Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (22 page)

Later Mavros sat at a table in the shade of the main square’s mulberry tree, riffling through the sheaf of pages he’d printed out in the Internet café. The barman had tried to look over his shoulder at the article Anna had sent, which drove him away. The last thing Mavros needed was Theocharis being informed that the foreigner he thought might be an antiquities thief was reading a profile of him.

Although his sister wrote for magazines that he rarely read because their glossy fashion pages and envy-fuelled gossip columns depressed him, Anna was a talented journalist with a knack for unearthing things her subjects would have preferred to remain out of the public domain. Mavros had eventually realised that he had more in common with her than he thought. Reading the in-depth article, he found himself admiring her piercing wit almost as much as the details yielded by her research. Panos Theocharis, ‘a businessman who combines the acumen of Onassis with the moray eel’s ability to make snap decisions’, was generously praised for his charity work and the establishment of the museum—although Anna made it clear that his core business activities had hardly suffered from the free advertising and profile-raising engendered by these activities. There was a fair amount about how Theocharis had expanded the family mining business across the world after the war, but this was less interesting to Mavros than the information his sister had dug out about the family. It seemed that many of the lurid stories peddled by the gutter press were true.

For instance, Aris, the only child that Theocharis had fathered on his three wives, had written off more cars and needed more hush money than a dozen other tycoons’ spoiled sons. The old man had been forced to send his son to New York when he was in his twenties to keep him away from the Athenian police as well as the media. He was overseen by a company of very discreet and very expensive lawyers, but stories had slipped out about sessions in drinking clubs with well-known hoodlums. No one took any of that seriously— Aris was perceived to be too much of a buffoon to become a serious criminal himself. But that hadn’t stopped him picking on people smaller than himself. One indiscretion that the lawyers failed to suppress was made public by a nightclub hostess who sold her story detailing a night of sexual and physical abuse to a New York tabloid. Aris had shown no remorse. He remained defiant and was apparently proud of the fact that his low-life friends referred to him as ‘Kojak’, alopecia having caused his hair to fall out in his early thirties.

There was no mud like that on Panos Theocharis. He had apparently been a devoted enough husband to his first two wives, although neither of them had lasted the course. The first, Aris’s mother, died of cirrhosis in 1970. The second had been killed in a road accident, her Mercedes shunted off a hairpin bend near the family’s house in Gstaad by a car that was never traced. The post-mortem found a large quantity of diazepam in her stomach. Both of the women had been Athenian heiresses and it seemed that Theocharis, in his seventies when he became a widower for the second time, had decided to marry beyond the confines of his class.

Mavros slapped his thigh when he realised who the old man had chosen. He knew there had been something familiar about Aris’s stepmother and, as he’d seen outside the Astrapi, lover Dhimitra. Fifteen years ago she’d been the popular singer Mimi, whose heavily made-up face adorned hoardings all over Athens. Mavros couldn’t remember the name of any of her hits—she had been a purveyor of eardrum-bursting love songs to the tone deaf—but he remembered her blowsy, come-hither poses. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t been accepted into Athenian high society with open arms. That was why Theocharis and she spent most of the year on Trigono.

Mavros ran his fingers through the pages when he finished the article. The material about Aris and Dhimitra was revealing, but there were some things about the old man that he found more intriguing. The first concerned the museum and the acquisition of the numerous pieces he’d bought. Anna quoted an expert at one of the great international auction houses, who stated that there had never been even a hint of malpractice or illicit dealing by Theocharis, something that was apparently very unusual with private museums. Mavros reckoned that had to be horse shit, especially in Greece. The fact that Theocharis had apparently suspected him of being a thief or a bent dealer only made him more suspicious—it took one to know one. Anna also pointed out that the family had recently been hit by several business failures around the world, though she didn’t specify them or say how serious they’d been to the overall Theocharis fortune.

The other thing that struck him was what Anna had written about Theocharis’s activities during the Second World War. He had served with a specially trained unit that had been in action in the Cyclades and the Peloponnese. Although few records were available, there were rumours at the time that his activities had led to unacceptably high losses—of Allied as well as enemy personnel. Coupled with the fact that the book about Trigono during the Italian occupation by the Paros historian had disappeared from the library, this hint of savagery beneath the millionaire’s urbane surface made Mavros even more curious.

