by Nick Brown
The heat of the day was increasing and he tried to stick to the shade as he walked from the square to his parking place by the river. The river had run dry even earlier this year and was now little more than a wide stinking trench of cracked and dried mud strewn with rubbish. As he walked across the waste ground by its banks, which was signposted a civic car park, his scuffed boots kicked up clouds of thick white dust from its surface. Inside the old Fiat, which he had on long term loan from a local car hire firm as it was no longer considered safe to rent out, it was sweltering despite the fact he’d left the windows open.
He threw his sack onto the backseat and began the regular painful process of negotiating the cars blocking him in and the potholes scattered across the rocky terrain. Then, after a prolonged wait at the new traffic lights, which seemed designed to hold up traffic from all directions before allowing one common thirty second window of opportunity, he turned onto the main road to Pythagoreio.
It was a relief to be out of the town and driving through the spruce and pines that lined the steeply climbing road as it snaked its way through the ridges flanking Mount Kerkis. Here it was cooler and, apart from the speeding taxis, driven by men with one hand out of the window holding a cigarette and the other clutching a mobile phone to their right ear, the road was quiet.
After climbing for ten minutes, the road levelled out and the sea could be seen on both sides of the island. Steve drove this road every day of the week but still hadn’t tired of the beauty of this view with the sea sparkling in the sunlight below him and the mountain looming above. For a few kilometres, the road followed the ridge through some of the best kept vineyards on Samos falling away gently on either side into the valleys.
He was startled by the sound of a siren as three police cars, one unmarked and black, swept past him at speed on the other side of the road, almost forcing him into a ditch. As he took evasive action he caught a glimpse of the clean shaven, pale face of the man in the back, obviously the senior officer, staring out of the window at him. The man was wearing a jacket and tie, most unusual for Samos.
He was watching this alarming cortege in his rear view mirror as it careered into the distance when a bright red sports car flashed round the bend behind him, and on seeing his old Fiat began hitting its horn and flashing its lights. The driver looked young behind his black glasses and Steve wasn’t disposed to give way, thinking that such an expensive machine would be unlikely to want to risk a collision with the shed he was driving. But he was mistaken; as Steve was trying to occupy the centre of the road going round a bend, the sports car pulled out, the driver gunning the engine and forcing him to swerve into the side verge. He had to focus all his attention into avoiding the ditch, but not before he caught a glimpse of the driver grinning through designer stubble and giving him the finger. The sports car, a Ferrari he thought, something else not often seen here, disappeared round the bend.
By the time Steve got his car back onto the road he was angry and shaken. The other driver had been more than just reckless: he’d enjoyed forcing the old Fiat off the road. He continued on through the vines, but the day had changed and his mood soured and wishing the sports car would crash didn’t do enough to lift it. Rounding another bend just before the sharp right turn towards Ormos-Marathakampos, he was flagged down by an old local woman in the middle of the road. She shouted to him through the car window.
“Kirios, Kirios, come quick, bad problem.”
She grabbed his arm and began jabbing her fingers frantically towards a copse of trees on the other side of the road. He saw tyre marks swerving off the road and the rear of the red Ferrari poking out of the undergrowth amongst the trees. The rear wheels were off the ground, the front of the car wedged at an angle into the wood. Steve moved nervously towards it, leaving the Fiat in the middle of the road, its driver’s door flapping open, the engine running.
He heard the whimpering before he saw the man and paused, fearing what he’d find. He was pushed forward by the shouts of the woman.
“Yes, Kirios, in there, go, you must go now. “
The heat of the sun was reflecting off the shiny red paintwork of the Ferrari; Steve hesitated, shifting from foot to foot in indecision, not wanting to move further but knowing he had to. There was a horrible bubbling sound at the back of the whimpering. Steve couldn’t stand it, wanted to stop it, so he forced himself on. At first he couldn’t understand why the driver hadn’t moved; the front of the car wasn’t badly smashed up, it had pulled up short of the tree trunk. Only some low growing branches of the old gnarled olive seemed to have come into contact with the car.
He turned his head to look at the driver, saw he was pinned back against the headrest, whose white leather upholstery was stained a slimy red. The twin forks of a time-hardened olive branch had burst through the shattered windscreen and skewered him to the seat. Steve forced himself to look at the injured man and understood the cause of the whimpered speech delivered in simple, almost nursery, Greek,
“Can’t die, not me, not here, help me please; help, can’t die, not meant to.”
One of the branch ends had gone through the flesh under his left armpit and the other had pierced his right shoulder, tearing a huge gash in his throat en route. Steve could see the blood gushing from this wound; he’d plenty of experience tending to accidents on excavations, and knew that if the arterial bleeding wasn’t slowed the man would die soon. He screamed to the woman to call an ambulance but she’d gone. The young man fixed him with the terrified look of a child, his large brown eyes imploring succour.
Moving the twigs and olive leaves away from where branches had pierced the flesh, he could see the wounds clearly. They confirmed his initial diagnoses, the bleeding from the throat was the killer; the rest could wait. Now he was doing something he felt calmer, his hands stopped trembling as he probed the bloody torn flesh for the source of the bleeding.
