Crying Blue Murder (MIRA)

by Paul Johnston

  Dhimitra’s breathing was shallow, her face taut.

  ‘That surgery I paid so much for in Switzerland enhanced your bosom very successfully, didn’t it?’ her husband said, sitting back. ‘Yes, it seems you’re clean.’

  ‘Fuck you, Pano,’ she said. ‘Even sticking your fingers inside me didn’t make your old cock stiff, did it?’ She started pulling on her clothes, jerking her head round as the door opened without warning.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ said Aris, a grin spreading across his heavy face. ‘It never occurred to me that sex still played a part in your relationship.’

  ‘Be quiet and come over here,’ the old man said. ‘You, stay,’ he said as his wife started to move away, her blouse still open. ‘The three of us need to talk.’

  Aris pulled a chair in front of the sofa, the flesh of his thighs wobbling beneath his shorts. He was wearing the green shade on his head even though the sun was kept from the room by blinds. ‘Talk?’ he asked, suddenly less sure of himself. ‘What about?’

  Theocharis waited until Dhimitra had sat down, his eyes directed out of the high French windows towards the white mass of the village in the distance. The surface of the sea in the straits beyond was cutting up, the waves whipped by a strengthening northerly wind. ‘What about?’ he repeated, glaring at his son and then his wife. ‘This man Alex, the one who calls himself Cochrane. I have made an interesting discovery about him.’ He pointed to his desk. ‘Fetch me that black file, Ari.’

  His son clumped across the room and returned, handing over a document wallet. ‘He’s just a tourist, for Christ’s sake,’ Aris said under his breath.

  ‘I’m afraid he isn’t,’ Theocharis said, taking a photograph out and holding it up to them. ‘Do you recognise the couple he’s with? I know it’s an old photo, but the youth is plainly Alex.’

  ‘Christ and the Holy Mother,’ said Dhimitra. ‘That’s Mavros the communist, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very good,’ her husband replied. ‘And the woman is his wife, Dorothy Cochrane-Mavrou. The name Cochrane meant something to me the moment he said it, but I couldn’t place it until yesterday.’

  ‘So what?’ Aris demanded, his brow furrowed. ‘So the guy’s father was a communist. Are we supposed to torture him like your friends the Colonels did with his kind during the dictatorship?’

  Theocharis turned on him. ‘Shut up, you fool. This has nothing to do with politics.’ Then he ran a hand through his pointed white beard. ‘Though maybe that is a way of tackling it.’ He thought for a few moments then focused on his son again. ‘The point is that he is not just a tourist as he pretends. He speaks Greek and he holds dual Greek and British nationality.’

  Dhimitra was staring at him. ‘Why the pretence?’ She moved closer to her husband. ‘How do you know about his background, Pano?’

  ‘I was suspicious of him from the beginning. Remember, he talked Eleni Trypani into showing him the dig. That made me sure he was a thief or a dealer. I invited him to the tower to gauge his reaction to the collection, but that was inconclusive.’ Theocharis gave his wife a scathing look. ‘Mainly because, despite the fact that I asked you to be welcoming, you were interested only in making a spectacle of yourself.’

  Dhimitra stuck her chin forward. ‘You should have told me why you wanted my help.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ the old man said, holding up a photocopied sheet. The printed script was blurred but legible.

  ‘Jesus,’ Aris said, straining forward. ‘He’s a private dick.’ His expression had darkened. ‘That’s all we need.’

  ‘How did you get this?’ Dhimitra asked. ‘It’s a Public Order document.’

  ‘One of my people here obtained this and his ID card last night. Mavros doesn’t know they disappeared for a time.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Aris said. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  Theocharis stood up and took his stick from the end of the sofa. ‘Ostensibly, as you both know, he’s trying to locate Rosa Ozal.’ He looked at them in turn. ‘More disturbing as far as I’m concerned, his interest in the dig suggests that he may in reality be investigating illicit antiquities trading, either freelance or on behalf of one of the ministries. I’ve got my people in Athens checking in the relevant offices.’

