Mrs Pargeter's Package

by Simon Brett

  “She’s a witness of what we done,” said Larry Lambeth twitchily. “She’ll tell Stephano and Georgio and that lot.”

  “She can’t tell them. She can’t speak.”

  “She has ways of communication.”

  As if taking his words as a cue, Theodosia suddenly let out a different sound. A strange, unearthly sound, that seemed to come from deep within her, torn painfully from her frame.

  It took a moment before Mrs. Pargeter realized that the woman was speaking.

  The voice was rasping and rusty, but with an incongruously innocent lightness. Through its strangeness, it was the voice of a child, the child Theodosia had been the last time she had spoken, before experiencing the shock which had struck her dumb for thirty years.

  “What is she saying?” whispered Mrs. Pargeter urgently.

  “She says that she heard me read her father’s curse. It frightens her very much.”

  More strange sounds were dragged from Theodosia’s body.

  Larry Lambeth interpreted. “She did not know that Christo had deliberately sabotaged the boat. She saw the fire. It was terrible.”

  Theodosia mouthed hopelessly, once again robbed of speech by this recollection. Mrs. Pargeter felt sure it must have been the sight of her brother apparently going up in flames that had traumatized her all those years before.

  But the woman regained control and once again the uneven, unaccustomed speech began.

  “She hates her brother now she knows the truth. She adds her curse to her father’s curse. She hopes he will die.”

  Too late, thought Mrs. Pargeter. That merciful tumor on the brain of Christo Karaskakis—or Chris Dover—had saved him from the literal fulfillment of old Spiro’s curse. But who knew what flames of conscience had scorched him at the moment of his death?

  Or, though she didn’t really believe in hell, she could recognize that the idea of Chris Dover roasting there for all eternity would neatly tie up all the ends of his story.

  A new urgency came into Theodosia’s voice.

  “She says they’ve got the girl.”

  “Girl?” Mrs. Pargeter echoed. “Conchita?”

  Yes, of course. At the time she had seen nothing odd in Conchita’s nonappearance at Spiro’s Greek Party, putting it down to some tiff between the girl and Yianni. But now the absence took on more sinister coloring. And that had been late evening. Conchita could have been missing for up to seven hours.

  Larry Lambeth’s translation confirmed her worst fears. “The dark-haired English girl, she says.”

  “Who’s got her?”

  He urgently relayed the question to Theodosia.

  “The tourist woman—that must be Ginnie—the tourist woman arranged to meet her on the headland, but Stephano and Georgio were waiting there, and they took the girl.”

  “Oh, no!” Mrs. Pargeter could not forget the reference to Stephano in old Spiro’s deposition. Stephano had aided and abetted Christo in the earlier crime. Christo was dead, but Sergeant Karaskakis was still very much alive and dangerous. “Where have they taken her?”

  The translation came back quickly. “There’s an old fisherman’s hut on the headland. They’ve got her in there.”

  Mrs. Pargeter grabbed Larry Lambeth’s hand. “Come on! We must get there—quickly! There have already been too many deaths in Agios Nikitas!”

  chapter

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  The headland referred to was one of the scrub-covered arms that encircled the bay of Agios Nikitas. It was a steep-sided spine of rock, the end of which thousands of years before had dropped away into the sea to form cliffs. There were a couple of paths across the ridge which led to tiny bays otherwise only accessible by boat, but they were little used. The thorny undergrowth was inimical to travelers in the tourist uniform of shorts and T-shirts, and the gradient unappealing under the daytime sun.

  Heat raised no problems for Mrs. Pargeter and Larry Lambeth, but the steep climb and the sharp thorns did. They were both scratched and breathless by the time they approached the dilapidated hut. The darkness was diluted by a thin sliver of moon and their eyes had quickly accommodated to the conditions.

  “I’ll go first,” Larry murmured.

