Crying Blue Murder (MIRA)

by Paul Johnston

  Mavros opened the door and immediately felt eyes on him. The lights inside were low, a deep red colour that made it hard to make out faces. Approaching the bar that ran down the right side of the cramped space, he recognised the English foursome, their table covered in beer bottles. Beyond them were the two Americans from the Glaros, the sharp-tongued woman and the laid-back man, a half-empty bottle of wine in front of them. The other tables were occupied by people he hadn’t seen before. A tanned, middle-aged couple looked at him curiously.

  ‘What would you like, my friend?’ The guy behind the bar spoke English. He was thin and short, his mousy hair gathered into a ponytail that made the heavy earrings he wore even more prominent. ‘Beer, whisky, cocktails, I’ve got everything.’ He extended a scrawny hand. ‘Rinus is the name.’

  ‘Hello, Rinus,’ Mavros said. ‘I’m Alex.’

  ‘And I’m Eleni.’ English with a Greek accent.

  Mavros turned to the woman who’d appeared out of the shadows at the end of the bar. She was of medium height, her black hair spliced with threads of silver. A dark blue shirt and loose-fitting jeans covered a figure that was on the borderline between full and overweight, the skin on her round face burned and creased by the sun. Shaking her hand, he put her age at over forty, maybe as much as fifty.

  ‘So what’s it to be, Alex?’ Rinus’s accent was a mixture of European and American, his manner friendly but also detached, as if working a bar were somehow beneath him. His stained white T-shirt bore the words ‘Astrapi—Let The Lightning Blow Your Mind!’

  ‘Beer,’ Mavros said. ‘Amstel, if you’ve got it.’

  The barman laughed. ‘I told you, I’ve got everything.’ He flipped the cap and handed Mavros the bottle. ‘Besides, I was born in Amsterdam. How could I not serve Amstel? The stuff they brew in Greece is a lot better than the Dutch piss too.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Mavros said, looking around the place.

  ‘Where are you from, Alex?’ Rinus asked, swallowing beer and then pouring a clear liquid into three shot glasses.

  ‘Scotland,’ Mavros said.

  ‘You don’t look very Scottish,’ the woman called Eleni said. ‘Or sound very Scottish.’

  Mavros shrugged. ‘We don’t all have red hair and Billy Connolly accents.’

  ‘Who’s Billy Connolly?’ she asked, leaning forward to take one of the shot glasses.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Rinus, handing Mavros one and raising his own. ‘Welcome to Trigono, my friend.’

  Mavros acknowledged the toast and swallowed neat spirit.

  ‘Tsikoudhia,’ Rinus said. ‘The local ouzo. Clears the throat, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yup.’ Mavros washed the oily taste away with beer.

  Eleni gave a hollow laugh. ‘You picked a good time to come to Trigono, Alex.’

  Mavros looked at her through the cloud of smoke that was hanging in the bar. ‘It does seem a bit quiet,’ he said. ‘Apart from in here.’ The music—mid-period Van Halen—was making conversation difficult at more than arm’s length.

  Eleni kicked her bar stool closer. ‘Two young people, a boy and a girl, were drowned yesterday. The island is in shock.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Mavros said, playing dumb. ‘How did—’ He broke off as the door opened with a crash.

  A uniformed policeman walked in, followed by the heavily built, bald man Mavros had seen driving his Jeep on to the ferry. Rinus immediately lowered the volume of the music.

  ‘Good evening, Stamati,’ the barman said. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope. Can I offer you something?’ His Greek was fluent but with a strong foreign accent. ‘Evening, Ari,’ he said to the other man in English. ‘The usual?’

  ‘Fuckin’ A,’ the bald man replied, looking around the room, a slack smile playing across thick lips. ‘I’ll just help myself.’ He leaned across the bar and grabbed a bottle of vodka, then went over to the tanned couple in the corner.

  ‘The music,’ said the policeman in a low voice. ‘There have been complaints. You shouldn’t have opened the night before the funerals.’

  Rinus raised his bony shoulders. ‘Is there a law against it, Stamati?’ He poured a large measure of whisky.

