Byron's Shadow

by Jason Foss

  Step by step, Flint wrote a diary of the excavation, starting with the first meeting with Sebastian Embury back at the Society of Antiquaries in Piccadilly. Relations had been tepid after that meeting, becoming awkward on the journey to Greece, and difficult thereafter. Only in the week before the murder had the personality clash become intolerable.

  ‘Problems begin about time we start work in olive grove’, he wrote.

  Had there been a sudden crisis? Flint’s amateur psychology had diagnosed that the Director had been under pressure, but from whom? Embury had always boasted of his connections — he knew everybody who was anybody in classical archaeology. Discounting half his claimed familiars as mere dropped names, Flint was still left with the impression that Sebastian Embury had built up considerable influence in academic circles. If he had been hassled by mysterious men in a car, he would have called on his contacts at the various archaeological schools or the University of Athens and had them pull strings, as he always claimed he did. Unless, of course, he was mixed up in something where academics carried no weight.

  ‘Embury out of his depth,’ he wrote.

  ‘Did not tell Emma (so said Emma)’

  ‘Did not tell Dr D. (so said Dr D.)’

  ‘Always on the telephone (to who?)’

  ‘DID see Neil Ennismore (so said Juliette Howe)’

  Embury could have used the phone, but had gone to see the academic in person. Flint should do the same, but he had been told Ennismore was now in Athens. He took out his map of Greece, laid it on the bed and began to plan his escape from the Argolid.

  Chapter Fifteen

  She’d left Jeff hiding on the beach, where everyone could see him. It was a neat idea, that one, it amused her. How she’d engineer his escape to Athens was another matter. Lisa was winding her tongue around a tune she had picked up on the radio as she pushed open the door into the cool, dark, hotel interior.

  ‘Mrs Lisa Canelopoulos?’

  She stopped singing as the two uniformed men advanced from the lounge. She stopped smiling as they explained why they were there. With a solidly locked jaw, she allowed herself to be escorted to the police car waiting in a side street.

  Nothing was said by either policeman as they drove her the ten miles to Argos. Lisa nibbled a fingernail and stared out of the window. The mountains receded, the sea was replaced by marshland and orchards. Steadily, she acquired composure. The police had to be grasping at straws: they might suspect, but could have no proof she had helped Flint. Breathing deeply and slowly she prepared her position. Polite indignation, plus empty cooperation, was the mood to adopt and keep.

  Interrogation proceeded in two languages; Greek when she felt she was winning and wanted to enhance goodwill, English when she felt threatened and hedged by the questions.

  Yes she knew Jeffrey Flint.

  No, they were not lovers.

  No, she had not seen him.

  Bright light streamed from a window high above the head of the police inspector with the scarred face and bad breath. Lisa hated the man instantly, and hated the light even more. Deceit needed darkness.

  No, she had not helped him.

  Alibis were required and produced, all convincing, most fraudulent, all impossible to check in their triviality. Solidly she resisted intimidation, all suggestion she was keeping information back. She could lie, she could stonewall and still smile. She could recognise when the police felt confident in their questioning and when they were simply hoping to trick her into confession.

  No, she did not know where Flint had gone.

  No, she saw no need for a lawyer.

  Why did she visit Doctor Dracopoulos?

  Now she knew who had tipped off the police. She played the innocent, smiled at the rude and aggressive detective and bottled up the anger for later. Internally, she weakened as the pressure built up. Externally, she maintained her charade. Four hours passed, with the time measured in fractions of seconds. Scarface rolled his eyes towards his young colleague and grunted. He folded up his file and left the room. The other policeman sighed, then smiled at Lisa.

  ‘Okay. I can drive you back to your hotel now.’

  *

  Lisa was not singing as she again pushed her way into the hotel lobby, which now seemed cold and dingy. The young hotel clerk with the quiff and the nervous smile flourished an envelope. Her mind was elsewhere and she slit open the letter and read half of it before she realised what it was.

  ‘Bastards,’ she muttered.

  All sunhat and floral smock, Pat Abbotts from Dudley sidled up to her and began to whinge. Lisa hardly heard, re-reading the letter, cursing her late husband, the police, God, and most of all, Jeffrey Flint.

  ‘But Mrs Cannypullos,’ Pat from Dudley was becoming insistent, ‘you said you’d see about the shower, room seventeen.’

