonas, but that’s about the sum of my knowledge. Can I get back to Lord Coe now?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ Mavros said, but his sister had already rung off.

  So far, so nothing much. He checked his email and found a message from Angie Poulou, with several attachments. They occupied him for a couple of hours.

  Deputy Commissioner Telemachos Xanthakos was responsible, among numerous other things, for homicide in the prefecture of Viotia, immediately northwest of Athens. He was that rare thing, a senior policeman under the age of forty. He also had a degree in classics from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, his home city. He sometimes wondered how he’d ended up in the backwater of Viotia, its industrial eastern section balanced by heavily cultivated land in the plain around Thiva, ancient Thebes, and towards Livadheia further west, where the police and provincial headquarters were. The mountains stood around like great giants, Parnassos at the far west of the prefecture, Kithairon where Oedipus had been exposed to the south, and Elikonas, legendary home of the Muses, in the southwest. With the myths of Semele and Dionysus, Cadmus the first King of Thebes, Pentheus, Oedipus and Heracles, let alone the historical resonances of the ancient city as well as the great battles of Plataea, Leuctra and Chaironeia, Xanthakos had plenty to investigate in his free time. When he’d first been appointed to the force, he had no shortage of that, being secretly gay – Greek policemen were notoriously homophobic – and having no family nearby. At least there was plenty of open space in Viotia for running, his second passion after the ancient world. That kept his two-metre frame slim and, according to his secretary, who he suspected had a hankering for him, ‘fit for the ladies’. The problem was his work. Now he was little more than a bureaucrat, reading files, approving budgets and supervising junior officers.

  Until today. The deputy commissioner was standing on a hill south of Thiva. Through a narrow valley he could see the fertile valley beneath Mount Kithairon, but the area’s links with the Oedipus myth weren’t at the forefront of his mind now. Crime scene operatives came out of the charred remains of a stone farmhouse.

  ‘One partially melted body, probably male,’ said one.

  That much Xanthakos already knew. The switchboard had taken a call from an incoherent man, who was currently leaning against the side of a high-end Volvo. The splatter of vomit at the building’s entrance was his.

  ‘So, Mr Matsa,’ the deputy commissioner said. ‘You drove up here for the first time in two years today and discovered the remains of the man inside.’

  The man nodded, his face pale. ‘My father grew up here and he came back every winter to hunt till he died three years ago.’

  ‘He was the founder of Matsas Pasta AE outside Thiva?’

  ‘That’s right. I run it now with my brother Angelos.’

  ‘And Angelos hasn’t been here since your father died?’

  ‘God, no. Angelos hunts women, not rabbits.’

  ‘You have no idea who the dead man could be.’

  The businessman stared at him. ‘No. How could I?’ He looked down. ‘He’d been tied to that chair, hadn’t he?’

  ‘So it would seem. You don’t have any enemies do you, Mr Matsa?’

  ‘If that’s an accusation, you can talk to my lawyer.’

  Xanthakos smiled. ‘Don’t overreact. These questions are perfectly routine.’

  Stavros Matsas looked up into the cloudless sky and wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Routine for you, perhaps.’

  The deputy commissioner caught the eye of the teenage boy in the Volvo. ‘Did your son see anything disturbing?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He was playing some bloody video game. I brought him up here to see the family roots, but he couldn’t give a shit.’

  ‘Did anything unusual strike you as you arrived? Apart from the smoke-blackened building.’

  ‘That’s a pretty big “apart from”.’ Matsas drank water from a bottle. ‘Now I come to think of it, there was something.’ He stood up straight and pointed to the bend in the rough track below the summit. ‘That Judas tree. It was my grandfather’s pride and joy. He never expected it to survive the wind up here. Some fucker’s driven into it, and recently.’

