Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) Read online

  The old man looked at her briefly then shook his head. ‘I will tell him.’ He glanced at Mavros and then at his wife. ‘You are right, Eleni. All the finds must go to the museum.’

  The archaeologist nodded, saying nothing about the largest and potentially most significant piece.

  ‘The doctor told me that Aris might lose his sight,’ Theocharis continued. ‘The fool. What did he think he was doing?’ He suddenly sank back on to the sofa. ‘My God, what will become of us now? The family is falling apart.’

  Dhimitra stubbed out her cigarette and went to him, but he pushed her away with surprising force. The gilded ex-singer gave him a look of undisguised loathing then walked out of the room.

  Mavros and Eleni turned to follow but they stopped when they heard Theocharis’s voice. It was now querulous.

  ‘Mr Mavro,’ he said. ‘Look in the right-hand drawer of the desk. You will find an old diary. I had it taken from Elizabeth Clifton’s room along with everything else my people could find pertaining to…pertaining to the war. I swear that I didn’t know anything about what happened to her subsequently. Aris must have been talked into taking her up the track by the German woman. She could be very persuasive when she wanted to be. But believe me, my son was unaware of the horrors perpetrated by Lefteris and Barbara Hoeg in the cave.’ He shook his head. ‘I have been told by my sources in New York how low he has sunk, but he has never been able to keep his mouth shut. He would have let something slip, if not to me then to Dhimitra or to the others he thinks are his friends.’

  Mavros went to the desk and took out the battered leather book, opening it to see tiny, almost illegible writing.

  ‘There is much about the war in Trigono in there,’ Theocharis said, ‘not all of it flattering to me. Perhaps it will help you to understand the island and its people a little better.’ He shook his head. ‘I must apologise for the injuries that Manolis and Lefteris inflicted on you after you left the bar. I wanted them to find out about you, but they let their innate savagery get the better of them. Lefteris later removed your identification card. He put them back during the night. He retained a key to the widow’s house from the time when they had an affair.’

  Mavros closed the book and stepped back towards the sofa. ‘And Andonis?’ he asked, his heartbeat quickening. ‘My brother Andonis? Do you really have any information about him?’

  The old man glanced up at him, his face gaunt beneath the tapered beard and his eyes cloudy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice even fainter. ‘That was nothing more than a device to get you off Trigono.’

  Mavros felt his stomach somersault. After clenching and unclenching his fists several times he managed to convince himself that he’d never really believed Theocharis knew anything about Andonis. He had gone along with it because he had to, because love of his brother and the bonds of family duty required him to.

  Eleni took his arm and led him away, leaving Trigono’s leading citizen alone in his soulless mausoleum.

  Mavros didn’t leave Trigono immediately. He was exhausted, his head throbbing from the blows he’d taken. Army helicopters flew the badly injured away on the first day, the wind having dropped and been replaced, with typical Aegean unpredictability, by a mild southerly. He had slept badly and got up early in the morning, the events on the southern hills still troubling him.

  Because of the complexity of the case and the fact that both Greek and foreign natives were among the dead and the suspects, a police unit was sent from Athens. They arrived at midday and took statements from everyone with painstaking attention to detail. Mavros managed to get them off his back by calling his high-ranking contact Kriaras and promising to make himself available as soon as he was back in Athens. Roy was questioned about Lefteris’s death but he wasn’t arrested and it didn’t seem likely that he’d face charges.

  Eleni, accompanied by a pair of policemen, was to take the smaller Cycladic pieces, including the one she’d retrieved from the bush where she’d hidden it, to the Culture Ministry’s experts. She would also report the find of the life-size statue—it hadn’t yet been removed from the unsafe cave. She was hopeful that she would be assigned a team of assistants to recover the latest find and to continue the dig, given its increased significance.

  ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done, Alex,’ she said after she had knocked on Rena’s door. She declined to enter the widow’s house. ‘You’re a duplicitous bastard, but your heart’s in the right place.’ Her expression darkened. ‘I only wish I had been as questioning as you about Rosa’s unexpected departure, the departure that never was. And about Liz.’

