Byron's Shadow

by Jason Foss

  Christos Dracopoulos was physician to Anatoliko and neighbouring villages. He was also a noted antiquarian, specialising in Byzantine icons and had been appointed site guardian for the Roman town at Palaeokastro. His blank, inward-looking house was one of the largest and oldest in the village, lying just below the church, with its roof on the eye-line of the bronze statue.

  In his shirtsleeves, Dracopoulos answered his own door. After a few moments passing a suspicious eye from one to the other, he remembered enough Greek hospitality to allow the visitors inside. He coughed once and adopted a slow, shambling gait. His wife was called into the cool, dark passage which bisected the house. Flint caught an odd stare, devoid of a glimmer of welcome. Dracopoulos gave her a rapid order, which turned out to be for fruit juice. With an expression of manic disgust, the woman disappeared through a doorway.

  Not a happy household, thought Flint.

  The doctor cleared his throat, then led them out onto the veranda, overlooking a walled enclosure that might have been called a garden, given a lawn. Orange juice arrived in a glass jug, served without a smile. Dracopoulos barely acknowledged its arrival. He would perhaps have been some years Embury’s junior, now fifty-something and even more gaunt and sickly than Flint remembered. Dracopoulos lounged deeply into his cane chair as Flint reintroduced himself.

  ‘Your hair is shorter…’ Dracopoulos said. Perhaps Flint would not need a translator, after all. ‘I remember you with Sebastian. Such a loss, such a tragic loss.’ His English was imperfect, but his vocabulary stretched far beyond Flint’s three words of Greek.

  ‘We were old friends. For five, even seven years, Sebastian came to the Argolid. I suggested he works here at Palaeokastro...for three years everything was fine, but then...’ He waved towards vines scrambling skywards up the grey stonework, indicating that his old friend was up there, somewhere in the ether.

  ‘I have to thank you for arranging my defence.’

  Dracopoulos frowned, requiring Flint to explain himself. ‘Mr Boukaris, my lawyer? I thought Emma arranged him, but she said it was you. He never sent me his bill, I’ll have to thank him one day.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Boukaris; that is him all over. A big-hearted man. He was born here, you know? His father is our village hero.’

  The statue, of course. Past and present cuddled each other very closely in small villages. Flint could imagine Mr Boukaris retained some paternalistic influence over local affairs. Perhaps he would hunt him out if the investigation ran dry.

  ‘You invited Sebastian to dinner the night he died,’ Flint began to cautiously advance his enquiry.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you any idea why he couldn’t come?’

  The doctor had obviously never read of the relationship between tobacco and health. By way of reply, he lit a small cigar and examined the burning end.

  ‘Did Emma tell you why he didn’t come?’ Flint continued.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dracopoulos said, ‘It was so long ago, I don’t understand why you want to know this. I cannot remember.’

  Flint looked towards Lisa for help, but she simply rolled her eyes upward. He was on his own.

  ‘Could you try? I really need to know a few facts. I was the one who found Sebastian’s body, I remember everything about that night, as if it were yesterday. You don’t forget events like that.’

  Dracopoulos shuffled. ‘Why disturb the dead? Eh?’

  The cane chair creaked as Flint fidgeted around his questions. ‘Did Emma walk here?’

  A hand waved away the irrelevance of the question. ‘Yes, I think so, why is that important now?’

  ‘She was here all evening?’

  ‘Yes, with myself, my brother and his wife.’

  ‘And who took Emma home?’

  ‘She walked, it wasn’t far,’ The answer was rapid and automatic. Too rapid, perhaps. ‘Greece was safe to walk at night, even for a woman. It still is, away from the tourists.’

  A barbed edge was audible to his words and the contradiction threw Flint off-course. Adam had heard a car; was he mistaken, or was Dracopoulos’ memory at fault?

  ‘Any idea what time it was?’

  ‘Seven years ago? It was late, I don’t know, is that important?’

  It was a detail too distant to check — perhaps Flint would never be able to ascertain the truth.

  ‘Did Sebastian ever tell you about what he was looking for at Palaeokastro?’

  Dracopoulos shook his head slowly, concentrating on the cigar. ‘The city plan.’

