Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (32 page)

Agamemnon was staring at me, his eyes bulging. I thought
he was going to hit me, but he managed to restrain himself
and stepped away to talk to the islanders. Before I lowered
my head I saw their empty expressions, their damp eyes
looking at me without accusation, only with profound
sadness. They seemed to understand that I had involved
myself in things that were far beyond my powers
.

Back in the cave I tried to come to terms with what had
happened. By my carelessness I had brought destruction on
Myli; I had indirectly caused the death of the old man; I had
probably consigned seven innocent people to the horror of
the occupiers’ prisons. And what had I achieved? Our
sabotage had interrupted the power supply for a few hours
and destroyed part of the Italians’ stores, which they had no
doubt already replenished. They clearly still had plenty of ammunition
and any deficit of food they would have taken from
the local population
.

But soon I thought again, regrouped, as we were taught to
do in basic training. This is still a just struggle, a struggle that
must continue. We will have to lie low for some time. That will
give us the opportunity to plan more operations. I can’t expect
to see Maro much in the near future, but our love can wait. It
is strong enough to survive this setback. The war is the
priority. I must be as clear about that as were the ancient
warriors—Leonidas and the Spartans who died at
Thermopylae, the original Sacred Band of Thebans who
perished en masse at the hands of the Macedonians of Philip
and Alexander in the great defeat at Chaironeia. In fact, I
must be cold and deadly like Griffin. Yes, I must become
ruthless if the enemy is to be prevented from hurting more
innocent people
.

A devastating thought has just struck me. Perhaps my love
for Maro is weakening me, corrupting my ability to fight.
Perhaps Maro is actually my fatal flaw, my own Achilles’ heel.
If I really was the soldier I was trained to be, I would reject
her. Send her back to the harsh discipline of her family
.

But am I man enough to do that?
 

As Mavros reached the beginning of the flat area and turned to take in the panorama of Trigono’s northern sector, he thought he saw a sudden movement on the heights of Vigla to his left. Raising his hand to his eyes and blinking in the wind, he saw two heads above the line of the hill. One was indistinguishable, but he recognised the white sunhat habitually worn by the crabby American anthropologist Gretchen. Presumably she had dragged the unusually laid-back Lance out here again. He wondered what more she could expect to learn about anger management out on the hills—unless discovering how long her partner could last without laying into her was the subject of her studies. Then he remembered that she was also a specialist on funerary practices. Did she have an interest in the graves Eleni was excavating?

He was glad to see that the archaeologist’s motorbike was standing by the fence, but less happy to spot the muscle- bound form of Mitsos emerge from his tent.

‘What you want?’ the ex-seaman said in heavily accented English, his eyes narrowing as he took in the damage to Mavros’s face.

Resisting the temptation to give him an earful of abuse in Piraeus argot, Mavros pointed to the plastic roof of the excavation. ‘Eleni?’ he asked.

‘Working,’ Mitsos replied. ‘You not be here.’ He pulled a mobile phone from the back pocket of his jeans and pressed a button. ‘Calling boss.’

Mavros raised his eyes to the sky. ‘Eleni!’ he shouted. ‘It’s Alex. Come and save me from King Kong.’

There was a pause during which Mitsos told someone— Panos Theocharis? Aris?—that the foreigner was at the dig again. Eleni appeared from the shelter and sauntered across, wiping her hands on her grimy T-shirt. Her face was drenched in sweat and she didn’t give him more than a cursory glance.

‘You wait,’ Mitsos said, putting the phone away. ‘Boss coming.’

‘What’s going on?’ Eleni asked in Greek, listening to the watchman’s sullen explanation. ‘Wanker,’ she cursed. ‘You don’t have to tell them about people I invite.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he replied, keeping his eyes off her.

‘You’d better come in,’ Eleni said to Alex, pointing to the lock which Mitsos opened reluctantly. ‘Animal,’ she said under her breath. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her arm. ‘Still looking for Rosa?’ She stared at him. ‘My God, what happened to you?’

‘I fell over on the way back from the bar last night,’ he replied, following the archaeologist under the roof and into the inferno. He didn’t want to tell her about the attack in case that put her off answering his questions. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Come into the passage,’ she said. ‘It’s much cooler.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘You sound very serious.’

