The Dead Travel Fast (16 page)

He finished and looked at Theodrakis, who paused to take a sip of wine while he thought how he should respond, then decided
that as he had come here for help and it was too late to go back he may as well unburden himself.

“I am dealing with a series of ritualistic killings that appear to have been committed by different people; some of these people we have already charged: we have their fingerprints, DNA. And in some cases confessions and yet …”

He paused.

“And yet I’m convinced they didn’t do it. Sounds mad doesn’t it? Let me tell you about the old tramp. This man, a harmless unfortunate dependent on hand outs and living on the street, is well known to the police because of his habit of confessing murders; according to him he’s committed all the high profile murders of the modern age and some much earlier such as Julius Caesar, who he claims to have killed in a cafenion in Vathia ten years ago.

“He turned up at the station to confess to one of these ritual murders, but the strange thing was that he was keener to tell us what he hadn’t done: he hadn’t killed Samarakis; this was a departure from the norm and he was obviously terrified of whatever he thought it was that had. When they checked him out his evidence was all over one of the victims. He wouldn’t have had the strength to kill in that way but he could tell us exactly how it was done: he knew all the procedures we’d kept out of the news.

“So I interviewed him and something inside him came out to taunt us, for a time we were in the presence of a quite different entity. So much so that one of the men in the room with me is still off work with some type of mental breakdown.

“Also, in my judgement there is no way Andraki could have killed Samarakis. So whatever the papers say, we are nowhere near the killer.”

He paused but had gone too far now to go back; he’d gambled on making this disclosure to Vassilis and in a way it was a relief to share this mind-destroying material with someone else, so he carried on.

“But the worst part of this is the ritual: the cutting out and taking of the bones. Where are the bones? What does this thing need them for?”

This last sentence he blurted out like a child. Vassilis regarded him with an expression that Theodrakis thought might be pity, maybe even affection. He poured more wine and as the detective gulped it down, he started to answer.

“I know what it wants them for. Sadly, I don’t know where they are and without that the knowledge is useless. You can take comfort though; this nightmare doesn’t really concern you. You are merely a modern walk-on part in a tragedy that extends back before time as you would recognise it. Our curse is to watch and contain it: as a punishment for our part in letting it loose in the first instance. We watch through the ages. But we wear out and some of us are corrupted.”

This made no literal sense to Theodrakis, but he believed it down in some submerged level of consciousness. Vassilis pointed to the weather-beaten roof of the chapel where, with a raucous cackle, three giant crows took off and flew high up to circle above them.

“Look, see there, Syntagmatarchis, we are not completely alone, we have some helpers, albeit reluctant ones. Birds that have the reputation of being ill-omened by most of the ignorant and, to be fair, not without good reason.”

Now Vassilis, who Theodrakis noticed had drunk none of the wine despite having lifted the goblet to his lips, seemed to come to a decision and said,

“You will know I am hated on this island. Hated but feared and the latter is the more important, and I, as the most visible member of our little group, play up to that reputation. We do not encourage enquiry. You will have noticed my costume I am sure; it is a style I once preferred to the current inhibiting fashion. I have nothing but contempt for your society and the, shall we say, service I am compelled to provide.

“Your fellow poet, that pathetic archaeologist, has had contact with my brothers in England. That is why he ran here to escape, not knowing that I arranged for him to come and he is too stupid to recognise it. Now others have arrived. This I did not foresee and fear they will prove to be a catalyst; things will accelerate and deteriorate unless they can be stopped. And if they are not
stopped, the present problems of this feckless country will seem as nothing by comparison with what is to come. That is all I will tell you at present, any more would disturb you excessively.

“But you have enough to be going on with. Find those bones quickly; use Watkins, he may be a fool but he is the perfect agent for what we face.”

Theodrakis was surprised to hear Vassilis use the collective ‘we’ but hadn’t time to think about it as Vassilis had one last statement to pass on.

“One last thing concerning the source of the evil you have seen but not recognised. As a poet, you will no doubt be able to place these few words

‘Things fall apart the centre cannot hold:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’

The blood dimmed tide is loose’.”

He looked at Theodrakis as if judging him then spoke with the manner of someone bringing a conversation to an end.

“Yes, I thought you would know it. Yeats, as a minor adept, understood a small part of this; I think you might have liked him. Now go; your eyes have been opened, you will know what to do. Do it quickly.”

Theodrakis saw the ancient servant women was standing behind him waiting to show him out and he followed her like someone in a dream. Outside in the compound there was a strikingly beautiful woman waiting by the squad car, much to the discomfort of the driver. She waited until he was close and said,

“You saw her too: saw what I saw. Be very careful.”

She turned and walked into the house.

