Nemesis of the Dead (2 page)

The wedding, whilst eye-catching, would never have graced the pages of a celebrity magazine. Jack in uniform, six-foot-three and balding, with a big nose, jug-ears and an off-centre grin, his features having undergone considerable repositioning during his rugby-playing days. Corrie in ivory silk, five-feet-nothing, perilously short-sighted and on the wrong side of a size sixteen. Not Romeo and Juliet in any orthodox sense, but a loving, symbiotic partnership nevertheless.

DI Dawes had never been a confirmed bachelor. Indeed, he had been a very reluctant one. Work had always sabotaged budding relationships, and girlfriends would get fed up with him not turning up for dates or, worse, rushing off just at the climax of something crucial. Eventually they left him for blokes in less demanding jobs. In Corrie, he had found a kindred, feisty spirit where work and partnership lived mostly in peaceful co-existence – as long as he could curb her compulsion to interfere.

This second time around, Corrie had looked forward to a perfect spring honeymoon in Paris – with no snails. But the honeymoon gremlin struck again and they had scarcely popped a champagne cork when Jack was called back to duty to head a murder enquiry, all leave cancelled. It had developed into a long and gruelling investigation with Jack more than usually affected by the circumstances. During the worst of it, he and Corrie had promised each other a relaxed, romantic honeymoon as soon as the case was over. The destination was negotiable, they would pick somewhere at the last minute. But wherever they chose, it must be as far away from crime and cooking as possible.

‘It says here …’ said Jack, wandering into the bedroom waving a computer print-out, ‘… that Katastrophos is a tiny Greek island, like a pebble dropped in the sparkling Ionian Sea.’

Later, Corrie reckoned that her masterly intuition should have kicked in then. What sort of a name is Katastrophos if not full of portent and omen?

‘Sounds perfect.’ She held her swimsuit against her, a miracle of cantilever engineering with a clever skirted bit designed to conceal fat thighs. She grimaced at herself in the mirror. ‘Tell me more about Katastrophos. It’s hard to picture it without glossy brochures.’

‘There isn’t much to tell.’ Jack lay back on the bed and swung his feet up. ‘It’s the smallest of the Ionian Islands, which run down the western coast of mainland Greece. It’s also one of the few islands not shown on any tourist map. Only eight kilometres long and three kilometres wide. Must be a kind of sausage-shape, I guess. It’s called Katastrophos because of a catastrophic earthquake a couple of centuries ago that destroyed most of its Venetian buildings and a lot of the inhabitants.’

‘I see. It’s a seismic sausage. Doesn’t it say anything nice?’

‘’Course. Listen to this blurb. “
Katastrophos has an intimate charm that has escaped the blight of tourism. Apart from a very small annual influx of tourists
…” – that’ll be you and me –“
… there is little to disturb the soporific atmosphere. If you crave peace and quiet or need to retreat from the stress of modern-day living, Katastrophos is the ideal ‘get away from it all’ holiday destination
”.’

‘Wonderful. Just what we need.’

‘And what about this bit? “
According to Greek legend, Katastrophos was created by Poseidon who struck the Ionian Sea with his trident to create a secret island paradise to share with his wife Amphitrite
.” What better place for a honeymoon than a secret island paradise?’

Corrie climbed on the bed, hauled up her glasses dangling on a chain around her neck and began reading over his shoulder.

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ She pointed. ‘It says Antony and Cleopatra are reputed to have had a dinner party at Katastrophos on the eve of the Battle of Actium.’

‘So what?’ Jack grinned. ‘Are you cross you weren’t around to tender for the catering?’

Corrie gave him a withering look. ‘You know what happened at Actium?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘The combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian. It completely destroyed their plans for the future. It was a turning point in the history of Egypt and Rome.’

Jack stared at her. ‘You know, I worry about you sometimes. What sort of sad person remembers stuff like that? You need a holiday, Corrie. Two weeks in a luxury hotel overlooking a stunning horseshoe bay, flanked by silver-green olive groves and majestic rows of cypress. Nothing to do but swim and sunbathe. And plenty of wine and Greek food that you haven’t had to cook yourself.’

