The Age of Olympus

by Gavin Scott

  Forrester walked to the door and opened it to leave. “One last question,” he said. “Was the General standing between you and the shrine when the explosion went off, or was he on your far side?”

  There was a long pause before the injured man answered. “He was on my far side,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Forrester.

  24

  THE MAN FROM ATHENS

  Halfway down the path from the monastery to the kastello Forrester found Venables sitting on a tree trunk, staring out over the dazzling blue sea and smoking a cigarette. Companionably he shifted his canvas manuscript bag and moved along the bench so Forrester could sit down beside him.

  “You don’t use these, do you?” he asked, holding up the cigarette case, and then said, “I would have put you down as more of a pipe man, but you don’t smoke a pipe either.”

  “Never felt the need,” said Forrester.

  “Not even to soothe your nerves, as the advertisements used to promise?”

  “I have to admit,” said Forrester, “my nerves are being sorely tried at present. As yours must be.”

  Venables nodded. “He was a bloody good chap. He didn’t deserve to die. Oh, Christ, how banal that is. We all deserve to die. We all deserve to live. I just didn’t expect to be robbed of his company so soon.”

  “Or his talent.”

  “Or indeed his talent.” He turned to face Forrester. “Have you made any progress? Do you have any evidence that it was one of us and not your bloody Nazi?”

  “No evidence,” said Forrester. “Just possibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  “That Keith saw something in the grove, possibly even sketched it, and he later realised the sketch pointed the finger at whoever tried to kill Giorgios Stephanides. Which led the murderer to take advantage of the situation at the castle to put him out of the way before he told anybody.”

  “Good God,” said Venables. “Then we have to look at his sketchbooks right away.”

  “I think it’s too late for that,” said Forrester. “Whoever killed him will have already destroyed the evidence.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Venables. “They certainly haven’t got rid of all his sketchbooks: we were sharing a room and I saw them only this morning.”

  “Well, I suppose we should look at them,” said Forrester, “but I don’t expect to find anything now.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Venables. “But we should go and see.”

  As Forrester stood up he staggered a little, dizzy, and Venables took his arm to steady him.

  “Are you all right?” said Venables.

  “I’m fine. I’ve just been up since the early hours.” And as he said these words the image of the man and woman in the wood flashed with extraordinary vividness into his mind.

  “What is it?” said Venables. “You look as if someone has just walked over your grave.”

  “I was up there last night,” said Forrester, gesturing towards the trees, “just wandering about because I couldn’t sleep. I saw a man and a woman talking. Whispering. Conspiring. She promised someone would die.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. At first I thought it was Alexandros and Helena.”

  “Jesus. You think Alexandros and that lesbian bitch got together to kill Keith? I’ll fucking kill them – both of them.”

  It was Forrester’s turn to put a hand on the other man’s arm. “Don’t be ridiculous. I saw two people among the trees, talking. I heard a few broken words. They could bear any number of interpretations. For example if it was Helena she could have been saying that it was Penelope who had to die. The woman might have been Ariadne. It might have been Penelope. When I moved towards them they heard me coming and slipped away.”

  “Penelope?”

  “Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Helena wants Alexandros for herself, Penelope stands in the way; why wouldn’t she want to kill her?”

  “This place is a madhouse,” said Venables.

  “There’s also the possibility,” said Forrester, relentlessly, determined to divert Venables from some rash act, “that Alexandros himself was trying to kill Stephanides in the grove that day.”

  “But why?”

  “Because Stephanides was trying to take Penelope away from him. She and Stephanides were childhood sweethearts – did you know that?”

  “I did not,” said Venables, looking at him with angry, almost wounded eyes, as if this complexity was too much for him. “All I know is that some swine shot my friend to save their own neck and I want to make sure they suffer for it. So let’s go and look at those bloody sketchbooks.” But as they reached the point on the path where the harbour came into view, they stopped dead, staring.