  Aris’s expression was less sombre now. ‘It sounds to me like it’s time this Alex Mavros received a dose of pain to keep him in his place.’ He got to his feet and stood by his father. ‘Want me to organise something?’

  ‘I have already organised a dose of pain, as you put it,’ Theocharis said, keeping his eyes off his son. ‘It didn’t run as smoothly as I hoped, but I don’t think Mavros will be asking any more questions for a day or two. Now it’s time we discovered what Eleni has told him. My tame archaeologist has been behaving rather erratically in recent weeks.’

  ‘Shall I bring her to the cellar tonight?’ Aris said, his tone avid.

  His father shook his head. ‘No, we’ll handle it differently. We still need her, at least in the short term.’ He glanced at Dhimitra. ‘I presume you’ll want to be involved. I know how much you dislike Eleni.’

  The former singer nodded, her fingers with their painted nails wrapped tightly around the old man’s fleshless arm.

  Mavros finally managed to get rid of the English tourists by feigning a worse headache than he had. He was grateful to them, but their noisy bonhomie was not what he wanted right now, and the darkness meant they had seen nothing that would identify his attackers. They didn’t look particularly bothered that he wasn’t going to involve the police. His main concern was to talk to Rena again before she left for the fields. She had already put bread and olives and a flask of water into a wicker basket.

  As his rescuers headed for the door, the woman Jane giving him a questioning look, he remembered what they had been saying about Rinus in the restaurant. Had Roy made good his threat to avenge his woman’s honour?

  ‘Did you ever get to the Astrapi last night?’ he called after them.

  ‘Nah, mate,’ Roy replied, running his hand over his shaved and scarred scalp. ‘But we’ll be there tonight. You make sure you join us. There’s going to be some fun.’ He laughed in a worrying way and then disappeared into the passage.

  It looked like Rinus’s escape would only be temporary.

  ‘I must go,’ Rena said. ‘Melpo is waiting for me.’

  ‘Melpo?’ Mavros said, trying to place the name.

  ‘My donkey,’ the widow said with a smile. ‘Well, the donkey I use. You are losing your memory, Mr Investigator.’

  Mavros got up from his chair. ‘Now I remember. You keep her out at the old man’s farm.’ He extended a hand towards her. ‘Wait, Rena, we must talk more.’

  She stared at him doggedly and then put down her basket. ‘All right. But not for long.’ She came back to the table under the pergola and sat down.

  ‘This woman,’ Mavros said. ‘The other one you said left suddenly. Who was she?’

  A cloud seemed to pass over Rena’s face. ‘Ach, Alex. I don’t want to talk about her. She…she was here and now she’s gone.’ She bowed her head.

  Mavros remembered his mother saying something similar about his father and his brother, Andonis, but he suppressed the thought. ‘What was her name?’ he asked gently.

  Rena kept silent and then raised her eyes to his. ‘Liz,’ she said. ‘Elizabeth.’ She pronounced the English version of the name carefully, then got up and went into the kitchen, returning with her accounts book. ‘Here you are,’ she said, opening it and pointing to an entry only a few lines above his own incomplete details. ‘This time you don’t have to pretend you can’t follow the Greek.’

  Mavros gave a rueful smile then looked at the neat script. ‘Clifton, Elizabeth,’ he read. ‘Nationality British, date of birth 4/9/67, arrived September thirteenth, departed September twenty-third.’ He glanced up. ‘That’s under a week before I came to Trigono.’

  Rena was nodding. ‘Yes. She had your room. She was…she was a very
good woman. Very friendly.’

  Mavros was thinking about the photos and the computer diskette he’d found. He’d assumed they were put up the chimney by Rosa Ozal because of the handwriting on the back of the photo showing the dig, but maybe this woman Liz was responsible for hiding the package. He looked back at the entry.

  ‘Paid a hundred and twenty thousand in advance.’ He looked at Rena. ‘When was she supposed to leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Rena said, blinking several times.

  ‘What happened?’