  ‘People change their plans, leave early all the time,’ Mavros said. ‘It’s the nature of the islands in the summer. Don’t blame yourself.’ He touched her arm. ‘Who took the photos of you with Rosa and Liz. Was it Rinus?’

  The archaeologist frowned and then nodded. ‘Don’t you ever give up? Yes, it was the Dutchman. He likes to think he’s a woman-chaser, but mostly we laughed at him. He spent his spare time with porn videos. Or with poor Dinos. At least he never hurt him.’

  ‘But he hit Rosa, didn’t he?’ Mavros said.

  ‘Tapped her, more like. She slapped him so hard in return that his cheek glowed for a week. He didn’t bother her again.’

  ‘But he told people he’d seen Rosa leave,’ he mused. ‘Barbara put him up to that. Maybe he got some kind of kick out of the lie.’ He met Eleni’s eyes. ‘Do you think he suspected what she and Lefteris were doing?’

  She bit her lip and then shrugged. ‘Who knows? I doubt it. We’ll probably never find out.’

  Rinus had been arrested for drug possession after the police searched his flat and found small amounts of grass and Ecstasy. Dealing would be a tougher charge to make stick. If he was lucky he’d serve a short sentence and be deported. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be coming back to Trigono.

  ‘Good luck at the ministry.’ Mavros smiled and touched her arm. ‘No hard feelings?’

  Eleni shook her head. ‘No, Alex. I don’t know why I tried to seduce you. I was under pressure, I was looking for a way to get back at Theocharis. I thought that if you were a dealer or a thief, you might—’ She broke off and laughed. ‘No, that’s not it. You’re a good-looking man. I just wanted you, that’s all.’ She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You look terrible now, though. Get some sleep.’ She turned and walked quickly down the street.

  When Mavros surfaced in the late afternoon, he sat down at the table under the pergola in the yard and went through the diary that Theocharis had given him, deciphering the handwriting with difficulty. Then he told Rena about what old Maro had been through during the war.

  ‘Christ and the Holy Mother,’ Rena said when he finished. She was dabbing her eyes around the dressing on her cheek. ‘She never told me. The poor woman. So it was true that she loved a foreign man in the war. My worthless husband told me she did and that she was responsible for her brother Manolis losing his arm. I thought he was just peddling gossip. But what happened to Kyra Maro’s officer? For all his promises he never came back.’ She looked across the yard at Melpo. The donkey had taken up residence there since the villagers’ siege of the house and was chewing hay contentedly, her black eyes gleaming. ‘Women are nothing but beasts of burden,’ Rena said bitterly. ‘They whip us, they crush us, and for what? Love? Children? That’s all shit!’

  Mavros nodded slowly, flicking his worry beads. Having to keep his hands off them when he was pretending to be a tourist had almost driven him back to cigarettes. ‘By “they” you mean men?’

  ‘Who else?’ the widow replied, glaring at him. ‘Don’t tell me you treat women any differently.’

  He froze, remembering Niki. She’d left a message on his mobile for him to call her that morning.

  Rena was nodding, aware that she’d struck a nerve. ‘Exactly. And what about Rinus? And Aris? I’m not even talking about that bastard Lefteris.’ She shook her head. ‘The only men who come out of this series o
f horrors with any dignity are the weak ones—Mikkel, the American who died…’

  ‘Come on, Rena,’ Mavros said. ‘You’re being unfair. Surely you don’t think the Englishmen Roy and Norm were weak. As for George Lawrence, maybe he didn’t even survive the war. Liz will probably know about that. I’ll see if I can visit her in hospital when I get back to Athens.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Rena concentrated on searching for grit in a bowl of dry rice. ‘I pray to God that she recovers.’

  Mavros went into his room and called Niki. He was connected to her message service. It was only when it ran on beyond the usual instructions that he realised there was a new response.

  ‘If Alex Mavros, private investigator and professional shit, is calling, let him stay on Trigono and copulate with the goats. Andhroniki Glezou doesn’t need him. Go to hell, liar.’