  Fifteen Greek soldiers were marching down the gangplank of a Greek naval vessel moored beside the quay and forming up in a neat line under the eye of a sergeant. No sooner had they disembarked than a diminutive figure in a raincoat and fedora appeared at the top of the gangplank, and though he was too far away for Forrester to see his face, he knew instantly it was Inspector Kostopoulos.

  Then the soldiers and their sergeant snapped to attention and saluted as a tall, commanding figure came down the harbour steps to greet them. It was General Aristotle Alexandros.

  * * *

  Half an hour later Inspector Kostopoulos was seated in the big armchair in the main room of the kastello under the portrait of a pirate chief, regarding the assembled company with a satisfaction that would not have been out of place if they had been brought there to celebrate his birthday. It was quite a crowd, including not only the servants but Abbot Spyridon and the devoted Chrystomatos.

  “Is so good to seeing you all again,” said Kostopoulos, “plus those not known to me yet but which acquaintanceship will make a very pleasant. I am speaking in English for benefit of those not knowing Greek, but also practising for when Scotland Yard calling me home.” He waited for a response and when none came slapped the arm of his chair impatiently. “Was joke,” he said. “British joke. Nobody here having sense of humour, obvious.”

  He sat up straighter in the chair and glared round at them. “My studying of Athens death of great poet Michaelaides still ongoing. But now is complicated, natural, by half crushing of Colonel Stephanides, and by shooting of English artist Beaming.”

  “Beamish,” said Venables.

  “Exactly,” said Kostopoulos. “He is your friend?”

  “Was,” said Venables.

  “So was you who shot him?” said Kostopoulos.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Didn’t you hear what I just said? He was my friend.”

  “Calming down, calming down,” said the policeman. “Friends is shooting friends, sometimes, just like husbands and wives, everybody knowing that. No stone will be kicked about in this investigation. Nobody too important to accuse. Remembering that, please. Now, Kostopoulos fully aware of tin man roaming Hydros with stolen stone, Greek heritage at stake etcetera. So already Sergeant Bogdolu Pyrolithos and men are searching whole place and all can be resting assured stealer and stone together will be found.”

  He settled himself more comfortably in the armchair. “Now I explain my methods. Simple methods but always working for me. I will have a long talk with each person one by one, while all other persons staying nearby to be convenient. Everybody will tell the truth, of course, except the murderer, and when all stories are compared side by side murderer’s lies will stand out like written in blood.”

  “What if the murderer is Oberleutnant Kretzmer?” said Lawrence Durrell. “Who is not here for you to talk to?”

  “Then all can relax,” said Kostopoulos, “because the next time anybody seeing tin man he will be lying on door.”

  He looked at them triumphantly – and saw their incomprehension. “By which I am meaning lying dead on door after Sergeant Pyrolithos and his men are shooting him and putting him on the door to bring him back here.” No one responded, and suddenly Inspector Kostopoulos was an
gry.

  “Is obvious what I mean,” he barked. “Anybody ever seeing cowboy movie knowing what I am talking about. Dead outlaws always put on doors after shootout. Always. Anyway, totally beside point. I have seen enough of you. My initial impression have been made, which is good for some, not so good for others. Now I am telling everybody to get out excepting for General Alexandros. General Alexandros I am questioning first.”

  And one by one they stood up, avoiding each other’s eyes, and left the room.

  Forrester, however, stayed behind. “I was wondering how your investigations into Michaelaides’s death were progressing? Did you find out what poison was used?”

  Kostopoulos looked shifty. “Germans was pigs,” he said. “Everything smashed before they leaving.”

  It was a moment before Forrester understood. “Including the police laboratory?”

  “Also, best police doctor gone to communists. Disaster!”

  “So you don’t know what poison killed him?”

  “Heart condition,” said Kostopoulos, shrugging. “His own doctor saying he had heart condition. Maybe he dying natural, after all.”

  “It didn’t look like a heart attack. You yourself said it was poison.”