  So many of her hate figures were safe, but Mrs Abbotts was in range. Lisa spun around and allowed her emotions to explode.

  ‘Why don’t you just fuck off?’

  The abuse echoed around the lobby. Mrs Abbotts’ mouth fell open. Lisa pushed past the tourist, hearing the clerk expressing concern. She turned and glared at him.

  ‘And you’re out of a job.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Flint had wandered into the security of a soft focus fantasy garden. Nymphs in wispy veils picked flowers and danced to Dylan tracks. A crashing door jolted him awake. He sprang out of bed on reflex as the door opened and the light snapped on.

  ‘Hi.’

  No mob of burly blue-clad men poured inwards. A woman stood with her back to the door. Familiar, yet totally unknown. She had bobbed, ear length black hair and was completely without make-up.

  ‘Elena Kyriacou,’ she introduced herself.

  Flint’s eyes had adjusted to the light, he felt for his glasses and slipped them on. ‘Lisa?’

  She gave a grunt. ‘Did I frighten you? Sorry.’

  ‘What’s the game?’ He realised he was naked and sat back on the bed, glancing at his watch. ‘It’s two am.’

  ‘We have to get out of here quick. I spent all afternoon at Argos police station, they know what you’re up to and know I’m helping.’

  He blinked, trying to disassociate dream from reality.

  ‘Plus, I had a letter. Dear George’s friends who loaned him the money for the hotel have suddenly decided they need it back.’

  Flint had found one sandal and reached under the bed for the other, feeling like Jonah for swamping Lisa’s dreams.

  ‘Don’t apologise or anything,’ she said. ‘I’ve only lost my hotel, my home...’

  ‘I’m sorry...’

  ‘Don’t be sorry!’ she snapped. ‘I was stupid getting mixed up with you again. I should have told you to piss off when you walked into my hotel, but I can’t change that now. Let’s just get those bastards, Jeff.’ Lisa almost sobbed the last words and she fell against him.

  Flint held her tightly, knowing that whoever stopped Embury excavating was determined that nobody else would start ferreting around in the facts. The bad guys were queuing up to stop him and with no way back, the only escape route was forward.

  ‘We have to go,’ she pulled herself away from him. ‘We have to run, or someone is going to kill us.’

  ‘Athens?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Lisa had packed a few clothes into a rucksack belonging to a client and requisitioned an ‘Argus Rentals’ 125cc motorbike from the Hotel forecourt. Flint had never been happy on motorbikes. In the dark, on the mountain road to Epidaurus, he rode pillion, wearing the rucksack for added instability. Slowly, haphazardly, they wound through the Ahraneo mountains, past Epidaurus, and down towards the glowing eastern sky. Telegraph poles and roadside rubbish grew in the feeble headlight beam, then faded into the dark. An occasional car charged them from behind, or blinded from ahead, but the police seemed to be slumbering.

  As the sky brightened, Lisa pulled to the side of the road. Cold and stiff-legged, Flint scrambled to the to
p of the road bank, peering between pine trees which cascaded towards the sea.

  ‘“The rosy pink fingers of dawn are rising above the wine-dark sea”’, he mis-quoted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Poetry.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s Byron isn’t it?’

  ‘Homer, “Odyssey”.’

  ‘Of course, how thick of me not to know. I would have failed Eng. Lit. if I’d stuck it out.’ She yawned, dancing a tight circle at the road margins to pump life into her legs. ‘I could murder a coffee, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Bad taste joke of the day.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t function in the morning without coffee.’

  Without coffee, they followed the twisting route overlooking the Saronic Gulf. An hour found them in a small, unwashed taverna, breakfasting with a chunk of bread and two coffees each.

  The sun was high and blazing when they emerged once more. A bare right leg and bare right arm felt the prickle of heat as Flint clung to Lisa’s back. Lead on, the breeze told them the Corinth-Athens highway was ahead, rumbling with traffic. Brain-numbing noon saw Megara approaching, where the petrol tank ran dry and they coasted into a filling station to buy just enough fuel to see them to Athens. Back on the highway, buttocks ached, arms ached and lungs rebelled against the choking petrol fumes. No romantic odyssey led them from ancient Eleusis to Athens, where the dual carriageway churned through an industrial jungle of refineries and scrapyards. Oil tankers and private cars hurtled towards the capital with no knowledge of a highway code, leaving Lisa to battle in their slipstream, braking, swerving, accelerating and cursing. Flint simply hung on, as close to death as he ever hoped to be, hating the modern world with more conviction than ever. Tourist-laden jets whined low overhead and the heat-haze of summer smog throbbed with their passage. Scrapyards gave way to building sites and a jumble of concrete-coated hills: Athens.

