A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  ‘It is not the volume you complain of,’ she said with a French accent. ‘It is that it makes you sad.’

  Normally at that point, confronting a not-yet-charmed woman commenting on my emotional state, I’d have tried still harder to charm her, perhaps charm her into bed. But I had at least fifteen years on her and she was very far from finding me tolerable, let alone charming.

  ‘What if I don’t wish to be sad?’ I said, adding a so-there smile.

  ‘Ah,’ Chante said, nodded wisely. And closed the door.

  And left the music playing at volume.

  The second time I’d run into her had been in my kitchen. I had come stumbling down out of my bedroom at the ungodly hour of ten in the morning wearing nothing but underpants and found her going through my cupboards.

  ‘What the hell?’ I had demanded with regrettable lack of originality.

  ‘Birthday candles. Do you have any birthday candles?’

  ‘What in the holy fuck would I be doing with birthday candles?’

  ‘Minette wishes to have a birthday party for Amadou.’

  My raised eyebrow elicited the explanation:

  ‘Amadou is her dog.’

  ‘Of course it is. How did you get in?’

  ‘Both doors have the same key,’ she explained. Not even a hint of defensiveness mind you, no consciousness of guilt. If I pulled that sort of … Well, I had pulled that sort of thing many times actually, but not recently.

  The third meeting happened the morning after the murder. Once again I stumbled down the stairs from my bedroom, aiming like a wobbly missile toward the coffee maker, when I found her in my kitchen.

  ‘Jesus Christ. What, more candles for your movie star’s dog?’

  ‘Only an egg. You have no eggs?’

  ‘I have eggs in the fridge.’

  ‘But why would you put eggs in a refrigerator?’

  ‘It’s how we do things in America,’ I said and pushed the start button on the coffee machine. ‘What do you need an egg for?’

  ‘I am making a piperade.’

  This was my chance to once again display my erudition and basically stun her into admiration. ‘What are you doing for espelette peppers?’

  Oh yeah: that stopped her. She withdrew from the refrigerator holding a carton of six eggs and stared at me with dark, distrustful eyes. ‘Aleppo peppers. You can find them in the farmer’s markets.’

  ‘Piperade with eggs.’ I nodded reluctant approval. It was acceptable. In fact it sounded good, and I suspected would sound even better once I had my coffee. ‘Is that for your movie star?’

  ‘Minette has no scenes today. She is spending the day with a friend.’

  ‘Friend, huh? That sounds like juicy Hollywood gossip.’

  ‘Do you like such gossip?’ Her English was very good, but still goh-SEEP sounded cutely French.

  ‘The very act of telling you how little I care about Hollywood gossip exhausts my entire year’s allowance of interest in Hollywood gossip.’

  She took that on-board. She had a habit of looking away when she was thinking, like she wasn’t looking at you, but at your shadow. It wasn’t a stare into emptiness, it was as if she saw someone standing immediately behind you, peeking over your shoulder. She focused on that visual echo.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, then nodded, turned and walked off with my eggs.

  ‘Agenda item,’ I muttered. ‘Chain lock. Or a Rottweiler.’

  I poured coffee and carried it and my laptop out onto the patio. The sun was up, the Mediterranean was sparkling and dotted with happy sailboats, the coffee was hot and bitter, and aside from the fact that I’d been thirty feet from a grisly murder the day before, all was right with the world.

  I have a morning routine that involves signing onto a VPN, opening an incognito window in my browser and googling my aliases, filtering for the previous twenty-four hours.

  Nothing. There never was. Still …

  I closed the incognito window and went to Goodreads to obsessively read the most recent reviews of my books. This was accompanied by grunts of approval or angry snorts of dismissal.

  ‘Go get eating utensils, hurry while it is hot!’

  I spun around, guilty, and closed my laptop like I’d been looking at porn. Chante had three plates balanced on her left arm like a diner waitress, two dishes of spicy red piperade with an egg coddled in the middle, still cooking from the heat. The third plate was toast.

  I really saw no alternative to getting silverware. Also napkins, marmalade, butter and salt.