  Rena raised a hand to her forehead then met his eyes. ‘I don’t know, Alex. I came back from the fields in the afternoon and…and she was gone. The door to her room, your room, was open and I went to greet her. As soon as I looked in I realised she had left. There was nothing belonging to her anywhere. Even the wastepaper bin in the bedroom was empty and it was often full of papers.’ The widow gave a sad smile. ‘She was always writing on a notepad or on her computer.’ She shook her head. ‘We had got quite close,’ she said softly. ‘I’d have expected a message.’

  ‘Did anyone else see her leave?’ Mavros asked. The similarity of this second unexpected departure to Rosa’s bothered him. The barman Rinus had supposedly witnessed the Turkish-American woman get on the ferry.

  Rena raised her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask anyone.’ She looked down. ‘I didn’t want people to think…’ Her words trailed away.

  ‘That you had become over-friendly with her?’ he said gently.

  She nodded. ‘I’d already been cursed when Liz and I were seen touching each other.’ She chewed her lip for a few moments. ‘That animal Lefteris.’ She stood up. ‘I must go to Melpo.’

  Mavros got up too. ‘Are you walking out to the farm?’

  ‘Yes. I have no choice. Old Thodhoris won’t let me keep Melpo anywhere closer to the village.’

  ‘I’ll come with you to the junction.’ Mavros needed to check the place where he was attacked, but he also didn’t want to leave his conversation with Rena unfinished. Her mention of Lefteris and the way the blood rushed to her neck and face had caught his attention. He went into his room and picked up his bag.

  On the street Rena drew her black scarf over her hair. ‘I think she was a journalist,’ she said, unprompted. ‘I mean Liz. She asked me a lot of questions about the island. She was very interested in what happened during the war.’ As they passed a pair of old women, she wished them a good day. They muttered a grudging response. ‘She had some old books about it, one of them filled with tiny handwriting.’

  Mavros was thinking of the photo of George Lawrence and the war memorial, as well as the diskette with his initials on it. He’d also remembered the Paros historian’s book, the one that Panos Theocharis had apparently suppressed. Was the copy in Rena’s suitcase connected in some way to Liz Clifton?

  ‘Old crows,’ Rena was saying under her breath, looking back at the women. ‘They are relatives of Lefteris…’

  They had reached the end of the village and the track that led to the Bar Astrapi was on their left. Mavros stopped and tossed a coin in his mind. He reckoned Rena would only leave the donkey waiting for one more question. Should he ask about Liz or Lefteris? He went for the latter, the fisherman’s muscular bulk looming up before him. The way he and his father had stared at him in the restaurant made them good candidates to be his assailants—old Manolis looked capable enough of violence despite having only one arm.

  ‘What has Lefteris done to make you hate him?’ he asked, raising his sunglasses to look into the widow’s eyes.

  Rena’s cheeks blanched. ‘What has he done?’ she said in a tight voice. ‘What has he done?’ She dropped her gaze. ‘I was drawn to him for a while. He sensed my weakness after Argyris died, he came to me and overwhelmed me. For a while he made me feel like a woman again.’ Her voice dwindled to a whisper. ‘And then I realised that he only wanted to dominate me, to mount me like a bull.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Until something happened to him in the summer and he couldn’t…he couldn’t do it any more.’ She looked up. ‘But that only made him more violent than he used to be.’ She opened the top button of her blouse and pointed to a scarred patch of skin. ‘Cigarettes. He told me not to scream and I…I obeyed him.’ Her eyes were clouded with tears. ‘And…and I saw what he was doing to his son. He and that bastard Dutchman, they’re in it together. Lefteris rents the bar to him and they do their filthy business there. But why did they have to involve poor Yiangos? He used to be such a sweet boy but Lefteris was making him hard, in his own image. Oh, God…’ Rena drew her sleeve over her eyes. ‘I have to go, Alex. I’ve said too much.’ She twitched her head as if to deny everything she’d told him and hurried away, the wicker basket banging against her leg.

  Mavros stood watching her as she moved up the asphalt road towards the Kambos. It sounded like she knew about the drug dealing. He hadn’t expected such an outpouring of information, let alone emotion. He wasn’t sure where it all left him. He would have to talk to Rena again, though much of what she’d said was only tangentially linked to Rosa Ozal. But he was getting a bad feeling about the case. Someone else was too. The attack on him wasn’t a random one. He went up the narrow path to confirm this impression. So Lefteris and Rinus were in business together. The barman was still serving customers when Mavros had left so he couldn’t have attacked him, but he might have put his partner up to it.

