A Darker God

by Barbara Cleverly

  “His reaction was certainly beyond reasonable,” agreed Letty thoughtfully. “Didn’t you think? The man’s a volcano. And they go off, not because of any outside trigger, but because of an internal pressure. I think that little outburst tells us more about him than you, Thetis.”

  “Well, I was jolly glad you were there to put a bag over him.” Thetis sniffed. “Do you think I have grounds for an official complaint?”

  Letty studied her, wondering whether the girl could possibly be as unaware as she appeared. “You owe that man an apology and an explanation,” she said coldly. “He’s a good man. I don’t like to watch you making a monkey of him. At the very least, you’ve been wasting his time. I’ll tell him myself if you don’t.”

  Thetis sighed. “Oh, very well. I’ll do it. Tomorrow.” “And this time I refuse to stand by in your corner holding the towel. When he turns up in the morning I shall make an excuse to leave the two of you alone to slug it out together toe-to-toe. I’ll give you ten minutes. That should be long enough.”

  Chapter 34

  Thetis had a charming way with her, Letty decided, hearing her embarking on the twentieth telephone call after breakfast. Low and full of controlled emotion, she responded warmly, she was grateful and understanding, she cut seamlessly from the pleasantries to the important part of her delivery: the rescheduling of the play and a repetition of the invitation to attend, warmly given.

  Taking a breather, she replaced the receiver and consulted her list. “We’re doing well, Letty. Halfway through those with telephones and no one’s backed out. It’s a case of: Oh, by the way, could I possibly bring along my colleague … my sister … my dentist … a party of ten …?’ Ghouls! It’s going to be the social event of the year and for all the wrong reasons! They’ve all heard the stories! Just wait to hear the hissing intake of breath that greets the appearance of the body in the bathtub when it trundles onstage! How are you doing?”

  Letty put her pen down. She’d brought a folding desk into the library to join Thetis, who’d assumed command of the telephone. “Oh, getting through it! I’m fighting on two fronts. There’s the funeral front and the first night. Funeral’s no problem. Small and discreet ceremony on Wednesday and the undertaker does just what his name suggests. Good man. Flowers … church … all arranged. I’m engaging that Greek priest with the wonderful voice—Andrew would have loved that—I’ve sent William off to the Cathedral with a note.” She looked at her watch. “I’m guessing he’s stayed on for the service. All that incense and the thunderous baritone—it ensnares him every time!”

  “What about the play?”

  “Hardly much of a problem. I have Maud’s notes and address book.” Letty laughed. “The woman could have been a field marshal, you know. Her army would have been always in step and well victualled.”

  “But marching in the wrong direction.”

  “Well, I’m appreciating her attention to detail. We’re promised cushions by the hundred … Geoffrey may be reassured that his pig-sticking can go ahead; if he’s got the heart for it, he’ll have his carcase.”

  “Knife?” Thetis asked. “Are they going to let him have that knife back?”

  “Not much use without it, I’d have thought. I’d better check with Montacute … No refreshments, I decided, for the crowds. Just champagne and canapés for the Prime Ministerial party staying on afterwards for the libation ceremony. Maud knew how to delegate, which makes things a bit easier … She notes that Hugh Lattimore has this in hand. The ancient and holy ceremony comes under ‘Stage Effects,’ apparently! I suppose that’s right. He’s down here as ‘plaiting the ivy wreath for the god’s head’ and unblocking the drainage channel. Lucky old Hugh! I’ll go over it with him, just in case … his last effort with the body in the bath rather misfired. It would have made better sense historically, I suppose, to have arranged for the ceremony to happen before the play … you know, an offering up … Hope you like what you’re about to receive, Lord Dionysus … More authentic? What do you think?”

  “Oh, don’t let’s even consider it!” Thetis spoke sharply. “Keep it simple! We can’t contemplate a single change at this stage. It would be disastrous!”

  “Just a thought. A rambling, silly thought. I agree—we probably want to avoid having the possibility of P.M. of Greece parading about before a full audience, playing High Priest, lit by arc lamps, the target of all eyes, and Lord knows what else. He must stay discreetly within the protection of his thick marble seat, flanked by bodyguards, until the arena’s been cleared, and then stroll across the orchestra to pour the wine and trickle the honey. I think we’ll leave out the honey, don’t you?”

