by Adam Croft
A computer monitor peered briefly over the top of the marble counter, a number of post-it notes stuck around the edge of the screen. Behind Maria’s chair was a series of small pigeonholes, containing either passports or keys — in some cases, both. In short, it looked much like any reception desk in any hotel in any tourist resort in any part of the world.
‘Indeed, but there won’t be any nails going into any coffins until we’ve found out who killed Jennifer Alexander,’ Hardwick replied.
Ellis Flint, sensing better results from a less direct approach, steered the conversation back towards the personal before Maria could think of a response. ‘What do you think your father will do now? If the hotel has to close, I mean.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, showing the first sign of emotion since Hardwick and Flint first met her upon checking in at the Kollidis. ‘Retire, perhaps. He does not have much money, but it is better to retire now and lose no more, no?’
‘But he’s been running this place for years. Surely he must have some money put aside,’ Hardwick said, like the proverbial bull in a china shop.
Maria went silent for a few moments, seemingly reminded of some painful past memory.
‘I think my mother has most of the money, Inspector.’
‘Your mother? Where is she?’ Ellis asked.
‘We do not know. She left ten years ago. Business was still good then, but one day she decided to leave and she has not come back since. I think perhaps my father and her had been arguing many times. I do not know for sure. But the business was good, so it cannot be because of that. Then, one day, we woke up in the morning and she had left.’
‘She left? Why?’ Ellis asked.
‘Promise me you won’t say anything to my father. You see, he is not always a pleasant man. When my mother was here, he was a violent man. He used to beat my mother and make her feel terrible. I think this is why she left.’
‘Did she say anything before she went?’ Hardwick asked, Ellis Flint having been placated into silence.
‘No. I did not even see her go. My father woke me up one morning and said to me she had gone during the night.’
Hardwick’s eyebrows rose. ‘So you didn’t see her go? What did she take with her?’
‘Nothing. No clothes, no possessions. My father said she took only the money. Since that day, we have had no money. I can see you think this is strange, Inspector. It is true, many people thought this at the time. The police were here, and they gave my father a hard time but in the end they went. They must have believed him.’
Or been unable to prove otherwise, Hardwick thought, as he exchanged glances with Ellis, who, for once, seemed to have cottoned on rather quickly.
29
‘Do you not think it rather odd,’ Hardwick said as they walked slowly into town, ‘that Mrs Giannakopoulos would just disappear without taking any personal belongings at all? Aside from her husband’s bank cards, that is.’
‘Depends,’ Ellis replied. ‘If things got a bit heated and she just felt that she had to go. Must happen all the time.’
‘I’m sure that story does come up all the time, yes. Bigfoot has been reported hundreds of times, Ellis. Doesn’t mean that it’s ever true, though. I mean, why would she not even say goodbye to her only daughter? Does that not strike you as a bit odd? In fact, I know it does. I saw the look you gave me in there.’
‘What, so you think Stavros was lying to his daughter? And the police?’
‘Well, why not? Often it’s the simplest explanation which is the correct one, Ellis. Think about it. Perhaps another argument did ensue. Perhaps Stavros did get violent towards his wife again. Perhaps he got so violent, he killed her. How do you explain that one away? Simple. You dispose of the body and tell everyone she’s walked out on you. A few well-timed cash machine withdrawals to add credence to the story and grab your money before the accounts are frozen should any suspicion arise, and you’re home and dry, provided you can keep up the pretence. And let’s face it, Stavros Giannakopoulos has proved himself to be a pretty shady character by all accounts. If you’ll pardon the pun.’
‘What pun?’ Ellis asked, oblivious.
‘Accounts, Ellis. Mr Giannakopoulos said that evening that he needed to go back to his office to work on his accounts, but we’ve since found out that he was actually… well, reviewing his CCTV footage. Of the sun loungers. And the young ladies on the sun loungers.’
‘That doesn’t make him a murderer though, does it? Just a bit pervy.’
