The Dead Travel Fast (12 page)

“No, I don’t think we’ve found the killers.”

“Good, at least you are honest and there’s no need to ask me
any questions, I know what you’re after. You want to know what that fat pig Samarakis came here for, don’t you?”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

“He came because he was frightened; he’d seen something he shouldn’t have. Yes, even that swaggering bully felt fear, so like a little boy he came to me for a charm to protect him: the poor fool. I saw death in him the moment he came through the door, it oozed out like sweat from every greasy pore in his wicked body. Because once he had seen what he did his death was certain, and you’d better pray death was all that waited for him.”

She chuckled mirthlessly and made clucking sounds to herself before continuing.

“Once he understood, he couldn’t wait to pass on what he’d learned, hoping that the death would transfer with it. So think yourself lucky, Athenian, that his knowledge died with him.”

“How can you know all this?”

“You would not understand if I told you and even if you did, you wouldn’t believe. But for the sake of my silly granddaughter, whose luck and judgement seems to get worse each day, I will give you some advice.”

She waddled round to an ancient rush-bottomed chair and lowered herself onto its greasy seat.

“Hippolyta, wait outside while I tell something to your man.”

Hippolyta slipped through the door leaving Theodrakis sweating in the fetid heat of the room, standing before the crone.

“You should never have come here; this is not your place. Here you are like a fish who tries to walk; here you can trust no one, here no one is who they seem, here no one will protect you. Yet deep inside you something has wakened that might help you; it may even save you. All this is far beyond any defence that I could give you, but here is the only help I can offer. On this island there is one person who can help you and one who can damn you. The first you do not know, the second you will recognise. That is all. Listen, I want no more of this evil; it works and moves in a more powerful world than mine.”

Theodrakis realised it was a waste of time asking questions. He mumbled his thanks and walked to the door. As he was leaving she spoke one last time.

“Do not mistreat that foolish girl outside. I know you understand that if you do, I will set misfortune on you.”

Outside, the sweat drying on his body felt cold. Hippolyta linked his arm and they walked down the hill towards the village. Neither of them said anything about the visit to the crone. He walked her home and as they reached her door she said,

“Tomorrow I don’t have to work; if you like, I will take you on one of the boat picnics that the captains arrange for tourists.”

In normal circumstances he would have avoided this like the plague, but now he agreed instantly.

“Good, it’s a pity we can’t go on the best one: that is on Captain Michales’s boat but I do not think you would be welcome. I will call at your hotel at nine, bring something for swimming.”

She pecked him on the cheek and disappeared inside. Later, he sat on his balcony with the evening’s events chasing each other round his mind. Yet, despite the frightening strangeness of the evening, on balance he felt better than he had at any time since leaving Athens.

That night he dreamed of the woman again and this time she spoke to him, but her words slipped away before he could make sense of them. She also touched him and his ejaculation was intense enough to wake him. He thought of sponging down the sheets but instead drifted back to sleep.

He sat in the corridor waiting for the meeting, flexing his hands to see if he could loosen them up, but it did no good. His fingers and his toes felt numb and frozen when he’d woken that morning, and only warmed up slightly once he got moving. The bed had been empty but she’d left a note on his pillow, ‘Had to dash, reception will get you a taxi, lovely night ring soon. A’.

He supposed he’d maybe trapped a nerve as he slept, reckoning he was too young for circulation problems. He was still flexing his fingers as the door to Professor Andraki’s room opened and he was invited in. Andraki seemed almost excited to see him; the colour had returned to his face, he looked flushed as if he’d run up a couple of flights of stairs. The room was even less tidy than usual: the table, desk, chairs and floor were littered with maps, papers and books. There were at least half a dozen dirty coffee cups in various degrees of emptiness strewn about. He shook Andraki’s hand, picking up the familiar scent of alcohol on his breath.

“Good morning, Doctor Watkins, I just wanted a quick word before you start. I hope the team I picked is to your satisfaction.”

Steve mumbled that it was, while clearing a jumble of papers off the seat that Andraki indicated he could sit on.

“Good, good, excellent, I just wanted to ask you—”

He finished in mid-sentence and Steve realised that Andraki had started to stare intently at his face.

“Your ear, Doctor Watkins, I never really looked at it before before …”

He broke off again then seemed to mumble to himself as much to Steve,

“Lucky, you must be very lucky, you’re marked yet alive.”

“Sorry professor, I didn’t quite catch all of that.”

“Forgive me, I did not mean to appear rude, I just wondered how you came to, er, damage your left ear.”

“It was in an accident.”

This had nothing to do with Andraki and he didn’t want to think about it; he was still plagued by nightmares of that cold night on the mound at Skendlebury. He decided that maybe Andraki was drunk and said,

“Professor, time’s moving on, I need to get to the site.”

Andraki seemed to pull himself together like a man coming round from a dream.

