Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (20 page)

‘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.

The small chamber, its internal wall hewn out of the rocky base of the
kastro
, was lit by a multitude of candles, the heavy scent of wax hanging in the air. Kyra Maro was kneeling on the floor, her tiny head on the embroidered bedspread. Rena could see no movement in her chest, but that wasn’t what frightened her. There was an open tin box on the floor and the bed was laid out with darkly stained objects that she knew immediately were human bones. And between the old woman’s outstretched arms was a skull, the eye sockets gaping and the cranium disfigured by an uneven bulge on the top.

Rena’s knees were weak and her breath was coming in rapid gasps. She forced herself to go closer and bend over Kyra Maro. Touching her fleshless wrist, she found a pulse that was stronger than she’d expected. She stepped back, unsure what to do. The way the room had been arranged gave the impression of ritual. Perhaps the old woman did this every night, there was no way of knowing, and she might be upset to be discovered with the bones.

Kneeling down beside the box, Rena looked at its lid. A white cross had been painted roughly on it, along with the capital letters alpha and gamma, and the numbers 1943-1964. She rocked back on her heels and tried to make sense of this. The gamma may have referred to a member of Kyra Maro’s family—her surname was Grypari. But whose bones could they be? As far as Rena knew, the old woman had never married or had children. She assumed the numbers were dates; 1943—Maro would have been about twenty then. But whose were the initials? And why had his or her bones been taken from the ossuary?

Rena shivered and got slowly to her feet, having decided to go without waking the old woman. Though faint, her breathing was regular and she didn’t seem to be ill. It was as she ran her eyes around the cell-like room one last time that Rena saw the faded photograph in the icon niche. She recognised it immediately. She had come across it in the room across her courtyard that she rented out. Her surprise at seeing it again in Kyra Maro’s bedroom diluted the shock she’d got from the bones. Then the old woman twitched, her eyes suddenly flickering.

Not wanting to be caught in her sanctuary, Rena moved quickly out of the room towards the front door. She remembered to take the bowl of soup to cover her tracks—she’d come back with it later. Outside, she turned the key in the door and started quickly down the street, almost colliding with Manolis Gryparis. The old man with the single arm stared hard at her as he brushed past. She was halfway home when it occurred to her that now Kyra Maro’s brother was aware that she had a key to the old woman’s house. As far as she knew, no one else in Maro’s family had one. It was the kind of knowledge that the old bastard was quite capable of using to his advantage—or to that of his terrible son, Lefteris.

Eleni pulled up in front of the Bar Astrapi, dust rising in the bright lights. Mavros let go of her and got off the bike, his thighs aching. He’d been trying to grip the seat in order to reduce his hold on her, but she’d driven so fast that he’d been forced to encircle her midriff with his arms as he’d done earlier in the day.

‘You can buy me a drink for the ride,’ Eleni said, her voice humourless. ‘I won’t charge you for anything else.’

‘Yes, I’ll get you a drink,’ Mavros replied. ‘In a few minutes. First I want to go back to my place to change so that you can take these clothes back.’ He also wanted to call Niki, but he wasn’t going to tell Eleni that.

The archaeologist gave a shrug. ‘You do what you like, Alex,’ she said indifferently. ‘You know where to find me.’ She turned away and went into the bar, the sound of heavy rock music increasing as the door was opened.

Mavros walked down the unlit track towards the village. He could have done without another late night, but there were people he needed to talk to and he reckoned that their guard would be down and their tongues looser in the Astrapi. That was, unless Eleni warned them about his interest in Rosa. Even if she did, their reactions might be revealing.

He entered the village street and in the sparse lights made out his landlady approaching her front door from the opposite direction, a plate in her hands. He gave her a wave, but her head was down and she didn’t respond.

‘Hello,’ he said as he got closer.

Rena’s head shot up and she gazed at him with wide eyes. ‘Oh, Alex.’ She gave him a nod as she put her key in the lock, holding the plate firmly in one hand.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked as he followed her in.

‘Wrong?’ she repeated, eyes to the front. ‘No.’ She turned when she came out of the passage to the yard. ‘You know, the dead young persons…’

Mavros nodded. ‘It must be very hard for everyone.’

‘No,’ she said bitterly. ‘Not for everyone. There are people who do not care so much.’

He looked at her and saw that her eyes were damp. ‘Excuse me, I have to…’ He moved towards his rooms.

‘You stay in now?’ Rena asked, her expression lightening slightly. ‘You would like coffee?’

Mavros shook his head. ‘No, I’m meeting—’ He broke off. Maybe this was the time to question Rena. But she still looked very upset. It would be better to talk to her in the morning. ‘I’m meeting some people.’ He smiled awkwardly as he remembered Rena’s aversion to Eleni. ‘Goodnight.’

The widow kept her eyes on him for a second then nodded. ‘Goodnight,’ she said in a low voice.

Mavros went into his bedroom and changed out of the clothes Eleni had given him. He was wondering about Rena. Underneath the black clothes and scarf she was attractive, young enough to find another husband and smarter than most island women. But there was something worrying about her, something that at times made him feel like a naughty child. It was as if she lived in a different dimension to everyone else on the island, as if she had access to mysteries denied to other people. He grunted as he pulled on a clean T-shirt. Maybe she was just more subtle than her rivals about taking the tourists’ money without making them feel they’d been milked.

He took his mobile out and called Niki’s flat. His encounters with Eleni had brought her closer and he wanted to hear her voice. Niki may have been volatile and trying, but he knew her feelings for him were genuine. As it turned out, he heard her voice only on the recorded message. He told her he’d call again the next day and cut the connection. The same happened with her mobile number. She’d probably passed out with a case file on her face—when she wasn’t with him, she took her work to bed and turned off the phones.