  He held the phone away from his ear and stared at it. He wasn’t sure if Niki was serious, but he felt bad about telling her he’d been on Zakynthos. Hearing his name all over the TV and the radio when news of the case broke couldn’t have been pleasant. He’d already had to make reassuring calls to his mother and sister, as well as promise his friend the reporter Lambis Bitsos an exclusive interview.

  Sitting down on the bed, he went over the other things that had happened earlier in the day. Barbara’s body had been removed from the freezer in her home that morning, following Mikkel’s admission that he’d put it there for safe-keeping. The German was in a terrible state. Mavros thought about what he’d been through. Not only had he found his woman dead in the pool, but he’d been savagely attacked by Lefteris. The fisherman had put the unconscious Mikkel and Gretchen next to the stoned barman and then removed them, presumably to terrify Rinus into silence about the drug trafficking. Dinos the goatherd had seen Lefteris carrying the unconscious bodies. He appeared from a hiding place on Profitis Ilias at dawn, his eyes wide. The city policemen hadn’t been able to make much sense of what he was saying and Mavros had helped to calm the frightened young man down. Dinos’s mother came to meet him at the police station and gave him an unsympathetic glare. No wonder he spent his time on the hills with the goats.

  Mavros went back outside and stood across the table from the widow. ‘Why were you so hostile to the Dutchman, Rena?’ he asked.

  She looked up at him and shook her head. ‘I told you I was involved with Lefteris until I understood what a madman he was.’

  He nodded.

  ‘His son Yiangos helped me, distracted his father from me when he started beating me. I…I loved that boy.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘I never had sex with him, despite what the idiot villagers think. But I did love him, the wretched soul. When he told me what Lefteris and Rinus were making him do, transporting and selling the drugs in the village, I hated them for it. But I couldn’t do anything about it. Yiangos made me promise not to talk. He was very frightened of Lefteris.’

  Mavros sat down. ‘Rena, why did you look at me like you wanted to kill me when I saw you on the ridge above Lance’s body?’

  The widow nodded. ‘It was strange,’ she said slowly. ‘I’d been working in the fields and my mind must have been wandering. The wind was enough to drive anyone crazy. I looked down and thought I saw my husband Argyris standing over his own corpse.’ She twitched her head. ‘Ridiculous. You don’t resemble him in any way.’ She gave an embarrassed smile. ‘There was something else.’ She dropped her gaze. ‘Your eyes, Alex. One of them is different, the bright blue marked with brown. It fascinated me and worried me at the same time. The old traditions are foolish, I know, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking of the evil eye. There were times I thought you were the bringer of bad fortune.’ She looked up at him and laughed lightly. ‘If you are born a peasant, you can never shake off the beliefs you grow up with.’

  Mavros felt uncomfortable. He had been vain enough to imagine that Rena fancied him and in fact she’d thought he was an emissary of the Devil. Then he remembered another occasion when the widow had scared him. ‘I saw you out here in the early morning with a knife in your hand.’ He was thinking about the absence of photos on her walls and the crumpled image of her husband under her pillow. ‘Argyris…he wasn’t good to you?’

  Rena gave a sharp laugh. ‘You could say that. He was weak compared with Lefteris, but he knew how to hurt me, especially after he’d been drinking.’ She shook her head. ‘Not that I knew anything different. My parents treated me harshly when I was a child. They wanted a son but I was all that arrived. I left my own island to get away from them.’ She laughed again, this time bitterly. ‘I didn’t realise that Trigono was hell on earth. Sometimes I wish they were all dead, the islanders who hate Kyra Maro and me.’

  Mavros held his eyes on her, steeling himself to ask the questions that still plagued him. ‘Rena, I need to know,’ he said slowly. ‘I found some things I don’t understand in your bedroom. A copy of a book about Trigono during the war— you know the one, written by the Paros historian Vlastos— and an ancient figurine.’

  The widow’s face was a study in melancholy. ‘You are good at your job, Alex.’ She shook her head. ‘But the way you do it is wrong, the lying about who you are and the searching without permission.’ She swallowed a sudden sob. ‘Even if you did find poor Rosa.’

  Mavros handed her a tissue and waited for her to dry her eyes. He heard the donkey’s regular chewing from the corner of the yard above the chirping of the birds in the bougainvillaea. He could feel guilt gnawing at him, but he didn’t know how else he could have broken the case.

