The doctor opened a door into one of the intensive care rooms. The light was muted, and the only sound came in regular bleeps from the machines around the bed. The upper part of Captain Kollias’s torso was swathed in bandages, as was much of his head. His swarthy face, recognisable only by its thick moustache, was bruised and swollen, with plastic tubing coming from his nose. The doctor leant over and spoke a few words, and Captain Kollias stirred and opened his eyes. Leo drew up a chair next to the bed, and the doctor left them alone together.
Captain Kollias had closed his eyes again, but his mouth was moving. Leo leant forward. ‘Captain Kollias? Can you hear me?’
Captain Kollias stirred again, and reached out a big, hairy hand and laid it on Leo’s arm. He tried to speak, but his voice was hoarse and Leo couldn’t make out his words. He waited. Captain Kollias cleared his throat and tried again.
‘Thank you for coming, Mr Davies.’ The guttural voice, so clear and resonant in the courtroom, was weak and tired now. He was evidently in a very bad way.
‘I’m so sorry about your accident,’ said Leo. There was nothing much else he could say. He knew he wasn’t here for social chit-chat. He would simply have to wait for whatever it was Captain Kollias had to tell him.
Moments passed. Captain Kollias’s eyes ranged round the room, as though he barely knew where he was. Leo presumed he was on some kind of pretty strong painkilling medication, and wondered if he was going to be capable of saying anything much. But after some time his eyes fixed on Leo’s.
‘This has been so much on my conscience, Mr Davies. If I am going to die, I need to tell you. I am a Catholic, I cannot bear to let this …’ He breathed heavily, closing his eyes.
‘You’re not going to die,’ said Leo gently. At any rate, he hoped not. In his bowels Leo felt stirrings of fateful apprehension. ‘Is this to do with the case?’
‘With the
Persephone
, yes,’ said Captain Kollias, his voice barely a whisper. ‘With the boy.’ His face contorted in misery, and large tears squeezed from between his bruised eyelids. ‘I did not know he was on board. If I had known he would come back, I would never have done what she asked. Never …’ Tears rolled down his face and into his moustache.
Leo took a deep breath. He fished in his pocket for a pen. Why was there never paper handy when you needed it most? He glanced around, then crossed the room quickly and opened the door. A nurse was on her way down the corridor.
‘Please, I need to write something down. Do you have any paper?’
The girl went to the nurses’ station and came back with a notepad. Leo returned to the room and sat down next to Captain Kollias. He leant close. ‘You’re talking about Adriana, aren’t you? What did she ask you to do? Take it easy, tell me slowly.’ Captain Kollias began to speak, and Leo jotted down his words.
‘She asked me … she asked me to make some accident happen, so the yacht would be destroyed. She wanted to pay me. We talked about it. I said the best way would be a fire. I said I could make it look like an accident.’ Captain Kollias stopped, breathing laboriously. Leo waited, pen in hand. He supposed that somewhere, deep in his subconscious, he had been expecting this. Or something like it. For all her charm and loveliness, he had always known the kind of woman Adriana was. He recalled now the single glance which had passed between her and Captain Kollias in court, and understood everything. Everything, that was, except her motive, the reasoning behind such unnecessary mendacity. After a few seconds, Captain Kollias resumed. ‘We agreed it would be best to do it when the yacht was in Italy. It was going to be dry-docked. All the crew would be gone, except for Pantazis, and the boy Vasillios …’ His face contorted again, and fresh tears oozed down his face.
‘Pantazis – that’s Mr Staveris, the engineer?’
Captain Kollias nodded.
‘Did he know what was going to happen?’
‘No. He knew nothing.’
‘Tell me, as clearly as you can, how the accident, the fire, was arranged. Take your time.’
Captain Kollias nodded. He seemed calmer now that the telling of the tale was underway. ‘I had to wait for her to arrange about the paintings first.’
What paintings?’
‘In the yacht, in the main area, she had some very precious paintings. They were in some kind of frame, screwed to the wall …’ Captain Kollias raised his hands to gesture. ‘I had to unscrew them, and she took the paintings away.’
‘Where did she take them?’