The terrified eyes of the young driver tried to follow his actions, mutely beseeching Steve to save him: he’d stopped crying and was silent. Steve found the gash from which most of the blood was pumping and tried to pull the flaps at the edges of the tear together. But the blood made it greasy and each time he tried his fingers stumbled and slipped against each other and away from the wound.
He let go and bent to rub his fingers in the dust below the car to give them extra purchase; something he had only ever done before when bowling occasional off spinners on the cricket field, an image he was surprised to find flashing across his mind. He moved back to the bloody throat, caught the agonised but trusting look in the young man’s eyes, noticed how pale his face now looked and murmured to himself without thinking, “Drained of blood, he’ll die soon.”
This time his gritty fingers found a precarious purchase on one flap of the wound and while trying not to let slip the hold of his left hand, he felt for the other fine lip of the wound with his right. Twice, three times he thought he had it, only for it to elude him and vanish back into the gore of the ruined neck. Then he had it: only a tenuous grasp, but if he could keep it, enough.
He carefully pulled the edges of the laceration together until they overlapped and applied as much pressure as he could without losing his grip. The pumping of the blood decreased, then reduced to slow ooze that seeped between his fingertips. He just hung on there, frozen in the same position, not daring to move any part of his posture in case he lost his slight hold on the slippery nubs of torn flesh.
He could never gauge how long he remained suspended there, all his senses concentrating on the feeling of his fingertips; it could either have been minutes or hours. But one thing he did notice was that, crouched down against one of the olive trees near the car, there was a man. Steve knew he hadn’t been there when he’d arrived. The man said nothing, did nothing, just watched. He was partly in shadow, Steve couldn’t see him clearly; he was wearing some type of dark woollen cloak like the older island goat herders. His face was partly obscured by leaves so that he resembled a creature of the ancient f
orest, like the carving of a Green Man Steve had once unearthed on an excavation in Cornwall.
This freezing of time was shattered by the sound of a siren. Steve daren’t turn his head to look, for fear that any movement would loosen his fingers’ precarious grip and the blood would begin to pump again. He couldn’t feel his fingers now and sweat was pouring down his forehead into his eyes making them sting; he felt like he once had in an assembly at school in the moment before he fainted, having stood for twenty minutes listening to the head teacher droning on. But he was aware how pale the young man was and how his breathing was faint and irregular, so the gentle touch on his shoulder took him by surprise. A paramedic moved next to him, looked carefully at the dying young man almost drained of blood then turned back to another medic behind him. The second man moved to the car and steadily placed two clips where Steve’s hands were and the first man gently steered Steve away.
He leaned against a tree and tried to light a cigarette with shaking hands, saw two police cars arrive and their occupants run to the accident; he saw his own car being moved to the side of the road. He heard, as if in a dream, one of the cops shouting and frenzied activity. Then there was someone beside him taking the unlit smoke out of his mouth. He looked down and saw that it was filthy with the blood from his hands. A fresh one was placed between his lips and lit for him.
As he took a deep drag, the figure spoke one sentence then moved off to disappear into the wood, and Steve saw it was the Green Man who’d silently watched him. By the time the smoke was finished the medics, augmented by several others he’d not noticed arrive, wheeled the young man on a trolley, with a drip suspended over him, to the road and into the ambulance. A policeman came over to Steve and began to lead him.
“You go with him to hospital.”
“Why?”
“Because you must.”
By now he was at the step leading into the ambulance. He climbed in, the door shut behind him, the siren started and they moved off. He sat in shock as they gathered speed, his brain trying to make sense of what had happened to his day, and the things he could make least sense of were the words the Green Man had spoken before he merged into the trees.
“You meddled with what you don’t know, for us and for you it would have been better to let him die.”
Chapter 3:
A Walk in the River
Whilst Steve was entering the ambulance, the black police car he’d watched reached its destination. Theodrakis climbed out, feeling sweat sticking the fine silk shirt to his back. A local cop was trying to pacify a small crowd gathered in front of the police station. Pushing through them, he climbed the three steps and shoved the re-enforced glass plate doors which slid apart with a swish.
This was a new building, concrete with tile cladding, built just before the economic crash and designed with an eco-friendly system of temperature control which had either broken down or been turned off as an efficiency saving. So the interior was no cooler than outside in the sun’s glare. He noticed, strictly against European regulation, each desk carried a whirring electric fan with a spider’s web of leads to the few accessible plug sockets that the vast open plan office provided. The desk’s occupants sat sweltering, shirts open, sipping at iced coffee or water, the only difference from a municipal police office of the past was that nobody smoked: that law apparently did apply here.
Theodrakis guessed the number of empty seats indicated that smoking was happening elsewhere. He picked his way through the maze of desks, aware of all the eyes in the room following him as he passed through a set of double doors at the back. Behind the door was a corridor with a series of office doors on one side and windows looking on to an internal courtyard on the other. The courtyard was crowded, the air thick with smoke; he followed the corridor to the end and entered a small meeting room devoid of natural light.