  There had been a path to the door in the days when fishermen used the building regularly, but this now showed only as an indentation in the surrounding scrub, which muscled up close, threatening to engulf the hut. No light showed through the broken glass of the windows, and the only sound was the incessant restlessness of the sea.

  Larry moved cautiously forward to the door, found the handle and pushed it inward with a sudden movement. He paused, but, the silence remaining unbroken, moved forward and was lost in the darkness of the interior.

  There were two sounds. A soft thud. A harder thud.

  Then silence reasserted itself.

  Whatever dangers lay inside the hut, Mrs. Pargeter had come too far to shirk them. It was no time for pussyfooting. Her dead friend’s daughter was in danger.

  Coolly, Mrs. Pargeter pushed through the encroaching brushwood and in through the open door. As she did so, she announced in a clear voice, “Good morning. I am Mrs. Pargeter and I am coming in to see what’s happening.”

  The darkness she entered was total. Her feet stepped firmly across the floor of dusty rock.

  There was a loud clatter behind her as the door was slammed shut. She turned, to be met by the dazzling beam of a flashlight.

  “You are a very nosy woman, Mrs. Pargeter,” said a voice she recognized.

  “With some justification, I think . . .” she said, “Sergeant Karaskakis.”

  chapter

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  Now she could see the rectangular outline of his uniform against the wall of the hut. His face was in shadow, but she could supply for herself the evil leer beneath that triangular mustache.

  She turned to look round the hut. Conchita was tied to an old wooden chair, which had in turn been tied to one of the hut’s upright supports. Though the girl strained to communicate, only a liquid gurgle could penetrate the gag made by her own scarf, whose overpaid designer had never envisaged this usage for his creation.

  Larry Lambeth lay face downward, unmoving, on the floor. Mrs. Pargeter rushed to his side.

  “It’s all right. He’s only unconscious,” said Sergeant Karaskakis languidly, as he hooked the flashlight to an overhead beam.

  Mrs. Pargeter turned Larry over. His eyes did not react, but his breathing was regular. She looked up to the Sergeant, who loomed above her, gently tapping against his palm the nightstick which had presumably knocked Larry out.

  “As I say, you are very nosy. Foolishly nosy. Too nosy for your own good, Mrs. Pargeter.”

  She stood up and faced him, remembering more of the late Mr. Pargeter’s words of wisdom. “The only situation which might justify panic is one in which panic is likely to help. Such a situation never arises. Though pretended panic may sometimes cause a useful diversion, real panic can never be anything other than a waste of energy.”

  “I do know, Sergeant,” she said, “why all this is happening. It is the crime of Christo Karaskakis that is behind it all.”

  He stiffened at the mention of the name.

  “And Joyce Dover was killed because it was feared that she might reveal the secrets of that crime. Which was nonsense. She had no desire to expose anyone. All she wanted to do was to find out about her husband’s past. All his life Chris had managed to keep the truth about his background secret, but his conscience would not allow him to let that secret die with him. In what was perhaps a final gesture of honesty, he offered his wife the chance of knowing the truth. He saw to it that she received a letter after his death. And that letter led her here to Agios Nikitas.”

  Sergeant Karaskakis casually pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “Might this be what you are speaking of?”

  Even in that inadequate lighting, Mrs. Pargeter could see the distinctively
purple writing on one side of the paper.

  “Yes. You found that in Joyce’s luggage at the Villa Eleni.”

  “So?” he asked insolently, shoving the letter back into his pocket.

  So . . . that means you were definitely there the night she was murdered. But Mrs. Pargeter didn’t bother to say it out loud.

  “Everything you say,” the Sergeant continued, “may be very interesting . . . but I don’t know what relevance it has to me.”

  “It is relevant to you because you were involved in Christo’s original crime. You and Georgio helped him steal the boat, you helped him sabotage the outboard motor. You were an accessory to the attempted murder that went so horribly wrong.”

  “You’ve done a lot of research, Mrs. Pargeter,” he said, without intonation of either praise or blame.

  “Yes. Where’s Georgio?” she asked suddenly.

