Nemesis of the Dead (8 page)

‘I know – I saw you. And it was
last
night. It’s tomorrow, now, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘What? Oh never mind that. The thing is – I asked her if she was looking forward to being a master’s wife at the Swiss university and she said …’

‘… she wouldn’t go,’ finished Jack.

‘That’s right. So I said, “
but what if he goes without you
?” and she said—’

‘… he couldn’t go without her.’

Corrie sat up in bed and snapped the light on.

‘Jack, I really hate it when you do that! It’s so irritating. Why can’t he go without her? I don’t understand. Is there something I don’t know? Your copper’s nose has been twitching like Bugs Bunny ever since we got here. What are you up to?’

Jack sat up then, yawning and scratching his head.

‘Nothing you need worry about, my love. There’s just something I need to keep a bit of an eye on, that’s all.’

‘Why? We’re on holiday and you’re hundreds of miles from the squad. What do you need to keep an eye on? Tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell, yet. Nothing’s making any sense at the moment.’

‘It’s got something to do with Maria’s food poisoning, hasn’t it?’

‘It might have. But what I can’t work out,’ murmured Jack, mainly to himself, ‘is where the lights in the monastery fit in, why Sky’s tattoos washed off in the rain and how come Sid’s rash is on the wrong hand.’

‘Jack, none of that has anything to do with you – you’re on leave and even if there is something dodgy going on, Katastrophos is not your patch – it’s not your responsibility.’

He looked sheepish. ‘Well … a bit of it is.’

‘How can it be? There isn’t any local police for you to liaise with and you’re not on the end of a phone so they can’t possibly have called you with something urgent. Unless …’ Corrie got out of bed and eyeballed him now. ‘Unless, you knew about it before we came.’ His open face gave him away and Corrie pounced, angrily. ‘You did, didn’t you? You’re on a job. Jack how could you? You promised this honeymoon would be—’

He put his arms around her. ‘Now don’t go into one, love. It’s just a simple little matter I said I’d investigate if I had time. It need not interrupt our honeymoon in the slightest. You’ll hardly know I’m working.’

‘All right then,’ she challenged, ‘what do you need to investigate? Is it something about Diana? Tell me and I’ll find out for you.’

‘Oh no,’ said Jack decisively. ‘This time you stay right out of it, sweetheart. No interfering – I mean it.’

He put the light out and lay down, the discussion clearly at an end.

Corrie went back to bed and lay there fuming. How could she interfere when she didn’t know what was going on? Huh! A fine honeymoon this was turning into.

D
espite her initial resistance, Corrie continued to prepare the meals in Ariadne’s absence. In truth, it was not too much of an imposition since most of the dishes were cold except for the main course at dinner and she found she enjoyed experimenting with the fresh local ingredients. So far, nobody else had keeled over clutching their stomachs, so she assumed her conscientious attention to hygiene and the rigorous scrubbing she had given all the surfaces had paid off.

She had also ditched several pots that were beyond cleaning. Some looked as though they had been used for long and fiendish alchemic experiments. The massive black cauldrons with the bottoms burnt out were obviously too big and heavy for tiny Ariadne to lift, so Corrie guessed she had probably just kept boiling one lot of stew on top of another and doling it out with a ladle. They smelled foul, like decaying meat and very old cabbage water.

If she was honest, she was quite glad to be cooking. It gave her something to do when Jack was preoccupied with whatever it was he was keeping his eye on. If nothing else, she thought charitably, it had at least taken his mind off that last harrowing murder investigation. Sometimes, when he was satisfied that his eye could take a rest, they went into town, or lazed on the beach or simply sat on their balcony, sipping wine, but even when he was dozing Corrie had the uncanny feeling he still had one eye open.

Argus the All-Seeing, came into her head unbidden, as had so many of the Greek gods she thought she had forgotten until the mystic influence of Katastrophos conjured them up again. Argus got his soubriquet from his unorthodox number of eyes. Some said he had four – two in the usual place and two in the back of his head. Other accounts claimed he had up to a hundred, all over his body. This excess of ocular equipment made Argus an excellent private eye, able to watch around the clock since he could always keep a lid or two peeled while the rest caught a little shuteye. Yes, Jack was definitely Argus, mused Corrie fancifully. She recalled that Zeus’s wife had hired Argus to keep watch on her husband, who was king of the gods, ruler of Mount Olympus and a serial miscreant. So if Jack is Argus, who is the all-powerful Zeus? Her whimsical imagination would come up with only one possible answer – Professor Gordon. But why would Jack be keeping an eye on Professor Gordon?

The days of the Greek gods were passed in endless pleasure – much like a group of tourists on holiday. They enjoyed an everlasting dinner party seated round golden tables on which there were served limitless supplies of untaxed nectar and ambrosia. They never wore out physically, having an elixir of life flowing in their veins instead of blood. They lived from impulse to impulse – keeping their lives exciting and unpredictable. Their passions were not always laudable – anger, jealousy, lust, greed – but despite this they remained supremely free of any self-reproach or guilt. In fact, Olympus was simply a glorified
taverna
with celestial call-girls. Oh yes, there was a good deal of pretty hot skirmishing for maidens up on Zeus’s Olympus.