Now he was more keen than ever to learn whether Theocharis or his unruly son had met Rosa Ozal.

The woman woke up and knew immediately that something had been done to her. She sniffed the air and picked up a chemical smell, the residue of an oil-based fuel. The only light in the hole or cave or wherever she was being held was the grey line in front of her, the faint, tantalising hint of a world outside. She moved her hands, feeling the rope bite but also aware of the numbness throughout her body. Scrabbling on the gritty floor, she tried to locate the water bottle. Nothing. Her throat was parched and she could hear the rumble of her empty stomach. It was difficult to calculate the passage of time. She thought it was at least a day since she’d drunk or eaten. But she hadn’t been abandoned. The cloying smell and the pain between her legs proved that. She moved her fingers towards her groin then stopped them, frightened of what they might find. Dragging herself as far away as she could from where she’d been lying, she emptied her bladder and felt a stinging sensation.

She stilled her breath and listened hard, tried to pick up any clue to where she was. There was a gentle soughing of wind coming from the line of light and, farther off, a current of what must have been water, a great body of water in restless motion. The sea, yes, it was the sea, but it wasn’t so close, she wasn’t in a sea cave. It made her think of a beach and a coastline again, but she couldn’t place them, couldn’t conjure up a name.

‘What’s happening to me?’ she said aloud, her voice hoarse and cracked. She smelled the rankness of her breath. ‘Who brought me here?’

She struggled with her memory, dredging up a flight on an aeroplane, vile food and the stewardesses with their noses in the air. But she could bring back nothing of where she’d come from or where she’d been going, no names or faces of people she’d met, no landscapes other than the beach that had appeared to her. Was she on an island?

Then the idea hit her like a kick in the stomach, the sudden, unreasoning fear that whoever was keeping her captive had decided not to give her anything else to eat or drink. She tried to scream, but she was already falling into an even blacker hole.

Just before it closed around her she was sure that she heard the notes of a pipe and, farther away, the muffled barking of what sounded like more than one dog.

Out of the corner of his eye Mavros noticed a person approaching him. He quickly folded up the printed pages.

‘Hello, Alex.’

The German stood smiling, a faded Ferrari cap on his head. He gave the impression of a lost child, unsure whether to approach a stranger.

‘Ah, Mikkel,’ he said. ‘Good morning. On your own?’

The older man set down the blue plastic bags of shopping he was carrying and nodded distractedly. ‘Barbara’s at the house.’ He said the words as if they were a standard response rather than one he had much faith in.

‘Is she working?’ Mavros asked, taking in the German’s nervous expression. He remembered Barbara’s nudge in Mikkel’s ribs when he had asked them about Rosa Ozal. Maybe this was the time to exert some pressure on the couple’s weaker link.

‘Yes.’ Mikkel took off his cap and smoothed down his thinning fair hair. ‘She works on her designs in the morning. I leave her on her own.’

Mavros gave him an encouraging smile. ‘It must be difficult, submitting designs and so on from Trigono.’

Mikkel shrugged. ‘It’s all right now. We have a computer, e-mail and so on. It wasn’t so easy in the past.’ He looked away, lower lip between his teeth. ‘But she has her reasons for living on the island.’

Mavros was pretty sure that, whatever those reasons were, they weren’t all shared by her husband. ‘It must be tricky for foreign women in a small community like this.’

Mikkel’s eyes jerked back on to him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ Mavros said, nodding towards a pair of muscle- bound young islanders in cement-stained clothes, ‘the local men view foreign women as easy targets, don’t they?’

The German’s face flushed. ‘I…I don’t know where you get that idea from,’ he said, turning his head away again. ‘Anyway, Barbara is quite capable of looking after herself when I’m not here.’

‘Oh, you aren’t here all the time?’

Mikkel shook his head. ‘I am required to attend board meetings and finalise the accounts every month. I’m going to Hamburg next week.’