  The deputy commissioner looked at the koutsoupia, its yellowed leaves spread across the ground on the near side.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘One of my officers will take your statement and you may go.’ He walked to the tree, eyes on the track. The ground was drier than a bone in the Sahara and the dust hadn’t even retained the recent tracks of the police vehicles. But the trunk of the koutsoupia had taken a heavy scrape and there were marks on the dried vegetation around it and the earth below. He waved to the crime scene technicians, then went to talk to the medical examiner, who had just emerged from the roofless building.

  ‘Anything useful?’ the deputy commissioner asked, breathing through his mouth to reduce the stench of what was unpleasantly similar to roast pork.

  The ME, Frangiskos Priftakis, was a short and laconic Maniate. He took his mask off and breathed in the mountain air. ‘His wrists and ankles were bound by wire to the metal chair, and someone had taken the trouble to bolt it to the earth floor – it’s as hard as stone.’

  Xanthakos nodded. ‘Do their penises always swell up like that?’

  Priftakis jerked his head back to signal the negative. ‘Depends on where the fire is concentrated and how quickly it burns out. Your chemists will be able to tell you more, but I’d say this fire – you can smell the petrol beneath the burned flesh – didn’t last long. It certainly wasn’t a serious attempt to destroy the body.’

  ‘So what was it then?’ the deputy commissioner said, to himself as much as to the ME. ‘His teeth are presumably intact.’

  ‘Yes, though who knows how far that’ll get you? If he isn’t a local, he could have used a dentist anywhere. Or he might be one of the many who never use one. No fingerprints, I’m afraid – the epidermis from the fingers is completely gone. I’d say the petrol was dumped over his head and upper body.’

  ‘Any marks on the body?’

  ‘You’ll need to wait for the post-mortem. It wouldn’t surprise me if I find something.’

  Xanthakos raised an eyebrow.

  ‘There’s no sign of clothing at all, my friend. Only the remnants of a piece of burlap, probably from the farm. As the wire shows, the poor guy was tied down. I’d say he was tortured too.’

  The deputy commissioner looked southwards to the mountains separating Viotia from the Athenian metropolis. The Olympic Games were in full swing, athletes pounding the track, straining for the tape, heaving weights. He hoped to get down there to see the women’s and men’s marathons, but he had a feeling that the melted man would not be a solitary victim.

  That thought sent him back to his car with a spring in his stride. Life had been dull. Then his phone rang. It was his boss, telling him to be prepared for a call from the Ministry of Public Order and to do whatever he was ordered. He slumped into the seat of his service Nissan, feeling more deflated than an airship with perished seals. It looked like the case was about to be taken away from him.

  FOUR

  Mavros had a lot of material, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere. Lia Poulou was a good student, according to the scanned school reports her mother had sent as email attachments. Her pastoral tutor was happy with what was called her ‘moral development’, saying in the last report that she was mature for her years and an example to her contemporaries, though she had become ‘rather withdrawn’ in the Easter term. She played basketball, went to ballet classes and had passed her Grade Four piano exam. Mavros tried to get an impression of the girl from the photos Angie had sent. She was tall and slim, her h
air black like her father’s but her complexion as pale as her mother’s. In portrait shots, she looked straight into the lens with striking confidence. There were other pictures of her in her school uniform, tutu and sports kit. What struck Mavros most was Lia’s stern expression – there were few shots of her smiling and when she did, it was in a restrained way. She reminded him of statues of the ancient gods: austere and composed, but with intimations of dangerous power beneath the surface.

  Her mother had written a character assessment which did nothing to dispel that impression. She said that Lia was ‘my best friend and helper, the only person I can rely on when things get tough’. Mavros wondered about that. What kind of things got tough for the super-rich? It was notable that Angie never mentioned her husband. He wondered what their relationship was like. It must have been hugely taxing for the mother to be unable to talk about her daughter’s disappearance and keep up the façade that she was in Switzerland, especially during the holidays; in her email, Angie said that Lia was supposedly on safari in Kenya with new classmates. It must have been even worse when the person she relied on most was the one missing.

