When another ten minutes had passed I looked back and was alarmed to find that I couldn’t see the Swallow. Panic fluttered in my chest. I breathed in gulps. My heart rate soared, gobbling oxygen. I was suddenly disoriented. I thought the current had swept me away from the bay. A grey shape flitted past at the very edge of the light and I thought I glimpsed a fin. I struck out for the surface, suddenly consumed with the notion that I was running out of air. I gulped and then gulped again and a part of me knew that I was losing control. A tiny voice in my brain struggled to be heard. Stay calm, it said. Just relax.
Somehow, with a great effort of will, I managed it. There were no sharks, I wasn’t lost and I hadn’t run out of air. I took deep breaths.
I remembered that I should wait a few minutes before I went the rest of the way up to avoid nitrogen sickness. I floated twenty feet down, thinking calming thoughts. When at last my time was up I filled my vest and kicked for the surface. I emerged into the welcome warmth of the sun, took off my mask and removed the mouthpiece, flexing my aching jaw. I had never felt so relieved in all my life.
The Swallow was a hundred yards away. As I struck out towards her, Dimitri began hauling in the line and when I reached the stern he helped me aboard. As I sat on the deck and took off my gear I told him that I hadn’t found anything, hoping that he couldn’t tell how close to losing it I’d been.
He checked my tank to see how much air was left and, though he didn’t comment, I knew I’d used it up too fast and told myself I’d do better the next time. ‘Anything up here?’ I asked.
‘A few yachts passed by, but they were a long way off.’
We swapped roles. This time Dimitri put on the wet suit and strapped on a tank. I handed him the weight belt and the line.
‘Same arrangement, OK?’
He nodded and gave me the binoculars, then quickly checked over the equipment with practised ease. When he was ready, he glanced at his watch then climbed down into the water and quickly vanished.
That day we each did two more dives, moving further out in the bay each time as we systematically covered more ground. By the end of the afternoon we had to return to Kioni to swap our empty tanks, and I phoned Kounidis to tell him we were spending the night on board the boat.
We motored back to Pigania and anchored for the night, then ate a meal of pasta and sausage washed down with beer. We agreed to take four-hour watches, and when we tossed for the first shift I lost, so Dimitri went below to rest while I stayed above and drank coffee to stay awake. I kept the rifle by my side and a torch handy, and every fifteen minutes I walked the deck, listening for the sound of a stealthily approaching boat.
Sooner or later I knew somebody would come.
TWENTY-FOUR
We spent two days searching the bay, gradually moving further out until we were almost beyond the headland. Dimitri and I existed in a state of undeclared truce, though I wondered how long it would last. We avoided any mention of Alex. In fact we avoided talking about anything at all, instead absorbing ourselves in preparations for our repeated dives, and in between times returning each day to Kioni to refill our tanks. Given that at night we took alternate watches, the only occasions when we were briefly together with time on our hands was when we ate. Even then we made sure our breaks were kept to a minimum.
On our third night on the boat I had fallen asleep, the still, quiet hour before the end of my watch getting the better of me. Lulled by the gentle motion of the waves my eyelids flickered and closed. In the moment before consciousness departed I told myself it would just be for a few moments. But during that time somebody had crept aboard the Swallow.
I’d been having a dream. In it I had watched my father walk along the wharf towards the boat. It was early, the darkness melting to grey. I saw a figure emerge silently from the shadows and move towards him. I knew what was going to happen and though I wanted to call out a warning, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. I could only watch with mounting helplessness as the figure moved closer. My father was oblivious to the danger. The figure raised his arm, something heavy in his hand, and then he brought it down in a sudden blur of motion. At the very last moment, my father sensed something and began to turn, but he was too slow. His eyes locked on mine, registering surprise and then accusation in a silently begged question. Why didn’t you warn me? I heard the crack of something hard against his skull and he crumpled and fell. There was a splash and then he was gone.
A hand gripped my arm and I opened my eyes in panic as the images of my dream fragmented. I registered the barrel of a gun and flinched. It was Dimitri.
‘Your watch,’ he said.
Groggily I sat up. The air in the confines of the cabin was sticky and hot and I was soaked in sweat.
‘You were dreaming.’
I came awake, realising that in fact I had not fallen asleep on my watch. I had stayed awake until I’d woken Dimitri at two in the morning before stumbling to bed myself. ‘What time is it?’
‘Six. I am going to get a couple of hours rest.’
‘Right. Everything OK?’
He nodded. ‘It is quiet.’
I went up on deck feeling thick-headed from the heat and not enough sleep. Light crept into the sky as the sun came up. The water mirrored the green hills, as still as glass. I drank a hot cup of coffee then stripped off and dived over the side. The water was cool enough to take my breath away, but instantly it cleared my head. I struck out and swam fifty yards from the boat then turned and came back, digging my arms in deep, breathing on every third stroke, concentrating on kicking hard and fast. I emerged panting, and dripping water onto the deck.
By the time I roused Dimitri, the heat of the day was building. We drank coffee and ate a light breakfast before getting ready to repeat the procedure we’d followed on each preceding day. We were beyond the bay itself by lunch time. I studied the chart and realised that within another day we would reach the trench where it was too deep for us to dive. So far we had found nothing, and nobody had found us. Though occasionally boats passed by, they were usually a long way out and nothing came within a mile of us.