  I sat facing the prime view, Chante took the chair to my right and turned it halfway, either to see the water or avoid seeing me.

  I pierced the eggs and let the yolk spread creamy goodness. I took a bite. Cocked an eyebrow at her. Took another bite.

  ‘This is actually good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You cook.’

  ‘Évidemment,’ she said, which is French for ‘duh.’

  ‘No, I mean you cook. The dish is perfectly seasoned, the presentation is professional, no dribbles or greasy thumbprints on the plate. The egg isn’t off by twenty seconds either way, so you may have actually taken into account how much it would continue cooking as you carried the plates up here.’

  She briefly made eye contact before explaining to my shadow, ‘I have had some training.’

  ‘You cook for what’s her name?’

  ‘I do many things for Minette. I am her assistant.’ She betrayed a hint of pride.

  I nodded. ‘Cool.’ We ate and then sat back and relaxed until it was clear that in this relationship I was the busboy. I cleared dishes and brought us both fresh coffees.

  ‘Will you write now?’ Chante asked.

  I frowned. ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘I know that you are a writer. Madame Stella told me. She said you would be quiet.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve read any …’

  Her look was either pitying or contemptuous, somewhere on that scale. ‘I do not read popular books.’

  Great. She was a snob. A French snob, no less, and no one can touch a French snob, it goes deep with them, especially as regards food or literature. Or language. Or clothing. Art. Architecture. Philosophy. Almost anything, really.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not that popular,’ I said with acid sarcasm.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. Like she had checked my BookScan numbers.

  Yeah, well, my latest barely missed the New York Times list, I’m outselling most of Elmore Leonard’s backlist, and I was shortlisted for an Edgar, so fuck you. I did not say.

  She stood up. ‘You can leave the plates on the little table beside my door,’ she said. ‘I must go to the market. Is there anything I can bring you?’

  ‘Eggs,’ I said. ‘Someone took mine.’

  ‘And the money?’

  Had I been the violent as opposed to the nonviolent sort of ex-criminal, that’s when I would have strangled her. I fished out a twenty-euro note. ‘Bring me the change.’

  When she was gone, I spent some time looking up coverage of the murder on the beach on several English language Cyprus news sites, as well as Google-translated Greek language sites.

  The consensus was clear: murder was bad. Murdering a foreign tourist was arguably worse (though the Greek language papers were less convinced of that).

  Police were releasing no details, but had issued an official statement which read in part, ‘Haven’t got a fucking clue.’ Or words to that effect.

  I read the comments sections because they’re often a better insight into attitudes and you get information that doesn’t quite rise to the publishable level. In this case, the killer was black, therefore obviously an immigrant or refugee and, well, shrug, that’s what happened when you let in people who were not Greek. So sorry for all those refugees, but we can’t very well have them stabbing tourists. Some comments pointed to the murder of an expat nine months earlier and suggested that a wave of expat-related murder was sweeping the island nation, w
hich might well lead to a panicked exodus of expats and there goes the real-estate market.

  All fine by me, I was in Cyprus but not permanently, I had a one-year lease with eleven months to go. So, if a woman being stabbed to death in Paphos was an excuse to shrug and blame nonwhite outsiders – deplorable, certainly – but all the better for me: the less hue and cry the less likelihood of me being dragged into it.

  I opened the travel article I was supposed to be writing for GQ magazine, reminded myself of where I’d left off and what I needed to write next, and got down to it, convinced that I was as safe as ever I could be.

  THREE

  ‘Mr Mitre, I am so glad you could come!’

  ‘David, please, and I wouldn’t miss it. I was honored to be invited.’

  Not true. Left to my own preferences I would not have attended the party, but if I meant to blend in rather than attract attention, I had to curb my misanthropy. If you don’t meet people when you move somewhere new, you don’t know who to toady, who to ignore, who to keep an eye on and most importantly, who to bribe.

  So, when Dame Stella Weedon, along with her dotard husband, Sir Archibald Weedon, had invited me to a soiree at her much larger villa and made it clear in that politely insistent way that the British do so well that I was expected to show up and play the part of the largely obscure visiting author in her cast of partiers, I agreed.