  The policeman looked around, his eyes resting only briefly on Mavros. ‘No, Rinus,’ he said, pronouncing the second syllable of the name as ‘nose’. ‘But be more careful or I’ll have to close you down.’

  The barman smiled nervously. ‘You wouldn’t do that.’ He leaned close to the policeman and whispered in his ear.

  Mavros saw the cop grin as he gulped down his whisky. He went over to where the big man was sitting. ‘I have to go now, Ari,’ he said. ‘You won’t make any trouble tonight, eh?’

  Aris laughed provocatively. ‘Me, Stamati?’ he said in Greek. ‘Trouble?’ He drank vodka from the bottle. ‘Go fuck yourself.’ His tone was no longer playful.

  Eleni shook her head as the policeman left. ‘Wanker,’ she said after him in Greek. ‘You lick his fat arse and like it.’

  Mavros kept his face expressionless. He wondered if Stamatis was the officer who had been unable to give any information about Rosa Ozal to the Athens police. After a moment he asked, ‘Who’s the big man?’

  Eleni glanced over her shoulder. ‘Aris Theochari,’ she said. ‘The beast, you mean, not the big man.’ She drank from her glass. ‘Don’t tell him I said that,’ she added, giving Mavros a stern look. ‘I work on his father’s land. Theocharis the mining tycoon?’

  ‘Theocharis,’ he said. ‘The name’s familiar, I’m not sure why.’

  She was studying him thoughtfully. ‘Do you know anything about ancient Greek art? Have you heard of the Theocharis Museum of Funerary Art?’

  Mavros nodded. ‘Of course. I visited it last year when I was in Athens.’

  The Greek woman clapped, an ironic smile on her lips. ‘Bravo, Alex. We all want foreigners to learn about our wonderful culture.’ She drank again and then stood up. ‘I’m going now,’ she said abruptly. ‘I’m an archaeologist, you see, and I have to be at the excavation not long after dawn.’ She waved at Rinus. ‘Goodnight.’

  Mavros watched her walk away, her solid frame moving with surprising grace towards the door.

  ‘Ach, Eleni, don’t go,’ the bald man bellowed. ‘I want you to sit on my knee and tell me about the exciting things you’ve discovered.’ The couple he was sitting with laughed, the woman louder than the man.

  The archaeologist stopped as she reached the door, but she didn’t turn round. It slammed after her.

  ‘Shit,’ Rinus said with a groan. ‘I only just got that replaced.’ He tilted his head towards the table behind Mavros. ‘The big man decided he wanted to take the old door with him one night. He was pissed out of his brains.’

  Mavros looked at him. ‘You’re Dutch, yeah? Where did you learn to speak English?’

  The barman laughed, revealing uneven yellow teeth. ‘That good, is it?’ His expression darkened. ‘My father was in the oil business. He sent me to an English public school. Then I made the mistake of marrying an Englishwoman.’ He shook his head. ‘Bitch left me after we moved here. Took the kids back to Salisbury.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mavros moved farther down the bar. He didn’t want any of the Dutchman’s tsikhoudia or his life story. He was more interested in the museum benefactor’s loudmouthed son.

  ‘…ruined the island, Ari,’ the male half of the couple to the rear was saying. ‘There are far too many houses being built and sold to foreigners on the east coast.’

  The bald man let out a guffaw. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Mikkel, but aren’t you a foreigner? Didn’t you buy a house on the east coast?’ His English had a strong American edge to it.

  ‘Yes, but that was ten years ago,’ the woman put in. Her features were well formed, her expression a strange mixture of arrogance and vulnerability. ‘Before the hordes came and lowered standards.’ The Englishmen were murdering a Gloria Gaynor song and she gave them a withering look.

  Aris leaned over and put his a
rm around her, provoking a nervous smile from Mikkel. ‘Ach, Barbara,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘You Germans are such snobs.’

  Norm, the worst of the singers, had just been shamed into stopping by a nudge from his other half, Jane, who looked embarrassed by his performance. He glanced around. ‘You got that right, big fella,’ he said, raising a bottle in salutation.