  ‘Emma seemed to think he had discovered something important, something unusual. Did Sebastian confide in you, as site guardian?’

  ‘No, there was nothing extraordinary.’ He checked his large wristwatch and muttered something in Greek.

  Cooperation was about to cease, so it was time to drop the subtlety. ‘Would you say anything was going on between Emma and Sebastian?’

  ‘I do not understand.’ He may have understood, for the doctor’s discomfort increased.

  ‘Were they...’ Flint fished around for words.

  Lisa had been quiet so far, sipping at her drink and watching Flint play the bumbling amateur detective. ‘Were they lovers?’ She slipped into Greek and emphasised the act of love-making with a few gestures.

  ‘No, no,’ Dracopoulos was emphatic, even offended. ‘You are poisoning his memory. I thought this was a social call, a polite visit, do not insult my friend!’

  Colour had flooded into the sickly complexion and the Doctor had lost all composure. Further kite-flying would only be destructive, so Flint nodded to Lisa, and thanked Dracopoulos, who dismissed him by clearing his throat again. As they retreated from the house, the icon in the hallway caught Flint’s attention, with its soft-eyed Madonna framed by gold leaf. It had to be Byzantine, original and expensive.

  ‘Thrilled?’ Lisa asked him as they sat back in the Datsun.

  ‘He collects antiquities,’ Flint said, half to himself. ‘Never trust anyone who buys or sells antiquities.’

  ‘A tomb-robber is a tomb-robber,’ Lisa said. ‘Does it really make any difference whether that picture hangs on some bloke’s wall, or in a dusty museum?’

  ‘Yes. Archaeology and money don’t mix. When they do, you have the opportunity for all manner of fun and games.’

  He started the engine and pulled off sharply up the incline towards the square. Only two or three minutes’ downhill ride would bring them to Palaeokastro. Stones and potholes rumbled beneath the car, jolting thoughts of all those questions Flint wished he’d asked. Emma should be able to answer most of them, if she’d been here.

  ‘The Good Doctor wasn’t a happy man,’ Flint said.

  ‘Would you be, if your friend had been murdered and the prime suspect called in for tea?’

  ‘Prime suspect?’

  ‘Yes. I asked around last night. The locals who remembered the story said you had been let off. The police never found anyone else to pin the blame on.’

  That could prove tricky, Flint thought. ‘Am I wrong, or was Doctor D. being evasive? I spotted at least one blatant lie.’

  ‘I assume everyone is out to screw me unless they can prove otherwise,’ Lisa said with deep conviction. ‘He could just have a bad memory; it was an awfully long time ago.’

  ‘But tragedy has an effect of fixing events in the memory. Everyone can remember where they were the day John Lennon died.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Flint sensed that Lisa was being deliberately obstructive, but pressed onwards. ‘Lies are like London buses, you don’t get one on its own. Just for a moment, let’s fantasise that Emma was behind Embury’s death. Let’s say it was a crime passionelle. She couldn’t have worked him over on her own; it needed at least one man and she needed two-way transport to Nauplion. The good Doctor D. just attempted to give her a perfect alibi, so if Emma did have something to do with the killing, he must have had a hand in it too.’

  Chapter Ten

  Flint met Lisa in the lobby of
Hotel Sun after she had dealt with the aftermath of breakfast and weathered a stand-up argument with one of the travel company reps.

  ‘Do you own this place?’ he asked idly, as she sifted through the contents of her leather bag.

  ‘I thought I did,’ she replied, flicking her eyelashes to indicate betrayal. ‘My plan was to marry an old man with pots of money, but dear George had pots of other people’s money. Let’s go and play Humphrey Bogart.’

  ‘Hey, Lisa, you don’t have to help. This isn’t a matter of life and death.’

  ‘I thought it was.’

  He had expected, irrationally, to find Lisa had been captured in amber and preserved intact. The reality was that Lisa was subject to the laws of time: she had passed beyond maturity into disillusion; she substituted his romantic attachment to the past with practical concerns of the near-future.

  Suddenly, she pinched him on the cheek and flashed her eyes. ‘Come on, day out. I’ll treat you to lunch, and I don’t mean a student picnic.’

