Byron's Shadow

by Jason Foss

  Flint explained the rules governing the supervision of foreign excavations, but as he talked, an idea broke through. It had been naive to limit his suspicions to Emma.

  ‘And I thought he just meant me,’ Flint said with a touch of awe in his voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Long, long ago, when we were having a barney up in the olive grove, Embury said he was tired of people interfering and telling him where to dig.’

  ‘Someone interfered,’ Lisa said, ‘and they made sure he never dug anywhere, anymore. If I were you, Jeff, I’d find yourself another suspect.’

  There had, of course, only ever been one suspect. When Flint parked beside Taverna Mikos, the rest of the earthen space was filled by a blue-and-white police car. Through the plate glass window he could see a navy blue figure lounging against the bar, capturing the attention of the taverna owner.

  Scarface turned and gave a wry smile as Flint walked inside.

  ‘Mister Jeffrey Stanley Flint,’ he said.

  ‘Doctor Flint now, but friends call me Jeff.’

  ‘So, Doctor Flint,’ Scarface said pointedly. ‘You are back in Nauplion.’

  Mikos suddenly found pressing business in the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, I’m looking up old friends…’

  Scarface had learned to speak English in the intervening years and his uniform had changed. Both indicated he had been promoted.

  ‘You should have stayed in England.’

  ‘We’re all Europeans now.’

  The policeman collected his hat from the counter, as if to leave. ‘I hate paperwork, Doctor Flint. That is what you are — paperwork. I have to open my files again. You were too expensive to extradite, but now you are here. Don’t run away this time.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The holiday was over. He remembered Scarface as humourless and vindictive and seniority had obviously compounded his flaws. To distract himself, Flint telephoned Vikki, but he found little to say that did not involve Lisa. Next he rang his research student Tyrone Drake on site in Hertfordshire. Flint winced at the idea of a field archaeologist owning a mobile phone; what was the world coming to?

  Tyrone was OTT, as expected. The final season at the Burke’s Warren villa was already yielding the buckets of evidence missed in the previous years. It was predictable that Tyrone would be the one to scoop up the goodies and Flint was left with the feeling he had made the wrong decision in returning to Greece.

  Over one of Mikos’ questionable Souvlaki — the cooking had not improved with practice — Flint talked over the old times with the perpetrator of the meal. Mikos looked through the seventeen photographs which Flint had taken during that first excavation. He paused at each face and tried to guess the owner’s name.

  ‘Did Sebastian have any enemies?’ Flint asked.

  Mikos turned down a lip as he shook his head.

  ‘Did he used to argue with anyone — apart from me?’

  ‘What is argument?’ Mikos asked awkwardly. ‘My neighbours come here and we argue politics or some boy will forget to pay for his drinks. Okay, Sebastian would argue, but so what? He was a man, he had his honour.’

  For the Greeks, arguing was part of life. For the English, it was a painful experience to be avoided at all costs. Mikos seemed unaware of the subtle difference, so the line of enquiry was abandoned in favour of an early night.

  Flint lay in bed well beyond ten the next morning. He was out of ideas, the trail was cold and Lisa little more than lukewarm. Amid bleak philosophising that would have been more at home in one of those turgid Scandinavian films he abhorred, Flint walked across the site, eating a peach for breakfast. He took the New Road, as Mikos called it, passed the olive grove and the breezeblock building, crossed the gully on an embankment, then climbed to the neck of the valley towards Anatoliko. A quarter of a mile beyond the olive grove he turned aside to visit one of the outlying farmsteads he had once surveyed.

  A flash of red and white revealed a two-metre ranging pole lying neglected in a patch of coarse weeds, and further down the hillside he came across a survey line, still partly pegged in position: the archaeology of archaeology. Unseemly haste had typified his last departure from Greece. He picked up the ranging rod, then found a boulder and sat against it, disturbing a lizard who scuttled into a crack.

  The sun was hovering over the distant hills, turning them into shimmering haze as Flint brooded. Some might find literary murder fascinating, but real corpses oozing real blood were repulsive to civilised thought. Investigating the lives of dead people was fine when they had been in the ground over a thousand years. Toying with the loose facts of Sebastian Embury’s death verged on bad taste.