  The Sergeant smiled. “He has gone home. Gone home with his English whore to get drunk. Georgio was always feeble. He can’t stand it when things get too hot. Thirty years ago, he was with us when we stole the boat, but when we start to fix the outboard, he gets afraid and goes away. He is not a man, Georgio.”

  Mrs. Pargeter was pleased that Sergeant Karaskakis made no attempt to deny his crime. But her pleasure was not unmingled with other emotions. His ready admission of guilt suggested that he was not too worried by the possibility of her surviving to bear witness against him. She knew she must try and keep him talking as long as possible, while her mind desperately raced to see a way out of her predicament.

  “Sergeant, there was no need to kill Joyce Dover. She represented no threat to you. And there is certainly no need to harm Conchita. You should release her.”

  “No.”

  “Then at least take the gag off. No one can hear her shouting out here.”

  “No. She talks too much,” he said, affronted. “She talks rudely. She does not behave as a woman should behave.”

  It was not the moment to enter into a feminist debate, so Mrs. Pargeter asked coolly, “What are you planning to do with her then? With all of us, come to that?”

  “What happened with the boat,” he began slowly, “has been a secret for thirty years. We want it to remain a secret forever.”

  “Fine,” said Mrs. Pargeter. “That suits us fine. We don’t want to dig up the past. When we get back to England, we’ll never think about it again, promise. I can assure you, your little crime may seem pretty important out here in Agios Nikitas, but the rest of the world has no interest in it at all.”

  “We cannot take risks, I’m afraid. Christo would not wish such risks to be taken.”

  “You shouldn’t still care what Christo thinks. Show a bit of independence. Make a decision of your own for once in your life.”

  This approach did not unfortunately have the desired effect; Sergeant Karaskakis seemed instead to read it as a challenge to his masculinity. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that! Or I will gag you like the other one!”

  “Gagging me won’t help you at all.”

  “It will, Mrs. Pargeter. So will tying you up.”

  As he spoke, he reached behind him for a hank of rope. She struggled, but a woman in her late sixties was no match for a man more than ten years younger. Her arms were quickly trussed behind her and she was strapped against another upright beam beside Conchita.

  “All right, well done,” she taunted him. “So you’ve managed to knock out one man from behind and tie up two women. What do you want—a medal for bravery?”

  “Mrs. Pargeter,” he sneered, “your death is one that I will not regret at all.”

  “Oh, I see.” She was still managing—with difficulty—to keep the insolence in her voice. “And how are you proposing that I should be killed?”

  He gave her a smile, though there was no vestige of humor in it. “This is a very dry island in the summer. There are many fires. A wooden building like this would not survive long in a fire.”

  Conchita gurgled and struggled as she heard this spelling out of their fate, but Mrs. Pargeter still contrived to appear unruffled, even though she had just noticed two petrol cans against the wall behind the Sergeant. “Fires do get investigated, you know. If you’re proposing to use that petrol, traces would be left. Arson is a fairly simple crime to recognize.”

  “So? There is a lot of arson on the island already. Men from other villages may be jealous of Agios Nikitas’s success with the tourist trade. They will be blamed. As I say, there are many such crimes. It would not be thought strange.”

  “But some of the details might be thought strange. The fact that two of the charred bodies had been tied up is the kind of thing that might be noticed.”

  His mirthless smile grew broader. “That would depend, of course, on who was conducting the investigation. I represent the authorities here in Agios Nikitas. I would be the first person on the scene of the tragedy.”

  “So you reckon you could tamper with the evidence again—just as you did after Joyce’s death?”

  He shrugged.

  His next words were more chilling than anything he had said up until that point. “Mind you, it would probably be simpler if the bodies were found not tied up . . .”

  “You mean dead before the fire got to them?”

  “Why not?” Once again he tapped his nightstick against his palm. He looked across at the two women, assessing his next move.