  The woman called Barbara gave him a vicious look. For a moment Mavros thought she was going to get up and lay into the much larger English male.

  Aris grinned and put the vodka to his lips. As he lowered the bottle he winked at the Americans, Gretchen and Lance. They smiled back nervously.

  ‘Anyway, what about these drownings?’ Barbara asked. ‘They say that Yiangos and Nafsika were found naked, in a clench.’ Her eyes were wide and her tongue flickered across her lips.

  Aris drank again, his eyes back on the English group. The buxom woman Trace was staring at him with drunken interest.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ the German Mikkel said. ‘I went fishing with Yiangos sometimes. He was a natural seaman. How could he—’

  ‘Fucking shut up, will you?’ Aris roared, getting to his feet and swaying over the table. ‘This is a bar, not a funeral parlour. I’m going to find some company that knows how to have a good time.’

  Mikkel mouthed his embarrassment to Barbara, who shook her head at him fiercely. Mavros watched as Aris Theocharis stumbled towards the English table and swept the bottles away.

  ‘Who wants a party?’ he yelled.

  ‘Oh, yes please,’ said Trace. ‘We’d love a party.’

  Jane didn’t look so sure, but Norm and Roy gave a cheer when the big man ordered a double round of drinks. The barman seemed unperturbed by the increase in the noise. It was clear to Mavros that he had an arrangement with the policeman, one that no doubt involved more than free drinks.

  Suddenly Mavros remembered something that his brother-in- law Nondas had once said about the smaller Greek islands, that they were magnets for all the world’s misfits. Bull’s-eye. He decided that he’d gathered enough background detail for one night and headed for the calm of his room in Rena’s courtyard.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MAVROS let himself into the house as quietly as he could. A single light had been left on at the far end of the passage that led into the courtyard. He crossed over to the outhouse and opened the door. Turning as he closed it, he caught a slight movement behind the half-open shutters at a window on the first floor. A shadowy figure was visible, remaining there as he looked up at it. Obviously his landlady thought she hadn’t been observed. He held his gaze for a time then went into his room. Rena was a strange one, he thought. She was shy and reserved, her black clothes showing that she had been bereaved—a parent? a husband?—but there was deep emotion simmering beneath the surface, he could sense it. What was she doing at her bedroom window? Taking the night air or keeping an eye on her latest tenant? Mavros wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or flattered.

  He closed the shutters and plugged in the electric anti-mosquito device. The siesta he’d taken meant that he wasn’t ready to crash out immediately and, besides, he hadn’t checked the room yet. Although he hadn’t so far been able to ascertain from Rena whether Rosa Ozal had stayed in it, he wanted to look around anyway. There was the faintest of chances that something had been left behind. An impartial observer would call him a nosy bastard, but he had learned to be thorough—during a case in which a divorced father abducted his twin daughters, he’d come across an incriminating letter behind a rack of vintage Macedonian wine. He started behind the bedstead, immediately discovering that Rena was a scrupulous cleaner. There wasn’t a speck of dust.

  He sat on the floor and wondered if he was wasting his time. Anything that had been left behind would have been found by the landlady. He glanced around the room. Where might she have missed? His practised eye soon found the only likely place. In the far corner there was a traditional hand- built tzaki, the uneven stones of the fireplace rising in a narrowing column to the ceiling. The raised platform where the wood was burned was spotless, the space beneath the chimney almost filled by a bright blue vase containing a fresh spray of magenta bougainvillaea flowers.

  Mavros moved the vase on to the varnished stone floor. Before he put his hand up the chimney, he asked himself what he was doing. In such an out-of-the-way place he wasn’t just looking for things that had been left, he was after things that had been deliberately hidden. Why would Rosa Ozal, or anyone else, make use of the chimney? He almost gave up, but curiosity had wrapped its coils around him. The only way to shake them off was to get his hand dirty, so he did.

