Crying Blue Murder (MIRA)

by Paul Johnston

  Mavros bided his time before going out. Rena stood motionless in the yard for over ten minutes, and he had no idea how long she’d been there. As the sky lightened further, she seemed to come back to herself, going into her kitchen and busying herself with what the rich smell suggested was a baklavas. It was when she emerged wiping her hands on a cloth, her expression less bleak, that Mavros decided to approach her.

  Rena gave a shy smile as he came across the courtyard. ‘Good morning, Alex,’ she said, stuffing the cloth under her apron.

  ‘Good morning, Rena,’ he said, returning her smile.

  Spots of red had appeared on her cheeks. ‘You like coffee?’ she asked, glancing towards her kitchen. ‘I make a honey pastry but it is not ready yet.’

  Mavros nodded. ‘I would like a Greek coffee, no sugar, thank you. I can wait for whatever it is that you’re baking. It smells fantastic.’

  Rena stepped away briskly, her demeanour now very different to what it had been earlier. Mavros felt bad about deceiving her, pretending that he didn’t know what the sweet filo pastry was. But, as her appearance with the knife had emphasised, she was a complex character. If he was to prise information from her, he’d need all his skills. That Rena was obviously grieving but was still eager to please made him feel even worse. The way that she looked at him suggested that she might have more than just a landlady’s interest in him. He wondered if his blue-brown eye had caught her attention as well as Eleni’s, and swallowed a groan.

  When she came back out with his coffee on a tray, he took the plunge. ‘Rena, there’s something I want to ask you about. Is this a good time?’

  She looked alarmed at his serious tone. ‘Of course.’ She sat down opposite him at the table under the bougainvillaea. ‘What is it, Alex?’ she said, her eyes on his.

  Mavros smiled to put her at ease. ‘I wondered if you’d ever seen this woman on the island.’ He held out the folded photograph of Rosa Ozal.

  Rena took it and opened it. She tried to dissemble but her lips parted and she blinked several times, one hand rising quickly to the corner of an eye.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Mavros asked, leaning forward and watching her carefully.

  Rena raised a hand. ‘Do not worry,’ she said, breathing deeply. ‘I…I sometimes feel…how do you say? Dizzy?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you with this.’ He tried to take the photo from her hand.

  She tightened her grip on it. ‘No, no,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Please forgive me, Alex. I have been working in the fields too much these days and the sun is a devil, even at this time of the year.’ She looked down at the photograph again. ‘Yes, I know this woman,’ she said slowly. She raised her head and met his eyes again. ‘She stayed in my house.’

  ‘Did she?’ Mavros was relieved that Rena had told the truth. But why had she seemed so shocked by the photo? He didn’t buy what she said about the effect of the sun. She would have been used to it.

  ‘I remember her name,’ Rena continued, her voice still soft. ‘Rosa. She was American, I think.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Do you remember when was she here?’

  Rena thought about it. ‘In June, I think. She stayed for about ten days. If you like, I can check in my book.’ She stood up and went to the kitchen. ‘The eforia, the tax office, makes us keep records,’ she said as she came out. ‘Most people do not bother, but I like to be careful.’ She turned the pages of a large cardboard-covered book. ‘Yes, here she is.’ She held the book out to him.

  ‘Rosa Ozal,’ he read, then stopped. He wasn’t supposed to be able to understand Greek. ‘What’s all this?’ he asked, pointing to the handwritten columns.

  ‘Nationality American,’ Rena said, leaning forward. ‘There is her passport number. Arrived June fifth, left June sixteenth. Paid fifty thousand drachmas in advance.’

  Mavros had taken a pen and a small notebook from his pocket and was writing down the dates. He looked back up at her. ‘She’s a friend of mine,’ he explained with a brief smile. ‘She recommended that I come to Trigono.’

  Rena was studying him and he could almost hear the question she was asking herself. Why was he taking down details about the woman? That was hardly the action of a friend. He put his notebook on the table quickly.

  ‘Can you give me your passport, please?’ Rena asked, her voice suddenly more formal. ‘I need to write down your name and the number.’

  ‘I…I had to leave it at the bank,’ he said, the words coming out in a rush. ‘I’ll give you it tomorrow, all right?’ He had only his ID card with him and he didn’t want her to see that.

  Rena nodded slowly, her eyes questioning. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘is there something wrong?’ She looked at him and it struck him that maybe she was in the same position as he was; maybe she was trying to decide how much to disclose. ‘Has something happened to Rosa?’

  ‘She sent a card in June,’ he said. ‘From Trigono. And then it seems she went to Turkey. But no one who knows her has seen her since she left the US for Greece.’

  Rena’s eyes were wide, her mouth open. Then she twitched her head and glanced at Mavros nervously. ‘Rosa has disappeared?’

  Mavros raised his shoulders. ‘So it seems.’

  ‘And you are a friend? You are looking for her?’ Rena’s face was glowing red, her expression almost as pained as it had been at dawn.

  He nodded.

  ‘But you said Rosa went to Turkey?’ Rena asked. ‘Shouldn’t you be looking for her there?’

  ‘I thought that maybe she enjoyed herself so much here that she came back. You haven’t seen her since June?’