  The coast road swept through the shadow of Palamidi and around into tree-lined streets opposite what had been Nauplion station. The station was now some kind of park, with its carriages frozen exhibits. Flint noticed more traffic, more development on the northern fringes of the town as he drove through the new suburbs, past the football ground and brought the car to rest in a strip of unmade ground beside the disused railway track. On that fateful Wednesday night, this had been an ambiguous spot: part industrial, part coastal, part wasteland, part development. He remembered heaps of gravel, the grey concrete skeleton of a new building and half a dozen warehouses which had marked the frayed edge of town. When Embury had last been seen alive, he was walking northwards, towards the building site.

  Now the building site was an office, some of the warehouses had been replaced with more modern structures and buildings continued for a further quarter of a mile. Flint slid out of the car and adjusted his camera. He began to take photographs of the car in the position he remembered parking the Fiesta. A short jog brought him to the buildings of concrete and peeling wood which clustered haphazardly alongside road and railway track. Doorways, signposts, parked trucks and thoroughfares were quickly snapped. He recognised a few name-boards and was gratified to think there was some continuity. His film exhausted, Flint examined the ground on his walk back, as archaeologists do on reflex.

  ‘Why here?’ he mused.

  It was no place for an illicit affair, or even for the backroom business meeting Embury had hinted at. His killers would have wanted Embury away from people and away from any clues to their identities; the warehouses advertised the owners’ names and were thus no place for a furtive conspiracy. Perhaps the grey skeleton, the last structure in Nauplion, had been simply the first stage on Embury’s final journey to the underworld. Embury seemed to have been reciting instructions: ‘Park by the yellow concrete mixer, then walk northwards’? Embury must have met someone in a car; the car drove away — perhaps — but the killers certainly returned rather than dump the body over a cliff, or throw it across the railway track.

  ‘Any clues, Humphrey?’ Lisa had remained in the car, listening to the radio.

  ‘If I were Bogart, I’d have found a book of matches leading me to a seedy nightclub and a stripper who knew everything.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Life’s not like that.’

  *

  Tourists of all nations pack into the great theatre of Epidaurus at dusk to witness the peddling of ancient Greek culture. These tourists would never pay attention to a square, red-roofed bungalow that sat forlorn in a wasteland beyond the coach-park. Only the British could have built that house, which would have been more in place on a Burmese rubber plantation.

  Flint had recited a ten-minute life history of Juliette Howe during the drive.

  ‘Do you know everyone in archaeology?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘Enough; they fall into distinct categories, so it’s easy to pigeonhole those I’ve only heard about by repute.’

  ‘So Juliette Howe is in the frumpy spinster pigeonhole?’

  ‘Loosely.’

  The sun-bleached veranda had seen happier years and the front door opened at a touch. Approaching forty, dressed in a wide matching set of khaki t-shirt and shorts, Juliette was instantly likeable and quick with the tea and digestives.

  ‘Doctor Flint! I read your book.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Economy and thingammy.’

  ‘Economy and Society in Third-Century Britain?’

  ‘Yes, I found your approach, rather...’ Juliette seemed to be hunting for a polite way to disapprove.

  ‘Radical?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Radical was a term of deprecation in some circles. Flint dropped Juliette into the ‘Old Imperialist’ pigeonhole.

  Lisa and Flint were seated on a dusty sofa beside a potted palm, allowing their eyes to run around the room which was mainly full of pottery in various stages of classification or assembly.

  ‘Does your house look like this?’ Lisa whispered, as Juliette fussed with a kettle.

  ‘I hate pottery,’ Flint muttered, ‘and I live on a houseboat.’

  ‘Is there a Mrs Flint?’ Lisa probed.

  ‘Don’t believe in marriage.’

  ‘Live-in-lover?’

  ‘Sugar?’ asked Juliette.

  Lisa took her tea and was gradually excluded from conversation, except to say ‘Yes,’ or ‘Really?’ at the correct point whilst otherwise meaningless archaeological gossip was exchanged.

  ‘…but don’t quote me!’ Juliette grimaced, ‘I do go on a bit. Yes, poor Sebastian. Dear Emma was so cruelly upset, she still hasn’t forgotten him. You do know Emma Woodfine?’