The sun blistered down on Sidney’s pallid kneecaps, endowing each with a fiery glow. Sweating profusely, he stripped down to just speedos and trainers and climbed gingerly into the old rowing boat. He leaned forward, dipping his oars, missed the water entirely and toppled on to his back. Gulls rose, shrieking. Sid struggled back to a sitting position and sculled again, this time making a few pitiful ripples on the surface of the silver sea. This rowing lark wasn’t as easy as it looked. At this rate, by the time he found the cove the sun would have set and Diana would be on her way back. And he was far from sure that he ought to be going after her in the first place.

He had met her just as she was pulling away from the hotel landing stage in one of the two small rowing boats that Hotel Stasinopoulos put at the disposal of its guests. She looked ball-achingly sexy in a skimpy red bikini and a huge floppy sunhat. He knew he was staring and forced himself to blink before the sun shrivelled his eyeballs.

‘I’m going to sunbathe down the other end of the island where it’s more private,’ she had whispered. ‘I need to tan my white bits. Why don’t you get the other boat and follow me? We’ll have lunch together in one of the caves.’ She patted the picnic basket that Ariadne had been prevailed upon to provide. ‘You bring the wine, honey. See ya!’ And she’d pulled expertly on her oars and skimmed away like an Olympian athlete going for gold. Sid watched the fluid movement of her arms and legs, bronzed and sinuous, as she disappeared around the curve of the bay and out of sight. Then, consumed with a lust that totally annihilated his better judgement, he went to fetch a bottle of Yanni’s wine and the other boat.

Now, he bent to his oars again and at last got some sort of rhythm going. All he had to do was follow the coast until he spotted Diana’s boat beached on one of the little coves at the north-west end of the island. After that, he wasn’t sure what he’d see but he had a pretty good idea and it made his mouth dry.

Marjorie was in the lobby of the hotel, furtively sticking a stamp on a postcard to Dan. She had bought it secretly in St Sophia and had hoped to post it, equally secretly. Ambrose was sitting outside on the terrace, ostentatiously drafting letters of complaint to the travel company and his solicitor, both of which were currently running into six pages. It would keep him occupied for some time, she thought. He seemed to be enjoying himself for the first time since they arrived. She even heard him laugh a couple of times, anticipating the distress and alarm he was sure his threatening rhetoric would evoke. He had an unpleasant, mirthless laugh, more of a neigh really. She could hear him now. Hner, Hner, Hner.

Ellie appeared, fresh and scrubbed in one of Tim’s check shirts and over-large, cropped cargo pants from which her thin white legs protruded like a couple of pieces of string. She was clutching a postcard, too.

Marjorie was surprised to see her alone. It was rare to see one half of the heavenly twins without the other.

‘Hello, dear. Where’s Tim?’

Ellie smiled, her dim blue eyes peeping out from under her ginger fringe. Like a startled fawn, she never seemed to look anybody straight in the eye.

‘He’s still in the shower. If I hurry, I’ll be back before he realizes I’m missing. I just popped down to post this card.’ She dropped it in a cardboard box on the desk, which had POST written on it in red felt tip.

‘Is it to your mother, dear? Only it’s just occurred to me that the post must have to go to the mainland and I expect that means Charon will collect it when he comes to pick us all up again in his ferry on Saturday week. We’ll probably be home long before our postcards arrive.’

Ellie giggled. ‘I never thought of that. Oh well, never mind. This card is for Poppy, my puppy. I can read it to her when I get home.’ She skipped off, straight back upstairs to her besotted husband.

If anything, thought Marjorie, smiling fondly after her, that girl is even drippier than when she arrived. But the mutual bond between her and Tim was there for all to see, shining and solid, like golden chains binding them together. Marjorie wondered if Ellie knew how lucky she was. She posted her card through the slot in the box and made her way outside, this time through the front door, preferring the angry gaze of the Gorgons to the even angrier gaze of Ambrose. She shielded her eyes and stared out to sea, bathing in the dreamy, soothing blueness of Katastrophos Bay. Has it all been my fault for allowing it? she wondered. She sensed that that was what Corrie thought. But when you’ve suffered years of bullying and humiliation, in whatever relationship and however deserved or undeserved, it isn’t just your self-esteem that goes, it’s your faith in the future, your ability to believe that anything you might do could make the slightest difference. Life seems pointless when you can’t see an end to the misery. What do you do when there aren’t any bits of happiness left to cling to?

‘I’ll tell you what you do,’ she said aloud, into the sea breeze. ‘You pull yourself together and you put a stop to it.’

Sidney spotted Diana’s boat halfway up a pebble beach in a very pretty cove with sparkling white sand. The sun gonged down on the burning shingle but there was shade from some olive trees that grew right down to the shoreline. He couldn’t see Diana but as he dragged his boat up the beach next to hers, he noticed the cave – one of the sea grottos Yanni had told him about, only found on the exposed north-west coast. It had a big hole in the roof and a clump of cypress at the entrance. He fetched the wine from the boat, and crunched up the beach into the cave, calling her name so she would know he was coming.