  ‘Oh, Alex,’ Rena said with a sigh. ‘Let it go. It’s finished now.’ She shook her head at him again. ‘I took the book from the library the day before old Theocharis came to remove all the copies. I didn’t want him to have his way, even though I didn’t understand what he was doing. I was going to put it back in the library later. And the marble figure, that beautiful thing? I found it in Kyra Maro’s field a few weeks ago. I was going to hand it over to the archaeologist, but as she’d tried to steal Rosa and Liz from me I thought again.’ She looked away. ‘If you must know, I want to give it to poor Maro. Especially now I know how she has suffered in her life.’

  Mavros nodded. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. But, Rena, why didn’t you report the disappearances of Rosa and Liz?’

  She looked at him as if he were a child. ‘Have you any idea how many tourists visit this island in the summer, Alex? Have you any idea how many of them leave before they said they would? Why do you think I ask people to pay in advance?’ She shrugged. ‘I was upset because I thought they were my friends…my lovers.’ She bent her head as another sob convulsed her. ‘Oh God, how could they do that to Rosa? How could they leave her to rot? Oh God…’

  Mavros felt a flood of compassion and he leaned forward, putting his hand on the widow’s. He looked at her, with her dark hair drawn back under the scarf and the sleeves of her black blouse rolled up over her smooth arms. She had her forbidding side, but she was as fine a human being as he’d ever met—gentle, caring and selfless. He was ashamed that he had harboured suspicions about her. ‘To think that the villagers say you poisoned your husband,’ he said, taking his hand from hers and getting to his feet. ‘The morons.’ He turned away.

  Her voice followed him across the yard. ‘Are you completely sure I didn’t, Alex?’

  He stopped for a moment but didn’t look back.

  In the evening Mavros went out to the hill above the enclosed cemetery and looked away across the darkening waves to the western islands. The sun was low, the clouds in the pale blue sky suffused with a bright pink radiance. He was trying to get the case out of his mind, trying to lose himself in the beauty of the Aegean, but his experiences on Trigono were too vivid. In practical terms, the case had been a success—he had found Rosa Ozal, even though part of him wished he’d never seen her ravaged form. Indirectly, he had saved some precious artworks for Greece and the rest of humankind, as well as putting the screws on a rich man who had been corrupted by his wealt
h and power. And there would be fewer illicit drugs on the island, at least for a while.

  But he still felt dispirited. If he had concentrated on Lefteris earlier, if he had followed up the signs he’d seen of the killer’s violent nature, perhaps Barbara and Lance wouldn’t have died and perhaps Gretchen and Mikkel would have escaped the physical and mental trauma they’d been subjected to. As it was, as the fisherman had pointed out, his questions had only brought about more senseless crimes.

  He looked at the sea, following a white trata as it headed for the fishing grounds, gulls already above its stern. There was nothing he could have done for the young couple who had drowned, nothing he could have done to save Rosa Ozal from the savagery Lefteris had inherited from his father Manolis and turned into something worse. As he’d learned from Lawrence’s diary, the old man had always been hard, his character forged by the island’s harsh demands and by the war. That cruelty had been magnified as it moved down the generations. As for Barbara, he didn’t have the courage to imagine how her mind had worked.

  But then, as he became aware of the first stars in the sky’s canopy, Mavros saw the other side of Trigono, its softer, more human dimension. The Cycladic figures rose up before him, the smooth lines of their unseeing faces and marble bodies, the entwined limbs of the ageless lovers that had been revealed by the explosion. George Lawrence and Maro had sustained themselves by love during the war, for all the lieutenant’s poetic fantasies about Greece. Perhaps the doomed young couple, Yiangos and Nafsika, had been passionate about each other too.

  Suddenly he thought of his parents. Spyros and Dorothy had survived the war and the civil strife that followed it by loving each other without restraint. He considered his relationship with Niki and felt unworthy. But perhaps, like all the other romantic episodes in his life, this one was condemned to failure because of Andonis. Perhaps he loved his lost brother too much—the memory rather than the reality of him—to admit anyone else to his heart.