Secret Souls (20 page)

He stopped a small boy passing him at a run by grabbing his arm and asked him to go to the coffee house and tell Phillipos the chief wanted his usual breakfast but with two orders of ham. He patted the child affectionately on the top of his head and the boy took off as fast as his feet would carry him. Manoussos picked up a wooden chair and walked towards Larry Snell.

Larry stood up as Manoussos placed his chair at the table. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

The two men shook hands and both sat down. ‘How about some breakfast? asked Larry.

‘I’ve ordered some. You seem to be doing all right. Not here even twenty-four hours and you’ve managed to find the best breakfast in Livakia. You continue, don’t let those eggs get cold.’

‘You know what it’s like when you’re working in the field. The first thing you suss out is where to eat, a safe place to sleep, the women. Once those priorities are in place, the work takes over.’

Manoussos reached into the bread basket. He broke the piece of coarse white bread in half and scraped some butter from the plate with the end of it then dipped it in the bowl of honey and popped it in his mouth. ‘Oh, that’s good, just what I needed. I don’t know whether to ask how you found the accommodation at Christina’s or was Astrid as delicious as ever?’

‘Ah! You’ve been there, done that. Delicious, imaginative, fun. Elefherakis is a most unusual host.’

‘Max will want details.’

‘That doesn’t mean he’s going to get them from me.’

Manoussos began to laugh. ‘He will, you know.’

Larry Snell liked Manoussos Stavrolakis and was much relieved to hear his laughter. It had a genuine ring to it and he sensed the man had come to terms with the inevitable realisation that his Chadwick and Larry’s were one and the same woman. Larry handed him another piece of bread. This time he had spread butter on it and a thick slice of ham.

‘Larry, I want to talk to you about Chadwick. There are things I have to know.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘It doesn’t seem to be a matter of choice any longer.’

Just then Phillipos arrived with a row of white plates balanced on his arm, a small boy carrying a large coffee pot and a cup and saucer running behind him: Manoussos’s breakfast. Phillipos served the chief of police, sat down and poured the coffee, and while Manoussos cut into the perfectly fried eggs the man posed several questions to him. Some ten minutes later, satisfied with the answers, he left the two men to finish their breakfast.

Larry had been grateful for the distraction. He was curious as to what had changed Manoussos’s mind that he now so readily accepted Chadwick had been deceiving him. He had almost asked him but that ten-minute interruption by Phillipos gave him time to think it over. Now he knew that he would not.

‘Tell me some of the things people have said about Chadwick’s character, Larry?’ asked Manoussos.

A shrewd question for a policeman but not for a lover, thought Larry, who was aware that Manoussos was trying to build up a profile of Chadwick Chase, to see if she had the psychological make-up of a killer – the very same thing he himself was doing since there was no evidence to prove that she was.

‘Diana, Hannibal’s daughter, now believes that Chadwick had a native sassiness which she replaced with an acquired innocence. Before Hannibal’s death she had never thought of Chadwick as having been cunning rather than intelligent, deceiving everyone by appearing to be naive about people as well as life in general. When she admitted that to me and that she had in fact thought
quite the opposite until her father’s sudden death, the will, Chadwick’s strange behaviour subsequent to Hannibal’s demise, I confronted her with her appraisal of Chadwick. I suggested to her that in the milieu Hannibal had thrust Chadwick into as a child of twelve and had kept her in until his death, her behaviour was rather a sign of someone brought up in wealth: only rich women are sheltered; only the overprotected ones unworldly, or in Chadwick’s case allowed to be worldly only on Hannibal’s terms. Maybe she had been right not to believe those things about Chadwick, and conceivably she was wrong now.’

‘How did she take that?’

‘Not very well at all.’

Larry wanted to ask Manoussos if he thought Diana’s assessment was correct. He hesitated, and thought better of asking anything about the private life of the police chief and Chadwick; he had after all been asked not to. He would wait for things to develop.

