by Gavin Scott
Once down on the cobbled seafront they walked westward away from the moored boats until they came to an old wooden bench by a slipway where they sat, listening to the lapping of the water beneath a sky studded with stars. There were doves cooing gently in a dovecote somewhere behind them.
“Do you think you can really help Alexandros find out who was trying to kill him?” asked Sophie. “Isn’t it something the police ought to be doing?”
“Absolutely they should,” said Forrester. “But I don’t think there is a policeman on the island – and by the time they bring anybody over from Athens the killer might have another go. Besides, from our experience of Inspector Kostopoulos I don’t have very much faith in the Athenian constabulary. Do you?”
“What worries me,” said Sophie reluctantly, “is that if you don’t succeed and General Alexandros is killed, you’ll blame yourself.”
“Well that’s a great encouragement for me to get it right, isn’t it?” said Forrester, smiling.
“Get what right, boss?” said a soft voice in the darkness. They turned to see Patrakis standing behind them.
“Come and sit down, Yanni,” said Forrester, shifting along the bench to make room. “I’m talking about the fact that General Alexandros has asked me to help him work out who might have been behind this afternoon’s events. I wondered what you thought might have happened.”
“Who might have wanted to kill Colonel Stephanides?” said Yanni.
“He probably wasn’t the one they intended to kill,” said Forrester.
“Why not, boss?” said Yanni.
“Well because—” began Sophie but Forrester had heard something in Yanni’s tone, and stopped her.
“Let’s assume for a moment that Giorgios was the intended victim. Do you have any thoughts as to who might have wanted to do it, Yanni, and why?”
“Where is the General’s wife right now?” asked Yanni.
“You know as well as I do,” said Forrester. “She’s up at the monastery with—”
“Colonel Stephanides,” said Yanni. There was a pause.
“Why shouldn’t she be?” said Sophie. “He’s her husband’s friend and he’s been injured. It’s only natural.”
“Don’t forget I spent the day here while thou sought thy stone, boss,” said Yanni. “And like always, my ears were open.”
“And heard what?” asked Forrester.
“Conversations,” said Yanni enigmatically.
“Between whom?”
“Between the lady of the house and her friend the colonel.”
“You’re not suggesting there’s anything between them?” asked Sophie.
“Well, I also talk to people,” said Yanni. “People who have been on this island for a long time, and they have a story to tell about those three.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Forrester.
“They say,” replied Yanni, clearly relishing the moment, “that Giorgios and Ari and Penelope were all children here together. They say when they were young that Giorgios and Penelope could not be separated, and that if anyone had asked which of them was going to marry the other it would have been those two, not Penelope and Alexandros. Stephanides was a young man of great beauty and they say that she had eyes only for him.”
“But she married Ari,” said Sophie. “Why?”
“That I cannot answer, my lady,” said Yanni. “But they say that the reason Giorgios was in Limani Sangri the night we arrived was that he and Alexandros had quarrelled about what the Abbot was going to do in the evening. With the relics.”
Forrester thought back to the strained conversation between Alexandros and the colonel that he had interrupted that morning – and began to see it in a different light.
“You think it’s possible that Alexandros was trying to kill Stephanides himself?”
“I don’t know, boss,” replied Yanni, “I wasn’t there. But if I had seen my wife whispering to a man the way I saw Mrs. Alexandros whispering to Giorgios, I might have decided to kill him just to be on the safe side.”
“But the false message, the one that brought Ari to the shrine, was just for him. Giorgios was only there by chance,” said Sophie.
“And how do we know that?” said Forrester.
“Because Ari… told us,” said Sophie, her voice trailing off as she realised the significance of what she was saying.
“Exactly,” said Forrester.
“But surely we saw Ari trying to help Giorgios?” said Sophie. “When we came into the glade?”
Forrester stared at her, reconstructing the scene in his mind. “We saw him kneeling beside Giorgios, certainly. I assumed he was trying to lift the stone, but when I think about it I can’t be sure. It was only when I got a branch and we used it as a lever that we actually shifted it.”
Forrester tried to imagine a version of what he had seen in which Alexandros was leaning over the injured Stephanides, gloating. But it was hard.
“Anyway, weren’t the colonel and Ari comrades in arms during the war?” said Sophie. “And doesn’t Giorgios still seem to be Alexandros’s right-hand man? Remember how he headed Helena Spetsos off at the Archbishop’s reception?”
“That doesn’t stop there being bad blood between them over the woman,” said Yanni. “This thou knowest, boss.”
“All the same,” said Forrester, “I find it very hard to think of Alexandros trying to kill Stephanides by bringing down the shrine on him. If he wanted to do him harm he’d have attacked him face to face.”
“You made a very similar argument in Athens,” said Sophie, “when we began to wonder if Alexandros had used poison to kill Jason Michaelaides. You said a man like him wouldn’t use something like poison. And now you say a man like him wouldn’t blow up a shrine to crush his enemy.”
“Fair point,” admitted Forrester. “It does sound rather like special pleading. But there is the fact that he himself asked me to try and find out just what happened this afternoon.”