  “Good idea. As I say—keep it simple. But the wine, Letty … have you …?”

  “It’s done. Almost. I’ve asked the merchant to offer us some dramatically bloodred stuff. His darkest. He thinks I’m a bit mad and insists on bringing round a few samples to make sure he’s got exactly what I want. I thought I’d order a whole case so the party can join in. Always such a disappointment, I’d have thought, to watch good wine being poured away into the earth, even if it is going to the god. Might at least enjoy a drop ourselves!”

  Thetis paused and then, in an offhand voice: “Oh … Letty … thinking of personal security … the gun you so kindly took from my bag—do you think …?”

  “Of course. Hang on, I’ve got it right here.”

  Letty fetched her satchel and took out the gun and the toffee tin full of ammunition. She found she was surprisingly reluctant to hand it back to Thetis and watched her slip it into her pocket with regret.

  “Do be careful, Thetis! It’s loaded. I fired off two bullets, but then I cleaned it and reloaded. Safety’s on but be aware that you’ve got a full complement in there. Didn’t you notice the added weight?”

  “Glory be! You actually fired this thing? At someone?” Thetis said. “I’d better put it away in the drawer.”

  “It was a kindly act you had no idea you were committing, Thetis, putting that gun in my hands! I owe my life and that of Sergeant Perkins to it…. Have you ever been to Eleusis?”

  Before she could finish her story the telephone rang.

  “But of course,” purred Thetis into the receiver. “Please put her on …” She turned and pulled an excited face at Letty. “Helena! How good it is to hear you …”

  Letty grinned and went to answer a light tap on the door. Demetrios stood there looking anxious. “There’s a wine merchant down below wanting to see the mistress about a case of Mavro … Mavro …? He’s got the samples you asked for.”

  “Ah! The Mavrodaphne,” said Letty. “That’s what I ordered. Go and tell him I’ll come straight down.”

  “He’s at the tradesman’s entrance, miss,” said Demetrios, and hurried off ahead of her.

  Thetis put down the telephone, smiling and pleased with herself. She was still smiling when Montacute thumped up the stairs and came into the library.

  “Excellent news, Inspector!” she said. “I’m about to make your day! Where’s Letty got to? You must both hear this.”

  She went to the door and shouted down the corridor for Letty. “Letty! Come on back! Great news!” Seeing Maria whisking by, she called to her. “Maria! Find Miss Letty, will you? She’s probably gone to her room.”

  “No, miss, she’s downstairs with the wine man.”

  “Oh, Lord, yes. Tell her to come straight back up to the library when she’s finished.”

  “Whatever’s going on?” The inspector was mystified.

  “Percy! I can’t keep it to myself a moment longer! Oh, where is Letty? I need to share a triumphal hug!” Thetis eagerly took the inspector’s hands in hers. “I shall have to make do with you!”

  Montacute leapt backwards in alarm and remarked that he was quite prepared to wait to share the news, whatever it was, with Letty. Disappointed, Thetis restricted her chatter to an outline of their morning’s work. Finally, sensing they were running out of acceptable conversation, Montacute rema
rked that it was odd that Letty had not arrived. Where had Thetis said she’d gone? She’d not left the house, surely, against all instructions?

  Thetis shuffled her feet anxiously. “Well, no, Percy. She wouldn’t do that. I know what she’s up to. She’s hiding somewhere about the place.”

  “Hiding? What do you mean? Who’s she hiding from?”

  “From you and from me. She read the riot act to me at the jail yesterday and told me I’d better get on with a confession I have to make to you … or else. We agreed that as soon as you appeared this morning she’d discreetly make herself scarce and leave us together for ten minutes.”

  “Confession?” Montacute leapt on the word. “You’re confessing to something more? Something that’s going to take ten minutes to express?”

  “Oh, Percy! Ten hours wouldn’t be long enough!”

