by Gavin Scott
For what seemed like an eternity he fell, and then he felt an agonising pain as the branch of a cypress tree tore into his calf, and then he was grabbing for more branches and the branches were breaking and he was still going down and there was one of the massive vines that stretched across the alleys and it was breaking under his weight and without warning his shoulder hit the cobbles and the smashed branches were coming down on top of him. There were voices and lights coming on behind the shutters of the whitewashed houses, and as he looked up he saw Brandt, silhouetted against the moon, and he knew that this was not over, and would not be over until one of them was dead.
Not thinking where he was going, and as fast as the pain in his leg would allow him, he limped away from the wreckage, as people began to emerge into the alley, and suddenly he was in Stratonos Street and there were strings of lights suspended from café to café and open windows and music and tables and there was Sophie at a restaurant table in the street, talking with Jason Michaelaides and Constantine Atreides, and Paddy Leigh Fermor kissing Joan Rayner and David Venables arguing with Charles Runcorn about Clement Attlee. He took a deep breath, brushed at his clothes to hide the worst of the damage they and he had sustained, slipped into a spare seat, and ordered a glass of grappa. No one except Sophie seemed to have noticed he’d been gone, and she simply gave him a cheerful grin and continued with her conversation.
“I was just telling the countess,” said Michaelaides, “that Odysseus was the ancestor of the Vikings.”
Forrester suppressed the pain shooting up his bruised leg. “I think the Vikings relied less on Odyssean cunning and more on large axes,” he said, swallowing the grappa, and felt, with relief, its fiery harshness course through him.
“I was thinking of putting Odysseus in my book,” said David Venables. “Following him about the Aegean, that kind of thing.”
“Perhaps I could draw the countess as Penelope,” said Keith Beamish.
“And Leigh Fermor as one of the demanding suitors,” said Runcorn. “Being cut down by Odysseus’s retributive arrows.”
“My dear old chap,” said Leigh Fermor, “if I were cut down by an Odyssean arrow, who would win the Greek people over to democracy with his wonderful lectures?”
“There are times, Leigh Fermor,” said Maurice Bowra, “when you remind me irresistibly of Mr. Toad, endlessly making up verses in praise of his own magnificence.”
“Then you must be Badger, Maurice,” said Leigh Fermor affably, “always trying to spoil Toad’s fun.”
“Only in Toad’s own best interests,” said Runcorn.
“Well, of course,” said Leigh Fermor. “That’s a given.”
“Who is Mr. Toad?” asked Jason Michaelaides, and as always with any group of English people there was a chorus of voices eager to describe the delights of The Wind in the Willows. Keith Beamish even dipped his finger in wine and did a rapid and remarkably vivid sketch of Toad on a napkin, holding it up to Michaelaides, but the poet shook his head.
“I’m sorry, I do not see,” he said.
“Well Toad was a tremendous show-off, you see, just like Paddy,” said Venables.
“Is not clear,” said Michaelaides.
“After defeating the stoats, he came up with a programme for an evening’s entertainment, to celebrate his victory,” said Joan Rayner.
“The first item was Speech… by Toad,” said Maurice Bowra. “Followed by the promise that there would be Other Speeches by Toad During the Evening.”
“Then he promised an Address, by Toad,” said David Venables.
“A Song, by Toad,” said Charles Runcorn.
“And other Compositions, all by Toad,” said Beamish, “to be sung by the Composer.”
“So you see,” said Maurice Bowra, “why Paddy fits the part so perfectly?”
Leigh Fermor shook his head in mock horror at this critique, and Michaelaides opened his mouth to ask another question, but no words emerged. Instead, his eyes widened, his hands came slowly up to his head as if he was performing a charade to which the answer was pain – and then he teetered back in his chair like a child at the back of a classroom, lost his balance, and fell into the darkness. There was a sharp crack as his head hit the cobbles.
Seconds later the poet was lying on his back on the roadway and Sophie was kneeling beside him, her hands beneath his head. There was blood running through her fingers.