Diana was lying on a blanket in the shaft of sunlight that streamed in through the hole in the roof. She was smiling. He knew that because he was focused firmly on her teeth to stop himself ogling her bare breasts like some sad yob. It was with considerable relief that he noticed she was still wearing the bottom half of her bikini – a tiny red triangle held in place by a couple of strings. She rose languidly to give him a welcoming kiss. At the same time, he bent awkwardly to receive it and found his face winging in at bust level. One glorious breast actually brushed his cheek. A faintly unsettling experience, but nothing to the one into which he was plunged a terrible moment later. Handing over the bottle of wine, he somehow contrived to trap her nipple between his fingers. He recoiled with a small gasp and apologized.

She laughed, a delicious gurgle. ‘Sidney, relax.’ She produced a corkscrew from the picnic basket and, with the bottle gripped firmly between her thighs, she uncorked the wine, the impact jiggling her superstructure just enough to make Sid’s hot head sing.

It wasn’t as if Sidney was unaccustomed to toplessness. In Benidorm, acres of boobs in various shades of brown stretched supine to the sea, trembling the air above them with shimmering oil. There, though, they were impersonal. They could be anything – cakes with cherries on, skullcaps, stranded jellyfish – anything. But these boobs were Diana’s: firm, delectable and quite clearly available to him.

He coped reasonably well at first, managing not to look when she began stroking sun-oil into one of them. It was when she handed him the bottle and asked him to do the other one that the rudder of his self-control was shot away. He jumped up with a light laugh, concealing the straining bulge in his speedos with a carefree hand, then ran down the shingle and hurled himself trembling into the sea.

When he came back, cooler and with a grip on himself, she had poured the wine and set out the food. He picked up one of Ariadne’s anonymous kebabs and nibbled at it, his appetite eclipsed by another more urgent need.

‘The sea’s very clean here, isn’t it? I could see me trainers through it. Course, if you believe Corrie Dawes, there’s monsters out there.’ He scanned the horizon, shading his eyes against the Ionian glint. ‘Sirens, Tritons, you name it. To hear her talk, you’d think half of flipping Loch Ness comes down here in the summer.’

Diana laughed. ‘They say Lord Byron thought Katastrophos so beautiful he wanted to buy it, but Homer describes it as “overrun with barren rocks and cliffs and only good for goats” – that’s assuming Katastrophos was the island they were referring to. Nobody can be sure.’ She looked around her, sipping her wine. ‘Don’t you just love it in here, Sidney? This is the Cave of Nymphs where Odysseus is supposed to have hidden some treasure on his return from the Trojan War. I lie here sometimes, imagining how incredibly randy Penelope must have felt, seeing her husband again after ten long years.’

Sidney looked at her in surprise. ‘Fancy you knowing all that academic stuff.’

She sighed. ‘You disappoint me, darling. Don’t tell me you see me as a blonde bimbo, too?’

‘No, course not,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s just that I was temporarily blinded by your amazing body. Be fair, Di. It’s the first thing to hit a bloke and it stuns him before he has time to investigate the brain department.’ He drank some wine, feeling his self-control gradually ebbing away. ‘I suppose I don’t really know anything about you, do I?’

‘There isn’t much to know. My mother’s Swedish, my dad’s American and I was born in Cairo. I can speak five languages, drive a truck, hit a mean home run and I’m after your body. What more do you need to know?’

Sid grinned. ‘I guess a clever man like the prof would have spotted your brain a mile off. How did you meet him?’

Diana refilled their glasses. ‘At college. I was a student and he was my faculty head. He was interested in me then. Now I think he’d only notice me if I grew leaves.’ She laughed but not happily.

‘Oh Di, if you were mine, I’d …’ Sid broke off because she wasn’t and he couldn’t.

‘Sidney, you are so cute.’ Without warning, Diana threw her arms around him and pressed soft lips on his.

Sid struggled – but only slightly – and concealed his feelings, as he always did, by joking.

‘Madam, please. Put me down. You’re crushing my
souvláki
!’ He picked blobs of greasy kebab off his chest, thinking that if he were one of those Sunday newspaper journalists, this would be the time to make his excuses and leave.

Diana smiled seductively, stood up and slowly untied the strings on the bottom half of her bikini. Then she parted her legs slightly and let it fall to the ground.

Had he found himself dropped into a whole cave full of naked girls, the situation might have taken a sexual turn, certainly, but Sid felt he would have coped. A bit of raunchy banter, winking and so forth, but he pictured himself remaining cool, poised, nonchalant, even occasionally stifling a sophisticated yawn and examining his fingernails. Not sitting, as he was now, mesmerized and helpless, his eyes rolling around in his head like marbles in a soup plate.

‘Strewth!’ he heard himself croak. He’d been able to have a half-decent conversation with her until she stripped off and dried his throat. ‘Look, Di, I want you like hell, but I don’t think we should be doing this. I mean, you’re married and there’s the prof to consider and …’