The yacht appeared while Dimitri was doing his last dive of the day, though even with binoculars I couldn’t make out the name. The sail had no charter company logo, which meant that it was privately owned. I compared it with the one I’d seen at Polis Bay the day Alex vanished, but although they seemed to be about the same size, I couldn’t tell if it was the same boat. It was sleek and white and looked like almost every other yacht cruising the islands. It was sailing east-west, making slow progress. As I watched, she came around into the wind and the sail flapped and came down.
The line I was playing out through my free hand stopped moving, distracting my attention. I put the binoculars down. Dimitri had been gone for twenty minutes. The line started moving again. I picked the glasses up again and took another look at the yacht, but couldn’t see anything.
When Dimitri surfaced I helped him back onto the boat and coiled the line. As I stripped off my T-shirt and started pulling on the wet suit I pointed out the yacht.
‘It arrived about twenty minutes ago.’
‘Did you see anybody on board?’
‘It’s too far away to make out any detail.’
‘Do you still want to dive?’
I thought about it. If we were being watched we needed to make it look as if nothing was amiss. ‘If anything happens you can get me up,’ I decided.
When I was ready, I climbed down into the water and when I was six feet beneath the surface I paused to look back. Dimitri stood by the rail, his outline distorted by the reflection of sunlight on the water. He raised a hand and then I turned and swam down.
The water was cool. The rocks formed towers and plateaux cut through with deep fissures and ravines. At times I swam around structures no more than thirty feet from the surface, at others I descended into the half light, fifty and sixty feet down, always checking to make sure that the line wasn’t getting snagged. Time p
assed. A lone fish flitted by hunting smaller prey. A stingray floated ghost-like beneath me and schools of smaller fish darted this way and that in some curious concert of movement. The unhurried rhythm of my breathing relaxed me. I had become used to diving now, was even starting to enjoy the strange quiet and weightlessness. I paused to check the line and my gauge.
Sunlight diffused through the depths, broken by the rocks which cast shadows on the sea-bed. I was deeper than I should have been. About seventy feet down. I’d have to stop for a little while longer on the way up. I began rising slowly, watching tendrils of seaweed undulating in the current. Rocks formed strange shapes. Another ray passed by, effortlessly gliding and changing direction in a sweeping turn. Not far away I glimpsed a black chasm, the beginning of the trench. I hadn’t realised I had come that far. It looked cold and empty. On the edge was a rock formation with an oddly regular shape. It reminded me of something.
I remembered my depth and glanced toward the surface. It was time to stop. I searched for the rock again while I waited, but now I couldn’t see it. It had become lost among the formless shapes below me, but then I found it again. What did it remind me of? A square structure, a dark long shape … My heart started thumping.
Gradually the shape emerged and took form. Damaged and broken, her lines disguised by the rocks she had come to rest among was the wreck of a ship. Her superstructure had been colonised by the sea, barnacles and seaweed slowly transforming her into a reef. I could make out her bow and a dark hole in the midsection of her hull. If I looked away even for a moment, she vanished, only reappearing again little by little in the gloom as I distinguished her from the sea-bed.
Then I was almost out of air and there was no time left. I kicked for the surface and when I came up Dimitri began hauling me in.
As I took my gear off I told him what I’d seen, excitement making me speak in a rush. ‘It must be the Antounnetta.’
It was no wonder that my father had never found her before. He had been looking in entirely the wrong place until he met Johann Kohl. We were no more than a few hundred yards from the mouth of the bay, but I could see how Kounidis might not have realised he was so close to the island when the Antounnetta had gone down all those years ago. The weather had been bad and there would have been no lights from that part of the island. When he went into the sea, the currents had swept him around the headland into the strait and eventually to the southern tip of Kephalonia.
It was only then that I remembered the yacht I’d seen earlier, but when I looked, it was gone.
‘It left a few minutes after you went down,’ Dimitri said.
By the time we reached Kioni, the light was going. Dimitri took the dinghy and sped across the harbour to fill our tanks. While he was gone, I phoned Kounidis and told him what we’d found.
‘We also saw a yacht today. It left after a while, but I’ve got a feeling it’ll be back.’
Kounidis was still stunned by the news that the Antounnetta had been there all that time. When he spoke, the strain was evident in his voice. ‘I think that now we should inform Miros Theonas,’ he said quietly. ‘This proves that you were right, Robert. He will have to listen.’
‘And then what? If Hassel sees the bay swarming with police he might vanish again. No, let’s play it out. Let Hassel come to us.’
‘That may be dangerous.’
I knew that he was right, but I had thought this through and Dimitri and I had talked it over. ‘There are two of us and we’ve got a rifle. Give us until lunch time tomorrow. If you haven’t heard from us by then, you call Theonas. We’ll leave a message with the harbourmaster.’
Though he was reluctant, Kounidis agreed in the end. By the time I got back to the boat, Dimitri had returned and I helped him aboard with the tanks. A few minutes later we slipped our lines and were heading back to Pigania. It was dark by the time we arrived. The moon had risen, painting the water in grey and silver while around us the hills were black against the sky.