‘OK. You’ve convinced me. How do we get there?’

Jack produced his meticulously planned itinerary.

‘Flight from Gatwick to Kalamata Airport on the Peloponnese peninsula. Coach transfer from the airport to the ferry port south of Methóni. Then ferry across the Ionian Sea to Katastrophos. It’s the only route. The island’s too small for its own airport. There’s just the one main resort, Agia Sofia – St Sophia. I reckon if we get the eight o’clock flight from Gatwick, we should reach Hotel Stasinopoulos in time to freshen up, have a glass of wine and enjoy a romantic dinner outdoors, under the vine-covered pergola, watching the sun set over Katastrophos Bay.’

Corrie stopped folding clothes and imagined herself there already.

‘Heavenly. You know, you’re right, Jack. We both need a holiday. Especially you. That last murder case really got under your skin. I could tell.’

Jack shrugged. The young man had undoubtedly been guilty, had admitted his guilt, but the custodial sentence was unexpectedly severe, mainly because drugs were involved. The look of utter devastation on his parents’ faces as he had been taken down was something Jack found hard to forget.

‘And I’m still sad about Lavinia,’ said Corrie. ‘It isn’t just that I miss her as a friend, it’s the effect it’s having on the business. Lots of those wealthy people at the funeral had become good customers, thanks to Lavinia’s recommendation. Then she goes and dies of a mysterious stomach complaint at a luncheon party catered by Coriander’s Cuisine.’

‘That wasn’t your fault.’

‘I know, but it doesn’t look good, does it? One minute she’s chomping down my confit of duck Béarnaise. Next thing, she’s writhing in agony with stomach cramps and drops dead before the ambulance arrives.’

‘Nobody blamed you.’ Jack put an arm around her. ‘It was made perfectly clear at the inquest. The post mortem didn’t find any evidence of food poisoning – or any other kind of poisoning, come to that. She was an elderly lady and she died of heart failure brought on by some sort of stomach virus. If there’d been any doubt, the coroner would have given an open verdict instead of natural causes.’

‘What makes me feel really awful is the money she left me in her will, bless her. She wanted me to use it to buy a posh new van with Coriander’s Cuisine painted on the side. She must have noticed my old one was knackered from the clouds of blue smoke outside her window when I turned up with the party food. She was such a kind, generous person.’

Jack looked thoughtful. ‘According to the newspapers, she left the bulk of a very considerable fortune to charity.’

‘Mm. There were just one or two small legacies to people like me who worked for her and some others who raised funds for her charities.’

‘What about relatives?’

Corrie shook her head. ‘She’d been a widow for years and I don’t think she had any children. At least, if she did, she never talked about them. Sad, really. I think she might have mentioned a sister once, or was it a brother? I can’t remember. Anyway, they couldn’t have been very close because I didn’t see any relatives at the funeral.’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘Neither did I.’

C
orrie was not a morning person. She barely spoke before nine and never until she had absorbed a great deal of caffeine. It was now 6.30 on Saturday morning and she and Jack were in a queue for the long-stay car park at Gatwick. It was moving reasonably quickly but ground to a halt when the old buffer at the head of the queue reached the ticket machine. He sat for some time gazing out of his car window at it. Then his wife passed him his glasses and he peered even closer.

‘It’s a ticket machine,’ snapped Corrie. ‘Press the button and take the ticket, you dithering old pillock.’

Jack grinned. ‘He can’t hear you, grumpy-knickers.’

‘I know, but it makes me feel better. If he took off that silly panama hat he could stick his head out of the window and see what he’s doing.’

Corrie hated flying but she had no intention of admitting it to Jack. She had psyched herself up for this trip and, fighting back the rising nausea, she marched bravely into the terminal building only to find that the flight from Gatwick to Kalamata Airport had been delayed by two and a half hours. By the time they boarded, Corrie had been in the Knicker Shop eight times, bought five pots of high-factor anti-wrinkle cream, eaten at least ten chocolate bars and read all the diet magazines. Now, at last, they were on the plane and settled in their seats. Jack leaned back and stretched his long legs into the aisle.