  A random left turn carried them into the backstreets of Peristeri, where they dismounted, groggy as poor sailors after an ocean crossing. Flint took out a ten drachma coin and unscrewed the bike’s single number plate, which slipped neatly down a drain. The bike was abandoned in an alley, with key left irresistibly in place, for some local hooligan to steal as soon as it fell dark.

  On foot, then by bus, Flint was introduced to Athens anew; bewildering, chaotic and thoroughly modern. The single day he had spent killing time at the Acropolis before his last flight from Greece years before had not prepared him for the confusion at street level. He needed to meet people, unearth facts, but first they must hide. Lisa would nod at his suggestions, read street signs aloud, looking for a location which matched his ideal; somewhere undistinguished, crowded and cheap. Regular hotels were beyond question, all would require a passport which had to be registered with the police. So the anabasis ended at an apartment block to the east of Omonia Square. A word in a kafenon led them to Mrs Kondyaki, a black-swathed widow who, on occasion, took guests.

  Mrs Kondyaki may have been in her late forties, but seemed older, with a practised stoop and heavily weathered features. She seized Lisa’s attention and extolled the virtues of the room. With its view of grey high-rise blocks framed by the wooded peak of Lykavettos, it fell yards short of a Michelin entry. As a refuge from unknown enemies, it was heaven at a discount rate.

  Flint dropped the rucksack in one corner as Lisa translated odd lines of monologue. Mrs Kondyaki lived in daily expectation that her son would find a wife and bring her back, so they would have to be ready to move out at a day’s notice. Even the bed was ready; the widow’s old wedding bed given to the son, awaiting the arrival of the wish-bride. Lisa flaunted her Greek lineage and waved away the inadequacies of the place. Embarrassed by poverty, the woman fussed over the guests as custom dictated she should. A plate of olives and herbs was served in her kitchen, whilst Lisa concocted an impressive and completely fake life story.

  Only when Lisa yawned did the widow take pity on the travellers and usher them to the bedroom. Flint flopped onto the bed, Lisa flopped by his side, arm held over sweating brow.

  ‘She’s friendly enough,’ he said.

  ‘Too friendly,’ came the exhausted reply.

  Flint let his eyes and his mind wander. Above him, on the wall above his bed was a fading print of a blue Madonna and traditionally swaddled Child. Not quite in the centre of the ceiling was an off-yellow lampshade suspended by a thin grey cord plus several spider’s webs. He rolled his head to look out through the open shutters to the balcony-window. Someone in the flat opposite could watch him as he lay there, watch everything he did.

  ‘We’re married, by the way,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Oh. Always saw myself as a perpetual bachelor.’

  ‘Will Vikki mind?’

  Visions of a fist wielding an afro hair comb came into his thoughts, overridden by the memory of a recent one-night liaison with a stunning Canadian student, in turn erased by one particular weekend of lust which had embedded itself in his psyche.

  ‘Vikki and I have an open relationship,’ he said.

  Lisa guffawed. ‘The sixties will never die whilst Jeffrey Flint lives.’

  An evening walk took them towards Exarha square; perversely triangular and lined with music bars and kafenons aimed at the student pocket. The wall of years had been broken down and Flint saw Lisa relax and regress towards the warmer, less bitter woman of younger days. For an hour they could have been back at Andreas’ in Nauplion, in the carefree week before the murder. In that distant past, seducing Lisa Morgan had been his principal objective in life, but priorities had changed somewhat. Or so he managed to convince himself.

  Back within the apartment, Flint chased away a pair of moths who assumed vampire bat proportions inside the lamp shade, whilst Lisa undressed and slipped into the bed. He turned the light off at the wall, then followed her.

  She rolled over to touch him, with one hand on his chest, naked and sticky sweet. For a long time they said nothing until Lisa broke the silence.

  ‘Do you know what I fancy?’ she said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘A damn good Open Relationship.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dawn clawed its sticky fingers into the Athenian sky. Car horns sounded reveille for the pair lying back-to back amongst the ruin of bedclothes. Flint awoke first, listening to the soft breathing behind him, watching the sunlight stream around the inadequate curtains.