Dimitri volunteered to take the first watch. I left him smoking a cigarette on deck and went below to my cabin. There was little chance of sleeping however, and after a while I gave up trying. Instead I lay on my back staring into the darkness, my mind a whirlwind of thoughts and images. I got up and went through my bag to find the photograph which I had found among Kohl’s things at the Hotel Ionnis. I stared at the slightly blurred faces, trying to discern details of their features as if somehow that would allow me an insight as to who they had been. Sons and fathers, somebody’s brother, somebody’s loved one. They were all long dead. I wondered if their relatives still thought of them. They looked so young. Take away the uniforms and they might have been on a school outing, the few older ones perhaps teachers.
I turned my attention to Hassel, standing to one side and slightly apart, and I thought about the story Irene had told us of how he and Julia had fallen in love. I went to fetch a magnifying glass which I had seen on the chart table in the main cabin, and when I looked through it the faces of the soldiers swam into startling clarity. Irene had said that Hassel was in his late-twenties, but he appeared younger. He was smiling slightly in the picture, though there was a faint but unmistakable stamp of melancholy in his expression. Amongst the others there was a visible camaraderie in their shared grins, their shoulders touching, but Hassel seemed separate from them. Perhaps when the picture was taken he had already met Julia and he was thinking of her. I noticed the iron cross on his uniform, and once again recalled the one I’d found in my father’s study. In a flash of realisation I understood something which I should have seen before and my blood quickened.
When Dimitri came for me I was still awake and deep in thought. He seemed subdued as if he too had spent the last few hours plagued by doubts and questions. When he saw the photograph on my bunk he looked at me questioningly, but I hadn’t yet made sense of what I suspected so I didn’t say anything. He handed me the rifle and went to his cabin, while I got up and made myself a pot of strong coffee. I sat on deck in the hope of feeling a cooling breeze but the air was utterly still. Ironically, now that I was up the minutes seemed to drag with infinite slowness and despite the coffee I was tired. I knew that if I lay down for just a minute I would fall into a deep sleep.
After twenty minutes I took the empty coffee pot down below. I could hear faint snoring from the direction of Dimitri’s cabin. Fatigue had eventually got the better of him and I envied him for having taken the first watch. Back on deck, the bay was calm. By the light of the moon I could see the shore fifty yards away where the track led up the ravine to the headland. I knew I would never remain awake if I stayed on the boat, and five minutes later I was rowing the dinghy ashore.
It took only a couple of minutes before I heard the scrape of rocks and I hauled the dinghy safely out. Making my way up the track was difficult in the darkness of the ravine where the moonlight barely penetrated, and I had to feel my way along. Eventually the going became easier and I reached the top and walked among the ghostly grey pines towards the headland. When I emerged from the trees it was empty and still. I looked down on the dark outline of the Swallow against the moonlit bay.
From somewhere close by I heard the skitter of a stone, but when I turned there was nothing to be seen other than the single bent tree where Dimitri had uncovered the grave. My pulse raced and my heart thudded in my chest. I sensed that I wasn’t alone. I felt unseen eyes watching me. A movement caught my eye and then a figure moved away from the shadow of the tree.
‘Mr French,’ a voice said.
I recognised it immediately. He came closer so that I could see him clearly. He held both hands out slightly from his body, showing me his open palms so that I would know he wasn’t armed.
‘Herr Hassel,’ I said. He looked a little surprised that I knew who he was, but he inclined his head in acknowledgement. I gestured toward the grave where Dimitri and I had reburied the bones he’d found. ‘Is that your grandfather?’
He looked over his shoulder. ‘I be
lieve so, yes. How did you know?’
‘I found a medal which I think my father dug up here. I think it belonged to your grandfather.’
‘Yes, you are right. He was awarded it during fighting in North Africa where he was badly wounded. It was before he was sent to Greece of course.’
‘You knew he was buried here?’
‘Yes.’
‘My father told you?’
‘I never spoke to your father. But he wrote me a letter.’
I thought about that, and then I said, ‘What exactly is this all about? And where is Alex?’
I looked around, thinking she might appear at any moment, but then I was struck by how tense Hassel was. His eyes held a gleam of anxiety which was dulled only by exhaustion.
‘We must talk,’ he replied. ‘I am very worried about her.’
Hassel had anchored his yacht on the far side of the headland and had moored a dinghy just off the nearest beach. We left it there and he came with me when I rowed back out to the Swallow. When Dimitri saw that I wasn’t alone he pointed the rifle at us until I called out to assure him that everything was all right. Nevertheless he kept the gun trained on us until we were aboard. I introduced Kurt Hassel, as I had discovered his full name was, and then I suggested we go below.
‘I think we all need a drink.’
I found my dad’s Scotch and poured three glasses. I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start, but Hassel had questions too. He wanted to know where I had found my father’s journal.
‘Is that what you were looking for when I disturbed you at the harbour?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Though I did not know who you were then.’
‘But you said my father wrote to you, so you must have known about this place,’ I reasoned. ‘Why did you need the journal?’
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