  Dame Stella was just the sort of woman I’d have aimed my charm at back in the old days. She had family money of some sort and was not at all bad-looking, a very well-preserved fifty or maybe fifty-two, so not ridiculously older than I. She had expensively blonde hair, a forehead Botoxed to marble, and the tanned and well-displayed legs of a younger woman. She wore an overly-vivid floral pattern dress, which was the second thing I noticed after the white gold-and-diamond necklace that must have made someone at De Beers happy. I ballparked it at about seventy-five grand USD. A fence might get forty, meaning I’d clear a good twenty, twenty-five. And the necklace almost certainly had brothers and sisters in an easily-popped safe.

  Not that I was … But you have to look. Looking is not illegal.

  Introductions followed, variations on ‘Instantly-forgettable person? I’d like you to meet David Mitre, the mystery novelist you’ve never heard of but now have to pretend to be a fan of.’

  They were happy, they were charmed, they were excited, they were indifferent. I matched one of those emotions, but I’m a capable enough actor to appear interested, so we all got along just fine, chatting about wine and food and whether British Airways would add a flight from Paphos to Gatwick, which led to complaints about air travel, and led me to ponder whether, when (not if) I went to hell, it would just be an eternal cocktail party.

  Chante was there, talking to two women. Minette was not. Nor was handsome George Selkirk. But I was pretty sure at least a few of the movie folk had deigned to come and eat Stella’s free prawns.

  The action took place mostly on the expansive terrace beside the inevitable infinity pool, three dozen people in resort wear holding glasses of wine and snagging hors d’oeuvres from passing waiters. It was a warm night, late May, the dividing line between ‘rather warm’ and ‘too bloody hot.’ The moon had either set or not yet risen, and cirrus dimmed the stars. The Mediterranean was black ink, decorated by twinkling ships’ lights, distant floating votive candles, full of fat tourists, or fish, or smuggled goods. If I’d been able to swap the wine for Scotch, light a cigar, and get rid of all the people, it would have been a lovely night.

  ‘You are Mr Mitre, I believe?’

  I was at the edge of the terrace looking with some longing at my own villa down the hill. I smiled (some might prefer the term ‘grimaced’) and extended my hand to a short, stocky man with more scalp than hair, densely-black eyebrows that seemed on the verge of becoming an eyebrow, singular, and a missing canine tooth. He was wearing a low-end gray suit with elbows that would need patching soon, a white shirt that had been stained by coffee at least once and never successfully cleaned, tired black leather shoes from the Stolid Footwear catalog, and an air of bone-deep skepticism. That wasn’t enough to prove that he was some sort of cop, but it was enough to raise the little hairs on the back of my neck.

  ‘I am Cyril Kiriakou, and may I say that I am a big fan?’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, hoping my heart’s skipped beats wouldn’t be apparent. ‘I didn’t even know my books were translated into Greek.’

  ‘Hah! Very true. I read them in English. In your efficient, unflowery prose, which I find so refreshing.’

  In the New York Review of Books, ‘efficient prose’ would be an insult. Not one I could deny, frankly, but definitely an insult.

  ‘Thank you again,’ I said. Because he was not the New York Review of Books.

  ‘I don’t wish to take up your time,’ Kiriakou said, ‘but in my official capacity I do like to meet new members of the expat community.’

  ‘Official capacity?’ I asked, as I measured the distance to the door using the great-panicky-leaps unit of measurement.

  ‘Yes, I am the assistant chief of police for the Paphos region.’ He waved a hand vaguely, presumably to sketch the extent of his territory, which at very least included the terrace. ‘I had hoped to meet you at some point, in both my official capacity, to welcome you to Cyprus, and unofficially as a true fan.’

  ‘Is there a great deal of crime on Cyprus?’ At least I think that’s what I said. In my head, it sounded like wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wawa?

  Kiriakou shrugged with hands as well as shoulders. He tilted his head side to side. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Normally, no. Pickpockets, tourist scams, the usual domestics. In an average year, we get around twenty murders – the lowest rate in the EU.’ He deployed the statistic as a point of pride but he didn’t look personally happy about it. ‘And of course very few of those would be of any interest to your readers.’

