The Lost Labyrinth (36 page)

It was several moments before anyone reacted. They were all too stunned. But then flames started licking around the base of the container, while the broken Citroen groaned and hissed and screeched from its wounds. The police cars fanned out and drove warily across, none wanting to be first, hardened to horrors though they were. They reached the perimeter fence, stopped, got out. The air beyond the container was filled with banknotes, as though a bomb had gone off in the steel briefcase. They fluttered down all around them, and several of the policemen were already gathering them up in handfuls, stuffing them in their pockets, careless of their evidentiary value.

Knox and Angelos pushed past them. The topless Citroen had burst through the wire fence beyond, before coming to a halt in a tangle of brambles. The steel briefcase was open in the rear, obscene amounts of cash lying loose in and around it. Both its air-bags had deployed, though they hadn’t done much good for Nergadze, still belted into the passenger seat, his left arm dangling down by his side, his gold watch still on his wrist, yet
with his right arm and everything from his chest on up sheared clean off, along with the car’s windscreen and roof, by the giant guillotine of the container trailer.

Gaille pleaded exhaustion and a headache shortly after they’d eaten, then asked about sleeping arrangements. Iain told her to take Petitier’s bed, insisting he’d be fine in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. She didn’t argue: chivalry had its benefits. She prepared for bed then covered the mattress with the cleanest blankets she could find, and climbed between them. Moonlight slipped into the room down the side of the curtains, throwing a pale blue tint upon the wall. She stared up the ceiling and wondered what to do in the morning, torn between checking out the rest of the basement and getting out of here altogether.

She tensed at soft footsteps outside her room. There was a gentle double rap upon the door and then it opened and Iain was standing there, his
sleeping bag over his shoulder. ‘Are you awake?’ he asked. She said nothing. ‘Gaille,’ he said more loudly, taking a step towards her. ‘Are you awake?’

‘Why? What is it?’

He came fully into the room, closed the door behind him. ‘Shift up,’ he said.

She rose up on her elbow. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The floor’s like rock in there. I can’t sleep, honest I can’t. My legs are killing me from all that walking. I need something soft. Please, Gaille.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Don’t be such a prude,’ he said. ‘You can trust me, you know. I mean we shared a sleeping bag last night, for Christ’s sake.’

She shifted across, not sure how else to handle it. At least the mattress was wide enough for two. He flapped the sleeping bag out beside her, clambered into it, gave her a smile that she could just about see in the darkness, then turned onto his side and put an arm around her waist. ‘Stop it,’ she said.

‘Only teasing,’ he sighed, taking his arm away. ‘So you and Danny Boy, huh? Was this his idea of a romantic holiday, or something? A conference on Eleusis?’

‘We were hoping to visit the islands too,’ she said defensively. ‘I’ve always wanted to see Ithaca.’

‘You should visit Cephalonia while you’re there. It’s just a short ferry ride away, and it’s absolutely stunning. Everything Athens isn’t.’

‘Don’t you like Athens?’

‘I
hate
Athens. The worst thing about my job, I spend half my life shuttling back and forth.’ He let out a slightly forced laugh. ‘One thing’s for sure, if I was trying to make an impression on a beautiful woman, I wouldn’t take her there.’ He grabbed a pillow, turned it to its cool side. ‘Just as well I no longer have one, I suppose.’

Gaille didn’t quite know how to respond to that. ‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Good night.’

The airport had its own medical centre, but after the police doctor had listened to Knox’s account of being water-boarded and beaten, he insisted on taking him to a nearby hospital instead, where they had the equipment to check for internal damage. He was sitting up on the examination table, waiting for the results, when the swing doors pushed open and Theofanis came in, carrying a manila folder and a plastic bag. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘And now you’ve found me.’

He ignored Knox’s tone, held out the bag. ‘We found some things of yours in Nergadze’s van,’ he said. ‘Angelos wanted you to have them back.’

‘Angelos did?’ asked Knox in surprise.

‘He’s a good man,’ said Theofanis. ‘He just has a tough job sometimes.’