As Michaelaides looked up at her with surprised, despairing eyes, Forrester knew that Sophie’s face was the last thing the poet would ever see. He himself looked up at the roof behind them and there, silhouetted against the stars, stood Cornelius Brandt.
The Dutchman watched silently for a moment, and then vanished into the night.
4
THE SPECULATIONS OF INSPECTOR KOSTOPOULOS
The hours that followed were, for Forrester, a nightmare of conflicting obligations. His first instinct had been to go after Brandt, but there was no way he could leave Sophie at a moment like this, and then the police arrived and then the ambulance and when Jason Michaelaides’s body had been taken away they all had to go down to police headquarters to make their statements to a diminutive man in a crumpled white suit, who introduced himself as Inspector Gregory Kostopoulos. Whether they could speak Greek or not, he insisted on addressing the English members of the party in his slightly unreliable version of their own language, and despite Forrester’s repeated corrections addressed him throughout as Forrest. The title “mister” also received his special attention, and had been abbreviated until it resembled a weather condition.
The last time Forrester had been in Athens police headquarters it had been used by the Gestapo, and he had no desire to spend any more time in it, but Inspector Kostopoulos was a slow and thorough man, whose interrogative method consisted of repeating whatever had been said to him with a rising inflection, and getting his interlocutor to say it to him again before he signalled his sergeant to write it down, which as the hours passed induced almost as much mental stress as bright lights and rubber truncheons. To Forrester’s story of Cornelius Brandt and Leigh Fermor’s confirmation of it he listened with polite incredulity, as if this was exactly what he expected imaginative Englishmen to come up with.
“A face entirely of tin,” he said thoughtfully. “Is very mythical, Mist Forrest.”
“Not made of tin,” said Forrester. “A tin mask to cover up some sort of disfigurement.”
“Like monster,” said Kostopoulos. “Greek monster.”
“Leigh Fermor saw him and said he was Dutch.”
“Ah! Mist Farmer,” said the policeman, reclassifying Paddy as a slightly ethereal son of the soil, “everybody loving his stories, me inclusive.”
“And I saw the man myself,” said Forrester.
“Yes, of course you was,” said Kostopoulos. “On roof.”
“That’s right, on the roof.”
“But why Dutchman wanting to kill fine Greek poet? You know that, Mist Forrest? Jason Michaelaides, finest Greek poet of our times.”
“I do know that,” said Forrester. “And I don’t think Brandt was trying to kill him. I think he was trying to kill me, and Michaelaides got in the way.”
“In way?”
“Of whatever Brandt was using to try to kill me,” said Forrester patiently. “It could have been a gun with a silencer, or he could have thrown a knife. Did you find the weapon?”
“Was no weapon,” said Kostopoulos.
“There must have been. Countess Arnfeldt-Laurvig had blood all over her hands when she held his head.”
“From cobbles,” said Kostopoulos. “From hitting head on cobbles when great poet falling over.”
“But something made him fall over,” said Forrester. “Something happened to him before he fell over. I saw it myself. We all did.”
“Oh, yes,” said the policeman. “Something happening to Michaelaides alright. He was poison.”
Forrester gaped. “Poisoned? Brandt couldn’t possibly have poisoned him – h
e was too far away.”
“You right there, Mist Forrest,” said Kostopoulos, “nobody on no roof was killing Jason Michaelaides. Was somebody poisoning his tzatziki.”
“Poisoning?”
“How else is he dying?” said Kostopoulos. “With no holes in him? Maybe not tzatziki but something else he’s eating.”
Forrester said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“Is tragedy,” said Kostopoulos. “And somebody going to pay.”
Dawn was breaking over Athens when, with Osbert Lancaster’s help, they were finally released with the admonition not to leave the city until the case had been cleared up, and all Forrester and Sophie wanted to do was return to their hotel, sluice themselves in the thin trickle of water from the shower, and fall asleep.