‘I don’t know. The yacht was here in England, in a marina in Southampton, two weeks before we were due to sail for Ventetone. She took them away, and then a day, maybe two days later, she brought them back.’ He paused for some seconds, struggling for breath. ‘She put them back in the frames and I screwed them to the wall again. Then she said it could go ahead. I was paid some money in advance, then I was to receive the rest after it had been done.’
‘Did she pay you herself?’
Captain Kollias closed his eyes and rolled his head slowly on the pillow. ‘Mr Defereras paid me.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred thousand pounds. A great deal of money. She knew I wanted to retire. I wish now I had not taken it, and that the boy might still be alive …’ He turned his head on the pillow and wept.
Leo waited. After a few seconds he said gently, ‘Tell me how you started the fire.’
Slowly, and with difficulty, Captain Kollias recounted the events of that night in Ventetone, how he had loosened the injector pipe, then run the generator so that the resultant diesel spray would ignite. He had taken the added precaution of collecting some fuel and spilling it in the bilge, and had then thrown in a lighted cigarette end to ensure the fire took hold.
Leo wrote down his words, recreating the scenario: the loosened fuel pipe, explained away by vibrations created during the grounding incident two weeks earlier; the two different means by which the leaking fuel might have been ignited, either by fuel spraying on to the hot generator or by the idle hand of Pantazis Staveris, engineer and forty-a-day man. He thought ruefully of all those experts who had worked so earnestly, detailing in their reports how very likely it was that the fire was started in one of these ways.
At length Captain Kollias had to stop, his chest rising and falling painfully. Leo read through what he had written down. There it was, in black and white. Adriana had scuttled her own yacht. The paintings destroyed in the fire were copies of originals, and she had claimed the insurance on them, and on the yacht. Why? In her position, why go to such lengths to secure a few million in a fraudulent insurance claim? Perhaps it was simply in the nature of things that people, even people as wealthy as Adriana, should be greedy and petty and conniving. And unlucky.
Captain Kollias gripped Leo’s sleeve tightly. When he spoke his voice was low, passionate, broken with misery. ‘I swear to God that I would never have done this if I had known the boy was on board! He was supposed to stay with friends that night. When they found his body after, when I realised that if we had searched we might have found him … But we could not have known. We could not have known.’
Leo patted his hand – there was no reproach he could make that the man had not already heaped upon himself. Consolation seemed the only natural thing to offer. After a few moments he said, ‘You understand the difference this makes to everything? To Miss Papaposilakis’s position?’
Captain Kollias closed his eyes wearily. ‘I don’t care. I tell you so that I can make my peace. I cannot die with this on my conscience.’
Leo suddenly realised with alarm that a patch of red was seeping swiftly through the layers of bandages covering Captain Kollias’s chest. He reached up and stabbed at the red emergency button on the wall above the bed. Within seconds a nurse was in the room, followed by the doctor. ‘Mr Kollias is bleeding,’ said Leo.
The doctor had already taken over, moving with swift urgency. He and the nurse were dealing with bandages and equipment and monitors as Leo looked on.
After some moments the scene grew calmer. The doctor issued some instructions to the nurse, then came over to Leo.
‘Is he all right?’ asked Leo.
‘For the moment. The strain caused his wound to open. You can’t talk to him anymore, I’m afraid.’
‘No, no, of course. I’m sorry if my visit—’ Leo broke off. ‘The thing is … as I told you, Mr Kollias was a witness in a court case. What he told me today makes a great deal of difference in that case. His evidence is important. How long do you think it will be till he’s able to leave hospital?’
‘I’ve no idea. Mr Kollias’s condition is still critical, and he’s due to have further surgery later today. It’s a question of waiting to see how he recovers from that.’
‘I see. I’m sorry if my visit has set him back.’
‘Don’t worry. It would probably have been worse if he hadn’t been able to speak to you. He was in quite a state.’
Leo went back to the waiting room. He decided to say nothing to Mrs Kollias about the recent brief drama. She rose anxiously as Leo came into the room.
‘Did he talk to you?’
‘Yes. Yes, he did.’
‘It was important?’ Leo could tell from her eyes, her instinctive deference, that she wouldn’t think of asking the nature of her husband’s private conversation.
‘Yes, it was. I’m very glad you rang me. I hope I’ll be able to speak to him again, when he’s better.’
