The Dead Travel Fast (17 page)

He woke with a jerk as the door opened and couldn’t remember where he was. Hippolyta brought the breakfast tray across and laid it on the bed.

“Don’t get too used to this, it’s not a regular service but last night you seemed so worn down.”

It was true, last night he’d fallen asleep as soon as they got into bed; yet, unusually, enjoyed a deep and dreamless sleep. She was still wearing the T-shirt she slept in, she climbed back into bed and side-by-side they worked their way through the contents of the tray. However, the day ahead couldn’t be put off indefinitely, and after draining the last dregs of the coffee and kissing her on the lips, which were sticky sweet from the honey, he got up and squeezed into the tiny shower cubicle. He heard the doorbell as he was drying and shortly after, the smokey voice of Captain Michales from the hallway.

“I have a message for the policeman who I think must be here.”

He didn’t hear her reply but he guessed it must have been affirmative as Michales continued.

“It’s from the English. Not Steve, the new one, he wants to talk to him, says it is urgent, perhaps it is not so bad your policeman is here; I have already too many women to watch over.”

Then the door shut and Theodrakis felt it was safe to leave the bathroom but before he could ask for more detail, his phone rang.

“Theodrakis, it’s Kostandin we‘ve got big trouble here, we need you.”

“OK, I’m leaving now.”

“Better tell whoever you’re with you won’t be back for a while.”

The line went dead and Theodrakis was left wondering; he hated being left in the dark, it fuelled his anxieties. He dressed hurriedly, reassured Hippolyta he’d keep in touch and left the apartment.

The taxi to Vathia took forever; he tried to call Lucca but only got his messaging service. There was an angry demonstration in Lion Square, a consequence of the Athens government having fallen during the night, the driver told him. He hadn’t time to worry about his friends and family in the capital, because as the cab rounded the corner they were stopped by a nastier crowd. The driver managed to reverse the cab and drive him through backstreets to about a hundred metres from the compound at the rear of the station.

“I’m not taking you any further; it’s too dangerous, get another taxi next time.”

Theodrakis didn’t leave a tip; just made an undignified dash for the compound gate, praying his electronic fob key would work first time for a change. To his relief it did and he scampered into the building in time to hear the first stone crashing into the re-enforced glass windows at the front. Inside it was pandemonium: the clerical support staff were in the rooms at the back while the police, some with helmets and riot shields, were couched in the spaces between the windows at the front. He saw the senior desk sergeant and shouted across to him,

“Who’s in charge here?”

“Syntagmatarchis Kostandin, I think, sir, he’s upstairs in the chief’s room.”

Theodrakis raced upstairs and found Kostandin on the phone.

“What’s going on and who’s in charge?”

“I don’t know, and you are, in that order. Have you got any instructions for me?” Kostandin managed a strained grin as he spoke. “No, really it’s true, it’s all blown up on the mainland. Xenarkis has been shipped out with all the specials and thirty local men to help restore order in Athens, they’ve called reinforcements in from all the islands. The situation there collapsed into anarchy not long after they flew out so I think they’ll be too late. Where’ve you been, Theodrakis?”

“No time for that now, I’ll tell you later, are you in touch with the island commander?”

“I’ve already said it’s you. Adamidis is under sedation, Xenarkis is probably circling over Athens trying to land and Samarakis is dead. Welcome to your command.”

“We’re the same rank.”

“Yes, but you hold central office rank, political rank, I’m only local so it’s you, and do you know? I’m relieved.”

“What’s going on out there?”

“In Lion Square, it’s the normal crowd of communists, anarchists and students as far as we know. We, as you will have noticed, have our own difficulties so we can’t get there to find out. I’ve told our few men stuck on the spot to keep out of harm’s way.”

“So, who are those people out there? They don’t look like the normal protesting class, they look like farmers and fishermen. I saw old women among them.”

Kostandin looked tired and worried; he slumped onto a chair, mopped his face with a grubby looking handkerchief before he answered.

“That’s not a protest, that’s a lynch mob, and before you ask who they want to lynch he’s called Antonis and his father is …”

Theodrakis answered for him.