‘Just a bit— Oh, Ellis, come on. That’s how these things start. Why do you think the police tend to stop people with the odd brake-light out, or for not indicating at a junction? It’s because they’ll usually then go on to find out the person has no insurance or is dealing drugs or something. Statistically, those who commit small, minor crimes often do so because they seem insignificant to them based on the bigger ones they commit. It’s a fact. And we can only base our investigation on the facts. The problem is, there aren’t many facts at the moment.’
‘Come on, Kempston. You’re always telling me off for letting my imagination run away with me. You know more than most how difficult it is to dispose of a body. Practically impossible, in fact. And in the middle of a bloody tourist resort?’
‘We don’t know for sure that it was during the tourist season that Mrs Giannakopoulos disappeared, do we? And anyway, practically impossible isn’t quite impossible. Many people do succeed. Look around you, Ellis. There’s the sea, for one. Rowing out in the dead of night and dropping a weighted body as shark food would be a good start. Or there’s the dense undergrowth on the edge of the resort. The foxes and wildlife would feast for days. Of course, with this searing heat the best place to leave a dead body is out in the open, as long as you can be sure no-one will spot it. If the body was left uncovered in this heat, it’d decompose in half the time, what with the local animal population helping it along. Then again, things could have stayed closer to home. The Kollidis Beach Hotel stands on quite a bit of its own land. You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mrs Giannakopoulos was buried underneath the bar.’
Ellis Flint narrowed his eyebrows and stayed silent for a few moments, trying to digest all of the information.
‘So you think she’s dead, then?’ he asked, finally.
‘Not necessarily, no. Purely conjecture, Ellis. Worth bearing in mind, but I think we’re probably better off concentrating on the dead body we do know exists for now, don’t you?’
***
29
Back at the pool bar, Ellis Flint was trying desperately to compose himself despite all that was going on around him. That was the problem: stuff was going on around him. A murder had been committed, yet everyone was trying to pretend nothing had happened. For some, of course, it was more difficult than other — James had barely been seen, having been mostly comforted by Darryl and Alicia. The atmosphere was a strange mixture of grief, suspicion and hope.
As Ellis shifted uneasily, he noticed that his stool seemed to wobble on the uneven slabs. His eyebrows shot up.
‘Kempston!’ he hissed. ‘Look! The patio slabs aren’t even!’
‘Ellis,’ he replied, without taking his eyes off the newspaper, ‘even I’m not quite that obsessive over neatness and order. When have you ever seen a perfectly flat patio? Slabs shift.’
‘Yes, especially when there’s a decomposing body underneath them!’
Hardwick’s eyes rose slowly from the newspaper, not looking at Ellis nor at the patio. Instead, he called out to the barman.
‘Arjun, when was this patio laid?’
‘Um, when the bar was built. Fifteen years ago, maybe?’
‘So it was laid before Mrs Giannakopoulos left?’
‘Yes, definitely. I remember them arguing about how much it cost to build for quite a while before she went.’
Hardwick smiled and returned to his newspaper.
‘See, Ellis? Wild theories will get you nowhere.’
‘Bu
t it was you who—‘
‘Nowhere, Ellis. Nowhere.’
30
Hardwick stood in the shade between two cream-cladded buildings — a bank and a jeweller’s shop — and gazed downward towards the coast. The luscious coarse green grass between the buildings gave way to patches of yellowing burnt areas as the gentle slope careered down towards the sea.
White buildings stood proudly against the shoreline, topped with stunning pink bougainvillaea, as the azure waters licked the golden sands that enjoyed the gentle, carefree weight of the children that played there.
The buildings were indistinguishable and the children little more than ants, dots in the distance. Hardwick liked this view. He liked to observe distant dots, knowing that there was no way that any one of them could see him stood up in the town, relaxing in the shade as he contemplated recent events.