  Kostopoulos squared his shoulders. “Michaelaides is old investigation,” he said. “New investigation is what is counting. Please not to obstruct, Mist Forrest.”

  And that was that.

  * * *

  As soon as they were dismissed, Venables led Forrester and Sophie to the room he had been sharing with Keith Beamish. Beamish’s backpack lay on his bed, and his sketchbooks were inside it. Without much hope Forrester sat down on the other bed with Venables and Sophie on either side and began to go through them from the beginning. The first pages showed scenes of Athens: the Acropolis, the market stalls, the Archbishop’s palace and the café in Anafiotika where they had all dined the night Michaelaides was killed. There was even a rough sketch of the table with all of them around it, eating, drinking, talking in the moments before disaster struck. For some reason the light caught Constantine Atreides’s distinctive panama hat so that it glowed with comic elegance in one corner.

  Forrester flicked the pages back and looked again at the sketch of the Archbishop’s reception. There was Stephanides, Alexandros and Venables beside the kouros, there was Michaelaides, declaiming, his hand raised as if in benediction, about to descend on the statue’s carved locks.

  Venables handed him the second sketchbook. “Here we are on the way from Piraeus,” he said, “with Runcorn and Helena and the rest of the gang.”

  Then there were pictures of the ancient harbour at Rhodes, and the whole group breakfasting at a table outside the tiny house there that Durrell had leased in the eucalyptus-shaded garden of an old Turkish mosque. Incongruously, everybody seemed to be eating Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

  The third sketchbook covered their voyage through the islands as Durrell visited his correspondents. There were any number of picturesque fishing villages, picturesque Greek peasants and picturesque children leading picturesque and heavily laden donkeys. Among the drawings created on the minesweeper itself, one showed Runcorn in close consultation with Helena; another, Venables and Prince Atreides looking out over the stern, their heads bent towards each other.

  Then came Hydros, with a view of Drakonaris from the harbour, and a sketch, clearly drawn from memory, of the scene in the kastello when the Abbot and his acolyte had brought in the ikons on that fateful night, with Helena lying sprawled on the floor among the debris. The next pages were the ones Forrester and Sophie had seen Beamish drawing in the grove: both the wider views of Maia’s shrine and the close-ups of the water trickling from the stone amphora. All three peered at them closely: none of the images seemed to contain any clue about who had planted the explosives that had brought the pillars down just hours later. Then Forrester held the sketchbook close to his eyes and peered at the join where the pages were bound.

  “It’s pretty much as I thought,” he said. He handed the book to Venables, who examined it, cursed and passed it to Sophie. “You can see that someone has taken out a page,” said Forrester.

  Sophie pursed her lips. “So the question is,” she said, “who had access to it?”

  “Well, obviously me,” said Venables. “I’ve been looking at Keith’s sketchbooks since Athens to make sure I was gathering the right copy to go with his pictures. As it happens, I hadn’t looked at what he’d drawn since we got to Hydros, and I hadn’t looked at what he’d sketched of the shrine because it was no particular concern of mine until somebody shot him.”

  Forrester stood up and examined the door to the room. “And there’s no lock,” he said, “so pretty much anybody could have come in and looked at the sketchbooks.”

  “So what do we do now?” said Sophie.

  “I suppose it’s our duty to report this to Inspector Kostopoulos,” said Forrester, “though I have to say I don’t have high hopes of that gentleman’s effectiveness.”

  “We should search for the missing page,” said Venables. “If we find who has it, we have our man.”

  “Only if he was stupid enough not to destroy it,” said Forrester. “Which seems to me highly unlikely.”

  * * *

  Afterwards Forrester and Sophie went out onto the terrace and spoke quietly as they looked out over the harbour, and he told her about his conversations with Abbot Spyridon and Giorgios Stephanides.

  “Penelope and Giorgios were lovers? Ah, that explains so much.”