  Montacute looked at his watch. “I have observed Miss Letty to be a punctual young lady with a keen sense of timing. We may count on a further eight minutes. You’d best get started.”

  Chapter 35

  So … Tell me: how long have you lived in Athens, Mr., er …?”

  “Gunay,” the man sitting beside her in the taxicab replied. “Soulios Gunay.”

  The youth driving the cab flicked a glance behind him and grinned unpleasantly. Lacking a roll on the drums, he underlined the announcement with a sharp tug on the steering wheel. Letty bit back a yelp of pain as she was jerked sideways against the gun barrel sticking into her ribs. Large old service pistol. Six-inch barrel. Probably a Smith & Wesson. She’d heard him click the safety off. How firm was the trigger? One more maniacal swerve like that, a moment’s inattention, and she’d be a late entrant on her own funeral list. In a momentary hysteria, she clearly heard the priestly baritone sounding out the Hymn for the Dead. Surely they wouldn’t bury her alongside Andrew and Maud? Letty shuddered. Her mind was racing but her body was restricted in its movements, unable to take action—an uncomfortable struggle which resolved itself in a futile attempt to chatter. She had decided that she might be being kidnapped but that was no excuse for bad manners. “How do you do, Mr. Gunay? Laetitia Talbot. How nice to meet you at last. Why don’t you tell me how I may help you? If you wanted to speak to me confidentially, you only had to ask. We could have gone to a café. There’s a—”

  “I had envisaged a quieter place,” he interrupted. “For our private conversation. Take the next right, Stefanos.”

  Letty was speaking in her Cretan-accented Greek, Gunay with what she guessed to be a heavy northern intonation. If they both kept it simple, they would probably understand each other. In any case the gun was speaking volumes.

  “We are going out into the country. A pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning. I thought we’d give Eleusis a miss today … You, I understand, have already left your mark on the architecture of that charming spot. No, we’re going in the opposite direction. To Sounion. The ‘Sacred Headland.’ The temple to Poseidon on top of the cliffs is a sight to behold. I have it in mind to make an offering to the Sea God. He is a greedy god who likes to take more than is his due. His foaming maw is always open. The place gets very busy in the afternoon but at this hour, when the population is mostly on its knees or cooking lunch, we should have it to ourselves.”

  Well, she could be forgiven, Letty thought. The man had looked every inch a merchant when he presented himself at the back door. The doffing of the hat, the slight bow, the obliging smile. The unemphatic invitation to approach his stock in the boot of his car, just around the corner. And then, suddenly, the gun in her side, an arm twisted behind her back, and a one-way fare to a deserted beauty spot.

  Letty reasoned that this man sitting next to her—unemotional, unremarkable—was the one behind their troubles. The deaths of Andrew and Maud—and soon her own—were to be laid at his door. If he’d attacked her in the street, if he’d ranted and raged and struck her, she would have been better able to fight back, she reckoned. Anger calls up anger. His obdurate calm, his cold assurance, were those of a priest leading a potentially skittish heifer towards the sacrificial altar. But Letty had caught the blood scent of previous victims and would stretch out her neck for no man.

  “Not another cliff top? You’re running out of inspiration, Mr. Gunay. After such a dramatic start, you let yourself down. The body in the bathtub was certainly an eye-catcher, the defenestration of Lady Merriman a piece of considerable daring. But so far you seem to be botching my disappearance. I’m wondering why you’re pursuing me with such vigour? Why me?”

  As she asked the question, a very convincing answer came to mind.

  “Why me?” she repeated more firmly. “What have I ever done to deserve such treatment?”

  He smiled. A handsome man at one time, she judged. Dark hair, greying, lean face lined with care, the leathery skin of a man of the outdoors. The eyes were concealed, evasive, hard to read. She glanced down briefly at the hand holding the gun. Immaculate. Possibly even manicured. Not a man of the soil, then. His light summer suit was of the best-quality linen, his shirt fresh and starched. In the close proximity in which he was holding her, she detected a whiff of French cologne and a trace of expensive tobacco.

  “You have done nothing. But you have something of mine, I understand.”

  “Ah! That wretched little Demetrios! He hurried to you with the news of my surprising inheritance? I’ll have something to say to him when I get back!”