It was in this place that he could properly take everything in, without the glaring sun; the prying eyes of others. With the distance which enabled him to take everything on board.
He ran through the events of the evening in his mind. At 9.45pm Stavros had left the bar, claiming he had to do some work on his accounts, but instead opting to watch back CCTV footage of scantily-clad holidaymakers. Fifteen minutes later, Darryl Potts took Alicia back to her room as she was feeling unwell. At 10.30, Jennifer stormed off back to her room, with James going to check on her around a quarter of an hour later. By 10.50, James had returned to the bar as Jennifer wouldn’t let him into the apartment. At this point, then, Jennifer Alexander was still alive.
Nick Roder left the bar around 11.15, with Hayley and Emma going to bed around midnight. Ellis, Ryan and Paul went shortly after. The only other people left had been Hardwick himself and James, who had not left the bar between coming back at 10.50 and the next morning, as the CCTV evidence had proven. The main suspects, then, were Nick, Hayley, Emma, Ryan and Paul. And Ellis.
The possibility was not lost on Hardwick. As much as Ellis was his trusted friend — and he’d never use that word about anyone publicly — his overly logical and fact-based mind just couldn’t look past the reality that Ellis was a suspect, with just as much opportunity to murder Jennifer Alexander as anyone. Hardwick was just pleased that he didn’t seem to have a motive, thereby knocking him further down the list than most.
Nick Roder had had a motive, though. Being publicly humiliated by Jennifer hadn’t best pleased him, and the consumption of alcohol could do remarkable things to a man’s brain. That could be said of any of the people that night, though.
As for the other two lads in the group, Paul Erenson had admitted to a history of violence against women, but had no visible reason to kill Jennifer. Ryan Farley, on the other hand, seemed like a fairly quiet, unassuming person but had disappeared for a few minutes — although that was the next morning — for a seemingly spurious reason. And it was the quiet and unassuming ones you had to watch out for.
As far as Hardwick could see, the only motive that either Hayley Saunders or Emma Benson had was that Hayley had been having some sort of holiday romance with Nick, and had witnessed him trying it on with Jennifer that evening. Emma, although she had no motive on the surface of things, did seem unnaturally protective over Hayley.
Ah, yes. And Arjun Beqiri, the Albanian barman. He had been the last man standing at the bar, naturally, as he’d had to lock up at the end of the night. But what reason would he have to kill Jennifer Alexander? True, she had turned down his advances but then she’d had to do so a number of times with a number of different people. One of the downsides to being extraordinarily attractive, Hardwick supposed. And Jennifer was hardly the first holidaymaker Arjun had tried chatting up, and certainly not the first to have rejected him. It just didn’t add up.
And then there was the problem of Ellis. The possibility just wouldn’t leave Hardwick’s mind. It was the drinking. He’d never seen Ellis drink that much in one evening before, and they say you never truly get to know someone until you know them drunk. And Ellis had been very drunk. Was this a reason to suspect him, though?
The more Hardwick thought about it, the more the net widened. Whoever killed Jennifer had to be someone she trusted, as all the signs were that she’d opened the door to the apartment and let her killer in. The problem was, she didn’t seem to trust anyone. Those with motives, then, had no opportunity. And those with the opportunity, had no motive. That could mean only one thing: Hardwick was missing a vital piece of information.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Ellis said as he rounded the corner and sidled up alongside Hardwick. ‘Admiring the view?’
‘Yes, until you frightened the life out of me.’
‘Heh. In a world of your own again, were you?’
‘Unfortunately so,’ Hardwick replied.
‘Who was that woman?’ Ellis asked, as the pair started to walk back towards the town.
‘Hmmm?’
‘I saw you about half an hour ago, talking to some Greek-looking woman in the café opposite the market. Just wondered who she was as I don’t recognise her from the apartment complex.’
‘Oh, just following up on a lead. Tell me, Ellis, do you remember everything that happened the night Jennifer Alexander died?’