Knox looked inside the bag, saw his wallet, mobile and the red-leatherette ring box. ‘Thanks,’ he said. It was a crude peace-offering, but welcome nonetheless. He checked the ring before he put it away in his pocket. It made him think of Gaille, of the threats Mikhail had made. He took out his mobile, and remembered how Mikhail had seen Gaille’s photos and text message, all the information he needed to track her down.

‘What is it?’ asked Theofanis, noticing his unease.

‘Nergadze,’ said Knox. ‘He vowed he’d make Gaille pay if I betrayed him.’

‘The man’s dead.’

‘Yes, but who knows what he did before he died?’

‘While running for his life?’

‘You didn’t meet him. I did. He wasn’t the kind to make empty threats, or to forget about them just because he had other matters to attend to. And he’s connected, too. His family are incredibly powerful. If he’d given orders—’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Theofanis. ‘The Nergadzes are finished. The whole family’s been taken down by the Georgian government.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I spoke to one of their agents myself. I had to tell him about the poor bastard that Mikhail shot and burned.’

‘Even so,’ said Knox. ‘I need to speak to Gaille. I need to know she’s okay.’

‘Why don’t you just call her?’

He shook his head. He’d tried from a payphone in the hospital lobby. ‘She’s not answering.’

‘I could send a car.’

‘She’s two hours’ walk from the nearest village.’

‘Oh.’ Theofanis pulled a face. ‘Maybe not, then. Not on Easter weekend. Not with the case tied up.’

‘Tied up?’ snorted Knox.

‘Sure. This guy Nergadze and his gang wanted the fleece. They murdered Petitier and Antonius for it. Then they abducted you and this woman Nadya.’

Knox shook his head. ‘Nergadze killed Antonius, I’ll give you that. But not Petitier. He only abducted me because he believed I’d killed Petitier myself for the fleece. How could he possibly believe that if he’d done it himself?’

Theofanis frowned and held out his manila folder. ‘Then have a look at this,’ he said.

Knox took it from him. It contained grainy stills from a CCTV camera, of a man in photographer’s trousers and a T-shirt, the peak of a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, masking
his face almost entirely from view. ‘What are these?’ he asked.

‘Your lawyer friend Charissa suggested we check the CCTV footage for the hotel lobby the afternoon Petitier was killed. This man arrived there an hour before Petitier. He ordered coffee from the bar then took a table and watched the door. You can see he doesn’t even touch his drink. But after Petitier checks in, he waits fifteen more seconds then goes after him to the lifts. I’ll bet anything he was waiting for Petitier.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Knox. ‘Do you know where he went?’

Theofanis shook his head. ‘We’re still looking through the other tapes.’

‘And you think he could be the killer?’

‘Let’s just say we’d like to talk to him. Do you recognise him?’

Knox looked again at the photo. It wasn’t Nergadze or any of the other Georgians, that was for sure. And it didn’t look like anyone from the conference. Yet he looked familiar all the same, though Knox couldn’t work out why. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, passing the folder back. ‘But I assume this means Augustin is no longer a suspect.’

‘We still have some questions for him,’ replied Theofanis. ‘For example, what was in that canvas bag he took into the airport?’

The answer came so suddenly to Knox, he couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Roses,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘When Claire came out of the terminal, she was carrying a huge bunch of white roses. That’s what was in the bag.’

‘He could have bought them at the airport.’

‘Sure, he could,’ said Knox. ‘After all, he’d only been fretting for a week about making things nice for her, so of course he’d have left it to chance that they’d have flowers on sale.’ He’d had enough of Theofanis suddenly, enough of this interminable suspicion, of this determination to find guilt. He jumped down from the examination table, winced as he landed. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘I need to get to Crete.’

‘You’re not going anywhere until you’ve got clearance.’

‘Then you’d better give it to me, hadn’t you? Or would you rather fetch one of your colleagues to put me in the bed next to Augustin?’

Theofanis met his stare for a second or two, then sighed and backed down. ‘You won’t get anywhere tonight,’ he said. ‘You’ve already missed the last flight. But I’ll drive you back to Athens if you like, and you can fly out in the morning.’