Late in the afternoon, they finally drove off the rough track onto the scorched land surrounding the Vassilis site above the sea. It was Giles’s fault they were so late. He’d taken Claire to Limnionas for a swim. Once there she’d been compelled by the beauty of the place and desperate to explore. They’d followed a track above the sea until it wound its way down to a rocky cove. Giles sat down on the tiny fringe of beach letting the water at the sea’s edge nibble at his toes and lost all sense of time gazing at the sparkling patterns created by the current: here smooth and deep blue, there disturbed, glinting, pale.

He came to himself and looked for Claire; eventually he saw her standing above him on a shelf of rock. She was naked with her arms outstretched as if frozen in a Mexican wave with her night dark hair part covering her face. She was in a world of her own; he was uneasy and decided not to call to her. He went back to watching the sea and when he turned again she’d gone. Some time later, he heard the sound of stones slipping as she slithered and scuffed her way back down the path to join him. He looked at his watch, surprised how late it had grown, and realised he was delaying Steve, who’d lent them his car.

All this he told Steve by way of apology as they drove to the site in late afternoon, rather than morning. What he didn’t say was that when the still-naked Claire reached the beach she’d made love to him with an urgent brutality that took him by surprise. Her normal modus operandi was slow and gentle. Not that he
was complaining, she was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to him: beautiful, caring, and generous. But he’d changed his T-shirt to a shirt with a collar to hide the bite marks on his neck: the bites on his lips and left ear he couldn’t do anything about. Steve commented,

“You’ve been having fun then; I thought you were meant to leave that type of thing behind you in the sixth form.”

He hadn’t graced this with a reply; just explained he’d left Claire to get a taxi back from Limnionas so he could join Steve on the site visit. He did mention, though, the increasingly rancid smell inside the car. Steve hadn’t reacted well to this. They drove the rest of the way in stony silence.

The setting of the site, despite fire damage, was still beautiful but didn’t have a good feel to it. Steve told him that one of its secondary functions was possibly an unusual Neolithic inhumation. Giles had seen enough of them to last a lifetime. So while Steve scratched around on the mound, Giles walked the area looking at the pot and flint scatter. By this time they were talking again and carried on a shouted conversation across a distance of around thirty metres.

“Steve, I still don’t understand what you’re meant to be doing up here for your girlfriend’s dad.”

“I told you I’m doing him a favour, it’s his land.”

“Funny sort of favour don’t you think? He’d have been better off getting it surveyed by the local archaeologists.”

“He doesn’t want people nosing around.”

“So what are we doing then? Hang on, that’s interesting, it’s the second of these I’ve found.”

“What?”

There was a pause; Steve shouted again.

“What?”

“This can’t be right. Steve, this is fucking human bone! Fresh human bone; what’s going on here?”

There was no answer.

“Steve, did you hear? I’m picking up fresh human bone, we need to get the police.”

Still no answer.

“You knew about this, didn’t you? You bloody knew it already. For Christ’s sake what are you mixed up with?”

“Giles, you’d better come over here.”

Steve sat slumped at the side of the mound, his feet hanging over the edge of the small trench. He looked like he was about to cry.

“Steve, what’s going on?”

Giles got no answer but looked into the trench and saw the edge of a cremation urn that Steve had been in the process of excavating. He sat down next to him and said gently,

“Think of the killings, Steve, this could be evidence, it might be your girlfriend next. You have to tell the police or at least that detective you were talking to.”

“And say what; that I had a bad experience in England and it’s followed me here?”

“Don’t be stupid, this has nothing to do with that; these are modern killings and these bones are fresh.”

“Look in the bottom of the trench, Giles. Trowel through some of the fill from the older level behind the urn, see what you find. Then tell me this has nothing to do with it.”

Giles took the trowel and went down on his knees to work. Soon he unearthed bones: long bones, fingers, shin and arm; old bones; some older than the urn burial. Others were more recent but he estimated still several hundred years old. They were mixed up and out of context but there was nothing fresh here, nothing connecting them with the murders. These had been buried for centuries at least. He was trying to explain this; Steve cut across him,

“Doesn’t this seem scarily familiar to you, Giles? Can’t you see the bones in there are the same as the ones you’ve found on the surface?”

“How would you know what I found? You didn’t bother to look.”

Steve didn’t answer; just sat, head bowed, watching his legs kicking the side of the trench and during the silence Giles filled in the blanks.

“There’s more, aren’t there? You’ve found more, haven’t you? What have you done with them, Steve? What are you playing at?”

Giles fired the questions not waiting for a reply, not that Steve looked like providing one. Then he shouted,

“That smell in the car, that’s bone isn’t it: you’ve hidden bones in your fucking car, haven’t you? What are you playing at? You’re concealing evidence. Why, why are you doing it? Are you completely fucking mad?”

“I’m scared. Not mad, scared. At first I thought I was doing it to give me more time on site but that wasn’t the real reason. Giles, I think that this whole site is some type of set up and that I’m the fall guy. I was lured to this island, it wasn’t a lucky break.”

He stopped and the two men stood silently thinking back to the horror of Skendleby. Then Steve began to tell him, in a quiet and almost controlled voice, about the site.