‘What do you mean by everything? If you mean could I have blacked out or forgotten something, no. Why?’
‘Oh, just asking.’
31
Hardwick knew that brains generally did the best thinking when they weren’t being forced, but instead left to subconsciously mull over the information in the background. It was with this in mind that he had convinced Ellis that it might be a good idea to explore some of the island’s culture and heritage, allowing his conscious mind to wander away from the Kollidis Beach Hotel for at least a few hours. Ellis, though, was less than convinced.
‘Kempston, we’ve not got long before most of our suspects will be leaving and heading back to England. And you want to waste the few hours we’ve got left looking at bits of old pottery?’
‘We’re not wasting any time, Ellis,’ Hardwick replied. ‘What the conscious mind can’t figure out, the unconscious mind often can. This is not only a welcome distraction, but a necessary one.’
‘In that case, can’t we stop everyone leaving? Keep them in the resort, somehow; stop them from going home.’
‘And how do you propose we do that, exactly? We already know the police can’t be involved, and we’ve hardly got the power to tell people where they can and can’t go. We’ll just have to do our best to find out who killed Jennifer Alexander before the flight leaves. And before you say it,’ Hardwick said, sensing that Ellis was about to say what he already knew he was going to say, ‘No, we wouldn’t be better off at the resort. We’d be better off resting our minds with, as you so eloquently put it, some bits of old pottery.’
Ellis was not one to argue with Hardwick’s experience of the inner workings of the human mind, no matter how much he failed to see the logic in what he had to say. To him, this was purely a waste of time.
The tour guide, who had introduced himself as Yannis, seemed far keener on the subject of his tour than most other guides Hardwick and Ellis had met. Perhaps he was new to the job, not yet disillusioned by the repetitive nature of having to tell the same stories, over and over again, to the same yet different groups of faceless tourists who either didn’t care and just wanted to get back out in the sun or who thought they were showing an interest by asking banal and inane questions.
They were barely three minutes into the tour when Ellis could hardly suppress his chuckle as the first bits of old pottery were shown. Hardwick shot him an icy look which could’ve frozen the forty-degree Greek sun within seconds.
‘This vase, which is pretty complete considering its age, was found by some architects who were building a new housing development on the outside of the town in the 1950s,’ the tour guide explained in extraordinarily good English. ‘It is quite remarkable in that it shows how the Ancient Greek myths and legends travelled
right from the mainland out to the smaller islands, being barely changed on the way. And remember, this was thousands of years ago, so there were no aeroplanes then!’
The assembled tourists laughed far more than they needed to.
‘So, when I mention the city of Troy, what comes to mind?’
‘Helen and the horse!’ a rather keen, plump American woman shouted out, as if there were gold stickers on offer.
‘Yes, absolutely. That is by far the most famous legend about Troy, but there is another legend which is much less known, but no less true. That is the story depicted on this vase. Now, in Ancient Greece homosexuality was not considered to be taboo, but instead was a natural means of male sexual pleasure without the need to procreate.’
Hardwick shifted uncomfortably as more and more pairs of eyes from the rest of the group started to move towards them. Ellis, naturally, was oblivious.
‘There are a number of different legends which show homosexuality, including the story of Apollo and Hyakinthos. The practice of homosexuality,’ the tour guide continued, ‘was only condemned much later by Christianity. It was at Troy that Zeus, the great father of the gods, cast his eyes on the handsome Trojan prince Ganymede, whom he stole off the earth by the claws of his eagle, and took to spoil up on Mont Olympos, making him his lover and cup-bearer. It is this image which is depicted on the vase, showing the eagle and the prince.’
‘Wasn’t Zeus married, though?’ a girl of no more than fourteen asked.
‘Yes, he was. Very well remembered. Zeus was married to his sister, Hera, who was a very jealous and nasty woman. She was not at all happy about Ganymedes and saw him as a rival for her husband’s affections.’