* * *
When he woke up the next morning, Forrester lay beside Sophie, thinking. Had he been completely wrong? Had Brandt merely been the witness to what had happened, not its instigator? There seemed no reason to doubt Kostopoulos’s assertion that Michaelaides had been poisoned – Sophie had confirmed her impression that the blood on the back of the poet’s head came from a superficial wound that had happened when he fell – but if Michaelaides had been given a dose of poison, who had done it?
Sophie had been sitting on one side of the poet, Charles Runcorn on the other. Sophie obviously had no reason to do Michaelaides harm, and as far as he was aware neither did Runcorn. He himself had been beside Constantine Atreides and directly opposite, with Maurice Bowra beside him on the right and Paddy Leigh Fermor on Bowra’s right. Keith Beamish was on Forrester’s left and David Venables next to him. Niko Ghika – who knew him best – was farthest away, at one end of the table, Joan Rayner at the other. As Forrester remembered it, the wine had been poured from a common pitcher, and the tzatziki, hummus, olives, pickled peppers, flatbread and taramasalata had been passed around the table and were being eaten by anyone who felt like it. If any one of these dishes had been poisoned, they would all, or at least several of them, have been affected.
But it had been obvious, as they had waited together at the police station, and when they were released by Osbert Lancaster into the care of the British Consul, that nobody was suffering from anything other than the effects of being kept awake all night.
In short, Forrester reasoned, Kostopoulos was wrong when he said Michaelaides had been poisoned at the restaurant. If he had been poisoned, the poison had to have been administered earlier.
Suddenly Forrester was remembering all the spanakopita, saganaki and tiropitas being handed around the Archbishop’s reception, and when Sophie awoke and he told her what he was thinking, she smiled. “I am beginning to realise that life with you will never be dull.”
Forrester laughed. “I could do with some dull, and I’m sure you could too.”
“If there is to be danger and excitement, though, it is very important it is with people you like,” said Sophie solemnly, and put her hand on Forrester’s face.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Besides,” said Sophie, “I liked that poor man too. I liked his poems. I held his poor cold hand in mine as he died. I want whoever killed him to be punished.”
“Alright,” said Forrester, “let’s see what we can do.”
* * *
Half an hour later Sophie was in a cab to the British Embassy and Forrester was headed back to Skaramangar House. But when he got there, with his list of questions about the reception arrangements carefully prepared, Inspector Kostopoulos was already in occupation, and though he now seemed prepared to agree with Forrester that Michaelaides might have been poisoned before he got to the restaurant, he dismissed the idea of doctored spanakopita with a wave of his hand. “You are not seeing trees for wood,” he said firmly. “Archbishop already telling me something much more interesting going on here last night. You remembering?”
“There was a lot going on. Half the Greek political establishment was here, to say nothing of most of the diplomatic corps.”
“Also to say nothing of him!” and the inspector pointed dramatically at the kouros.
“You’re not saying the kouros did it?” said Forrester, incredulously.
“With his accomplice,” said Kostopoulos, “the name of which will be discovered.” He snapped his fingers and a policeman stepped forward and began painstakingly swabbing the statue’s head.
“Archbishop telling me of ancient ritual, and Michaelaides reciting beautiful poem with hand on kouros’s head. Immediately Kostopoulos realising this is giving murderer perfect opportunity. Place poison on head of kouros just before Michaelaides recite poem, and hey prosto, deadly dose is administered to unsuspecting victim.” The policeman was now dropping the swabs into a brown paper bag.
“Surely that would be very tricky,” said Forrester. “You’d have to have a poison that was absorbed through the pores of the skin, you’d have to put it on just before your victim placed his hand on the statue’s head, and you’d have to put just the right amount so that the next person in line didn’t get poisoned.”
“All true,” said Kostopoulos triumphantly, “which is pointing to extremely skilled operator.”
“I would have thought that poisoning one of the hors d’oeuvres would have been much simpler,” said Forrester.
“Not knowing which saganaki victim will pick? Impossible.”
“Unless,” said Forrester, “you simply slipped a poisoned saganaki or tiropitas onto his plate while he wasn’t looking.”