He continued, ‘Now Diana’s husband, Bill Ogden, he champions Chadwick. He thinks that she is the most brilliant orchestrator of image – a shrewd politician. He believes that Hannibal taught her those things, throughout her life, and to become a key participant in shaping the Hannibal Chase myth and securing a place in it for herself. He sees her as a perfectionist who knows exactly who she is and what she wants. And he believes that what she wanted was to be all things first and foremost to herself and then Hannibal. He believes that Hannibal and Chadwick loved each other unconditionally, that they could deny each other nothing because they were each of them living on borrowed time: he would have died in that crash had she not saved him and she would have died in the backwoods of Tennessee had he not saved her by never hesitating a minute to liberate her from the miserable and unhappy life she was leading there. They breathed new life into each other and never stopped until Hannibal took his last breath.’

‘Did Chadwick tell Bill Ogden that?’

‘Not in so many words. But Bill and Chadwick were good friends and they did talk and he had seen the way she was with her
husband and her family. She was formidable, so was Hannibal, so was their marriage, but Bill Ogden – not being one of Hannibal’s children except in law – was able to accept that there was a secret side to their marriage, something dark that they made light of and lived out. He sometimes thought it made Chadwick unhappy but she never gave him any proof of that. “She keeps her secrets,” he told me. “They are in a strange way her life, her very private life, which she will never give up. If she had a hand in Hannibal’s death she will never tell us, we will never find out, because Hannibal didn’t want us to know.” ’

‘Hannibal Chase? From all you told me about him and his relationship with the child he saved, how he groomed her to be his wife, the life they led, one minute I can get a grip on the character of the man, the next I lose it because I can’t equate him with the man Chadwick described as her husband. It wasn’t easy for me to face but I have: Chadwick has been deceiving me ever since that first day we met. It’s been one lie after another. What is it about me that made her feel she had to do that? Was it out of a sense of guilt because she did have a hand in his death that she had to make up a fictitious life and husband for me to believe in? If not then what was it about Hannibal Chase that made her do that? These are haunting questions which will not leave me and will drive me away from the Chadwick I know and love because she was never really there.’

For several minutes the two men remained silent. Larry wanted to kick himself for having revealed the story of Chadwick and Hannibal to Manoussos without realising she was his woman, that they were in love. Had he been aware of that he would have handled the entire affair differently but now it was too late, there was no turning back.

‘I have a theory.’

‘As to whether Chadwick had a hand in Hannibal’s death?’

‘Yes.’

Larry watched Manoussos pale visibly. Here was a sharp and dedicated police officer. In love or not, he could not close his eyes or run away from the facts: he had been deceived, and there was a strong possibility that his lover was a criminal. Manoussos
Stavrolakis, a man in love, was giving way to the man burned by lies, the Cretan, and not least, the detective.

‘Well?’ There was resignation in his voice when he uttered that one word but there was too a coldness in his eyes, a hardness in the expression on his face.

‘I want your word that if I take you into my confidence you will consider whatever you learn from me to be out of your jurisdiction
vis à vis
the law? I have an obligation to the clients who have hired me to keep this a private matter. Unless I felt that it was safe to ask for your help, which I did because of what Colin had told me about you, I would never have been as indiscreet as I have been. Do I have your word?’

Larry picked up a moment of hesitation before Manoussos answered. ‘Yes, you have my word. Look, Larry, for you it’s business, for me it’s private. My life with Chadwick is fast going down the tubes. I’m going to try and save it. Anything you can tell me might help.’

Larry pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and, licking the end of one, placed it in his mouth and lit it. He took several draws on the cigarette. Then he spoke. ‘OK, let me give you my impression of Hannibal. He was a very vital kind of man, handsome, conservative, a moral creature who fell in love with an unusually seductive child who saved his life. For the rest of his life he would suffer guilt for that, compounded by his lusting after her. But he was also a man who understood a great many things about himself and life in general. The entire foundation of his life was based on existentialist thinking: man is free and responsible only if he lives his reality and it never becomes mere thought. And what happens to Hannibal? He is saved by an extraordinary child who is by her very nature living out her life by the philosophy he is struggling to follow. He already knows by the time they meet that you learn whatever you can from every relationship – but that most aren’t meant to last a lifetime and so you keep looking for one. There was nothing for it: once he and Chadwick saved each other, they were bound together and so he groomed her to last his lifetime. By all accounts that suited her very well. So they lived together in a good deal of mystery.