  ‘What, dull murders were they?’

  He laughed and nodded. ‘Drunken bar fights, revenge killings, domestics, usually cut and dried. That is the phrase? It is an Americanism, I believe.’

  ‘Yes. It is. Though we usually say just cut and dry.’

  He glanced around to see who was within hearing, turned a suddenly serious face to me and lowered his voice. ‘At the moment, however, we have a murder that does not fit any of those categories.’

  ‘You must mean that poor woman on the beach, yesterday.’

  Blink. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘It seems I just missed seeing it. At least I must have, I didn’t notice anything. I did hear a scream as I was crossing the terrace of the hotel, but I assumed it was just children playing. From what I saw on the news it must have happened right after I left the beach bar. I feel terrible that I … Well, this sounds bad, I guess, but I’ve never been anywhere near an actual murder, and to be a mystery writer and miss an actual murder …’ I did a self-deprecating laugh that had it lasted another second would have become hysterical. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a missed opportunity, to say the least.’

  Kiriakou was watching me and smiling, nodding as if he understood, though perhaps did not quite share, my bloodthirsty curiosity. He held that smile after I stopped talking. Held the smile and the look, waiting.

  I told myself it didn’t mean anything. Cops are like that, they’re trained in the uncomfortably-extended conversational pause. Also trained to smell fear, and I smelled. I didn’t like being near a senior cop. A beat cop, no problem, but an assistant whatever of whatever? But I was not an amateur, so I would not try desperately to fill the silence.

  ‘Of course for me it is just work,’ Kiriakou said at last, shooing work away with a flutter of fingers. ‘Work for which, to be quite perfectly honest, I have only limited experience and even more limited resources.’

  ‘But you must have suspects?’

  ‘Suspects plural?’

  ‘Well, there you have me, deputy chief, you see, if I were writing the story of the murder I would need suspects, pl
ural. Otherwise it would be a rather short book.’

  The policeman looked pained. He had quite an expressive face, unlike American cops who work hard to appear emotionless. What I did not know was how much of it was show. He winced, his fifth or sixth expression in about two minutes.

  ‘I wonder what an American policeman would do?’ He made a lopsided smile. ‘NYPD? Or your own New Midland police?’

  I shrugged. ‘Arrest the first black guy they saw and beat a confession out of him?’ I paused and added, ‘That’s a joke, of course. Mostly. I suppose it would be all the usual – fingerprints and …’

  ‘No fingerprints were found.’

  I stopped myself from saying, What not on the wine bottle? The guy wasn’t wearing gloves. Instead I said, ‘Forensics on the murder weapon?’

  ‘We do not have the murder weapon.’

  ‘Eyewitnesses?’

  ‘Oh, plenty of those,’ Kiriakou said, with a roll of his eyes and a wry smirk. ‘The suspect was male and black. We questioned twenty-three witnesses and those two points are all they agree on. I have one eyewitness who claims he saw the suspect running with a Kalashnikov and yelling, “Allahu akbar.”’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Eyewitnesses. Almost as reliable as your daily horoscope.’

  He blew out his cheeks. ‘No physical evidence, not even footprints since it was on grass. Useless witnesses. And no motive. Yet it was clearly premeditated. The man had carried a bottle of wine on a tray, like a waiter. And he had the presence of mind to wipe both clean.’

  I concealed my surprise. The killer had stopped and calmly wiped his prints? ‘Who was the woman? The victim? Was there a romantic thing, maybe?’

  His eyes dismissed the possibility of romantic entanglement, as well he should – I’d thrown it out there to make myself look a bit thick because I had a bad feeling about where this was going.

  ‘Ah, now there’s where it becomes interesting,’ Kiriakou said, moving too close. ‘She had a British passport, but our routine query to the British Home Office came back with a suggestion that the passport might be a forgery. That is perhaps not too surprising. But then, just this afternoon, the Home Office said it was indeed a valid passport.’