Kostopoulos looked disconcerted for a moment, and then waved his hands. “Not enough interesting,” he said firmly. “Agatha Christine curling the lip at it. No, Mist Forrest, this going down in annals as Kostopoulos famous kouros murder, of which headlines I am already seeing. Now, you will help me making diagrams of positions of all peoples in room at time. It will be your contribution.”
And two more policemen entered the room, carrying an immense blackboard.
* * *
Sophie was as surprised as Forrester when they met later that morning to compare notes at a café in Syntagma Square, but she was less inclined than Forrester to be sceptical. “He is a policeman,” she said. “And it is a very ingenious idea.”
“Far too ingenious,” said Forrester. “And with far too many practical objections. But I have a question for you: were you speaking literally, when you said Michaelaides’s hand was cold?”
Sophie looked puzzled. “Was it a metaphor,” said Forrester, “or did you mean his hand was actually cold?”
“Actually cold,” replied Sophie. “Cold and dry.”
“Well you should let the inspector know that, because it may help identify what poison was used, and steer him away from the kouros idea.”
Sophie pulled a face: she clearly was not entirely ready to reject the kouros idea yet. “If we’re talking about symptoms,” she said, “what about blurred vision and blind spots?”
“What about them? Did Michaelaides demonstrate either one?”
“I think he might have done,” said Sophie. “Remember when Keith Beamish showed him the drawing of Mr. Toad?”
“Yes.”
“Michaelaides said ‘I can’t see’. And ‘It’s not clear’.”
“Surely as in ‘I don’t understand’. After all, Keith had done the drawing with his finger, in wine, on a napkin.”
“I think he really meant he couldn’t see,” said Sophie, “and I think somebody ought to be looking for a poison that does that to people.”
“Well, it’s one of the symptoms of digitalis poisoning,” said Forrester. “But Michaelaides might have been taking it for a heart condition and we should pass that thought on to the good inspector too. But whether it was the kouros or a tiropitas, whoever did it must have been close to Michaelaides at the reception. Can you remember who you saw around him?”
“Well, David Venables, certainly, and of course General Alexandros,” said Sophie. “He had his arm around Michaelaides’s shoulder. And he had a motive.”
“Ah, of course, you don’t know. That’s what I found out from Mr. Lancaster at the British Embassy. He was very helpful.”
Forrester frowned. “Tell me more,” he said.
“Helena Spetsos,” said Sophie.
“What about Helena Spetsos?”
“She’d been having an affair with Jason Michaelaides since 1945.”
“Why would Alexandros care about that?”
“Because Helena Spetsos was General Alexandros’s lover during the war.” She saw Forrester’s surprised reaction.
“You didn’t know that?”
“I did not,” said Forrester. “She joined the resistance after I left for Crete.” He considered for a moment, searching his memory. “I do know they fought alongside each other, so it’s perfectly possible, of course.”
“You seem doubtful. That they were lovers, or that he cared enough to kill Jason Michaelaides?”
“You saw what happened when Helena Spetsos arrived at the reception: Stephanides delayed her so Alexandros could skedaddle, and she was furious. I assumed she wanted to see him and he was trying to avoid her.”
“Which he would if he’d just killed her lover.”
“Possibly,” said Forrester, frowning. “But it still doesn’t add up. Helena was eager to see Alexandros, not Michaelaides. So why would Alexandros be jealous of him? Did you see Helena and Michaelaides together after Ari left?”
Sophie thought, and then shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“They might have had an affair,” said Forrester, “but Alexandros was the man she wanted to see. Besides, if Ari had wanted to kill Michaelaides, he’d have shot him, not poisoned him.”
Sophie laughed. “That’s a very good character reference!”
“What I mean is, he’s a soldier, a man of action. Poisoning a rival would seem underhanded to a man like him.”
“But what if he wanted to make sure no one suspected him?” said Sophie. “In that case poison would be the perfect means.”
Forrester stared out at the ramshackle stream of cars, motorcycles and carts flowing endlessly around the square; despite their noise he could still hear church bells ringing in the distance, and cocks crowing in the houses behind the square. The sun was hot and the Acropolis so bright in the midday sun it was hard to look at it.