  “No. He has gone away. He has performed his last service. For you and for me. Unless … But do not think too badly of the boy—it is thanks to him that you are not already dead.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that.”

  “My plans were, as you have guessed, to kill Merriman and his charming wife. Two lives. And then his daughter. Three lives.”

  “But I’m not his daughter! Never have been!” Letty burst out in relief. “This is an awful mistake you’re making!”

  “Yes. I know that. Thanks to Demetrios, I know that. He hurried to tell us our error. Unfortunately, our attempt to kill you off at Eleusis was already in train before he could transmit his message to me. His father and his uncle were already on the road and had their instructions. He was concerned for you. Split loyalties … always a danger … it was time to withdraw him. I wait, but do not hear you enquire about the health of the man you shot?”

  “I don’t give a spit for his health! Why on earth should I? He didn’t have one of my bullets in him anyway … Your useless gunman was hit by a shard of marble from a temple column. The goddess intervened. Blame it on the goddess!”

  The car veered wildly again, throwing her violently to one side and back again as the villainous-looking youth at the wheel made his views clear.

  Gunay reached forward, slapped him on the head, and hissed a vicious warning. Then: “You must forgive him. You were speaking of his cousin.”

  “So. If it’s my lack of sympathy you’ve got a grouse about-put me out here and I’ll walk back. As penance. On my knees, if you like. I’ll guarantee to visit the patient in hospital and apologise, as you’re so concerned … Big bottom, hole in the head, he can’t be too difficult to find … Cousins! Troublesome nuisances! Look—if it’s a vendetta against the Merriman family you’re waging, I don’t qualify. I say again: I’m not a blood relation. Not a drop in common. I can offer you five male cousins from the female line all arriving by boat next week,” she added hopefully. “And well deserving of extermination—golfers all, I understand.”

  “No deal,” he said.

  The car hit the open road and accelerated aggressively eastwards in the direction of Cape Sounion. The donkey and foot traffic they encountered veered off the road out of their way, alerted by the blast of the horn. Gunay clicked the safety catch back on his gun and slid it away in his pocket, confident, Letty realised with a chill, that there was no possibility of her escape.

  “No deal,” he repeated. “Lady Merriman’s cousins are of no interest to me. But there is an arrangement I want
to offer you, Miss Talbot. In return for your life.”

  Chapter 36

  Montacute raced back upstairs for the third time and asked for Theotakis’s number.

  “They’ve got Laetitia Talbot,” he said.

  He spoke clearly into the telephone so that Thetis could follow the conversation. “That little shit Demetrios lured her to the back door. She went off with the wine merchant, according to the maid who was out at the back emptying a brush pan into the bin. She didn’t see the car—it was parked around the corner—but she heard it. Engine left running. No, of course not! I’ve checked with the firm. The owner is at home having his breakfast and was planning to come over to see Miss Talbot in an hour or so. Not much of a description from Maria. Can’t blame her. He looked just like what he said he was … presentable … well-off … Greek. Medium height, dark skin, Sunday-best clothes … Yes, I know … just like a thousand other blokes out and about this morning … A quarter of an hour ago? Let’s say a bit more.” He glanced guiltily at Thetis. “Say twenty-five minutes. I was distracted. Roadblocks? Can we get the roads watched? No idea in which direction … could be anywhere.”

  He listened for a moment, his eyes on Thetis’s stricken face. “Look—is this the right moment, Markos? Can’t this wait? I must get out and—They’ve found something? The name I gave you matched one on the records. Which records are we talking about? Turkish? Ministry for Exchange and Resettlement? Soulios Gunay. Tobacco farmer. Ah. And the Ministry of Internal Affairs … related to the Athenian Volos family. Demetrios! I’ll have his hide! Do what you can in the Plaka, Markos. You’ve got their address. I’ll screw a few thumbs around here.”

  As he put down the receiver, Montacute’s eye was caught by Letty’s satchel hanging on the back of her chair. He opened it up, running a hand through the contents. “Well, that’s one thing at least! It’s gone. Her gun. She must have got it in her pocket.”