  Which led him to Paschos Poulos. Winner of several businessman of the year awards, internationally respected executive with interests in Europe and the Middle East, friend of heads of state and prime ministers – the kind of person the Fat Man called ‘the crème de la crap’. It didn’t help that the guy looked like a disreputable football club owner, though that was one of the few traditional pursuits of the Greek elite that he had avoided. His hair was thin, his face disfigured by a nose that suggested he drank more than was good for him, and his suits, expensive though they no doubt were, failed to hide his burgeoning paunch. As was the way of his kind, he kept a low public profile, leaving the customary charitable work (‘legal tax avoidance’, according to the Fat Man) to his wife and attending only the bare minimum of events in the Athenian social calendar. He didn’t seem to have any hobbies, though his involvement in the planning for the Olympics made that understandable. He’d fallen from a horse in his twenties and never got back on, and a former employee said he thought sailing was for fools. So why had he taken on the Olympic work, even renouncing the large salary that went with it?

  Mavros wasn’t an economist, but he knew how the rich in Greece operated: do nothing unless there’s something in it for you. A scan of the business pages revealed that Poulos A.E. subsidiaries had been involved in building arenas, roads and the athletes’ village, as well as supplying many of the raw materials. His companies had franchises from foreign corporations for a range of Games-related commercial activities and he had even covered the expenses of selected journalists to publicise the Athens Olympics favourably. No matter what the Games ended up costing Greece, Paschos Poulos would be guaranteed a huge profit, but it was all above board – the bid process for contracts had been at least nominally transparent and his companies had prevailed because they were highly efficient. There had been a mini-scandal when three employees who worked in Poulos A.E. headquarters in the northern Athenian suburb of Kifissia had committed suicide in the space of a month, but all had been being treated for mental problems and no blame was attached to the company, despite their families testifying that they had been seriously overworked.

  Mavros got up and opened his door. The sound of Yiorgos snoring in front of the TV drifted up the stairs. Going down as quietly as he could, Mavros made himself a sandwich and tiptoed back up. The Fat Man’s blood pressure was much worse than it should have been. He took the pills he’d been prescribed reluctantly, moaning about Big Pharma and how the companies reduced people to zombies. Mavros tried to get him to moderate what he ate, but that was a largely futile campaign.

  Back to Paschos Poulos. Why had he insisted on a media blackout over his daughter’s disappearance? If Mavros had been involved from the start, he would only have resorted to that after preliminary inquiries with her relatives, friends, teachers and other contacts had drawn a blank, despite the risk that one or more might talk. Maybe there had been a ransom demand, but surely Lia’s father would have paid up. What reason could he have for keeping things in the dark? Had the kidnappers required that of him? Was he afraid of damaging the image of the Olympics in his homeland or of putting the standing of his businesses at risk? It had been over three months since his daughter had disappeared. Surely he would have been told by the police that it was unlikely Lia would be found alive. Perhaps that was why he had pressed on with his work – but what kind of father would be so cold-blooded about losing his only child?

  When in the murky depths – and a case in which he was forbidden to talk to anyone who knew the missing person was about as murky as it got – Mavros had an ace to play, even though it was one that came with a cost. He rang the relevant number and ascertained that its subscriber would be where he usually was in the early evenings. Then he took a ‘death in the afternoon’, waking from the siesta with the usual unfulfilled dreams and nausea. After taking a shower and putting on a fresh shirt, he went downstairs.

  ‘Look at these wankers,’ the Fat Man said, pointing at a pair of Greek wrestlers who had just been eliminated in the first round. ‘Their trainers couldn’t even get the drug regime right.’

  ‘So cynical.’

  ‘So true. Where are you going?’

  ‘Business meeting.’

  Yiorgos looked at his watch. ‘With that bastard Bitsos, eh?’

  Mavros shrugged. ‘Needs must.’

  ‘Make sure you take him a heap of porn.’

  ‘He’s got enough of that. Don’t burst a blood vessel. Seriously.’