  One figure came around the bend in the valley, then another, both dressed in blue and wearing peaked caps. Both policemen were lower down the slope, moving crosswise, stepping with care amongst the stones and brambles, pointing and searching for something: him.

  The human brain is the product of five million years of evolution for survival. On instinct, Flint pulled in his legs, then rolled around the boulder into its shadow, mimicking the lizard. Why had he done that? His pulse rate was up, adrenalin had forced a reflex action upon him. His heart pounding, Flint allowed himself a few minutes, then glanced around the rock to see the two figures were much further off, hands on hips, obviously lost or confused or apathetic. Finally, they moved off with purpose, back towards Palaeokastro.

  Flint felt vaguely guilty in his evasion, but Amnesty campaigning days came back to reinforce his resolve. If Scarface wanted to cause trouble, he was willing to stand up to him this time; but only with a lawyer present. He would hang around for an hour, then speak to Vassilis Boukaris.

  *

  Outside the Taverna, Mikos was seated at one of four tables, playing dominoes against two aged, overdressed men. Flint strode up in t-shirt, shorts and sandals, bearing the ranging pole like a spear.

  ‘The police came here,’ Mikos said. ‘They went upstairs.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ Flint lobbed the ranging pole violently at the rubbish-strewn terrace beside the taverna. It bit into the earth and stood quivering.

  Mikos’ expression made plain that he disapproved of such petulance. ‘They will come back. Where were you?’

  Flint deigned to reply, making straight for his room. It had been searched, messily and obviously. His passport had gone, his return air ticket had vanished as had his chequebook, wallet and credit cards. Even the back pocket of his jeans had been relieved of its burden of money. He always hid his travellers cheques, but they would be useless without identification. Seven or eight clinical obscenities were chosen at random.

  He hurtled downstairs, past where Mikos was nonchalantly laying down a double five, around to where the Datsun was parked. Had been parked.

  ‘Mikos! Where’s my car?’

  ‘The man from the rentals, he came.’

  ‘But I hired it for the week!’

  Mikos gave a groan, then apologised to his fellow players and gesticulated to Flint. ‘Come, telephone.’

  ‘I want you to find Vassilis Boukaris,’ Flint panted. ‘He defended me last time — I want to know my rights.’

  ‘I hope you have a lot of money.’

  Actually no, thought Flint, I don’t.

  Finding the lawyer took time. Flint sweated by the bar, growing restless as the Greek grew more impatient with the voice at the other end of the line. Mikos suddenly turned and winked, a finger inclined towards the drinks cabinet. The archaeologist took out a cloudy bottle of lemonade with thanks. The bottle had been drained by the time Mikos waggled the receiver at him.

  ‘Mr Boukaris for you.’

  ‘Jeffrey Flint here,’ Flint explained what had happened, the other saying little. Boukaris had always been economical with words.

  ‘I will see what I can do,’ the voice said, terminating the phone call.

  Flint tried to ring Lisa, but her receptionist informed him she had gone to Argos. Ringing Vikki would be futile — i
t was one of her days chasing Eurocrats in Brussels. College was on vacation, with both colleagues and students scattered across the world’s archaeological sites. Tyrone would be halfway down a third-century rubbish pit in Hertfordshire. Jules Torpevitch, his sometime flatmate, was working on a bone assemblage somewhere north of Marathon, but for the moment he may as well have been on the moon. Temporarily, Flint was out of allies.

  He went back to his room and re-checked his possessions. The photographs were still there, as was his notepad and that irrelevant golden trinket. He lay back on his bed, passing his trowel from hand to hand as he waited. He had carved ‘JSF’ onto its handle to prevent trowel-rustling by rookie excavators who had not yet learned that an archaeologist and his trusted trowel are seldom parted.

  ‘Jeff! Telephone!’

  Flint sprinted down the stair to hear what he hoped would be Vassilis Boukaris’ soothing voice.

  ‘Doctor Flint,’ said the lawyer, ‘You should have remained in England.’

  He objected to paying for duplicate advice. ‘Why?’