These last words brought a small smile to her lips. She nodded. Leo pulled out the pen and paper he had been using and jotted down a number. He handed it to Mrs Kollias. ‘Here’s my mobile number. In case you can’t reach
me at work. Please, ring me as soon as your husband’s well enough to speak to me again.’
On the way back to the City in the taxi, Leo pulled out the notes he had made at Captain Kollias’s bedside. He read through them, reflecting on how he was going to play this. It didn’t look as though Captain Kollias was going to be up and about any time soon – not before the hearing finished, at any rate – so his evidence would have to be put before the court in a hearsay statement. Before any of that happened, however, Leo would have to deal with Adriana. She was, after all, his client. He was going to have to tell her what Captain Kollias had said, and explain to her that he had a duty to reveal to the court what he had been told.
He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. Dear God, that part wasn’t going to be easy. She wouldn’t be the first of Leo’s clients to be put in the invidious position of being caught out in a lie. How would she react? If previous clients were anything to go by, she would go ballistic. She would accuse Captain Kollias of having a grudge, of lying for reasons of his own. She would point out that he had already given his evidence, and say that that should be an end of it. Leo, as he was obliged to, would explain to her that he would have to tell the court anyway, and she would doubtless turn on him and accuse him of not doing his best to protect her interests. Clients always liked pulling that one. That would be the usual train of events. Outrage, upset and prevarication – anything but a straightforward admission of the truth –
and then matters would take their course, and that would be the end of the
Persephone
claim. Leo knew, however, that his intimate involvement with Adriana added quite a different dimension to the matter. A most unprofessional one. Adriana might see no need to bluff and bluster. She might simply rely on all that existed between them, and ask him to make it go away. Because that was something he could do. He really could.
Leo gazed out at the traffic. Was there a lawyer born, he wondered, whose first instinct, on being given troublesome fresh information, was not to chuck it straight in the bin? That, he had no doubt, was exactly what Adriana would try to persuade him to do. She knew how close he was to moving from his world to hers. It would seem to her the obvious solution. Forget Captain Kollias had ever told him anything. Let the hearing end without saying a word. If Captain Kollias recovered, the situation could be dealt with without difficulty. With money, probably. A man who believed himself to be dying, with a burning desire to clear his Catholic conscience, was a very different thing from a man recovering from a bad accident and facing the possibility of being charged with giving false evidence. Of course, it would never come to that. Adriana wouldn’t let it. She would pay to see that it didn’t.
Money. It was what it was all about. Ten million on a fraudulent insurance claim. Why not? It was business, after all. She was a ship owner. It was the way she did things. Second nature. Just as it was second nature to assume that Leo would want part of her wealth, to
indulge himself. Working for, or with, Adriana – he could just see it. He would become a second Mr Defereras, making the pay offs, being involved in all her scams and deals, helping her increase her wealth, and enjoying it with her. That was one thing old Mr Defereras hadn’t done. That was the difference. Leo would live her life, take her money, enjoy the pleasures, and shrug off the lies. What was the big deal? Wasn’t much of his personal life conducted on the basis of deceit? He was habitually unfaithful to people he professed to love – Camilla, for instance. Rachel. Anthony. Everyone except for Oliver, the one sacred individual in his wretched life. He confessed himself incapable of fidelity. He had deceived and betrayed on a pretty regular basis. Here was Adriana, offering him a life of wealth and pleasure, on her terms. When she found out what Captain Kollias had told him, that would be the one ultimate term. The easy lie. Not even a lie. Just the option of saying nothing. Where was the difference?
The difference was that, whatever the nature of his personal relationships, he had never lied professionally in his entire career. It had never once crossed his mind. There might be many tainted and corrupt aspects of his life, but work wasn’t one of them. Not that he regarded it with any special pride. It was simply an ethic, part of having been a barrister for so many years. He might treat the notion of his responsibilities to other people with amused contempt, but when it came to his duty to the court – that nebulous authority hovering at the back of every lawyer’s
professional conscience, supreme and unquestioned – he balked. He couldn’t do it. Not for the sake of a life of ease and pleasure with Adriana, nor for anything her money could buy. Just as cheating was second nature to Adriana, so it was that Leo knew he had no alternative but to give it all up – Adriana, her case, and any delusions of a life of ease and idleness. Let justice take its course.