by Nick Elliott
‘What?’
‘Vanished without trace. His daughter called. She’s in a state.’
‘But why call you?’
‘Because she believes it’s to do with the Lady Monteith case. And she’s not calling the police.’
‘Let me get something straight, Claire. Given that it seems Alastair Marshall was involved, can I assume this isn’t just a CMM cold case. Is it one of his IMTF affairs by any chance?’
The timing of Alastair’s death, the note he’d left, had got me wondering.
She leaned forward. ‘Your intuition serves you well, Angus. Normally Alastair would have handled this. Now, that’s my job. And the IMTF have told me to enrol you – for this case. That’s if you’re willing.’
I didn't like the way this was going. I wasn't a spook, I was a freelance marine insurance investigator. But I'd got myself involved in the IMTF’s murky dealings before and now it seemed I was getting dragged in again.
‘Told you to?’
‘Well they asked whether you would be suitable and I said yes, you would.’
‘Why, Claire? I need to know what their interest is.’
‘This might sound ridiculous but they don’t know themselves – or so they say. Only that Alastair had opened a case file but he hadn’t briefed anyone. He died before he had chance, or before he was ready to.’
I told her then what Kostas had told me: that Alastair had left a message.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I met Kostas at Alastair’s house yesterday. He told me about the message. What do you make of it?’
So she was ahead of me. Not surprising; the IMTF was an intelligence agency after all. They’d have wanted Alastair’s house, his computers, files, everything locked down. They’d sent Claire to do it.
‘I’ve no idea who or what Eastfield is, never mind 176. I’m meeting Kostas at the house tomorrow.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Sure,’ I said, realising I sounded unenthusiastic.
‘Angus, are you with me on this?’
‘I’ll be with you – I’m talking about the IMTF now not the CMM. I’ll be with you when I know what the assignment is. And what outcome you’re expecting. This works both ways, Claire. I signed the OSA after the last time. You must have a theory at least. I’m not tearing into some dubious escapade blindfold.’
She was trying to supress her laughter.
‘What?’
‘Sorry,’ she said reaching over and putting a hand on my arm.
‘What?’ I said again irritably.
‘It’s just the way you sound so indignant when you say that. After the last time, Angus, I’d have said tearing into dubious escapades blindfold was your speciality.’
We both laughed. She was good at defusing tense situations. I called over for more drinks. This time she ordered a hot chocolate.
‘So what do you reckon? Any theories? And what’s the IMTF’s daily rate by the way?’ I was as mercenary as the next freelance when it came to business.
‘Well, to your second question, not too bad: five thousand a day - sterling, plus expenses; as from today.’
That sounded okay. If I’d handled this case for the CMM I’d be lucky to get a third of that rate.
‘As to a theory, if I had one I’d tell you. The IMTF tracks all our cases and most other P&I Clubs’ too. You know that. But it would have to be something pretty serious. And that message he left you makes me think he knew his life was in danger. I don’t believe his death was from natural causes for one minute. And now Buchan’s gone AWOL.’
‘So let’s assume Alastair discovered something about the Lady Monteith case and that knowledge led to his death,’ I speculated. ‘That’s a stretch in itself given all the other cases he’d be tracking that could have caused him trouble, but let’s assume for now. It’s a cold case. The owner thinks the cargo’s something special, possibly gold, and he wants to claim it from the wreck. In the process, he disappears, possibly kidnapped. Alastair’s dead, possibly murdered. Someone wants to get to the cargo first.’
‘Or cover the whole thing up.’
‘Yes, for reasons unknown.’
‘Like everything else about this case,’ she said sounding exasperated. ‘We know bugger all.’
‘So what about this theory you mentioned of something more sinister behind this than just a treasure hunt?’
She took a sip of her drink before deciding, I imagined, what she could and couldn’t tell me.
‘I meant what I said just now. I’m not going into this blindfold.’
‘I can’t tell you what I don’t know. It’s just that we’ve had an alert from Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency. A request actually for any information relating to cargo documentation on those British flag ships commandeered by the Japanese and sunk in Asia Pacific waters during World War Two.’
‘And Alastair knew of this?’
‘Yes, he did. It’s an unusual request but we work closely with the PSIA from time to time so we said we’d look into it. The Lady Monteith came up of course but there was no trace of any cargo documentation. We asked them what was behind the request and they said it was in response to a query from one of their politicians, and that they’d advise us further when the enquiry had been dealt with.’
‘Nebulous then.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
We talked on for a bit. The atmosphere in the bar was cosy but filled with clouds of cigarette smoke. The EU ban was treated as a mere suggestion in these parts.
‘I need some fresh air,’ I said. ‘Then I must get up the hill to the village.’
‘I’ll come outside with you.’
We walked along the harbour front dodging the waves as they lapped over the quayside.
‘I hate this place,’ she said.
‘It's not at its best at this time of year, and the funeral…’
‘It’s not that.’ Suddenly the mask was gone and there was a look of desperation on her face.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I said.
‘That Easter night still haunts me, Angus. I relive it when I’m awake and in my dreams. The shooting in Perama was one thing. It was almost like an exercise. I’d been trained for it. But not for what happened here.’