  Rena shook her head, her eyes down. There was something about the way she was reacting that Mavros had noticed from the start, something that made him think Rosa meant more to the widow than the average tourist who stayed with her.

  ‘Alex,’ she said, raising her eyes to his again. ‘There is a man called Rinus. He has a bar called—’

  ‘The Astrapi,’ he interrupted. ‘Yes, I’ve been there. And met him.’

  ‘Yes. This Rinus, he and Rosa spent time together.’ The words seemed to burn her mouth as she spoke them. ‘And Alex? Rosa left Trigono very quickly, before she was going to. I think…I think there was some trouble between them.’

  He leaned closer. ‘Trouble?’ he said, his eyes on hers again. ‘What kind of trouble?’

  Rena raised her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Someone told me they were shouting at each other outside the bar. I heard…I heard he hit her.’

  Mavros thought about the Dutchman and the way he’d spoken openly about Rosa. The barman was very sure of himself despite his small stature. Mavros would have to find a way of using Rena’s accusation to shake his confidence.

  He took out the photos he’d found in the chimney and pushed them across the table to the widow. ‘Do these mean anything to you?’

  Rena examined the photo of the dig, turning it round to see the writing in Rosa’s hand on the rear. A look of suspicion that turned into barely suppressed anger came over her face. ‘It’s where that woman works, the archaeologist,’ she said slowly. ‘But why was Rosa at…’ The words trailed away.

  ‘Rosa and Eleni were friends,’ Mavros said, remembering the photo he’d seen in the archaeologist’s album. He wondered why Rena despised her so much, but he didn’t think he’d get an answer to that question. ‘Did you know that?’

  For a few moments it looked like Rena was going to speak, her mouth opening and closing like a fish’s, but she kept silent and glanced at the photo of the war memorial. It was only when she picked up the faded shot of the wartime officer that she found her tongue again.

  ‘George Lawrence,’ she said, reading the inscription on the back. ‘I know this photograph.’ She stared at Mavros. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘They were all together, in a plastic bag up the chimney in my room. I think Rosa may have put them there.’ He was returning her look. ‘What do
you mean, you know this photograph? You’ve seen it before?’

  ‘I…I don’t remember,’ the widow said, shaking her head in a way that suggested confusion—or the attempt to imply it. She glared at him. ‘Why were you looking up my chimney? It is not for you to do that.’

  Mavros gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘I saw the edge of the plastic bag hanging down,’ he lied. ‘Rena, was Rosa interested in this man?’ He held up the portrait. ‘Did she ask you about him?’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, but—’ She broke off.

  ‘You said Rosa went in a hurry. Did she leave anything behind?’

  Rena felt the force of his eyes and looked down. ‘No, nothing,’ she mumbled.

  He reckoned she might be lying. That was something else he’d have to follow up. ‘All right,’ he said, standing up and moving away from the table. ‘Oh, one more thing. I heard that you are the village librarian. You look after the books.’

  His landlady looked up and nodded. ‘Yes, I look after the books. Nobody else wanted to do it and I like to read when I have time.’ She shook her head. ‘But it is not for you. There is nothing in English.’

  Mavros realised the flaw in his plan. As long as he maintained the guise of foreigner, he couldn’t ask her about the dead historian Vlastos’s book. This was getting complicated.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, giving a disappointed shrug. ‘I wanted to find out more about the island.’

  Rena raised her chin in a negative movement. ‘I am sorry. There is nothing for you in the library.’

  The small birds were drilling and darting between the branches. Mavros felt the widow’s eyes follow him across the yard to his room. His questions had yielded some useful answers, but he was convinced that Rena knew more about Rosa Ozal than she’d admitted. He’d also seen new and disturbing sides of his landlady’s nature. In the later part of the morning she’d been evasive; while earlier she’d stood in the cold grey of dawn, clutching a large knife and staring across the courtyard at his room—the room that Rosa Ozal had once occupied.

  Later Mavros sat at a table in the shade of the main square’s mulberry tree, riffling through the sheaf of pages he’d printed out in the Internet café. The barman had tried to look over his shoulder at the article Anna had sent, which drove him away. The last thing Mavros needed was Theocharis being informed that the foreigner he thought might be an antiquities thief was reading a profile of him.

  Although his sister wrote for magazines that he rarely read because their glossy fashion pages and envy-fuelled gossip columns depressed him, Anna was a talented journalist with a knack for unearthing things her subjects would have preferred to remain out of the public domain. Mavros had eventually realised that he had more in common with her than he thought. Reading the in-depth article, he found himself admiring her piercing wit almost as much as the details yielded by her research. Panos Theocharis, ‘a businessman who combines the acumen of Onassis with the moray eel’s ability to make snap decisions’, was generously praised for his charity work and the establishment of the museum—although Anna made it clear that his core business activities had hardly suffered from the free advertising and profile-raising engendered by these activities. There was a fair amount about how Theocharis had expanded the family mining business across the world after the war, but this was less interesting to Mavros than the information his sister had dug out about the family. It seemed that many of the lurid stories peddled by the gutter press were true.