‘I am serious,’ he said, lowering his head as he went under the heavy lintel. ‘I’m serious about finding Rosa Ozal.’ He glanced to each side as they moved down the passage. The burial chambers were as he remembered them, the skeletons in the positions where they’d been preserved for over four millennia. He breathed in the smell of the dusty space. ‘I’m still trying to find out what she did on Trigono before her sudden departure.’

Eleni stopped. She turned and looked at him in the artificial light, the generator’s hum penetrating to the subterranean corridor. ‘And?’

Mavros returned her gaze. ‘And…it seems that another woman left the island in similar circumstances.’ He was watching her carefully. ‘Just a few days ago.’

The archaeologist’s eyes widened and her lips parted. ‘Another woman?’

Mavros was curious to see if Eleni would admit that she knew Liz Clifton, as proved by the photo in her album.

‘Yes. A very attractive woman with an austere look to her. Blonde, in her thirties.’ He focused on Eleni’s face in the confines of the hewn passageway. She kept quiet and he decided to tell an untruth. ‘You were seen in a clinch with her.’

‘What?’ The archaeologist’s expression cracked, the aura of calm assurance gone. ‘Where? Who by?’ The questions came rapidly.

Mavros decided to increase the pressure by bending the truth. ‘Rena saw you together.’

Eleni gave a bitter laugh. ‘You shouldn’t believe anything that woman says, Alex.’ She drew closer to him. ‘Do you know what they say in the village?’

He raised his shoulders. ‘How would I?’

Eleni’s voice was low. ‘They say she murdered her husband.’ Her eyes locked on his. ‘And that she seduces the boys. Including Yiangos, the one who drowned.’

Mavros inhaled deeply, the inert metallic air making his nose twitch. The idea of Rena killing anyone seemed ridiculous. Then he remembered her fight with the Dutchman. He forced himself to concentrate on Eleni. ‘Why are you being so evasive?’ He stared into the dark brown eyes that suddenly were no longer raised to his. ‘I saw the photographs of you and Elizabeth Clifton in your album.’

Suddenly the archaeologist’s mouth was half open, the tongue protruding. She took a deep breath and looked at him, then nodded. It seemed she was finally going to come clean about Liz and Rosa.

And then a voice boomed down the passage from the covered trench outside.

‘Eleni? Are you there?’ It was Aris Theocharis, speaking Greek. ‘Come out.’ There was a pause. ‘Alex? Alex Mavros? I know you’re in there. Come out before I turn the lights off.’ There was a burst of coarse laughter. ‘We’re coming to get you.’

Eleni was staring at him. ‘Mavros?’ she said in a sharp voice. ‘What’s he saying?’

Mavros struggled to speak. ‘I—’

‘You’re not a foreigner, are you?’ the archaeologist interrupted in Greek. ‘You understand, don’t you? Christ. I knew there was something about you.’ She pushed him away angrily. ‘I don’t want to meet that bastard in here. He frightens me enough in the daylight.’ She darted into the last chamber and came back out with a torch. ‘Follow me.’ She glanced at him. ‘And keep your head down, you lying shit.’

Mavros accepted the insult. He had some explaining to do, but maybe he’d be able to turn the revelation to his advantage. Rena had opened up to him when she discovered who he was. As he went after Eleni, he caught a glimpse of a pair of partially uncovered skeletons, and then the lights flickered and went out. In the second before Eleni’s torch came on, he collided with the wall at the end of the passage.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘To the right.’

Biting his lip from the pain in his knee, Mavros realised that there was a narrow gap beyond a heap of recently fallen stone. Eleni had already scrambled over it, bending double to squeeze through a low aperture. He wasn’t sure if he would fit, but he pushed himself forward, feeling his hair pick up grit as it scraped the surface above. Then he found himself in an open space, the torchlight revealing what seemed to be a natural cave that was about ten metres long, the floor covered in a layer of small stony fragments. Mavros noticed that the surface was disturbed in the area nearest the entrance they’d used.

Eleni was squatting by the wall, the hand that wasn’t holding the torch resting on something on the cave floor. ‘Keep quiet,’ she whispered. ‘If we’re lucky he won’t find the gap.’ The light was extinguished.