‘Hannibal was an aristocrat in every sense of the word. But aristocrats are no more virtuous than ordinary people – what they have above all is courage, and after that taste and responsibility and a hell of a lot of endurance. He had those things in spades. Chadwick, backwoods white trash, had smidgeons of those traits when he met her they overwhelmed him and he cultivated them in her for her and for himself. Of course he saw something else in her, that same thing you fell in love with and I find so seductive about her, what many men when they see Chadwick fall in love with: the image that is a mere thirty percent of the package. It’s the other seventy percent, something much deeper than her astonishingly sensuous beauty, that sends men off the deep end.

‘Hannibal’s son Warren was his father’s best friend and confidant and was close to Chadwick from the very first day Hannibal brought her home. He refused to reveal anything about their very private life but sent me on to a woman who did know about it. She was the woman Hannibal had hired to educate Chadwick sexually. Now
she
was fascinating and gave me a picture of them and their life together that explains a great deal.

‘She saw them both, even though there was that vast difference in age between them, as equally matched sexually. Strong libido, sensuous, adventurous in sexual desire … that was Hannibal Chase, and what he craved in his women. Lilana de Chernier taught Chadwick at the age of seventeen to understand and experience the thrill of those things and enjoy fully the ecstasy that can result from them. She groomed Chadwick to be a sexually free woman, and Hannibal, who had a profound depravity and a sexually deviant world he liked on occasion to dwell in, when Chadwick seduced him, was only too thrilled to find she had been taught how to luxuriate in his pleasures.

‘Lilana says that Hannibal was a closet sybarite, one of those urbane and cynical people with an aversion to the strenuous and boring. He tried to compensate for being one through his philanthropic work, but was one nevertheless and pandered to his aversions. He considered that a flaw in his character, like his sexual libertinism, until he met and fell in lust and love with Chadwick. Whatever defects he had, he didn’t have to hide them
from her. She embraced them. She loved him totally and could accept and, yes, even revel in those things with him, which she did. They were a great part of their life together and became their secrets, their very private world. Even so, his demons did periodically cause him anxiety that made him sadistic in some ways to Chadwick. A guess made by Lilana and Bill Ogden. Only Chadwick will know if it’s true.

‘Lilana de Chernier knew them both very well. We know that kind of very special beauty Chadwick has. Well, she says that Hannibal worked on honing that beauty and taught Chadwick how to do the same from the moment he laid eyes on her. She believes that their relationship was indestructible, simple for Chadwick but complex for Hannibal. It was love and lust, total trust, loyalty that bound them together. Chadwick’s beauty, her soul, was for him a moment of respite – redemption – for which he was constantly looking. He had in the past through beauty – a woman, a piece of art, a flower, a garden – found it, but very nearly as soon as it was found, like a breath it would evaporate. These were only signs of redemption and nothing more. But then Chadwick came into his life and here was beauty once found that stayed. He was redeemed, they were complete.

‘Manoussos, we’re not talking here of big egos and weak identities. Chadwick and Hannibal were both big egos with strong identities, two people who would lay down their lives for each other and did when they married, and I believe did once more when Hannibal died. My theory is that he died for
them,
not for him nor for her but for
them.
I don’t quite know why. If Chadwick had a hand in it, it was not for money or power or to be rid of Hannibal Chase but because he asked her to.’

‘But you have nothing to back up that theory?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But you expect to find something?’

‘The more I learn about Chadwick, the more I believe there will never be evidence to prove my theory. Only Chadwick can tell us what really happened the night her husband died. Will she? Never to satisfy the family. Possibly for love, her love for you. But I wouldn’t bank on that. That does not, however, mean that I
won’t confront her with what I know and ask her to tell me the truth about the death of Hannibal Chase. When and if I do challenge her it will be because it’s my last shot at solving this case.’