“You’re right about them being out of context though, the mixing is deliberate, they must be used and reused for some kind of ritual and I think the ones outside are being kept for the next episode.”

Giles tried to speak.

“No, don’t stop me, Giles, I’ve had this shit going round in my head since the students found the first human bone. I need to get this out, you have to listen.”

He took a deep breath as if steeling himself then continued.

“First, let me tell you why I’m doing this. Two people told me I had to do it: Professor Andraki, who has since attacked a policeman and is suspected for at least one of the killings and been locked up, and Vassilis, who seems to run the island. He owns this land, he claims he’s Alekka’s dad but I’m not sure about that.”

He stopped, lit a cigarette with trembling hands.

“And they both asked me to pay particular attention to anything I found that was out of context, tell them only, not the police, them. No one else is meant to know. Now tell me Giles, what could be more out of fucking context than those bones?”

He didn’t want an answer, when Giles tried one he was cut off.

“No, don’t interrupt ‘cos if I stop I don’t think I’ll be able to start again.”

This time Giles stayed quiet.

“Now I’m going to give you the archaeological reasons why this is so bad.

“There’s bone from several time periods and they’re deliberately mixed up, which means from time to time it’s opened up and reused. Think about that, Giles: the place is still used. There’s bone in there from thousands of years before the Neolithic, yet there are people who still know about it and use it. What sort of people would be capable of doing that?”

Giles tried to speak but Steve hushed him.

“No, no, let me finish. The new bones are scattered on the surface around the site like they’re waiting to be used. Like we think they were left out to let the flesh rot in some British Neolithic communities. But all of them, the ones inside the feature and the ones scattered around, are all the same type, all long bones. The worst thing is that there’s bone here that predates the Neolithic: pre-date the ritual, how can that happen? It’s like time’s been warped. Remember the bones at Skendleby: it’s happening again.”

Giles said nothing; then, after an uncomfortable silence,

“Giles, I think I’ve been set up. I came here to get away from all this and ended up mixed in everything I ran away from.”

“Steve, why not tell Alekka, couldn’t she get her dad to take the pressure off?”

“Giles, you never listen properly do you? I’m not sure she is his daughter, I’m not even sure she’s alive. She’s so cold, after we make love I’m cold, my fingers go numb.”

A year ago Giles would have laughed and called him paranoid; out here with the bones he felt a trickle of fear lift the hairs on the back of his neck. Claire had said last night there was something badly wrong with Steve’s Greek girlfriend: something you shouldn’t trust. He had complete confidence in the blend of psychic power and intuition that was the basis of Claire’s judgement. She’d saved his soul and transformed his life, and he loved her with a sincerity of which he’d never believed he was capable. He also knew that Steve was badly damaged, mentally dislocated and needed careful handling.

Standing in the slanting late afternoon sunshine on this weird site with its strangely elongated shadows, he was wondering whether it had been a good idea to come here. But Claire said she loved the place and it had certainly charged her sexual performance in a way that, although stimulating, he’d not quite got
used to. He decided to calm Steve down and persuade him to act rationally.

“Steve, all we need to do is to give this site a quick once-over then take the recent bones to the police right? Then it will become a crime scene and be off-limits and you’re in the clear, yeah? Then you can take a few days off to show me and Claire round the island, chill out and forget the scary stuff.”

“That’s not how things work here Gi, it’s not England.”

“Have you got a better idea?”

“No, I’ve not got any ideas; I just don’t want trouble. I’m not going to have anything more to do with this site and I’m not going to the police. I’ll tell Vassilis about the bones and let him deal with it.”

“You can’t do that, you have to tell the police.”

“If you’re so keen, tell them yourself, you can have them. Come on, it’s getting late, let’s get away from here. Look, perhaps you’re right about some of this, maybe I am too wound up. I’m seeing Alekka tonight, I have to clean up, maybe she can tell her dad.”

Giles didn’t want to push him any further and they still hadn’t talked about Tim Thompson or his letter. He wanted to get off this ground before the sun went down. So they packed up, Giles slipped the two human bones into a collecting bag and they trudged across the burnt stony ground towards the car. The ghost of Tim Thompson hovered above them. The crows watching from the ruined walls of the deserted village rose into the air and flew slowly away.

The drive back was no relief; the rancid stench from the bones hidden in the back was stronger, but neither of them felt inclined to mention it. When Steve dropped Giles off, he got out and walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. He reached inside and rummaged around for a moment before pulling out a bundle wrapped in an old blanket.

“Please take these, Giles, and bury them in the grove while we decide what to do; I can’t keep them any longer. I’ll talk to Alekka about them tonight. I don’t think either of us wants more of this today; I’ll call in tomorrow morning.”

Giles accepted the atrocious bundle, knowing Steve was handing
the responsibility across with the bones but, since Skendleby, he’d felt responsible for him so he took them. Steve passed him a spade from the back of the car and he made his way into the grove to prepare a temporary burial.