Dr. Soulis was slim, dark haired, dark skinned and entirely lovely. A waft of her perfume made Mac go slightly weak at the knees and think of things he hadn’t thought of for quite some time.
Be professional, he reminded himself.
He decided to do the same as he’d done previously and just tell her the whole story.
‘That’s really strange isn’t it? Someone breaking in and just stealing chocolate. There’s a famous burglar in Athens who steals chocolate but I’ve never heard of it over here.’
Mac was glad she’d reminded him, he’d nearly forgotten about the Chocolate Thief.
‘So you can’t tell me anything that might help?’
She shook her head. Perhaps he was on the wrong track after all.
As she stood up to go Mac said, ‘It’s a pity that there’s only you and Dr. Christodoulou who are from Greece. I was so sure.’
She sat down again, her face was thoughtful.
‘There was another one, another doctor from Greece.’
Mac looked up quickly.
‘Really? But I was told that there were only two doctors from Greece employed by the school.’
‘Well that may still be right. The doctor I’m thinking of was on attachment from Athens University so I’m not sure that would count as being employed. He was here for a couple of years or so on a scholarship doing some research on rheumatic diseases. He was very good and very cute too,’ she said with a sweet smile.
Right then Mac was slightly sad that his ‘cute’ days were over, if he’d ever had any that was.
She wrote down his name, Dr. Nikos Nicolaou. Mac looked at it as thought he might be able to tease some meaning out of the letters themselves.
Perhaps he did after all. He had a sudden thought.
‘Dr. Soulis, how long have you been in the UK, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘No, I don’t mind. I’ve been here since I was fifteen. My family moved here when my father got a job at a university in London.’
‘So you’ve been here quite some time, however, I‘m wondering about Dr. Nicolaou. If he’d not been here all that long it’s possible that he might have been a little homesick. If he’d wanted to meet up with other Greek people is there anywhere near here where he could have done that?’
She gave it some thought.
‘Yes, there is somewhere. There’s a Greek Orthodox church not too far away. I’m not sure how religious Dr. Nicolaou was but I know that they organise a lot of social events.’
She got her phone out and found the website. Mac made a note of the web address.
‘Is there anything else you can think of that might help?’ Mac asked, hoping there was so he could have a little more of her time.
‘Sorry,’ she said with a little shrug of the shoulders.
They shook hands and then she left leaving only her perfume behind.
Mac wondered at himself feeling any attraction to a woman. He’d not felt anything remotely like that since Nora died and he couldn’t help feeling more than a little guilty.
He suddenly realised the time. It was now four forty five and he had to get to Mrs. Cresswell’s office as soon as possible. Of course he got lost again and, when he finally found it, he parked at an angle and left the green Almera unlocked. He had no time.
He hobbled into the building as fast as he could and breathlessly asked the receptionist if Mrs. Cresswell was in. He was lucky, she was planning to leave in a few minutes.
She didn’t look all that happy to be helping him so late in the day but Mac didn’t care. The good side of it was that she didn’t cavil at his request and was only too happy to load the doctor’s file onto his tablet as quickly as she could. She also sent a copy to Andy.
Mac sat in his car and read the file on his tablet.
Dr. Nikos Nicolaou, twenty seven years old, was a graduate of Athens University and was studying at the school having won a medical scholarship. He specialised in rheumatic diseases and the sabbatical was part of his research into the prevalence of these diseases in Central Greece. He was going to compare the rates of these diseases compared to those in Britain. His appraisals were uniformly excellent, all rated as ‘above expectations’.
His next of kin was a Mrs. Sofia Nicolaou and it gave her address. Agiou Athiris! Mac all but cheered. He was definitely on the right track.
It also gave a UK address, a flat in Hatfield and unfortunately, very little else. Mac sat back and thought for a moment.
Before he drove off Mac looked up the church on his tablet. He fed the address into the satnav and was surprised to see that it would take him less than fifteen minutes to drive there from where he was.