‘Belt up, sweetheart.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Fasten your seatbelt. The cabin crew will be round to check in a minute. Once we’re in the air I’ll order some drinks. How do you fancy champagne?’

Corrie swallowed hard. Only the whitening of her knuckles on the armrests betrayed the terror of the inner woman as she contemplated flying at 35,000 feet with nothing more substantial than clouds between her and the ground. Or the sea. She had never understood why they didn’t give you a parachute.

‘Champagne at half past ten in the morning? Isn’t that a bit flash?’

‘This is our honeymoon. My first and your last. Sod the expense.’

After the second glass Corrie felt much better.

The August temperatures were in the mid-nineties as the tourist-packed Boeing nudged the melting tarmac of Kalamata Airport. Drowsy taxi drivers woke reluctantly from their afternoon naps and braced themselves for the onslaught of eager holidaymakers. In the
tavernas
, cooks slammed quick-frozen
moussaká
into microwaves and whipped the clingfilm off the Greek salad. Local wine that had wintered in Esso cans was deftly decanted into summer carafes and at the flick of a switch,
bouzoúki
twanged from loud speakers suspended in the olive trees. Greece was ready to work its ageless charm on another batch of foreign
touristas
.

Corrie paused at the top of the aircraft steps as the heat from the simmering concrete blasted her in the face. After the air-conditioned cabin, it felt stifling and airless, like walking into a furnace. She wished now that she had dressed for Greece instead of Gatwick but she was glad to get off the plane despite the heat. She peeled off a couple of sweaters and resolved not to start dreading the return flight until it was absolutely imminent.

Half an hour later, Jack had wrestled their luggage off the carousel and, sweaty and uncomfortable, they were outside the building, shielding their eyes from the phosphorescent sunlight. Immediately in front of them was a fleet of shiny new air-conditioned coaches, parked in a neat herringbone along the kerb. Beside each coach, a smart, uniformed courier hovered with a clipboard and a fixed smile.

‘Which one’s ours?’ Corrie asked.

‘I think it must be that one.’ Jack pointed to a battered old bus painted in drab camouflage colours that looked as though it had once seen service as an army transport vehicle. It was parked right at the end, almost out of sight behind the swanky coaches, like a poor relative at a posh wedding. There was no courier but the driver, a swarthy man in a greasy cap with a formidable collection of St Christophers around his neck, was holding up a square of cardboard with ‘
Ferry Methóni
’ scribbled on it in black felt tip.

‘It can’t be.’ As they came closer, Corrie could see bald tyres and quite a lot of rust. ‘It doesn’t look roadworthy to me.’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ said Jack, subconsciously totting up the number of regulations the vehicle violated. ‘It isn’t far to the ferry port and the roads are good by Greek standards. It should only take a couple of hours and then we’ll be on the ferry drifting lazily across the Ionian Sea to Katastrophos and two weeks of idleness and luxury.’ He wondered if it were possible to carry the luggage and cross his fingers at the same time.

‘You want ferry – Methóni?’ The driver’s cigarette, stuck firmly to his bottom lip, bobbed up and down as he spoke.

‘That’s right.’ Jack rummaged in his travel bag for the documents but the driver had already picked up the suitcases and was hurling them into the almost empty luggage compartment in the side of the bus. The rusty floor juddered ominously beneath the weight and Corrie had a worrying vision of her clothes strewn all along the road to the ferry port. The thought of a pair of her big knickers adorning one of the roadside shrines was not a reverent one.

‘Everybody here. We go now.’ The driver motioned them aboard and climbed into his creaky driver’s seat where rosary beads and pictures of saints dangled from the rear-view mirror. Sadly, the saints had not seen fit to bless the bus with air-conditioning so the inside was unbearably hot.