  He groaned inwardly; Flint, you’re a rabbit. One day he’d wake up and not be surprised to learn the identity of his bedmate. One day, his libido would be brought into line by his political conscience, but perhaps not today; Lisa was beginning to stir.

  *

  A rack-and-pinion railway leads idle pilgrims to the church atop Lykavettos. From the mountain top, amongst a sprinkling of camera-clicking tourists, the heart of ancient and modern Athens lay before them. In the pleasing heat of late afternoon, the city smelt of concrete and traffic, but the city was an out-of-focus jumble of grey and white. Flint blinked, then took out the glasses which had nestled in the black trousers he had bought from a street vendor in Eoulou.

  Lisa clicked her fingers in front of his eyes. ‘Captivated?’

  ‘Saddened,’ he said. ‘Athens, Rome, Naples, Cairo, London, you name the classical city, and the modern world has fouled it up.’ Flint pointed to the sprawl of flats and offices which marched towards the horizon. ‘Junk architecture, cars, and tourists.’

  ‘Oh, ignore all that. Look at all the archaeology sparkling up at you.’

  He looked again, ignoring the tower blocks and letting his eyes rest on the monuments one by one. There was a certain magic luminescence in the marble and he saw how captivation would be so easy.

  Lisa took his arm and pointed out landmarks. High on the sanctuary, they mapped out their next moves, like gods on Olympus plotting the fate of men. Flint unfolded a map of the city and indicated the goals of his research; the National Library and the University lay back towards their apartment, with the Archaeologi
cal Museum beyond that. In the more select district at the base of the mountain lay The British School of Archaeology, sharing its grounds with the American Institute. Nearby was the Gennadeion Library and around the base of the hill, the French School of Archaeology. As the bases of itinerant scholars working in Greece, the foreign schools were at the hub of the world around which Sebastian Embury had moved. His friends, and his enemies, would know them well.

  *

  Flint occupied a telephone box for half an hour. His mum needed to be reassured (don’t believe what you read in the papers). Next, Vikki needed to be found.

  ‘Jeff, what’s going on?’ she enthused down the telephone.

  ‘I stirred up a rat’s nest in Nauplion.’

  ‘Terrific; my editor says I can fly out this afternoon.’

  Flint let his eyes rest on Lisa, leaning on a wall, distress etched on her suntanned features. ‘I don’t think that’s a bright idea, love.’ To put both Lisa and Vikki in close proximity would be like dropping two ferrets into a sack. One murder was enough to occupy his mind.

  ‘Are you with that Lisa?’ Vikki stiffened.

  ‘I met her,’ he said after just a fractional pause.

  ‘Well, I don’t care what you’re up to so long as there’s a story in it for me. Get it?’

  He couldn’t tell her where he was, or what he was doing. Vikki was a tenacious reporter, but she had the subtlety of the massed band of the Grenadier Guards. Facts were released in carefully rationed amounts; sufficient to correct the wild nonsense appearing in some of the papers, insufficient to be of any use to the opposition.

  ‘In return for all that, my sweetheart, I need money — say five hundred quid. I’ll pay you back. Give me a name in Athens, someone with nous, who can pass it on.’

  Vikki muttered something inaudible — probably abusive. She rustled pages of a filofax then said, ‘Hugh Owlett’ and passed over his number.

  ‘Thanks Vik, you’re a heroine.’

  *

  When shops re-opened in the late afternoon, they strolled through a maze of streets opening off Ermou; shops spilled onto pavements and what they did not offer could be bought from men with handcarts or baskets of second-hand goods. He borrowed money from Lisa, bought a battered typewriter and more clothes to suit the new personality he was designing. A carrier bag of assorted stationery turned Mrs Kondyaki’s scratched and aged dressing table into a work station for Flint’s research. In the evening, all those hours spent learning the art of draughtsmanship finally found its pay-off. With a fine black pen, a rectangle of card and a much-hunted pack of Letraset, Flint gingerly faked a new identity. The University of London crest was far simpler to forge than that of Central College and after only one failed attempt he created a convincing library card. A high quality photocopier was needed to produce the correct effect, but suitably crumpled and artificially aged, his forgery should pass the eyes of bored librarians around the city. He showed Lisa and she was impressed. The test was whether it would impress anyone else.