  ‘And her sister. We all keep in touch.’ Gosh, that was a whopper Jeffrey Flint.

  ‘She was so devoted to Sebastian.’ Juliette was an old hand at the game of tittle-tattle and puckered her cheeks with an impish, yet apologetic smile.

  ‘They were lovers ­– Emma told me all about it after his death.’ Flint expanded on the lie. If nothing else, it would replenish Juliette’s gossip stockpile.

  ‘Did she? That was rather brazen, she never told me! We all knew, of course. Sebastian would never admit to anything improper; he was very faithful to his wife’s memory. Didn’t you know? She died about six years before he did; cancer, it was very traumatic for poor Sebastian…’

  The ramble continued, with Flint trying to regain his grip on the knack of investigation. ‘Emma and Sebastian fell out just before he was killed.’ He inserted a pause. ‘Emma went off in a huff and had dinner with Doctor Dracopoulos. Do you know him?’

  ‘Do you know Christos Dracopoulos?’ Juliette gave a bemused, partly disapproving shake of her unkempt hair. ‘Greek men have a reputation for being hot-blooded, but Christos and a pretty face! Oh!’

  Could one equate Emma with a pretty face? It was perverse but possible.

  ‘He’s not a well man,’ Flint said.

  ‘No, his gigolo days are over. His wife’s mad, don’t you know? She has schizophrenia.’

  Juliette drifted off-tack with another classicist-on-heat story. Flint listened politely, smiling to Lisa when he could, then dived in with a last question. ‘Sebastian was in some sort of trouble; do you know anything about that?’

  The narrator seemed unhappy to break off mid-saga. After a pause, Juliette began to talk more slowly. ‘We come here in alternate years, so it must have been my second season when it all happened. It’s funny, but I remember it as clear as if it were last week. Sebastian came flying up here in his yellow bus, he wanted to see Neil—that’s Dr Neil Ennismore. He’s at the British School now.’

  ‘You’ve no idea what he was worried about?’

  ‘Work permits, I believe, or perhaps the licence to excavate, or some such bureaucratic nonsense. Ever since the socialists took over, they have been making excavation so much more difficult. Do you know, we can’t even dig this season? They say we mus
t write up what we’ve already excavated. I ask you!’

  Perfectly reasonable, thought Flint, feigning sympathy.

  ‘There was much less red tape under The Colonels, though I dread to say it.’

  ‘Shoot first, fill in the forms later,’ quipped Flint.

  Juliette frowned.

  ‘Sorry, I was being subversive.’

  ‘Yes. You have that reputation.’ Juliette changed the subject and talked for another forty minutes before the couple politely extricated themselves.

  ‘Emma was having it off with Doctor D.,’ Lisa announced, settling herself in the car seat.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘According to Juliette, everyone else is at it with everyone else’s other half. All your people have complex love lives.’

  ‘Yes, but not Emma.’

  ‘Just because you don’t like her you think she’s incapable of forming a relationship with a man.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m being sexist. Doctor D. hardly struck me as being a sex machine either, even seven years ago.’

  ‘Female priorities differ from those of men.’

  ‘So what does your female intuition tell you?’

  ‘Emma and Sebastian were hot-and-cold, trying to pretend nothing was going on between them. They have a tiff, she goes off to see Doctor D. He drives her home, hand on knee, they hop in the back, you can imagine the rest. It explains why Emma is so shitty to you: she’s simply crushed by guilt. It explains why Doctor D. told a lie. Would you be proud of bonking Emma?’

  By way of an answer, Flint grimaced, finding the scenario too unsavoury to contemplate. He started the car. ‘Sorry. Nice theory, but I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Super, what a waste of a morning. Why am I doing this?’

  ‘Don’t snap, I’m very grateful…’

  ‘Sound grateful,’ she said.

  Flint ground the Datsun around in a tight reverse turn. ‘I’m grateful, I need you Lisa, I’m a foreigner here.’

  ‘I’m the foreigner — you two were talking in your own special language. What was all that about a licence to dig? It sounded very technical and very boring.’