There were only four other people on board which surprised Jack. His information had led him to expect more. He glanced around, attempting to match his fellow-travellers to the hastily compiled briefing in his pocket. A couple in their fifties, obviously English, had already claimed the front seat behind the driver. The woman, pleasant-looking in a floral frock and comfortable wide-fitting sandals, nodded and smiled as Jack and Corrie passed. Her husband, clearly miffed about the standard of transport, leaned forward and began berating the driver, who ignored him.

The other couple, locked in each other’s arms on the back seat, looked about sixteen. They were so engrossed, it was doubtful they even knew they were on a bus, let alone aware of the other passengers. Jack and Corrie, upholding the deep-rooted British tradition of not fraternizing with strangers on public transport, settled themselves somewhere near the middle. The driver started the engine and after much grinding of gears and stamping on the floppy clutch, he steered the bus out of the terminal car park and on to the main highway to Methóni.

Soon they were bumping along the coast road that skirted the dazzling Gulf of Messinia. The sea flashed below, blue as a kingfisher’s wing. Jack stood up and wrenched open the window to let in a welcome breeze. It smelled of the open sea. He leaned close to Corrie and spoke into her ear so she could hear him above the noise of the engine and the rattle of loose bits of bus.

‘That bloke must be baking in those clothes. Makes me sweat just to look at him.’ He indicated the man in the front seat who was ignoring both his wife and the stunning scenery and reading an English newspaper.

Corrie looked and smiled. The man was a caricature of the old-fashioned, British, middle-aged man abroad – short and portly with dull brown hair and bland, rimless spectacles. Despite the soaring temperatures, he was wearing a collar and striped tie under a brown worsted suit. Corrie knew even before she glanced down that the socks in his leather brogues would be of the hairy woollen variety. He looked vaguely familiar but it was only when she spotted the panama hat placed carefully on top of his wife’s neatly folded cardigan that she remembered, with a pang of guilt, where she had seen him. He was the ‘dithering old pillock’ who had held up the queue at the car-park ticket machine. He had a very red face and kept taking out a khaki handkerchief to mop his brow. His wife, cool and bare-legged under her sleeveless dress, sat quietly by his side looking out of the window.

‘D’you reckon they’re going to Katastrophos?’ Corrie asked Jack.

‘Probably. She looks pleasant enough but I bet he’s a real pain in the arse.’ Jack’s recollection of his briefing more or less confirmed it.

‘You never know,’ said Corrie. ‘They might be stopping off at one of those other islands. The ferry passes between them before it puts out to sea.’ She glanced back at the young couple who were sharing a cheese torpedo, nibbling at it lovingly from either end. She nudged Jack. ‘I hope they’re coming with us. Aren’t they sweet?’

Jack put a finger down his throat in a mock vomiting gesture and Corrie smacked him on the arm.

The bus veered west, away from the coast, as the road curled inland, cutting across the south-west promontory of the Peloponnese peninsula. Now they drove through tiny villages with narrow streets snaking between flower-decked, whitewashed houses. Washing was strung out to dry from every balcony, bright as bunting. In the gardens, walnut-skinned crones in black headscarves dozed in the shade of magenta bougainvillea as the afternoon sun gonged down out of a brazen sky.

Jack wondered what the traffic cops back home would make of the driver’s road safety. Occasionally he drove on the right, but more often than not he steered straight down the middle, hooting and shouting Greek obscenities at the drivers coming the other way. Since they were also driving down the middle, they responded in a similar manner with much gesturing and cursing but there was no real malice, as far as Jack could tell. To them, it was perfectly normal. The rationale seemed to be that you drove on whichever part of the road was shady and had the fewest potholes.

The atmosphere freshened as the bus began to drop back down to the coast on the west side of the peninsula. The road looped around the headland and Corrie had a fine view of a pretty bay and the closer group of islets. According to the short and vague directions that Jack had managed to pull off the Internet, the ferry port that served Katastrophos was roughly five miles south of Methóni.