We had been watching the Easter Friday parade from a vantage point on the cliff above where we now walked when we’d been attacked. A man with a stiletto had surprised us. We’d grappled with him and he’d fallen to his death in the crowd of worshippers below almost pulling me over the cliff with him. I had the same flashbacks as Claire.
‘Stay with me tonight, Angus.’ She was looking directly at me. It wasn’t so long since we’d called a halt to our erratic affair but a day hadn’t passed that I didn’t think about her and our infrequent encounters. And I wanted her now.
‘Edward, the family?’
She sighed. ‘Please. We tried, believe me. It’s so complicated.’ She didn’t want to go into it any further. We went back to the hotel and to her room.
Chapter 5
I stood in Alastair Marshall’s living room looking out across the bay. The weather had partially cleared, the late morning sun occasionally shafting through gaps in the ragged clouds to sparkle on the water. The wind was still from the north bringing a chill to the air. Two wood-burning stoves, one at either end of the room, and a log fire on the back wall were throwing out more than enough heat to warm Sophia’s old bones. I was finding it too warm for comfort.
The seaward facing wall was mostly glass with sliding doors out onto a terrace. Beyond this the land fell steeply down to the bay where Alastair used to moor his boat in the summer months.
We’d already spent half the day going through his two laptops and his papers. We’d found nothing helpful. Claire had the necessary decryption codes to access his IMTF files and Alastair was a meticulous keeper of his case records but there was no mention of the Lady Monteith, of Sinclair Buchan or of its taipan, Montague Buchan. Neither was there any refer
ence to Hong Kong. The message he’d left that Kostas had handed me on our arrival was written on a scrap of paper. It had my name, my mobile phone number and the words, Eastfield and below that, 176. Nothing more.
Sophia, dressed in black, and her nephew, Kostas were with us. Sophia knew both Claire and myself from past visits to the house and we’d talked to her at the funeral. I’d explained what we needed to do. She hadn’t objected. Kostas was cooperative too. He seemed more interested in what was going to happen to the house and the land it stood on. There were five hectares of olive groves surrounding the property which Alastair had acquired forty-odd years ago before he’d built the house. I guessed Kostas had his eye on it. Claire and I had both been talking to him already but I liked to get people to repeat their accounts of events in case they changed their previous version.
‘So tell me again, Kostas. Where did you find this note and where did you find the body?’ I spoke in English for Claire’s benefit, and because my Greek was not as good as Kostas’s English.
‘I told you. The note was in my aunt’s room, in an old jewellery box he had given her many years ago. And Kyrios Alastair was lying on the jetty, where he moored his boat.’
‘But his boat wasn’t there.’
‘No. It was taken out of the water months ago. Before the first winter storms, as is usual.’
‘So what do you think he was doing down there?’
‘If I knew I would tell you.’
‘How was he lying?’
He sighed. ‘How many times? I have told the police. I have told the kyria yesterday.’ He nodded towards Claire who was staring out across the bay to the headland beyond, a view that was impossible to ignore. The house had been positioned to show it off to its full effect. Out across the bay was a wedge-shaped isthmus which, at some point millennia ago, had almost broken off from the land of which it had been a part. This rocky outcrop was the site of an ancient city which was believed to have served as a logistical staging post for Agamemnon’s forces during the Trojan Wars. Alastair had been an authority on the subject and I guess Claire was remembering his graphically imagined accounts of those times on her previous visits to the house.
I turned back to Kostas. ‘And I tell you now,’ he said in his assertive Greek manner. ’He was on his front. His face was to one side. There was some, how do you say, liquid from his mouth. It was yellow but with blood too, on the plakis, the paving. It was not pleasant to see.’
I thought about that. Arsenic? Wasn’t that used in pesticides? Was it available locally? It was too early to jump to conclusions. I thought also of Alastair, a man well into his seventies, dying a hard death so close to his home.
‘Was his clothing wet?’
‘Yes,’ Kostas said as if only just remembering. ‘It was, now you ask me.’
‘Wet enough for him to have been in the water?’
‘Certainly, yes.’
Claire seemed sure she could get hold of the autopsy report through the IMTF’s connections with Europol and through them, the Greek police. By this route she’d already ensured Alastair’s possessions, including his laptops and files, should be left untouched for her to inspect and take what she needed to take, before the police got their hands on them. The report would reveal whether he’d died from poisoning and hopefully where the poison had originated. I was also interested to know whether he’d managed to get to the jetty by himself or whether he’d been dumped there after his death.
‘Kostas, can you ask your aunt, as far as she knows, what Alastair ate in the day before you found him?’
‘We’ve been through this with the police too. His routine was the same every day. He ate yoghurt with honey and a nectarini or some other fruit every morning, and coffee. Then he worked. For lunch my aunt often made him a spanakopita or tsiropita served with some salad. He had one glass of wine, always one, and then he slept for one or two hours. It was the same every day. After his rest he went back to work. You understand she was in and out, doing the housework, shopping. She was not watching him all the time.’
‘And in the evening?’
‘That evening he was out. He went to the port. The police are not saying what he did or where he ate but it was not unusual for him to go there in the evenings.’