As it was even nearer he first visited the flat which was now leased by an elderly couple. They’d never met the previous tenant but they said that the neighbours talked highly of him. They gave him the name of the letting agents. Mac would look them up later. He tried the neighbours but, as they weren’t in, he decided to go straight to the church.
The Church of the Four Evangelists looked like any Victorian English parish church on the outside. It was built of grey stone and had a peaked roof with a little bell tower on top. Inside though it was totally different, the church was richly decorated and glittering with gold. Mac’s eyes were especially drawn to a golden screen covering the wall behind the altar. On the screen four men were sumptuously depicted, each one of them was holding an open book. The walls were also covered with icons. Mac stopped and looked closely at one of a Madonna and child. It was beautiful.
‘Not real I’m afraid,’ a voice with a London accent said.
Mac turned to see a man in his mid-thirties, dark skinned, black haired and bearded. He was simply dressed in black trousers and a white open necked shirt. He smiled at Mac.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking for the parish priest.’
The man’s smile broadened.
‘You’ve found him.’
Mac wasn’t quite sure what he’d expected but this young, confident Londoner was definitely not it. Mac showed him his warrant card.
‘I’m Father Joseph Stavrou,’ he said as they shook hands. ‘Let’s find somewhere a bit more comfortable.’
Mac followed the priest and the aroma of coffee into a little office.
‘Coffee?’ the priest asked.
‘Yes please.’
It was proper coffee too, strong and intense.
Father Joseph cut to the chase.
‘So how can I help the police?’
‘I’m looking for a Dr. Nikos Nicolaou. Do you know him?’
The priest thought for quite a while.
‘Yes, yes I think I do but I haven’t seen him for a while. I think he worked at the Medical School in Hatfield, is that the one you’re asking about?’
Mac cheered inwardly again.
‘Yes that’s him. When was the last time you saw him?’
Father Joseph gave it some thought.
‘Well he never came to mass that much, I don’t think he was all that religious really, but we used to see him at some of our social events. I remember him telling me that he enjoyed meeting up with other Greeks as he was missing home so much. I don’t remember seeing him recently though, probably not for some months I should think. Can I ask what this is all about?’
‘Just making some enquiries,’ Mac said non-committedly. ‘Did he have any friends in your congregation, anyone he might think of staying with?’
He could see the cogs going around in the young priest’s mind. A decision was made and it went against Mac. The open, animated expression on his face was replaced with something more closed off.
‘I’m sorry but no. I didn’t know him all that well.’
Mac knew that there was no point in pushing it.
‘Can you at least try and get a message to him, if he’s still around that is?’ Mac said as he pulled a Garden City Detective card from his pocket.
Father Joseph looked a little p
uzzled.
‘I thought you were a policeman?’
‘I’m a retired policeman, currently helping the police with this case. Can you tell Dr. Nicolaou that, if he wants to meet, I can meet him as a detective rather than a policeman if he’d prefer that.’
Mac could see that the priest was still reluctant.
‘Look what harm can it do? Just tell Dr. Nicolaou that I know what happened in Agiou Athiris in 1947. I’d be really grateful if you could do that. Please?’
Mac wasn’t sure he’d totally swayed the young priest but all he could do now was hope.
As he drove back home along the motorway he tried to think of what else he could do to push the case along but nothing came to mind. He looked at the clock. He was surprised to find that it was nearly seven. When he got home he made two calls, one to Tim to confirm the pub, and the other to Eileen, his favourite taxi driver.
By seven thirty he was comfortably seated at table thirteen in the Magnets. Tim was happy. He’d bought a piece of furniture he’d noticed in a junk shop in North London. He reckoned that with a little bit of ‘TLC’, as he called it, it would be worth ten times what he paid. Tim loved a bargain.
Mac brought him up to date with the case. He thought his friend still looked a bit dubious about his lead.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing though,’ Tim conceded.