  Mrs. Pargeter was not a religious woman. She was not convinced that God existed, and so her philosophy had always been to enjoy this life to the full, in case the concept of a future life was merely misleading propaganda circulated to control the worst excesses of public behavior. But she prayed at that moment.

  And, as Sergeant Karaskakis advanced towards her with his nightstick upraised, her prayer was answered.

  The door burst open.

  “No, Stephano! Don’t do it!”

  Framed in the doorway against the first paleness of dawn, stood Spiro.

  chapter

  THIRTY-NINE

  * * *

  Sergeant Karaskakis lowered his weapon, subdued by the presence of a personality stronger than his own. He was silent, awaiting orders.

  Mrs. Pargeter couldn’t understand in detail what orders Spiro gave him, but they seemed to be of the “Go outside, I’ll deal with you later” variety. The Sergeant, with the bad grace of a cat who’s just had its mouse emancipated, slunk out of the hut into the gray dawn.

  “Goodness,” said Mrs. Pargeter, “am I glad to see you, Spiro! That was quite a close shave. Do you know, he was proposing to set fire to the headland around us?”

  Spiro shook his head, his dark eyes more melancholy than ever. “Stephano is a dangerous and careless fool.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Pargeter was suddenly garrulous with relief. “I do know all about what happened,” she said.

  Spiro looked puzzled.

  “In 1959,” she explained. “I know about the attempt to kill you, the way the outboard motor was sabotaged. And I know how it went wrong, and how Christo got hoist with his own petard, and how he got burned and escaped to England and pretended to have come from Uruguay . . .”

  Spiro still looked uncomprehending.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t have heard about any of that. Don’t worry about it. The main thing is that I know why Joyce was killed and I know who killed her. And I’ve found out all about the curse your father put on Christo.”

  “Curse?”

  “Yes. I found it written on the back of the photograph—you know, in phenolphthalein.” The look of incomprehension in his face was now such that she explained, “Maybe it’s got a different name in Greek, but it’s that stuff that’s used as an indicator in chemistry, you know, to show the degree of alkaline or acidic content of . . .”

  Her words drained away as she realized how little they meant to him. He did not understand even the most rudimentary details about chemistry.

  And with that knowledge, she felt a whole sequence of other facts sl
ot into place. Spiro had been the studious one who enjoyed chemistry, Christo the tearaway who wanted to own the taverna. But Chris Dover, presumed to be Christo, was the one who always wrote his secret correspondence in phenolphthalein.

  Suddenly she saw a different perspective on the thirty-year-old “accident” with the outboard motor. It was not an “own goal” which had blown up in the perpetrator’s face. It had injured—though not killed—the person for whom it had been intended.

  And old Spiro’s words, “though you try to hide behind a new name” did not, as she had assumed, refer to Christo Karaskakis’s adoption of the pseudonym “Chris Dover.” They referred to Christo Karaskakis’s usurpation of the name of his older brother, Spiro.

  Chris Dover had not run away and changed his identity to escape the consequences of any crime he had committed. It had been to escape another attack from his homicidal brother, Christo.

  And, once Spiro had fled to England, Christo had calmly taken over the identity of his identical twin, together with the taverna that he had always set his heart on owning.

  The new Spiro had been confident that no one would reveal his secret. The real Spiro was too frightened of him to risk his anger again. Their father had died almost immediately after the incident, his death no doubt hastened by the knowledge of his young son’s true nature. Their nine-year-old sister, Theodosia, had been traumatized into silence by witnessing the crime.

  And, as for Stephano and Georgio, they were so totally the new Spiro’s creatures that they represented no threat. So long as he gave them both unlimited and never-to-be-recovered credit at the taverna, they’d keep their mouths shut.

  Christo, now called Spiro, had achieved his ambition and was free to concentrate on making money out of his ill-gotten inheritance.

  The facts were undeniable, but Mrs. Pargeter tried to pretend they weren’t. “Well, I think you can untie us now, can’t you, Spiro?” she said easily.