“That wasn’t quite what he said,” Sophie pointed out. “What he actually asked was for you to find out who was trying to kill him. Which, if he was trying to kill somebody else, would be a very good piece of distraction.”
“It would,” said Forrester, “but I have to admit I find it difficult to believe that’s what he was doing.”
“Well,” said Sophie implacably, “perhaps you should try harder.”
Sensing the clash between them, Yanni deftly shifted the topic of conversation. “So what was happening at Limani Sangri?” he said.
“We found the wreck but not the stone,” said Sophie.
“And no body?”
“No body,” said Forrester.
“It looks as if both Kretzmer and the stone were lost at sea,” said Sophie.
“That man has nine lives,” said Yanni. “I think he still has several to live.”
As Forrester opened his mouth to reply he suddenly found himself replaying the conversation with the fisherman at Limani Sangri: the bizarre conversation in which an obviously compos mentis individual had behaved as if he were an imbecile. And suddenly he knew why.
“Kretzmer was in the village all along,” he said as the thought formulated itself in his mind. “He was holding somebody hostage. That was why the old man said nothing. He wouldn’t lie but he wasn’t going to create a situation where we might go blundering into the village and get somebody shot.”
“You’re just guessing,” said Sophie. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Forrester. “But I’ve still got to go back.”
“What makes you think, even if you’re right, that he’s still there?” said Sophie.
“He may not be,” said Forrester, “but I think we have to go back. And even if he’s left the village he may not be far away.”
“Unless he’s taken another boat,” said Sophie.
Forrester cast his mind’s eye back to the waterfront of Limani Sangri. There had been very few boats there and none of them had been suitable for going long dist
ances across the Aegean Sea. As he thought about boats, he realised something else. “If we go back we should go by sea,” he said. “He won’t be expecting us that way.”
“My boat is ready,” said Yanni. “When dost thou wish to leave?”
18
THE GUN EMPLACEMENT
When Forrester woke the next morning it was still dark, but the first hints of light were already appearing in the sky and he knew he had to return to the grove before they left for Limani Sangri, because there were questions there that had not been answered. He got out of bed quietly, dressed, scribbled a note for Sophie promising to be back within the hour, and let himself out of the kastello.
As always, those first breaths of morning air energised him and made him feel as if he was alive at the beginning of the world, and it seemed only minutes before he was up among the pines and walking swiftly uphill towards the grove. The stones of the shrine and its fallen pillars glowed white in the semi-darkness, and with her covering gone, the statue of Maia seemed to be looking directly at him from her plinth. He stood for a long moment, taking in the geography of the scene, from the pediment to the stone amphora from which the spring still trickled, unperturbed.
As it had done, of course, long before man and his troubles came to the island.
Then he went over to the shrine, knelt down at the base of the pillar, which he calculated must have fallen first, and sniffed. Yes, there it was: that pungent almond smell he remembered so well. Nobel 808, the standard plastic explosive of the SOE. He remembered the feel of it in his hands, so like the plasticine he had played with as a child, but green, always green. And after four years of warfare in these islands, there was no mystery about how someone had come to get their hands on it: the stuff was everywhere, left by commandos, partisans, bandits and regular troops. On the other hand, not everyone had been trained to use it. He shone his torch on the marble, picking out the black soot left by the explosion and working out exactly where the explosive had been placed. Then, kneeling close to the ground, he moved slowly away from the shrine, looking for something among the pine needles. Within three feet he had found it: the remains of the tiny cylinder that had been ejected when the plastic went off, away from the direction of the explosion. He had used dozens of the things during the last few years – the timers that allowed the operator to get away before the charge went off. He examined it closely: this one, he knew, would have given the killer just ten minutes to get away after he had planted his bomb.
But of course it wasn’t a bomb, really. It was a demolition device. An odd way to try and kill someone, Forrester thought. If the idea was to murder either Ari Alexandros or Giorgios Stephanides, surely it would have been simpler to have planted a proper bomb in the grove rather than trying to bring a shrine down on top of them? And if the would-be killer had intended to kill Stephanides alone, or indeed Alexandros alone, how could he be sure that either one of them would be in the path of the falling pediment?
He looked into the blank white eyes of the goddess. “What did you see, Maia? What did you think about the bastard who was setting out to destroy your shrine?” The goddess stared back at him, her lips still curved in the ambiguous smile she had worn for two and a half thousand years. She was impervious to such insults, serenely detached from all the desperate intrigues of mortal men and women.
Pine needles don’t echo. They don’t ring to the noise of footsteps but rather deaden sound. Nevertheless Forrester heard it: the soft sound of a shoe as someone moved into the trees behind him, and without conscious thought he threw himself to the right as the shot rang out, and rolled swiftly into the shadow of the trees even as he landed.
The Luger was out of his pocket and in his hand before he had come to a halt and he fired back blindly in the direction from which the shot had come. He knew there was almost no hope of hitting anyone, but that didn’t matter: as much as anything he wanted to make sure that his attacker’s second shot went wide.