  “I don’t know that they were literally lovers,” said Forrester. “They were childhood sweethearts, all three of them, but Giorgios went away to Athens to write his masterpiece and Ari put on a smart uniform and got in first.”

  “Perhaps that’s what Penelope meant when she talked about sacrifices,” said Sophie, and relayed her early-morning conversation with the chatelaine of the kastello.

  Forrester considered. “But it sounds to me as if she was talking about sacrifices she had to make to keep the island safe during the war.”

  “Possibly,” said Sophie, “although her main point was that Constantine Atreides went into the castle just before Keith Beamish was shot.”

  “She was clear about that, was she?”

  “She was. But there’s something else. A feeling I had as we were talking.”

  “Which was?”

  “That someone was listening to everything we said, and Penelope knew it.”

  Forrester considered. “So it’s possible that she told you what she told you for someone else’s benefit?”

  “Yes,” said Sophie. “I’m almost certain that was exactly what was going on.”

  * * *

  Forrester was lying down in his room, staring at the ceiling when Yanni found him.

  “Well, boss,” he said. “So the soldiers have come to find thy German for thee?”

  “Here’s the funny thing,” said Forrester. “I had no problem hunting him myself. I feel a bit strange thinking of him being hunted down by other people.”

  “You English!” said Yanni. “Sentimentals, all.”

  “Both sentimental and hypocritical,” said Forrester. “Despite those qualms I wouldn’t really mind seeing him being carried in on Inspector Kostopoulos’s proverbial door, provided the stone was still with him.”

  “What if thou couldst get the stone off him without him being placed on the door?”

  Forrester looked at him, surprised. “Do you have any idea how that could be done?”

  Yanni took a long drag on his cigarette and stared out over the bay. “Remember the windmill? Near the castle? I have been thinking about it, and if I was the German that’s where I would have gone.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Forrester. “Of course. The castle was the obvious place, but if he went to the windmill he could have watched us from there all along. Why the hell didn’t we search it?”

  “Distracted by murder,” said Yanni, “right?”

  “But if Kretzmer w
asn’t in the castle, who was it threw the rock down from the chapel roof?”

  “Whoever killed Mr. Beamish,” said Yanni, simply.

  Suddenly Forrester was on his feet. “I have to go there. I have to go and check out that mill.”

  “If he’s still there,” said Yanni. “Plenty of time to escape since then.”

  “But where has he got to escape to? He needs a boat to get off the island. The only boats of any size are here. If I were him I would have waited until things settled down before coming to Drakonaris, wouldn’t you?”

  “But Kostopoulos says everyone must stay in kastello, right?”

  “Screw Kostopoulos,” said Forrester. “I’m going to the mill.”

  “Together,” said Yanni.

  Forrester shook his head. “No, I appreciate it. But I think this is something I should do on my own.”

  “The countess will want to come with thee.”

  “I know,” said Forrester. “That’s why I’m not going to tell her I’m going. And neither are you.”

  25

  THE WINDMILL

  Setting out for the mill unobserved proved to be easier said than done. Kostopoulos had taken the precaution of keeping two of the soldiers back from the search to make sure that no one left the kastello until he had spoken to the suspects. Having reconnoitred the front door and the kitchen door and discovered there was no easy way out there, Forrester decided that his best plan was to slip over the terrace balcony and drop a dozen feet down into the vegetable garden of the house immediately below.

  From here he took one of the alleys that wound its way uphill through the whitewashed houses of the village, then hurried across the path that led to the monastery until he found himself once more in the silence of the woods. He stood still, listened for Sergeant Pyrolithos and his men, and heard nothing.

  Ten minutes later he was passing through the grove, glancing briefly at the ruined shrine, and fifteen minutes after that was out on the open central plateau under the wide blue bowl of the sky. From here he could see the soldiers, in line in the distance, moving methodically across the island, but none of them looked up. The crickets were still chirping in the undergrowth and the scent of thyme still rose on the sun-warmed air.