Mac suddenly wasn’t so sure. A photo being moved and something mysterious that had happened in a Greek town seventy years ago, it all seemed a bit far-fetched right at that moment.
Then his phone rang. He had a message.
‘Meet us at the church tomorrow morning at ten. Only you or there will be no meeting.’
Mac smiled a broad smile as he showed the message to Tim.
‘Ah well, perhaps you haven’t lost your touch after all then. Another pint?’
Chapter Twelve
Three days to Easter
Mac slept fitfully. Whether this was due to the pain or his excitement at what the next day might bring he wasn’t quite sure.
By six thirty he was showered and shaved and was drinking coffee and eating toast. His back grumbled at him for a while but he ignored it.
Without much hope he put Dr. Nikos Nicolaou in Google and was quite surprised when it spat out two relevant results.
The first was a PDF abstract of a medical paper ‘Epidemiology of Rheumatic Diseases: Incidence and Outcomes of Rheumatic Diseases in Rural Greece’. Mac scanned the abstract but couldn’t make much of it. The other result proved to be more interesting. It was in Greek so Mac had to get the page translated.
It was from a local news website. The first article was entitled ‘Big scandal at local hospital’ and Mac read it carefully. However it made no mention of a Dr. Nicolaou. He had to go down the page before he found another article entitled ‘Local boy wins scholarship’. The article was three and a half years old.
‘Local boy Dr. Nikos Nicolaou has won a scholarship to study in England. The scholarship will allow him to work at a medical school there and learn more about his speciality, epidemiology. Dr. Nicolaou said that ‘He hoped that he’d be able to use his studies to make the lives of people who suffer from rheumatic diseases a little easier in the years to come.’
There was a small photo. Mac looked at it for some time. It showed a young man in a classic pose, the white doctor’s coat with the stethoscope draped around his neck. The young man was tall, dark skinned and had black curly hair. He was smiling and not just with his mouth. It somehow wasn’t what Mac had been expecting.
He still had a little time so he decided to re-read Edward Chappell’s journal. He wanted to be sure that he had it all in his head for the meeting with the doctor.
He left early and was glad he’d done so as the traffic crawled at walking pace past Stevenage. Even so he was still parked outside the church a good half hour before the due time. He waited and watched but no-one came out or went in. At nine fifty eight he walked towards the church, hoping that Dr. Nicolaou had gotten there early and that it wasn’t going to be a wild goose chase.
He met Father Joseph as he entered the church.
‘Are you alone?’ the young priest asked.
‘I am.’
‘Follow me then.’
Mac noticed that he kept looking behind him as he walked. Perhaps the priest didn’t quite trust Mac.
‘Here,’ Father Joseph said as he held open a door.
Mac found his heart was beating faster as he entered. He so wanted to know what this was all about.
Inside there was a small coffee shop. Two men were sitting at a table. They both stood up when Mac entered the room. One was the young doctor, who looked quite anxious, the other was an old man in his late sixties or seventies. He had grey hair and a large grey moustache. The resemblance to the young doctor was inescapable.
The old man waved at a chair, ‘Join us, please,’ he said in accented English.
Mac sat down.
‘I am Professor Dr. Nikos Nicolaou,’ the old man said.
Now Mac was confused.
‘I thought he was Dr. Nikos Nicolaou,’ he said pointing at the young man.
The old man smiled.
‘Yes, you’re right. He’s a real doctor though whereas my doctorate was only in history. Also in my family we tend to use the same personal names. There has been a Nikos Nicolaou in each generation of our family going back centuries.’
Mac understood this concept well. If you got a large number of Irishmen together and yelled out four first names it would pretty much cover everyone there.
‘You say that you know what happened in our town in 1947. Is that right?’ the old man asked.
‘I lied,’ Mac admitted. ‘But I really want to find out what happened and I’ve got a feeling that you know all about it. By the way where’s the Chocolate Thief now, has he gone back home?’
The two men looked at each other in some wonder.
‘How did you know about him?’ the young one asked.