‘How do you know he went to the port?’
‘Well, that’s where he went. There’s nowhere else to go apart from the old village on the hill, but there’s nowhere open there at this time of year.’
‘He could have gone to a friend’s house,’ I suggested.
‘Yes. But he didn’t have so many friends that he would have gone to dinner with at this time of year. He was friendly with many locals but I don’t think he had dinner with them in their homes; in the tavernas, yes. Anyway, my aunt would have known. He would have said.’
He spoke rapidly to Sophia then said, ‘My aunt says he would always tell her but that night he left without saying where he was going; usually though to the port, unless he was leaving the island.
‘Any idea where he might have gone? Where were his places?’
‘There are not so many open at this time of year. I don’t know where he went that night. People in the port are talking about it but no-one saw him. At least no-one is saying they saw him.’
‘Did he take his car?’ He had owned an old Land Rover.
‘Yes, I believe the police found it parked in the port. He’d left it in a side street, not on the harbour front, perhaps because of the weather. The sea was coming over the waterfront that night.’
That was pretty much all we got out of them. Alastair had got up, had his breakfast, worked at his desk, had lunch and a glass of wine, slept, worked, then went into town. The following morning, Sophia had phoned her nephew Kostas who had come to the house and they’d started searching for him.
We walked down to the jetty with Kostas. It was a rough, unpaved path. Steps had been cut into the hillside where the gradient was steep. As we descended I looked around for clues but there’d been high winds and rain since they’d found the body so evidence left of Alastair, in the unlikely event that in his last dying moments he had struggled down to the jetty from the house, might anyway have been swept away.
Although, with the prevailing winter winds from the north, we were on the leeward side of the island, the sea was rough enough over here to be slapping up and over the jetty. I walked onto it and peered down into the water. On a calm day I’d have been able to see to the bottom but now the water was turbid.
‘Did the police send a diver down here, Kostas?’
‘No. I would have known. I was here all the time that they were.’
‘I need a snorkel, mask and flippers, Kostas. He had a box full of them in his workshop when I was last here. ‘Can you get them for me?’
‘What, now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you mad?’ Claire said. ‘It’s freezing and you won’t be able to see a thing.’
‘I’ll get them,’ Kostas said heading back up the path to the house.
‘I just want to take a look,’ I said.
The shock of the cold water took my breath away. Once in I pulled flippers, mask and snorkel on and swam over to my left, to the corner of the search field I'd visualised from the jetty. I peered downwards then dived.
The bottom was no more than fifteen metres down. Free divers can reach well over a hundred metres. I was not up to those depths but managed to reach the bottom without difficulty. I looked around as I swam down but saw nothing other than the murky water and then, as I dived deeper, the sandy bottom strewn with rocks. I came up for air, swam to the next sector of the semicircle I’d mapped out roughly in my mind and dived again. Nothing. I came up for air again and peered up to see Kostas and Claire looking down at me. I gave them the thumbs down for the second time and dived once more.
It was on the fifth dive that I saw it, the blurred outline of a small boat lying on the bottom a little further out from where I’d been looking. I swam towards it. As I
came closer I could make out the name on the transom: T/T Toyama Maru. I grabbed a rowlock to hold me over the dinghy. It was no more than three metres long. There was no sign of an outboard, just the rowlocks. Had Alastair rowed this little tender from its mother vessel, the Toyama Maru, back to his jetty?
I surfaced again and gave the thumbs down. Then, for the sake of appearances, moved over to the final sector and dived. By the time I climbed out of the water I was shaking with cold.
‘You’re blue!’ Claire said handing me the towel.
‘Nothing down there I could see,’ I said, my teeth chattering. ‘Let’s get back to the house. I need a hot shower.’
I had my reasons for not telling Kostas or Claire what I’d seen. I didn’t know Kostas well. I couldn’t trust him not to tell the local police or his pals around the island what I’d found. As for Claire, I would tell her later. The problem I had was not so much with her but with the IMTF. She would be compelled to report everything back to them – or so I assumed – and I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I planned to keep as strong a measure of independence as possible. The management of CMM, Claire included, understood this was how I worked. But the IMTF was government, or quasi-government. I knew very little about them and until I did, I’d keep some matters to myself. I was probably in breach of the terms of my enrolment, but since no-one had told me what those terms were I felt free to make my own rules. Then again, they were paying me handsomely.
I spent a long time in the shower thinking. It seemed Alastair had rowed the tender ashore from a bigger vessel probably already knowing he’d been poisoned. Had he eaten poisoned food on the Toyama Maru? What had he been doing there anyway? Meeting people he thought he could trust, or was he coerced?
He was a wily old bird. He wouldn’t have easily been deceived. Then what? Had he escaped in the tender? He must have. Otherwise his captors, having poisoned him, would have simply dumped him over the side with a length of anchor chain round his ankles. But why poison him if they could have disposed of him that way over the side without leaving this trail of evidence? And the tender I’d found was small, suitable for a small yacht perhaps - unless it was used as a workboat by the crew of the mother vessel when they were scraping and painting the hull? Big yachts often carried small dinghies like the one I’d seen for use as work boats.