  ‘When this unfortunate murder took place, nobody wanted the publicity. Nauplion is a quiet town, these things do not happen. It was easy for me to persuade the Prosecutor to drop the case. Now, things are different, we have a new Prosecutor, a very determined woman. I will give you the same advice I gave you all those years ago. Leave Greece.’

  ‘I can’t, not this time. They’ve taken my passport.’

  ‘You don’t need a passport, not anymore. Simply leave, that is my advice, I make no charge for it.’

  ‘I need your help. I need legal advice to stop the police harassing me.’

  ‘I have spoken with the police. They have re-opened your case, they have evidence they failed to use before.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘They have a witness to the killing. Go home, Doctor Flint. I cannot save you this time.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Mikos would take no payment for the lemonade, which was fortunate. Flint remained leaning on the thin formica counter, unable to find a logical way out of the mire into which he had slipped. He was a thousand miles from home and suddenly way, way out of his depth. Unless he could quickly understand what had transpired, he would be sucked under.

  ‘Bad, Jeff?’ Mikos smiled for a tenth of a second.

  ‘Worse.’

  His mind was playing on all the unusual, unexplained events, past and present, trying to tie them into a pattern. ‘Do you remember the night Lisa came around for dinner?’ Flint asked. ‘We ate moussaka and listened to Bob Dylan. Someone called for Sebastian and he went outside. When he came back, we had a row over something stupid.’

  ‘Was it the biro-stylo you found?’

  ‘That’s right. Have you any idea who was outside? Sebastian came in steaming, just looking for a fight. Whoever he met really wound him up.’

  Mikos shook his head. ‘It was two men in a car. They were not from around here, I never saw them again.’

  Two men. Emma had been inside and uninvolved. Flint glanced along the bar, regretting that it gave only a slight view of the main street. Unpleasant thoughts were stalking around his mind. Fear was slowly taking its hold; he found he was watching for the inevitable police car without ever having planned it. He would go back upstairs, lie on the bed and analyse his predicament.

  Once upstairs, muddled thoughts replaced neat schemes of intellectual analysis. Flint paused before pushing open the door of his room. The last English archaeologist to sleep there had been beaten to death. He hoped the Gods on Olympus were not plotting an ironic, symmetrical end to the drama.

  Too many coincidences were troubling him. Embury had turned irrational just before the picture began to take on a sinister tinge. Who were the mystery men? Who stole the minibus? When did Embury learn the minibus had been found? What had been the purpose of that drive into Nauplion? Did Dracopoulos deliberately lie about Emma walking home? Where had this mystery witness suddenly sprung from and who had prompted Scarface into resurrecting the moribund case?

  Embury always seemed to be going somewhere, meeting someone, telephoning someone. Flint thought around names dropped by the Director and recalled faces of Greek and foreign visitors to the site, trying to identify others who could be involved in whatever-it-was. Conspiracy theories started to form in his mind. If this had been Italy, he would have said ‘Mafia’ and become terrified. As it was, this was Greece, but he was still terrified.

  Tyres on loose chippings and a motor rattling in the narrow streets drew him to the window. All his paranoid delusions blossomed into reality. Chequerboard blue-and- white, the Datsun police car was pulling up outside the taverna. In a fraction of a second, Flint had dived for his rucksack and the spare pair of socks stuffed deep in the left side pocket. Precious moments slipped by until a satisfying, paper-rich crunch rewarded the risk. He dumped his dirty laundry from a carrier bag, then swept his pile of odds-and-ends into the bag in one motion. Next, he hung his camera around his neck. A few seconds were wasted debating what else he could take before panic drove him from the room.

  At the rear was a claustrophobic box-room where Emma had once slept. It had one small window which overhung the flat roof of the rearward toilet block. As Flint skipped across the landing, he could hear Mikos greeting the policemen once again. If relaxed, the police might gossip for a few minutes, otherwise, they would pound straight up the stairs and slap on the handcuffs. Flint pulled himself onto the window ledge, then slid out, feet first. Then he lay still on the sticky tarred felt, listening for the feet on the stairs. When none came, he doubted his own fears, then self-preservation overcame self-doubt and he wormed to the back of the toilet block. Feet first, he scraped over the edge and landed badly on the slope below.