But there was no second shot; even as Forrester dived from the position in which he had fired to the shelter of the nearest tree he knew that his assailant had fled. The ground sloped steeply down from where the shot had come and whoever had fired it had clearly gone straight down the hill. By the time Forrester found himself racing down that same slope there was no sign of anyone ahead of him.
Suddenly he was out of the trees, with the path leading to the Monastery of St. Thomas on his left and the trail to Kastello Drakonaris on his right. Which way had his assailant gone? He stood still for a moment, drew in a deep breath and began to move swiftly along the right-hand path.
* * *
The first person he met when he went through the front door was Yanni Patrakis. “I was coming to wake you, boss,” he said. “It’s time to set off.” Forrester was highly tempted to go through the kastello to find out if there was anyone awake and smelling of cordite, but decided it was simply not practical, so he went to wake Sophie. Half an hour later all three of them were in the tiny cabin of the caïque as it emerged from the bay and turned east along the coast.
By the time the sun rose they were motoring through a milky sea of mist with Yanni at the wheel, still turning over the previous day’s events in his mind.
“What about the English?” he said, as Sophie handed him a mug of coffee. “The English from the boat. Any of them might want to kill the General?”
“Well, we should consider it,” said Forrester. He had left a note for Alexandros reminding him to track down the shepherd boy who had delivered the message about the fake rendezvous in the grove, and find out who had given him his instructions, but he had a strong suspicion whoever had done so would have made sure this line of enquiry was a dead end. And of course if Alexandros had engineered the whole thing, the message would have been fictional too. But they had at least forty minutes motoring around the island before they neared the Sangri inlet and going through the available information would be time well spent. “Let’s go through the list. As far as I know Durrell has never met either Ari or Giorgios before. He’s a poet, really. This newspaper job is just something the army has given him. I met him a couple of times in Alexandria – all we talked about was writing. My instinct is that he has nothing to do with this. Charles Runcorn is an academic, a historian, one of the great gossips. I’d have counted him out but for something that Sophie came across in Athens.” Yanni glanced at Sophie, who smiled.
“Ah, yes. He came to see Helena Spetsos while she was doing a somewhat risqué painting of Ariadne,” she said. “He said he was there on behalf of the British Council, but frankly I didn’t believe him. I wondered then if Helena had some kind of hold over him. I still wonder.”
“Such a hold that she might tell him to murder somebody and he might do it?” asked Yanni.
“Well, put like that it sounds far-fetched, but if she was the killer he might have been an accomplice, and it’s a possibility we should bear in mind,” said Forrester. “He does seem to have helped her persuade Durrell to add Hydros to his itinerary. And had that not happened, of course, neither would the attack.”
“What about your friend David Venables?” asked Sophie. “After all, he was the one who began the expedition that ended with them coming here.”
“Venables is a tough egg,” said Forrester. “I’ve known him for a long time and I know he’s cynical and ambitious. But as you heard tonight he’s a man of the left. The last thing he’d want to do is kill Ari and prevent him taking command of ELAS.”
“What if Venables was trying to kill Giorgios?” said Sophie. “For some reason we don’t know yet.”
“Perhaps because the colonel was trying to persuade the General not to go over to the communists?” said Yanni.
Forrester considered. “Possible. But if Stephanides was trying to do that, I’m certain Venables wouldn’t have tried to do away with him in a way that would have endangered Alexandros: that would be totally counterproductive. So for the time being I’m putting Venables fairly low on the list of sus
pects. But let’s not forget his friend Keith Beamish. We know he was in the glade earlier in the day.”
“But he called us over and talked to us,” said Sophie. “If he’d been there to set some kind of booby trap he’d hardly have let us see him, would he?”
“Unless that was to throw us off the scent,” said Forrester. “A sketchbook is a pretty good cover.”
“I find it hard to believe though,” said Sophie. “He’s a nice man and a good artist.”
Forrester laughed. “And good artists can’t be criminals?” he said. “What about Caravaggio?”
“What did he do, boss?” said Yanni.
“Well, if you’d been in Rome in 1606 you might have come across him strolling through the city with a bunch of armed retainers looking for trouble,” said Forrester. “He killed at least one man there and probably others in Naples and Milan. Even the Pope issued a death warrant for him.”
“You’re not seriously telling me Keith Beamish was some kind of Caravaggio, are you? I mean – he does watercolours,” said Sophie.
“I’d forgotten that, my love,” said Forrester. “The use of watercolours alone, of course, should prove his innocence.” He ducked away as she swiped at him, but as he peered into the mist ahead he saw nothing but a jumble of faces each competing for his attention: Durrell, Venables, Beamish, Runcorn, Helena Spetsos, Ariadne, Penelope. Even a jealous Alexandros himself if Stephanides had been the intended victim. He closed his eyes and let the images fade away, and by the time the sun had fully risen the sea was as still as if it had been painted and they were approaching the headland at the mouth of the bay of Limani Sangri.
With a conscious effort he put the murder attempt out of his mind and concentrated on the German.
“It’s a good thing we’re coming by sea, but we have to face up to the fact that as soon as we round the headland and enter the inlet, Kretzmer may well recognise the boat.”