Gaille woke abruptly to a dawn chorus outside her bedroom window, Iain’s rhythmic exhalations upon her neck and shoulder, his arm around her waist; but it wasn’t any of those which had disturbed her, and which now made her stiffen. It was her belated realisation of something he’d said just before they’d drifted to sleep the night before. ‘I
hate
Athens. The worst thing about my job, I spend half my life shuttling back and forth.’ Innocuous enough, except for that hollow laugh he’d followed it with. She hadn’t picked it up at the time, but it was as though he’d realised too late that he’d said something stupid, and was trying to cover.

She turned slowly onto her back, tipped her head to the side to watch him lying there, his
mouth fractionally open, the golden glitter of his stubble, the swell and fall of his chest. The one person who’d known what Petitier looked like, what he’d been up to these past twenty years. A man who, beneath his self-deprecating jokes, yearned for a great discovery. As quietly as she could, she lifted his arm off her. He stirred but didn’t wake. She got to her feet, tiptoed out of the room, closed the door softly behind her.

His backpack was resting against the wall by the front door. Her breath came a little faster as she put her hand on it. The fabric felt faintly charged, as though lightly dusted with electricity. It ran against her nature, looking through other people’s belongings, but she couldn’t stop herself. She unzipped a side-pocket, checked the contents: a lighter and a box of waterproof matches, a torch, a multipurpose penknife, tattered maps of Crete and a handheld GPS. She went through the other pockets, equally stuffed with hiking supplies. The main body of his backpack was filled with clothes. She came across his photographer’s trousers, scrunched the cotton for anything in the multitude of pockets. She found his wallet, checked it briskly, put it back. She felt something else, pulled it out. An Athens metro ticket. She turned it to the light, squinted down, went a little numb. It had been validated on the same afternoon that Petitier had—

‘What the hell are you doing?’

Her heart skipped a beat. She looked around to see Iain in the bedroom doorway, wearing only his boxer shorts. ‘You’re up,’ she said, stuffing the ticket back in the pocket, the trousers back in the pack.

‘Yes. I’m up. Now what the hell are you doing?’

She didn’t know what to say. She just squatted there, waiting for inspiration. ‘I was only…’ she began.

He began walking towards her, fists down by his side. ‘Yes. You were only what?’

‘I was looking for your first-aid kit.’

‘Oh.’ He stopped short. ‘What for?’

‘My ankle,’ she said. ‘I wanted some new bandage. This one’s getting dirty and stretched. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Of course not,’ he said, though warily, as though he didn’t quite buy her story. He crouched and unzipped the lower compartment, pulled out the kit.

‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ she said. ‘You had such a brutal day yesterday. I wanted to be gone and back by the time you woke.’

‘Gone and back?’

‘I have to find out what’s happening with Daniel and Augustin,’ she nodded. ‘I
have
to. It’s driving me crazy. I thought I could climb high enough to get a signal on my mobile.’

‘On your own? With your ankle still crocked? Are you
mad
?’

‘I wouldn’t take any risks.’

‘What do you mean? Just climbing that path is a risk.’

‘It’s my choice.’

‘Really? And who would have to rescue you if something went wrong?’

She hung her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I guess I wasn’t thinking. But I just…I
need
to know.’

He sighed and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t even be thinking of climbing on that ankle, not for another day at least. Tell you what, why don’t I head back up myself. I’ll call Knox, tell him what we’ve been up to, pick up his news. And we can make plans for getting you safely out of here. How does that sound?’

‘Terrific,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘And thank you so much.’

‘My pleasure,’ he told her; but there was still something in his eye. His gaze drifted to the Mauser leaning against the wall. ‘And maybe I’ll take that with me,’ he said. ‘See if I can’t bag us something fresh for tonight’s pot.’

All the early flights to Heraklion were full, but there was room on the first departure for Chania, a port in north-western Crete. Knox landed a few
minutes before six-thirty; with no luggage to collect, he breezed through arrivals. There was only one car-hire booth open, manned by an unshaven middle-aged man in sunglasses who kept pushing the sleeves of his rumpled linen suit up past his elbows. He tried to scare Knox into taking additional insurance against the deductible. ‘Nasty roads,’ he told him. ‘Terrible drivers.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Knox assured him, as he took the keys to a Hyundai. ‘I live in Egypt.’