Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (43 page)

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 wealth 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.

Mavros closed his eyes to shut out the shore and the running waves, the graveyard with its glowing white headstones and the islands fading into dusk.

It was time to leave Trigono and get back to the big city.

Kyra Maro left Tasos’s bones in the box under her bed. This time she didn’t feel the need to take them out—he was already so close. There was a pain in her chest that made breathing difficult but she wasn’t concerned by it. She leaned back on the pillows, letting her thoughts drift.

‘Ach, Rena,’ she said quietly. ‘You’re a good woman. You brought me food this evening even though I didn’t want it. And there was a strange look on your face, a sweet sadness in the way you smiled at me that for a moment made me wonder if you’d found something out about my life. I never told you about Tzortz or Tasos. It was better that way. You were already too close to me and the villagers hate you for it. Yes, you’re a good woman, but even now I am keeping my counsel, keeping my beloved to myself. But where are they? Often they have risen up before me as they used to be, firm fleshed and joyful, only for me to wrap my arms around them and discover that they were phantoms, shadows without substance. Now it seems that I do not even have that consolation. Where are they? What remains of Tasos is beside me, but Tzortz, you are deep in the chill salt water. Was it for this emptiness that I fought across the years to have your name inscribed on the war memorial? Was it for this that I crept out in the night and wrote your name on the stone when Theocharis had it removed? Ach, Tzortz, I loved you for so little time on the surface of the earth and for so long in spirit. When will the torment end?’

In an instant Maro was back on the hills of the southern massif, the sun sinking in a blast of red over Andiparos. In her pocket was a handful of pomegranate seeds, an offering to the goddess of the underworld. She was running down the hillside with all her youthful vigour, the broom and thistles catching at her bare legs, but Tzortz was already on the flat rock by the water’s edge. She kept screaming her lover’s name, screaming it above the mocking cries of the gulls, begging him to wait.

And then, to her amazement, the story of her life was changed. Tzortz beckoned to her, his coat and torso no longer weighed down by stones. He smiled, and behind him she saw a boat approach, a shrouded figure at the helm. The water was slapping against the hull as it bobbed on the darkening surface. Maro was at the shore, the skin on the soles of her feet being scraped by the rock’s sharp surface.

‘Come, my love,’ she heard her lover call. ‘We must go now.’

He jumped into the water, but his head came back above the surface immediately. Without hesitating she followed him, pulling herself forward with her arms, surprised that the sea was not cold. When she reached the boat, Tzortz was already on board. He bent down and took her in his arms, lifting her on to the deck. Her heart soared as she saw Tasos beside them, their small son smiling, his head smooth and undamaged.

And as the sunlight died, the three of them sailed away together.

Into a murderless blue.

M
AVROS
watched as Deniz Ozal walked listlessly across the yard of the Fat Man’s café and slumped on to a chair. Above them the blue-grey sky was choked with fumes, the noise of traffic throbbing in the distance. Grapes that had dropped from the vines lay uncollected on the gravel and the enclosed space smelled of fermenting juice. The improvised wasp traps hanging from the pergola were full of insects, a dull buzz emanating from the few that were still alive.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he asked the Turkish- American. ‘You take
varyglyko
, don’t you?’

Ozal waved a hand weakly. ‘No coffee.’ His face was pale and sweaty. ‘I can’t keep anything down.’

Mavros shook his head to keep the Fat Man at bay, not that he’d shown much inclination to take an order. ‘I’m very sorry about your sister,’ he said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.

His client was nodding slowly. ‘Yeah, well, you did a hell of a job.’ He looked up briefly. ‘Except I kinda wish you’d never found poor Rosa.’ He swallowed hard and brought a handkerchief to his face. ‘They wanted me to look at her remains, you know. What could I tell them? They already knew it was her from the dental records.’ He clenched his face. ‘Those fucking bastards, why did they do that to her?’ He stared into Mavros’s eyes as if he expected an answer. When one failed to come, he bowed his head again. ‘She was on holiday, for Chrissakes, all she wanted was sun and sand, maybe a bit of sex, how the fuck would I know?’ His words tailed away into a groan.

Mavros’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘She wasn’t checking the place out for you, was she? Trying to get a look at Theocharis’s private collection?’ His client gave him an agonised look. ‘I saw you meet Tryfon Roufos after you came here. He has a reputation. I want a straight answer. Were you going to bid for antiquities from Trigono?’

‘What?’ Deniz Ozal’s expression was incredulous. ‘Is that what you think? I sent my sister into that nest of vipers? Fuck you, dick.’ He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and unfolded documents. ‘It’s none of your business, but take a look if you want. Ottoman Imperial coins. That’s what I’m buying from Roufos. If the asshole ever shows up at his office.’

Mavros pushed the papers away. Ozal’s indignation had already convinced him. Rosa had simply been unlucky in her choice of holiday island.

‘One thing puzzles me,’ his client said, standing up unsteadily. ‘That postcard we got from Rosa in Turkey after she had supposedly left Trigono.’