  Flinching from a grazed knee, he moved swiftly across the back of the building, past an alleyway and behind a low wall. What next? His heart pounded hard. He remembered seeing a black bicycle propped in a passageway close to the petrol station and suddenly he had an objective.

  Palaeokastro lay stunned by the noon heat, so not a soul observed the Englishman dodge from the shadow of an alley, cross the street and disappear into the darkness of another. Gearless, black and rusting, the bike offered an environmentally sound means of salvation. He slipped the carrier bag on the handle bars, mounted whilst still in the alley, made four quick strokes of the creaking pedals and was into the sunlight once more.

  At the top of the hill, the police car was still stationary and unoccupied. Flint cast himself down the pothole-cratered road with reckless speed and was soon able to freewheel. No brake levers graced the handlebars, a fact Flint noticed whilst already passing twenty miles per hour. In four minutes he had made a mile, his arms shaking with the strain of holding a steady course over endless ruts and stones. The village faded into an off-white blur on the hillside, and the road levelled out amongst a bland valley bottom of scattered fruit trees and goats. He began to guess how long the police would stay in the taverna, how wide their search would be.

  The bike slewed violently as it came out of a pothole, the handlebar fought to escape his grip. The worn seat bit deep into his buttocks, but Flint remained upright. Far ahead, the road began to climb through orange groves before meeting the highway. A flash of sun on windshield told Flint that a car had turned onto the Palaeokastro road. Two hundred yards away, Flint could see a ramshackle hut some way back from the road. He began to weave to lose speed, then discovered the bike braked by backpedalling. With no margin to spare he managed to bump and coax the bike through the lines of citrus trees and behind the wall of the shed. A black car swept past in a cloud of dust and shower of gravel. Flint played with possibilities then decided to wait, recover his thoughts and see if the police car retreated to Nauplion.

  Half an hour ticked by on his scarred wristwatch. The shade of the shed was cool, a nearby herd of goats stood nonplussed, but only wasps and red-tailed hornets threatened his safety. The police car remained in Palaeokastro
and after twenty minutes was joined by a second, plus a van; the hunt was afoot. With limbs recovered from the first frantic bout of pedalling, Flint dared to resume his ride. One of a myriad of plans had gained prominence.

  Rough and in places ill-defined, the track which began just beyond the goat shed was a perfect escape route. He knew this path, or had done in what seemed another life, for the most part it was level or sloped gently downhill. Flint coasted down buttock-battering inclines and cycled along flatter sections where ruts and stands of dry vegetation permitted. He was alone amongst the dusty fields and sweet-smelling groves of fruit trees and only a pair of donkeys bore witness to his passing.

  After an hour, he came to the coast road and timed his sprint across. His head swam and he feared heat-stroke; where had he left his hat? The bike became a burden, heavy and squeaking as he pushed it up the last stony track to his sanctuary. Blue and cooling, the Gulf of Argos sparkled below the deserted chapel; objective attained.

  Flint ran the bicycle deep into a conifer-choked gulley, then fell into the shade and lay inert for fifteen or twenty minutes. Rushing was unnecessary; where could he go, wearing just one pair of shorts, one grubby college t-shirt, one pair of Jesus sandals, his watch and his glasses? With deep pessimism, he investigated the contents of his carrier bag, which contained his notepad, the old photographs, a roll of toilet tissue, his trowel, two biro’s and one pair of blue Y-fronts. He took out his red socks and unrolled them, allowing fresh Greek notes to spill onto the pine needles. One by one he picked them up, counting twelve thousand drachmae; something under fifty pounds. Digging deep into the bag he hoped for more, and from the bottom drew the treasure of Palaeokastro: a zip-lock bag containing a glittering but crushed pen.

  *

  The hours between four and dusk drew themselves into a featureless haze. As evening settled, only bats and insects disturbed him. His stomach regarded the breakfast peach as a dim memory; tea had been forgotten and supper was out of the question. He wished he had grabbed one of Mikos’ attempts at a sandwich whilst he’d sipped that lemonade. He wished dark to come so that he could sleep and when it did, sleep was almost impossible. Surprised at the cold and unable to find a comfortable spot to lie, he crouched, bored and seriously regretting the impulse that had brought him to Greece.