Three men in crumpled lightweight suits sat round a small conference table. Despite the ceiling lights the room seemed dark and the hot, still air was oppressive. The table was cluttered with plastic coffee cups; some had obviously been there for ages and there were sticky patches of spilt liquid seeping into the scuffed surface of the table.
A tall thin man with a prominent Adams apple, who Theodrakis recognised as a senior civil servant from the government offices in Vathia, motioned him to sit.
“It seems that the great benefit of your experience hasn’t had much effect yet, Theodrakis: we’ve got another one for you.”
Theodrakis ignored the sarcasm, he expected it by now and wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of a reaction. After all, what else could you expect from these provincials with their inbuilt inferiority complexes? However the message made his stomach churn, not another one so quickly, this wasn’t the pattern: he sat and listened.
“As usual everybody seemed to know about it before we did. You’d better get a grip on this, Theodrakis, its making us look fools and people are frightened. On this island when they get frightened they like to take the law into their own hands and, considering the results of your expert intervention, it’s hard to blame them.”
He favoured Theodrakis with a smile like a fridge door opening - it was the coldest thing in the room - and indicated to the man on his right to speak. This was Samarakis, squat and solidly built with a thick dark moustache following the lines of his permanently downturned mouth. He led the investigation prior to Theodrakis’s arrival.
“You had better do as Kirios Adamidis says while there is still law and order on this island, or your clever friends in Athens will lose confidence in your undoubtedly superior abilities. They’ve found another body near the top of the Potami rapids, this one was found by a tourist; that will look good in next year’s holiday brochure. I’ve got some men up there keeping the area clear, but it’s spooked them so the sooner you get there the better.”
He paused to pull out a pack of cigarettes, then remembering where he was put them back in the pocket of the crumpled jacket and continued.
“You know, this is the first time that I can genuinely say that I’m pleased you’re here, Theodrakis, because if you weren’t it would have been me having to sweat my way up there.”
He laughed and looked across at the other two who smiled with him.
“Oh, and one more thing, I don’t suppose you know much about the river. This stretch of rapids is just downstream from the source, it’s high up, you can do the first bit in a four by four but from there on it’s rough going and for most of it you have to walk the river bed. I used to enjoy it as a kid; I wouldn’t much like to do it now. You can go up or downstream, either way you get just as wet, so I hate to think what damage it will do to your expensive Athenian shoes and suit.”
He laughed again; Theodrakis was wondering whether to tell him that the shoes were English and the suit Italian when Adamidis gestured quiet and then spoke.
“Come, Inspector Samarakis, that’s enough. You had better start to think how you handle this with the press. Theodrakis, if this is another genuine case I want to see some results, this filthy business is hurting our island which has already suffered enough. If, God forbid, this is another one I want you to brief my friend, Professor Andraki.”
He gestured at the unhappy looking third man who appeared even more worried after Adamidis had finished speaking. Professor Andraki was small and slim with a neat, grey speckled goatee beard. He politely inclined his head towards Theodrakis but avoided eye contact.
“The professor has an unusual field of experience in local matters which, sadly, you might find useful. Now I must not delay you any more, Inspector.”
Having been dismissed Theodrakis got up and turned to go, reflecting that except for a greeting he’d said nothing; but he hadn’t let them provoke him, that was something at least. As he reached the door Samarakis said,
“Enjoy your paddle in the water, Colonel Theodrakis.”
In the police compound he found the four by four and its driver waiting.
“There’s some fisherman
’s waders in the back, boss, you can change into them as I take you up.”
Theodrakis grunted, conveying to the man that he’d heard, and they set off. During the drive he had time to mull over how much he hated this case and this island. The first hate was easier to explain than the second: the case made no sense, it scared him, polluted his every waking moment and his dreams, but worse, in some way he couldn’t quite grasp, it seemed familiar: like it had a particular personal connection and this made no sense.
The island undermined him. He encouraged the local’s perception that his antipathy was just the reluctance of a metropolitan Athenian to be stuck in a province far away on the fringe of Asia. But really he felt alone and out of his depth here. Every day he woke up in his impersonal rented room gripped by anxiety, the very air of the place oppressed him. His police colleagues resented him and expected him to fail; wanted him to, it felt like.
He hadn’t helped himself by not making any effort to connect with any of them, just played up to the stereotype of Athenian hauteur and disdain. So he was resented and disliked, and the longer he was here the more difficult it became to undo the damage his first impressions had caused: now anything he did or said compounded them.
He shuffled his legs into the musty-smelling filthy waders then took off his jacket and pulled the straps up over his shoulders. He thought about removing his tie but decided not to; let them laugh if they want. By the time he’d finished, the vehicle was off road and following a dirt track that wound its way up the increasingly steep slopes of the mountain. After ten minutes, the track finished at the edge of a ravine where two police officers in waders smoked and chatted as they waited for him.