“Vassilis. Why, for God’s sake? Why did you arrest him?”

“We had no choice; most of my men hate the nasty little shit as much as the crowd out there. We did it to protect him. He’s been hanging round at nights, people have always feared and hated him. Since his accident he’s got worse, they say Vassilis can’t control him anymore. Rumour is he attacked a girl who works one of the bars in Kokari. He’d been stalking her. They believe he’s the killer behind all the murders and that everything we’ve done up to now has been a cover-up. That Englishman screwing Vassilis’s daughter should have let him die.”

Theodrakis felt the start of a migraine. He wanted to sit down, say nothing and let Kostandin deal with the situation but he knew that option was long past. He looked out of the window: these were poor people, poor and frightened, unused to demonstrating, with no leaders and no tactics. Not like the Athenian protesters;
they shouldn’t be too hard to shift. He was about to give some orders when he noticed that Kostandin was still speaking.

“There’s more. We’ve got problems inside as well. The old man in the cells and Andraki in the hospital secure unit; none of the lads will go near them, they either shout frightening things or just howl. Don’t laugh until you see it, believe me it’s not funny; since we’ve had Antonis in here they won’t stop screaming.”

Theodrakis put up a hand to silence him, and outside the shouting lessened in intensity.

“Have we got tear gas here?”

“Yes, but surely you’re not going?”

Theodrakis cut him off.

“If it works on an Athenian crowd then you can bet it will work a lot quicker here. Send out a couple of canisters then baton charge, they’ll scatter soon enough, I don’t think those people really want to be out there anymore.”

Kostandin looked almost pleased that someone else was giving orders; he got up and shambled downstairs to organise the men. About fifteen minutes later Theodrakis watched a small phalanx of cops in riot gear charge into the acrid gas shrouding the weeping and choking crowd. They’d had enough and dispersed almost before the baton wielding cops reached them. Kostandin struggled to recall his highly strung men, who seemed keen to displace some their stress and fear onto the fleeing crowd with their batons. But within minutes the area was clear and the cops were joking as they stripped off their riot gear.

Theodrakis and Kostandin agreed the demo in Lion Square was too big to handle, especially now there was apparently no central government, and they weren’t sure what was the correct action to take. Instead they deployed some men in normal uniform to supervise the crowd until it dispersed. They’d arrest the hardcore activists later. Neither man was happy about this and most of the cops didn’t like their government’s handling of affairs any more than the demonstrators; the only difference was the cops had jobs and wanted to keep them.

Kostandin sent out for coffee and they slumped in silence onto the sofa in the chief’s room. Theodrakis noticed that while
Kostandin’s crossed ankles stretched over the carpet, his legs only just reached the floor. When the coffee arrived, Kostandin took a sip then said,

“There’s something else you should know: Lucca had to give the body of a suicide the once over, a fisherman from Aghios Konstantinos. He’d tied himself to a cast iron anchor chain and threw himself off the harbour wall. A bloody heavy chain, I’m surprised he could lift it but you can never really tell how strong some of these wiry built guys are.”

Theodrakis wondered where this rambling was leading.

“Anyway, the water’s not deep and he spent the night hanging above the anchor with his head less than half a metre below the surface so the first boat out in the morning found him; a nasty shock for them, I guess. You know, he must have judged the length of the chain pretty accurately.”

“Kostandin, get to the point, fascinating though this may be to you.”

“Sorry, I’ve been up all night trying to make sense of what’s going on here. The point is that before he topped himself, he posted us a note saying why he’d done it but with all that’s been going on it took us some time to put the two together.”

Theodrakis listened with a growing sense of unease, anticipating that what was to come wouldn’t be good.

“The note was a type of confession, a very strange confession.”

Theodrakis could feel the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.

“In it he confesses to the murder of Anna Macrie, your girl in the river, remember?”

Theodrakis nodded but said nothing the memory of finding her still upset him; he lost the appetite for the coffee slowly cooling in its plastic beaker.