‘From an article I read right at the start of the case. I’ve come across quite a few burglars in my time who liked to leave their signature behind. The only one I found who stole chocolate worked in Athens. Has he gone home?’
‘Yes, he said that finding the old lady was like an omen or something. He caught the next flight home,’ the young doctor said.
‘The lady he found told me that he said something. ‘Hockey’ she thought it was.’
‘He said ‘Οχι’. It means ‘no’ in Greek.’
This now made perfect sense to Mac. It’s exactly the word someone might use when they break in only to find an old lady who had fallen down the stairs.
‘Is he family?’ Mac asked.
‘My cousin,’ the young Nikos replied. ‘He’s a designer by trade but when he couldn’t get any work he started stealing. He only steals from those who can afford it though.’
‘Tell him he’s very good. So what is it exactly that you want from Mr. Llewellyn-fforbes?’
Again the two Nikos looked at each other.
‘You may not know what happened in 1947 but you seem to know just about everything else,’ the older Nikos said.
‘So tell me then. What happened in Agiou Athiris in 1947?’ Mac asked bluntly.
The old man spread his hands out on the table. Mac could see that they were shaking slightly.
‘I will but first I need to tell you what started all of this off. Is that okay?’
Mac nodded.
‘This is going to sound a little crazy, it still does to me if I’m honest, but three months ago I had a dream. In it I saw a man running out of a burning building. He was carrying something which he then covered in a blanket and put in the back of a jeep. He then drove off. That was it. Not much really but, at the time, the dream seemed very powerful and very real. I just dismissed it. Then three days later I had it again except this time I knew it wasn’t a dream but a memory of something that had really happened.
It took me
a while but eventually it came back to me. I must have been only nine or ten at the time and there was trouble in the town. My mother had warned me not to go anywhere near the square but I couldn’t help myself. I hid in an alleyway and poked my head around the corner to see what was going on. I couldn’t see much but I could hear well enough. I heard the crowd shouting ‘Leave the priest alone’ and then I saw flames coming from the church. The shouting from the square grew louder and the police that had been surrounding the church ran towards the square. I then saw a man in a brown uniform walking away from the square. I knew that uniform, he was a British soldier. He looked at the back door of the church and broke it open using the sole of his boot.
Smoke belched out of the door and I was amazed to see the soldier run into the building. I saw orange flames lick around the door and I feared that he might be dead when he suddenly ran out of the doorway. His face and uniform were black with smoke. I caught a glimpse of the thing he’d carried out. It was an icon, our icon, the town’s most treasured possession, Our Lady of Agiou Athiris. He wrapped it in a blanket and drove off.
I remembered telling my mother about it at the time but she made me swear never to tell anyone. She said that God had saved the icon and it would come home in its own time. She told me to forget all about it and I suppose I did just that. Why I was now dreaming about it some seventy years later I still have no idea.
The third time I had the dream was even more powerful than the second. I, like my father, am a man of the left and not religious, yet when I woke up I knew I had to do something about it. As mad as it all sounded I told my young grandson Nikos here and, for some reason, he believed me.’
Old and young Nikos looked at each other with great affection.
‘So we started looking for the soldier who had saved the icon,’ old Nikos said.
‘Or stole it perhaps?’ Mac suggested.
The old man shrugged.
‘Perhaps but all I knew was that we had to find it.’
‘Why?’ Mac asked.
He was totally intrigued by the whole thing now.
‘Hope,’ the old man said. ‘I’ve lived a long time but I’ve never known it worse than it is now. I came back to Agiou Athiris from Athens to retire some years ago and what I found disgusted me. Almost half the town was out of work after two manufacturing plants had closed. It was bad enough for the old but I feared most of all for our young people. At my age I’ve known prosperity and some good times but for the young it is truly desperate. There’s no work for them, no hope. They have nothing to look forward to in life. This austerity has ground us all down but the young worst of all.’
The Weeping Women (The Mac Maguire detective mysteries Book 3) Page 10