“Yes, of course, well I will come straight to the point. That land has always been off limits to us, even though it’s the oldest archaeological site on the island. It’s attracted more than its fair share of misfortune over the years and been abandoned at least three times. Remarkable artefacts are rumoured to have been found in situ and there are oblique references to it, as you know, in two of the more ancient and obscure texts.

“What you probably don’t know is the rather unhappy local tradition about the place. Unusually, we can evidentially substantiate this as dating back to the earliest records. The tradition concerns a legend of some type of ancient, yet recurring, blood rite. The aggregation of so much reportage, as you know, is often underlain by something of significance. Now Vassilis, whose family have kept it off limits, suddenly wants a stranger to investigate it; why is that, do you think?”

“Because of the fire, I guess, and the period’s my specialism, remember?”

“Of course, but it is also the specialism of many Greek archaeologists who know the terrain far better than you possibly can. Why do you think it is that he takes such an interest in your career?”

Steve could see Andraki’s cheeks flushed red and wondered at the anger, but replied calmly,

“Well, I did save the life of his son.”

“You consider that saving a life? There are many here who would disagree with you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Andraki ignored him, saying,

“I want to be informed of everything of significance that you find. I want to be informed at once, particularly about anything found out of context.”

“Oh, come on, you know that in an area like that stuff gets scattered all over.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. I must be informed of anything fixed that is out of context. Anything fixed, is that clear enough for you? You inform me at once.”

Steve’s anti-authoritarian streak boiled over so he failed to consider the bizarre implications of the demand. Instead he bridled and channelled his response towards the studied indifference calculated to most infuriate his superiors.

“Yeah, whatever.”

It had the desired effect on Andraki.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t feel quite so pleased if you knew where they think Samarakis the murdered policeman was go—”

He stopped himself from saying more but needn’t have bothered. Steve had walked out without having registered the implication of what Andraki might have been about to let slip.

Outside in the sunlight, the student team, Anna, Thomas and Maria were sitting in the dust under the shade of a desiccated plane tree; he waved to them and walked across to the kiosk to buy a bottle of water. While he was waiting he read the headlines of the local paper: ‘Satanist killer caught’.

He was sufficiently intrigued to buy a copy to read in the minibus on the way to the site and if his translation was correct, it appeared all the killings had been committed by one man. The journalist suggested an inside source close to the investigations had revealed that this man was a mentally disturbed vagrant well known on the streets of Vathia, and one whom most residents of the city would recognise.

The theme of the piece was relief; there was some muted praise for the police but the journalist posed the question: if the man
was so well known, why had it taken them so long to catch him? Inside the paper, however, the editorial asked why such a man had been allowed to roam the island on his killing spree and how someone so physically and mentally disabled managed to overpower and mutilate younger and stronger victims; Samarakis in particular. It concluded with the prediction that there would be further developments.

They drove through the charred wasteland left by the fire onto the grounds of the Vassilis estate which seemed unaffected, and turned down a rough and dusty track leading to the sea. The minibus pulled up on the broad flat terrace that Alekka had shown him on his first visit. The covering of coarse grass, thorn and scrub had been burnt off, but otherwise there was little damage. At the far end of the terrace Steve could see the ruins of the deserted village; he spread out the map on the bonnet of the bus so that they could orientate themselves. He was trying to pinpoint the area, where, according to Alekka, lay the buried site of great antiquity, when Thomas, a bearded post grad in his thirties, tapped Steve on his shoulder.

“Look, they’ve found it for us.”

Steve turned to follow the direction Thomas indicated and saw a flock of great black birds circling low above the ground. He was reminded, against his will, of what Father John told him about crows, reminded again when Maria said,

“That’s so creepy, like out of a horror movie or something; are birds like that meant to live here, Tom?”

Steve answered for him.

“Well, if they are or not, that’s more or less where the site’s meant to be so we may as well start over there, come on.”

They grabbed their gear from the bus and trudged across the uneven surface of the burnt ground towards the black carrion. The birds continued to circle low without touching the ground until they were within about twenty five metres, then with an accelerated beating of wings they climbed rapidly and flew off towards the sea with a racket of carking and cawing. The oldest and largest bird circled back onto the charred black stump of a scrub oak some twenty metres distant, from where it watched them.

The fire had burnt off most of the vegetation, down to the
thin stony earth that filled in between the rocky protrusions, and Steve noticed a scatter of flints and potsherds. The area the crows circled was different.

However ancient the site, it was apparent was that it had been tampered with very recently. In one sense this was fortunate, as otherwise locating the feature would have been time-consuming and difficult. Yet this thought made Steve uneasy: who would have known where to dig other than an archaeologist with detailed local knowledge? If this was the case, who was it and why? He remembered Andraki describing the desecration of the pre-Geometric burial site in Pythagoreio.