Mavros nodded. He’d been thinking about that himself. ‘Barbara Hoeg must have forged her writing—they were capital letters—or got someone else to do it. She was a designer, remember. She’d have known plenty of draughts- men. I guess she sent it to some contact in Turkey to post.’

Ozal was fumbling in his pockets again. ‘If the postcard Rosa sent from Trigono hadn’t turned up after all that time, I’d never have sent you down there.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I say, I almost wish I hadn’t.’

Mavros nodded. He felt the same way. But at least he’d managed to save Liz Clifton from sharing Rosa’s fate.

‘Here,’ the Turkish-American said. ‘A bonus for your trouble. You look like you took a major beating.’

Mavros glanced at the wad of notes and handed it back. Standing up and reaching into his own pocket, he took out the plastic bag containing Rosa’s postcards and photographs. ‘You’ll want these back. Use the money for flowers. Your mother will need comforting.’

Deniz Ozal looked at him in amazement then pocketed the cash. ‘Hell of a lot of flowers, dick,’ he said, and turned away. ‘See you around.’

Mavros watched him go, shaking his head. He wished he could believe that the antiquities dealer would give some relief to his mother, but he didn’t think the Turkish-American was capable of it.

The Fat Man lumbered up. ‘Did I see correctly just now?’ he demanded. ‘Did you turn down money?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Come on, Yiorgo, I don’t want his blood money.’

The café owner grunted. ‘So suddenly now you’re the class warrior, refusing the rich man’s loot? Didn’t your father teach you anything? First you take their capital, then you stage the revolution.’

Mavros sat down wearily. ‘Go away, Fat Man,’ he said.

‘I was going to ask you if you’d like the last piece of
galaktoboureko
. I kept it specially.’ Yiorgos turned towards the bar. ‘But if you don’t want—’

‘I want it,’ Mavros interrupted. ‘Bring it over here and I’ll tell you about the case.’

A wide grin spread across the Fat Man’s face. ‘That’s better. Just a minute while I close up.’ Despite the way he disparaged Mavros’s career, he was always keen to hear the details of his investigations.

Mavros waited till his friend had barricaded them from the outside world and returned with the pastry. The Fat Man put it on the table and then sank on to the chair opposite. For a moment Mavros thought it was going to collapse under the weight, but it held.

‘Aach!’ he said as he tasted the
galaktoboureko.
‘Better than ever.’ Then he started the story. He was breaking every rule of client confidentiality, but he didn’t care. The Fat Man was his confessor, as far as the atheist son of a leading communist could have such a figure. Besides, if he couldn’t trust Yiorgos Pandazopoulos, the world and everything in it was lost.

‘May the bastards rot in hell,’ the Fat Man cursed when Mavros finished speaking an hour later. ‘All of them. The murderers, the rich man who tried to sell his country’s heritage to that shit Roufos, the British officer who seduced the island girl—’

Mavros raised a hand. ‘No, Yiorgo. George Lawrence wasn’t a bad man. I spoke to the writer Liz Clifton in the hospital yesterday. She almost died from the effects of prolonged dehydration, but she’s improving now.’ He ran his thumb over his worry beads. ‘By the way, in case you were wondering, she was the one who put the disk and the photos in the chimney. The one of George Lawrence was hers, but the other two were Rosa’s. Liz found them in a gap beside the fireplace. They must have been holiday snaps Rosa had taken that weren’t found by Lefteris when he took the rest of her possessions, or by Rena when she was cleaning. Anyway, she told me that Lawrence’s poems show that he was tortured by guilt about his conduct. And the diary proves how much in love he was with Maro.’

‘Love!’ scoffed the Fat Man. ‘There are more important things in the world than love.’

Mavros lowered his gaze. Maybe Yiorgos was right. His own love life had never been very successful. He hadn’t even been able to track down Niki since his return. She hadn’t left any nasty surprises for him at his flat, but she wasn’t answering any of her phones. Maybe she had found someone more reliable.

‘Ah,’ said the Fat Man. ‘You agree.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Mavros said, shaking his head and dropping the beads on to the table. ‘I had a call from the widow Rena. Old Maro died in her sleep last night. A photo of George Lawrence was in her arms and…and she was smiling.’ He felt his eyes sting as his brother Andonis’s face suddenly rose up. As ever, there was a smile on his lips too.

‘Christ and the Holy Mother,’ Yiorgos said anxiously. ‘Don’t tell me you’re turning into a romantic. Surely private investigators can’t afford to have too many emotions. You have to nail the bad guys like Theocharis and Roufos.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll get Roufos the next time, Yiorgo.’ Mavros looked at him quizzically. ‘But you’re wrong. Private investigators can’t afford to do
without
their emotions.’

The Fat Man heaved himself to his feet. ‘See, what do I always tell you, Alex? You’re a freak with an alien’s eye, a half-breed. You keep letting your passionate Scottish side overrule your natural Greek coldness.’ His lips formed into a crooked smile.

Mavros looked at him seriously. ‘That’s right,’ he said in a level voice. ‘I’m a permanent stranger. I don’t fit in anywhere.’ Then he laughed. ‘Now get your hundred per cent Greek carcass over to the stove and make me a coffee. At the double, comrade.’

The Fat Man obliged.