‘So were you actually on the island in the first half of June?’ Mavros asked, keeping up the attack. ‘When my friend Rosa was here.’ He was watching the German carefully and noticed that his eyes widened when the name was spoken.

‘Em, yes, yes, I think so.’ Mikkel glanced at him anxiously, as if he might have given something away. ‘We told you, we didn’t meet her.’

Mavros took out the photo and held it up in front of him. ‘Are you quite sure? Only, Rinus told me she was in the Bar Astrapi several times. You go there often, don’t you?’

Mikkel gathered up his shopping bags. ‘I have to get home now. Barbara will be wondering what’s happened to me.’ He looked at Mavros, the lines on his face taut. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything Rinus tells you,’ he said in a low voice. Then he moved quickly away across the square.

Mavros watched him go. Was Mikkel just a jealous husband or was there something more disturbing beneath the timorous exterior? No, Barbara Hoeg was obviously the strong one in that couple. He had the feeling the world- famous designer was capable of anything if she put her mind to it. But she was a troubled person beneath the hard shell, and he had the feeling that she drank to escape.

At the corner the German almost collided with Aris Theocharis. They spoke for a few seconds, the big man shooting a glance at Mavros and then heading towards him. He was wearing loose cream chinos and boating shoes, the green eyeshade he favoured splitting his egg-like head in two horizontally.

‘You again,’ Aris said as he approached the table. He sat down opposite Mavros without waiting for an invitation. ‘How did you get on with my father last night? I’ll bet the old man dazzled you with his precious possessions, didn’t he?’ He gazed across the table with a belligerent grin that faded slightly when Mavros didn’t answer. Leaning forward, he lowered his voice. ‘Someone told me you’re a friend of a woman called Rosa.’

‘That’s right,’ Mavros replied, wondering who that ‘someone’ was. Rinus the barman? ‘Her full name’s Rosa Ozal. Do you know her?’

Aris shook his head. ‘Not personally.’ The grin widened. ‘Not carnally.’ He paused to see Mavros’s reaction, but there was none. ‘I wasn’t here when she was. But I heard a lot about her.’

‘Really? You’ve got a bit of an American accent. Have you spent time in the USA?’

Aris looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, I have. Office in Manhattan. Why?’

‘Well, Rosa’s from New York City too. You never ran into—’

Aris was shaking his head. ‘I told you, I never met her.’ The grin reappeared. ‘But she got very friendly with a lot of people here, I can tell you.’

‘Is that right?’ Mavros said. ‘Who, for example? I can’t find many people who remember her, apart from Rinus in the Astrapi.’ He kept quiet about Rena.

Aris suddenly looked less assured. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he mumbled, looking away.

Mavros decided against showing any more of his hand by winkling out second-hand information from the tycoon’s son.

‘Hey, wanna see my boat?’ the big man asked, grabbing Mavros’s arm. ‘Come on, you’ll like it. Where are you from? The fucked-up old UK? You haven’t got anything like her there, I can tell you.’

Mavros shook off Aris’s grip and picked up his bag. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

The large four-by-four was parked in the street off the square. As Aris climbed in, he waved at the shopkeeper opposite. The wizened old man acknowledged the greeting, but scowled as soon as Theocharis’s back was turned. The son didn’t get anything like the degree of respect from the islanders that his father did.

Aris drove down the narrow tiled street, ignoring the ‘No Entry’ signs and forcing pedestrians—women with buggies, a tourist with a rucksack—to press against the walls. ‘Out of the way,
gria
,’ he said, gesticulating at a bent old woman in black.

Mavros said nothing. There was no shortage of loudmouthed rich men’s heirs in Athens, but they were less incongruous there. Aris Theocharis stuck out on Trigono like a slug in a salad.

‘There she is,’ the driver said, pointing as they swung into the port. ‘Forty feet of glory.’

Mavros followed his arm to the
kaïki
that was bobbing on the light swell at the quayside. Its hull and large cabin were blue and white respectively, the mast and rigging in perfect condition. It looked like an old boat that had been expertly renovated, the general layout being that of the craft that used to carry freight between the islands before the large ferries started operating.