  The Fat Man extended an open hand, fingers wide. ‘Straight to hell with you, freak.’

  ‘See you there.’

  Mavros walked out into the sweltering early evening. Normally he would have walked to Omonia Square, but he hailed a passing cab. Thanks to Angie Poulou, he was in funds.

  The cypress trees around the estate on Ekali pointed their green fingers to the bright blue sky as if it were guilty of stealing her daughter. Angie sat on the broad terrace by the swimming pool, a wide sunhat on her head and a towel over her legs. The two street cats Lia had adopted were sleeping in the shade, their front legs entwined. Angie blinked back tears.

  What was she doing, taking on a private investigator? Paschos would explode if he found out – and, with the huge web of contacts he maintained, that would only be a matter of time. She didn’t care any more. All she had to do was talk to the press and he would be revealed as the schemer he was. Why had she gone along with his insane plan to keep Lia’s disappearance secret? In the beginning it seemed to make sense – deprive the kidnappers of the oxygen of publicity – but after she’d got over the initial shock, she should have stood up to him. For all his faults, he wasn’t a violent man. He’d never hit her, unlike the husbands of several women she knew, and he did listen to her, although these days she only saw him when they were on parade together.

  Angie took a few bites of the salad she had prepared, having given Fidelia, the Filipina cook, the day off, but she had no appetite. She felt empty inside, as if she was wasting away. She couldn’t live without Lia. Every possible fate – physical abuse, rape, torture, starvation, the white slave trade, accidental death, murder and more – had kept her awake at night in recent months. The fact that she couldn’t tell anyone the truth had given her migraines and driven her to the darkened room she used as a private space. After a week of that, she’d searched for a reliable investigator and found Alex Mavros.

  In truth he seemed more maverick than cautious, though the big case on Crete involving a Hollywood film company and a drug-producing village had shown how effective he could be. Besides, what she needed was someone who knew how the system worked while standing outside it. His half Scots half Greek background seemed to have given him that. When they met, she had trusted him immediately.

  But who was she fooling? What could one man do, when the best minds in the Greek police had failed? According
to Paschos, British and American law and order professionals in Athens for the Games had also been consulted, but had got nowhere. Lia had gone to a place that appeared on no map or screen. Perhaps she’d been beneath the surface of the earth from soon after she was snatched, occupying an unmarked grave that would never be found. Angie wouldn’t be able to live with that. She had sworn to herself that if Alex Mavros didn’t pick up any traces of Lia, she would go public. That would probably lead to the end of her marriage, but she didn’t care. Paschos had shown concern over Lia only in the first few days. After that, he got back to work and presented his usual implacable face to the world. His efforts to comfort her had been no more than perfunctory.

  The cats woke up and started chasing each other around the pool. Angie thought of the countless times she had played and swum with her daughter in this very place. But now the familiar lines of the tiles and stone walls, the canvas canopies and marble benches, blurred into obscure shapes, as if her home and everything she had experienced in it had been illusory – even her husband and, worst of all, Lia.

  Only Alex Mavros with his strange left eye could bring Angie back to the world she had known, the world with her daughter at its centre.

  Lambis Bitsos, crime correspondent for the left-of-centre paper The Free News, was a man of habit. Except when he was covering cases, he occupied a corner table in To Kazani, a down-market taverna in a backstreet near Omonia Square. The place had no terrace or roof garden, so in summer it really lived up to its name: the Cauldron.

  Mavros pulled out a chair opposite the skinny, balding journalist. ‘Jesus, Lambi, how do you cope in here at this time of year?’

  ‘As you see,’ he replied, pouring ouzo from a carafe and signalling for another glass and place setting. In front of him was a spread of aubergine salad, octopus with pasta, anchovies, and the taverna’s speciality, drunkard’s stew, containing pork, sausage and red wine.

  ‘Bekri-mezes?’ Mavros said. ‘How appropriate.’