“He had all the detail of how he killed her, even about how he got her to the river and put her in the water; it all matches what we found.”

He broke off for a moment. Theodrakis saw he was on the verge of tears but he ploughed on.

“Reading that note you feel you’re in the presence of real evil. Turns out you were right about the body being washed downstream later. Sorry, I’m not telling this very well am I?”

“No, you’re OK, take your time if you need to.”

“Lucca says the forensics confirm he was the killer.”

“Very nasty, but it doesn’t get us much further.”

“No, wait there’s more. He said he had no reason to kill her. He’d never seen her before. Said he couldn’t remember having done it afterwards. Then sometime later, out at sea, it came back to him. Everything came back and that’s why he had all the detail so well. It hadn’t been him though; well, it had been his body but it hadn’t been him in it.”

“So who was it, then?”

“The Devil. It was the Devil and he saw him; saw the Devil and it told him what the bones were for and how many more were needed for the curse to work. So he stayed out at sea till dark then came into harbour, wrapped himself in the anchor chain, and jumped.”

A couple of weeks ago Theodrakis would have laughed at such superstitious and credulous nonsense but now he just listened in silence.

“I’m sorry, Theodrakis, I can’t shake this off; I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Did he say where bones were, how many they needed and what would happen when they’d got them?”

“No, it was a suicide note, not a fucking autobiography.”

Theodrakis stood up and walked to the window, stood for a moment looking over roof tops to the sea, he wanted Hippolyta, he wanted to be sick. Instead he asked,

“Is Antonis fit to be interviewed?”

“I don’t know, none of the men will go near him, but he’s not making the noise the other two are, so he may be. I wouldn’t go in there though, all the same.”

“You won’t have to. Take me to him, you can wait outside, post two reliable men just down the corridor within earshot.”

Theodrakis didn’t want to conduct the interview. The memory of the session with the old man was too fresh in his mind, but since his meeting with Vassilis he had no choice - and besides, the absence of any superior gave him a free hand.

They walked down the hot, fetid corridors to the most remote cell, passing the noise of screaming from another room en-route.
The cell holding Antonis was down a short passage at a dog-leg angle to the others. The corridor lights were flickering as if the bulbs were about to blow. The two cops waited at the end of the passage and Kostandin walked with him to the door and unlocked it.

Inside it was cold, deep cold, but the cell’s occupant was unaffected. Theodrakis knew it was the prisoner who’d lowered the temperature, illogical as this was. He recognised Antonis from Professor Andraki’s office; hardly an auspicious beginning. Later, when he tried to remember the details of the brief interview, it seemed filtered through a hallucinogenic haze. Antonis had been curled up on the pallet which constituted the cell’s only furniture but as the door opened he jerked upright, reminding Theodrakis of a puppet when the puppeteer pulls the strings.

“I see you again, Athenian, and still you are no wiser. Your men have made another blunder and if it didn’t amuse me so much I would walk out of here.”

There was nowhere for Theodrakis to sit and he rejected the idea of sitting on the pallet next to Antonis. So he leaned against the wall by the door, which he was disconcerted to hear closing.

Hoping it wasn’t locked and that Kostandin was still outside, he began the interview.

“Tell me why you are in here.”

“Because your men are fools, fools who fear me and now wish they’d not locked me up.”

“Well, tell me what they suspect you of then.”

“They suspect me of many things; they’re just superstitious peasants in uniform, just like all the others who have lived on this island through the centuries. They think that I’m the murderer, just like the crowd outside.”

He put his head back and laughed, then looked round as if someone was behind him.

“Your father will be worried about you?”

“Father? Oh, you mean Vassilis: not worried in the way you imagine, no, he is more worried about my suitability for the task.”

“And what would that be?”

“I don’t think you are sufficiently prepared to be able to cope with the answer to that, policeman.”

“Why not try me?”

“No, believe me; you wouldn’t thank me if I did. But I will tell you that in arresting me, you have moved as far away from the real perpetrator as it’s possible to get. I’m surprised you didn’t understand that from your conversation with Vassilis. You pride yourself on your intelligence, do you not?”