Mavros sat down next to her in the darkness. After a while the distant sound of the generator could be heard again, but only the faintest glow came through into their hiding place. He was wondering why Eleni had run at the sound of Aris Theocharis’s voice, and he was trying to figure out how the big man had discovered his surname. Someone must have been through his pockets. Had Rena told Aris, or had someone else found his ID? Eleni’s words about his landlady came back to him. Rena a killer? He couldn’t believe it. But perhaps she had a link to the Theocharis family; most people in the village did.

‘Eleni?’ boomed a voice in the passage behind the rock wall. ‘Where the fuck are you? Alex? Alex Mavros? I want to talk to you.’ Aris was close now, the sound of his heavy feet loud. ‘Come here, Mitso,’ he shouted, then demanded if the watchman was sure that Eleni and her visitor had come down into the dig.

The watchman’s reply wasn’t clear. The shouting continued for a while, then began to fade away.

Eleni waited, keeping the torch off. ‘I wouldn’t like to be Mitsos right now,’ she said in a cautious whisper. ‘I discovered this area yesterday, but I kept it to myself.’

‘Is there another way out of the dig?’ Mavros asked.

‘Yes, there’s a gate at the far end where the rubble from the grave chambers is tipped. As far as anyone knows, I don’t have a key. They may suspect I do now.’

‘We haven’t left any footprints there, though,’ Mavros said. ‘Won’t they notice?’

‘That pair of apes?’ Eleni said in Greek. ‘They’re only interested in nipples and arses.’ Her tone was scathing, but there was still an undercurrent of fear in her voice. She switched on the torch and shone the light in his face. ‘So, Mr Mavro, now will you tell me what game you’ve been playing?’

Mavros put a hand up to shield his eyes. ‘No game,’ he said, deciding that the only way to gain the archaeologist’s confidence was to be honest. ‘I’m an investigator.’

‘A what?’ she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Christ and the Holy Mother. Theocharis will throw me off the cliffs if he thinks I’ve told you anything. Who are you working for? The Culture Ministry?’

‘Don’t panic,’ he said, stretching across and pushing the torch beam on to the stony floor. ‘I’m a private investigator. Rosa Ozal’s brother hired me to find out if she was on Trigono or if anything happened to her here. The family hasn’t seen her since she came to Greece in June.’

Eleni was silent for a while. ‘So why are you asking about…about Liz?’ she asked, her head down. Then she looked up. ‘And why have you been pretending to be a Scottish tourist?’

‘My mother’s Scottish,’ he replied. ‘You’ve probably heard of my father—Spyros Mavros.’

‘Not the communist? My God, you’re Mavros’s son? He had died by the time I was in the KNE, but people still talked about him.’ She paused. ‘Didn’t you have a brother who was…who was lost during the dictatorship?’

‘Yes. Andonis.’ He blinked. ‘So you were in the youth party?’

‘Along with all of my friends,’ Eleni replied, her voice growing sombre. ‘Then we grew up and realised that things weren’t so simple.’

‘The innocence of youth.’ Mavros touched her knee. ‘I’m sorry about the deception. It seemed easier to play up my non- Greek side.’

‘I don’t know how you can do it,’ she replied angrily. ‘Don’t you feel dirty?’

He shrugged, feeling the rock scratch him through his shirt. ‘It’s the curse of growing up with more than one language and culture. You’re always deceiving someone about who you are.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘The problem is, you’re never really sure who you are yourself. There’s a danger that you become the perpetual outsider.’

Eleni snorted and then was quiet for a few moments. ‘I suppose that’s true. I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘So?’ he said. ‘Who was the other woman? And what about Rosa? Are you sure you’ve told me all you know about her?’

Eleni stood up. He could see an object that he couldn’t fully make out under her arm. ‘Not now. Those bastards will be waiting for us outside. I want to see if this cave leads anywhere. Aris will look even more of a fool if we turn up outside the wire.’

‘What’s that?’ Mavros asked, trying to see what she was carrying.

‘I’ll show you when we get out,’ she said.

‘You’re making a lot of commitments, Eleni.’

‘So?’ she said, turning to him and flashing the light in his eyes. ‘Are you worried that I won’t stick to them?’

He waved the beam away and watched as she shone it over the other end of the cave. The roof there was hung with stalactites, some of them broken off and lying on the floor.