The bus driver pulled up next to the harbour of a tiny fishing town alongside a dilapidated wooden jetty and everyone clambered out, hot and sticky. Still with pendulous cigarette, the driver heaved everyone’s suitcases out of the luggage compartment and dumped them on the quay-side. Jack and the young man each put coins in his outstretched hand but ‘short-and-portly’ blatantly ignored him, and started fussing with his bags and his panama hat. His wife looked embarrassed.

The driver trousered the cash, smiling happily. ‘Which island you go? Sapientza – see lighthouse? Schiza? Venetiko? Very nice – very secluded.’ He winked at the young couple, still joined at the hip.

‘Katastrophos.’ The reply was unanimous.

It might have been Corrie’s imagination but she thought the driver’s smile faded fractionally. He fingered the bunch of St Christophers at his throat. ‘Good luck!’ he called ambiguously and climbed back into his bus. ‘Ferry leave in one hour. Maybe.’ Soon he was jolting back down the bumpy road to Kalamata.

The six travellers stood in an awkward circle around their bags like girls at a nightclub waiting for the music to start.

‘Well,’ said Jack, affably. ‘I suppose we should introduce ourselves since we’re all headed for the same island.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said ‘short-and-portly’ pompously. ‘My wife and I dislike holiday friendships. They impinge on one’s privacy.’

Now they were up close and she had her glasses on, Corrie could see that his dull brown hair was actually a hairpiece and a not very convincing one. How pretentious. She smothered a giggle. The Greek sun would play havoc with the glue.

‘I wasn’t suggesting friendship.’ Jack gave Corrie a look that said:
I told
you this bloke was a pain in the arse
. ‘I just thought that as Katastrophos is so small, with just the one hotel, we’re likely to keep bumping into each other.’

‘Absolutely,’ said the young man. He withdrew an arm reluctantly from around the waist of his beloved and held out his hand. ‘I’m Tim Watkins, and this …’ he looked at her adoringly, as if he could not believe his luck, ‘… this is my wife, Ellie.’

The two were wearing identical shorts, T-shirts and trainers and were physically intertwined to such an extent that it was hard to see where one started and the other finished. They had short matching haircuts and scrubbed freckled faces. For modern youngsters, they were quaintly wholesome and distinctly uncool, thought Corrie. Like presenters from a very old Blue Peter programme.

Ellie smiled at Tim, blushed and lowered her eyes to look at her wedding ring.

‘We’re on honeymoon.’

Looking at the agonizingly young newly-weds, Corrie suddenly felt embarrassed. She and Jack were on honeymoon, too, but they were in their forties and it seemed slightly indecent somehow. She relaxed, knowing instinctively that Jack would keep it secret. He had already asked her not to tell anyone he was a policeman. It was a profession, he said, second only to undertaking for making people feel uncomfortable on holiday. She and Jack were incredibly close when it came to understanding each other’s feelings. Almost telepathic. He would sense immediately that their honeymoon status was not something she would want to advertise.

‘That’s a coincidence,’ he blurted. ‘My wife and I are on honey … ouch!’ Sometimes, thought Corrie, telepathy needs a helping hand – or foot.

‘I’m Coriander Dawes,’ she said amiably, ‘and this is my husband, Jack. Congratulations to you both. You look very happy.’

Tim and Ellie smiled shyly and re-entwined.

‘Dobson,’ muttered ‘short-and-portly’ gruffly. ‘Ambrose Dobson.’ Then he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘This is the wife, Marjorie.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ Marjorie smiled as if she might like to chat further but her husband took her arm.

‘Come along, Marjorie. We’ll sit over there and wait for the ferry.’ He steered her towards a rickety wooden seat further down the jetty.

At seven o’clock they were still waiting. Corrie had always been fascinated by Greek mythology but now, watching the sun begin to set over Homer’s wine-dark sea, she began to feel a compelling affinity with the gods of ancient Greece that was totally unexpected and a bit spooky. It was almost as if she could feel their presence, watching and waiting to amuse themselves with mere mortals, like cats toying with mice. More substantially, her stomach began to rumble. So much, she thought, for their romantic dinner under a vine-covered pergola at Hotel Stasinopoulos.