  For instance, Aris, the only child that Theocharis had fathered on his three wives, had written off more cars and needed more hush money than a dozen other tycoons’ spoiled sons. The old man had been forced to send his son to New York when he was in his twenties to keep him away from the Athenian police as well as the media. He was overseen by a company of very discreet and very expensive lawyers, but stories had slipped out about sessions in drinking clubs with well-known hoodlums. No one took any of that seriously— Aris was perceived to be too much of a buffoon to become a serious criminal himself. But that hadn’t stopped him picking on people smaller than himself. One indiscretion that the lawyers failed to suppress was made public by a nightclub hostess who sold her story detailing a night of sexual and physical abuse to a New York tabloid. Aris had shown no remorse. He remained defiant and was apparently proud of the fact that his low-life friends referred to him as ‘Kojak’, alopecia having caused his hair to fall out in his early thirties.

  There was no mud like that on Panos Theocharis. He had apparently been a devoted enough husband to his first two wives, although neither of them had lasted the course. The first, Aris’s mother, died of cirrhosis in 1970. The second had been killed in a road accident, her Mercedes shunted off a hairpin bend near the family’s house in Gstaad by a car that was never traced. The post-mortem found a large quantity of diazepam in her stomach. Both of the women had been Athenian heiresses and it seemed that Theocharis, in his seventies when he became a widower for the second time, had decided to marry beyond the confines of his class.

  Mavros slapped his thigh when he realised who the old man had chosen. He knew there had been something familiar about Aris’s stepmother and, as he’d seen outside the Astrapi, lover Dhimitra. Fifteen years ago she’d been the popular singer Mimi, whose heavily made-up face adorned hoardings all over Athens. Mavros couldn’t remember the name of any of her hits—she had been a purveyor of eardrum-bursting love songs to the tone deaf—but he remembered her blowsy, come-hither poses. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t been accepted into Athenian high society with open arms. That was why Theocharis and she spent most of the year on Trigono.

  Mavros ran his fingers through the pages when he finished the article. The material about Aris and Dhimitra was revealing, but there were some things about the old man that he found more intriguing. The first concerned the museum and the acquisition of the numerous pieces he’d bought. Anna quoted an expert at one of the great international auction houses, who stated that there had never been even a hint of malpractice or illicit dealing by Theocharis, something that was apparently very unusual with private museums. Mavros reckoned that had to be horse shit, especially in Greece. The fact that Theocharis had apparently suspected him of being a thief or a bent dealer only made him more suspicious—it took one to know one. Anna also pointed out that the family had recently been hit by several business failures around the world, though she didn’t specify them or say how serious they’d been to the overall Theocharis fortune.

  The other thing that struck him was what Anna had written about Theocharis’s activities during the Second World War. He had served with a specially trained unit that had been in action in the Cyclades and the Peloponnese. Although few records were available, there were rumours at the time that his activities had led to unacceptably high losses—of Allied as well as enemy personnel. Coupled with the fact that the book about Trigono during the Italian occupation by the Paros historian had disappeared from the library, this hint of savagery beneath the millionaire’s urbane surface made Mavros even more curious.

  Now he was more keen than ever to learn whether Theocharis or his unruly son had met Rosa Ozal.

  The woman woke up and knew immediately that something had been done to her. She sniffed the air and picked up a chemical smell, the residue of an oil-based fuel. The only light in the hole or cave or wherever she was being held was the grey line in front of her, the faint, tantalising hint of a world outside. She moved her hands, feeling the rope bite but also aware of the numbness throughout her body. Scrabbling on the gritty floor, she tried to locate the water bottle. Nothing. Her throat was parched and she could hear the rumble of her empty stomach. It was difficult to calculate the passage of time. She thought it was at least a day since she’d drunk or eaten. But she hadn’t been abandoned. The cloying smell and the pain between her legs proved that. She moved her fingers towards her groin then stopped them, frightened of what they might find. Dragging herself as far away as she could from where she’d been lying, she empt
ied her bladder and felt a stinging sensation.

  She stilled her breath and listened hard, tried to pick up any clue to where she was. There was a gentle soughing of wind coming from the line of light and, farther off, a current of what must have been water, a great body of water in restless motion. The sea, yes, it was the sea, but it wasn’t so close, she wasn’t in a sea cave. It made her think of a beach and a coastline again, but she couldn’t place them, couldn’t conjure up a name.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ she said aloud, her voice hoarse and cracked. She smelled the rankness of her breath. ‘Who brought me here?’

  She struggled with her memory, dredging up a flight on an aeroplane, vile food and the stewardesses with their noses in the air. But she could bring back nothing of where she’d come from or where she’d been going, no names or faces of people she’d met, no landscapes other than the beach that had appeared to her. Was she on an island?

  Then the idea hit her like a kick in the stomach, the sudden, unreasoning fear that whoever was keeping her captive had decided not to give her anything else to eat or drink. She tried to scream, but she was already falling into an even blacker hole.

  Just before it closed around her she was sure that she heard the notes of a pipe and, farther away, the muffled barking of what sounded like more than one dog.

  Out of the corner of his eye Mavros noticed a person approaching him. He quickly folded up the printed pages.