  There were plenty of footprints on the dusty earth both inside and over the walls, far too many to be much help. It was easy enough to find the location where he had been assaulted. There was a patch of his blood on a large stone by the side where he had fallen, and the footprints in this area were even more chaotic—mainly trainers, the ones worn by both the Englishmen. He climbed over the wall to his left, the bones in his side complaining, and found more prints among the mule and goat tracks. These were from heavy boots, as worn by the village men, some of them no doubt left by the farmer who worked the field. But others must have been from his assailants. His rescuers were unsure how many there had been—they admitted they’d all been half pissed—but there had been at least two. He followed a faint line of double tracks then lost them in a patch of earth where the animals must have congregated. And then he found a length of thick metal piping.

  Biting his lip, he kneeled down and picked it up in a handkerchief before putting it in his satchel. It was about forty centimetres long, the metal grey and dented in several places at one end. Through the dust Mavros thought he could see traces of blood. If he decided to get the police involved this would be useful evidence, especially if the person holding it hadn’t been wearing gloves. But he didn’t intend talking to the local policeman, not even now. He’d seen the guy in the bar on his first night and it was obvious he was in Rinus’s pocket. But this was serious. Whoever laid into him hadn’t just been using fists. The piping was potentially a lethal weapon. If the British couples hadn’t arrived when they did, he might have been in a much worse state than he was. Someone on Trigono had upped the stakes in a big way.

  Trying unsuccessfully to protect his aching ribs as he clambered back over the wall, Mavros walked back to the outskirts of the village and hired the same mountain bike from the girl with the pitying expression. He mounted up and headed out towards the Kambos. He was hoping Eleni would be at the dig as he wanted to ask her about Liz. The photo he’d seen in her album showed that she had known the Englishwoman too. Now this was more significant since perhaps she had disappeared too. Was there a connection between Liz Clifton and Rosa Ozal, or had they both suddenly left the island by coincidence? Maybe Liz Clifton had just found the photo with Rosa’s writing in the room at Rena’s. But why would she, or someone else, have put it up the chimney along with the other photos and the diskette?

  When he reached the top of the slope between the village and the plateau, Mavros stopped to catch his breath. Looking around at the patchwork of cultivated land, he felt the wind on his back. The sea to his right was choppy, the vibr
ant blue cut with white. He hadn’t heard a weather forecast since he’d been on the island. At last he was experiencing the rapid increase in wind that was notorious in the Cyclades. Storms often messed up ferry schedules and forced urgent medical cases to be transported to the mainland by helicopter.

  This gave him even more motivation to wrap up the case. The idea of being marooned on Trigono was filling him with trepidation.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MAVROS followed the road through the cultivated plain. When it turned to the rough track beyond the Paliopyrgos estate and began to steepen, he ditched the bike behind a boulder overgrown with bone-dry thistles and continued on foot. The wind whistled past his head as he climbed towards the dig plateau and he felt his breath catching in his throat. The clink of goat bells made him look to his left. The coats of the animals were visible on the western slopes of Profitis Ilias, the young herdsman he’d met waving at him. At first Mavros thought something was wrong, so vigorously was the arm moving, then he realised that it was just an overstated greeting and returned it less effusively. That didn’t put the islander off. He came loping down the hillside, his dog barking at his heels.

  ‘I remember you,’ the young man said with a wide smile. His teeth were surprisingly white, the skin on his face smooth and tanned.

  ‘I remember you too,’ Mavros said, nodding and making to move on.

  ‘Dinos,’ the herdsman said. ‘I am Dinos.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mavros replied, staying where he was and resigning himself to a conversation with the lonely local. ‘I am Alex.’

  ‘Cigarette?’ There was another smile.

  Mavros shook his head, looking past Dinos up the slope. Some of the goats were right up on the ridge. An idea came to him. ‘You go up there?’