  He had to struggle to get the vent flap open. It had been closed to stop insects and dirt coming into the room. Either the chimney badly needed sweeping or there was something on the topside of the metal plate. He finally managed to swivel it upwards and a plastic-covered object slid into the palm of his hand. Feeling a frisson of surprise, Mavros drew it down carefully and put it on the grate. It seemed that the chimney had no need of sweeping after all. The pale blue plastic bag that had descended from it was pretty clean. It was about the size of a paperback book, though not as heavy. The bag had been folded tightly around the contents and secured by a couple of strips of tape.

  Mavros picked up his find and took it over to the table. He should have handed it over to Rena without opening it, but he rejected that course of action. After all, he could stick the tape back and give the package to his landlady if there wasn’t anything interesting inside. Smoothing the plastic down, he scraped gently at the edge of the tape. Both strips peeled away easily. He slid the straightened fingers of one hand into the bag and pulled out the contents. Two objects lay on the wooden surface in front of him, both instantly recognisable. One was a black computer diskette. It bore a label with an inscription in blue ink. At the top were the letters ‘GL’ followed by the number ‘1’and at the bottom were the letters ‘EC’. The other was a paper photograph folder.

  Mavros sat back. He wondered if he was about to see some previous tenant’s holiday snaps. But why would they have been put up the chimney along with a diskette? He shook his head and opened the folder. There were only three photographs in it. The first showed a flat expanse of stony ground in front of a steep cliff. At the foot of the cliff was a corrugated plastic roof that protruded a metre or so from the ground. The arid terrain and windswept bushes on the rocky surface behind suggested that the scene was in Greece. Was it on Trigono? Raising the photo to his eyes, Mavros made out a series of holes in the cliff-face. They looked like the entrances to caves. After checking that the back was blank apart from a printed serial number, he put the photo down and picked up the next one. It showed the Trigono war memorial that he had been looking at earlier in the day, the list of names clear and legible, apart from the one at the bottom that had been roughly removed.

  Mavros put the second photo down and rubbed his fingers across the stubble on his chin. Why had someone gone to such lengths to hide these two images? They were hardly standard tourist shots, but they didn’t seem to show anything very significant. Then he noticed that the third photo was completely different. For a start it was in black and white rather than colour, or rather what had originally been black and white but had now, with the passage of time, turned brown and cream. The subject matter was completely different as well. It showed a young man in military uniform, a peaked cap on his head. Mavros didn’t know much about such garb, but it looked British. He flipped it over and saw a small stamp on the bottom left corner that read ‘Vafopoulos, Photographer, Alexandria’. Above it was written the name George Lawrence and the date 1941 with a question mark immediately after it, all this in pencil that looked recent. Turning the photo back round, he looked at the soldier. He must have been in his mid- twenties, the cap and the raised brass insignia on his epaulettes showing that he was an officer and the style of the tunic suggesting the Second World War. He was facing the lens with a weak smile, his boyish feat
ures lit by more than the photographer’s flash. His eyes were uncertain, though. They were focused away from the camera, the limp lashes giving him the look of a poet rather than a warrior. Who was George Lawrence? And why had his image ended up in a chimney on Trigono?

  It was only as he put the third photo down by the others that Mavros realised what he had omitted to check. He picked up the shot of the war memorial again and turned it round. This time he saw a brief inscription in ballpoint above the serial number. It read ‘Trigono, June 5th 2001’. This writing was not the same as that on the back of the portrait. He recognised it. Heart racing, he leaned over and opened his satchel to remove the plastic folder with his notes. The postcard Rosa Ozal had sent to her family was at the back. He placed it face down next to the war memorial image. There was no doubt about it. The writing was identical.

  Opening her eyes to the darkness, the woman felt a wave of panic. She fought to control her breathing and sat up, the ropes impeding her movements. She let out a long groan then clenched her arms against her bare sides. The blanket she’d found on the ground near her had slipped off her torso and was tangled up with her legs. Her throat was dry, her lips cracked, and she stretched out for the bottle. It was full again. She put it to her lips and swallowed metallic liquid, then jerked it away, spitting and feeling her thighs dampen. Why did she keep passing out and sinking into dreams that wove patterns in her mind, patterns that one minute were seductive, full of glorious colours, and the next were ripped apart by monstrous, clawing hands? What was in the bottle?