The interference here was crude, looked like it had been done in a hurry and perpetrators wanted to get away as quick as possible. There’d not been any archaeological technique applied, but maybe an archaeologist had sold the information to grave robbers. But that made little sense as virtually nothing with saleable value would be turned up at a site like this. He could tell the others were thinking the same and it was spooking them.

They were standing on a slightly raised, circular area about five metres in diameter, covered in the charred remains of thorn and gorse. Before the fire it would have been hidden, now it seemed almost obscenely exposed and hacked about. Someone had dug a series of experimental holes searching for something, and then apparently having found it, a much larger hole.

This hole was too small for four people to work on so Steve asked Tom and Maria to take an area about the size of a football pitch with the feature at its centre, divide it into a grid and methodically walk each square collecting, recording and bagging every artefact they found. A process similar to that undertaken by police on the murder investigations which were being carried out all over the island.

He and Anna then made a photographic record of the site as they found it. It was hot, too hot really for such work which normally was not done in high summer, but, as Andraki had told him, these were exceptional circumstances. After recording the site and the damage inflicted on it they carefully collected some of the objects that had been turned up in the dug earth, mainly worked obsidian blades of surprisingly good quality.

By the time these were bagged, the sun was directly overhead and causing heat shimmer to distort perspective. The heat thrown back from the recently burnt earth was intolerable so Steve called a halt and they carried their finds back to the mini bus. Thomas raised the sun awning on a series of poles and they slumped into the shade.

After passing round the water they lay still for a while too hot and dried out to talk, then, after the effect of the water enabled sweat to form small streaks in the film of dust that coated their bodies, they began to eat, then lay down to doze away the next couple of hours.

They weren’t easy hours for Steve; there was something horribly familiar, not so much déjà vu as about to be seen. The site was all wrong: for a start why was it there? The land was poor with no other Neolithic stuff anywhere near. It wasn’t like any Neolithic site he’d worked on: not here, not Cyprus, not the Middle East. There was only one site it reminded him of. Skendleby: a site no one had been meant to find, and it would have been better if no one ever had.

He estimated what they had here was a secondary burial inserted into a feature from an earlier period. The burial, probably a cremation pot, had been robbed. Why? There wouldn’t have been anything worth robbing: so why dig it up? The flint blades he couldn’t figure, they were high quality and manufactured someplace else. He felt a sense of dread about the site but it was exciting archaeology.

So, by the time the sun was falling from its zenith and the temperature was moving towards the tolerable, he was almost impatient to get back to investigating the desecrated feature. He crouched at the edge of the main hole to sift through the loose earth that had slipped back into the void, while Anna sifted the material on the surface. His trowel immediately struck rock and he realised that the hole had been cut into the main feature.

In the next hour he uncovered enough dressed stone to be sure he was near the foundation of a painstakingly constructed building. For a moment he entertained the possibility that he’d discovered something to rival Lerna or Sesklo. He paused to catch
breath and wipe the sweat from above his eyes and was about to shout to the other two to come across to look when Thomas grabbed him by the arm.

“Steve, I think you should come and see what we’ve turned up.”

Steve saw his face was pale and thought maybe he’d also found something equally mega, that this was going to help rewrite the Neolithic textbooks. He was so excited he didn’t register when Thomas said,

“Steve, I have a bad feeling about this, I think we need to call the cops.”

Steve was already fantasising about the collection from Lerna in the museum at Nafplion and thinking of the Samian equivalent. Then he saw Maria crouched on her hands and knees above a pool of vomit and his fantasy disappeared with a jolt.

“Steve, look at this: we started finding it in this quadrant as we got close to the feature.”

He was interrupted by a bout of dry retching from Maria behind him.

“Look, the closer we get, the more we find.”

Steve looked and saw bone.

“So, what’s the big deal, you know there’s always fragments of bone round sites.”

“Steve, look closely: this is human bone, and once you clean it up a bit and remove smear from the fire it looks recent.”

“OK, but let the lab nerds analyse what it is when we get it to them.”

“Look at the piece that Maria just found and think again.”

Steve followed Thomas to the spot the where the fragment landed after she’d thrown it away in disgust.

“See that: Steve, it’s a human shin bone and there’s no sign of burn on it, look, it’s blood-stained and there’s sinew, ligament and muscle still attached.”

Steve looked at it, Thomas was right; it was a human shin bone, fresh, untouched by fire. He felt queasy.

“OK, I’ll get the lab to take a look at it soon. Remember, the first rule of archaeology; never make a snap judgement, get a second informed opinion.”

“Steve! There’s no fire damage. You know what that means. It was put here after the fire; the fucking thing’s brand new. The police can’t know about this yet, think about it.”

“All right, I’ve got the picture, there’s no need to go on. Listen, we’re finished here for the day; you bag up the bone you moved, leave the rest. I’ll get it looked at.”