Byron's Shadow Read online

  She rubbed her fingers along the casing, ‘Hmm, this must have been expensive, does it still work?’

  ‘No. The inside’s all rotted and the casing is too far gone to repair.’

  Lisa had found the inscription etched in flowing letters across the frosted gold surface. Leaning back to catch the light, she read it aloud. ‘Byron F. Nichols: I bet he was sick losing this.’

  She pushed the pen back towards him, then gave a long, relaxed, deliberate sigh. Flint wondered whether she truly thought him too young and cringed at the thought of their first meeting, three weeks before. Fresh from England, with two undergraduate diggers he had hitched to the coast and gate-crashed a hotel beach party. Whilst the others had found a pair of giggly nurses to impress with their tales along the lines of ‘the last time I got drunk’, Flint had sat beside Lisa and helped her whip life into the over-forties. A Greek guitarist strummed his way through transatlantic folk classics, but could master only the first two lines of each. Flint had begun to fill in the words, perking up the party and raising that full-cheeked smile on the courier’s face. Their deal had been struck by the light of a driftwood bonfire, since when the relationship had remained strictly business. Still, the night was young and he had every intention of correcting the situation.

  A large moving shadow indicated Andreas, the bar owner, emerging from within, approaching Lisa from behind and laying a hand on both shoulders.

  ‘Lisa the lovely, you have brought the great explorer?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gently wriggled from the grasp and took up the pen. ‘He finds buried treasure too.’

  Boredom had cast the die. Andreas examined the pen in unnecessary detail, then carried it inside, passing the trinket to all his friends, relatives and customers, repeating Lisa’s repetition of Flint’s story. Hands were waved, voices called from inside, people wanted to know more. Go away, thought Flint, fearing to lose Lisa’s attention amongst the mass of men, thinking of nothing beyond consummating their relationship.

  One man came back to them slowly, glancing at the pen, passing a courteous nod to Lisa. He was dressed in an open white shirt and black trousers, his face and hands betraying half a century as a peasant. Flint was unprepared, too late in sensing a purpose in his manner.

  ‘Pretty thing,’ the man said, choosing the wrong inflection for his English words. ‘Which Palaeokastro you are digging? The one of the Romans? Up in the hills?’ He inclined his head landward.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the man, still looking at the pen. ‘You’re digging in the olives now?’

  Flint nodded, wondering how the man knew and whether he cared.

  Andreas called from the next table. ‘Costas, do you know this man Byron Nikola?’

  Costas shrugged and thrust the pen back, with cold resentment in his expression. ‘You should look for Roman things, not dig up a poor man’s olives.’

  Flint suddenly felt uncomfortable, very foreign and very out of place. He avoided the Greek’s eyes and slid the culprit pen back into his breast pocket. Costas said nothing else and trotted away down the steps towards Stakiopoulou.

  ‘Glad I didn’t find the mask of Agamemnon,’ Flint said, disgruntled. ‘It was only a little hole…’

  ‘Sondage’ Lisa corrected.

  ‘Whatever. We were a good ten feet away from the nearest sodding olive tree.’

  Lisa put her finger to her lips. ‘Shush, remember where you are. Greece is full of foreigners trampling over every ruin they can find, throwing their money about, goggling at the peasants and their cute donkeys. It offends their honour, even the poorest have honour, they have a word for it — philotimo.’

  Flint’s philotimo had been badly dented and the mood had been broken. ‘Look, let’s just disappear before our fame spreads. It’s time to party. Lead me to the hot spots of Nauplion.’

  ‘Hot spots?’ she asked, with just a hint of innuendo. ‘You don’t strike me as being the disco type. They don’t do Bob Dylan...’

  ‘I’m not fussy.’

  ‘But I am,’ she said, ‘We’ll stay here if you don’t mind, it’s a little early for anything else.’

  A gentle Sithaki drifted out into the night and the odour of fried mullet wafted across from the next table. Worse ways could be found of spending an evening, he mused.

  ‘We’d better order more wine then,’ Flint said, hiding his regret. ‘Come Friday, I feel the need to unwind.’

  ‘Ah, so now you are finally admitting that digging is not just fun and games from morn ’til night. Admit it, Jeff, something odd is going on up there, isn’t it?’ Lisa’s voice was slowed even more by the wine.

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘That long-nosed cow gave me a filthy look. Is she your secret admirer?’

  ‘No, not Emma, we don’t get along. She’s thick with the Dalek, I’m not.’

  Lisa giggled slightly. ‘The Dalek?’

  ‘Our esteemed director: Sebastian T.D. Embury MA (Oxon) F.S.A., alias The Dalek.’

  ‘Why do you call him the Dalek?’

  Flint picked up the empty Demestica bottle and stuck the mouth onto his forehead, croaking ‘Excavate! Excavate! Resistance is useless!’ The bottle came down again. ‘It was Andy’s idea, he’s a space opera freak. Nicknames are one of those puerile things that keep us all sane.’

  Lisa giggled again. ‘How beastly is he?’

  ‘He’s just an alien, my mate Andy is perfectly correct. We’re all red-blooded human beings fresh out of college, full of ideas, full of enthusiasm but he’s a robot from the planet Tedium. He has no comprehension of modern survey techniques, plus, he’s an old-fashioned right-wing autocrat and I’m an anarchist, so there is a minor philosophical gulf between us. His latest stratagem for keeping me out of his hair is to send me out surveying the edge of that miserable olive grove. He’s hoping I won’t find anything and he’s not going to be disappointed! Meanwhile, he messes about on the juiciest parts of the site, pretending to be the great antiquarian.’

  ‘Take it from me, the boss is always a shit. Every boss I’ve ever had has been a first class shit.’ Lisa turned to attract the attention of the weighty Greek tavern owner and ordered a bottle of Nemea in impeccable Greek.

  ‘I wish I could do that,’ Flint said. ‘All the Greek I can manage is “yes”, “beer”, and “chicken”.’

  ‘The secret is to have a Cypriot mother,’ Lisa confessed. ‘My father was stationed in Cyprus. He was a Squadron Leader.’ She shaped her fingers into goggles around her eyes to mock her parent, ‘He runs a dog kennel on Dartmoor now. How the mighty have fallen.’

  He heard the resentment in her voice, but Lisa was a little old to be a teenage runaway. ‘Fluent Greek is a useful skill for a courier.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not going to be a courier all my life.’ She ran the neck of the empty bottle up and down between forefinger and thumb as she dreamed. ‘I’m just learning the travel trade. One day, I’m going into business, perhaps set up a little hotel around here. What’s your ambition Jeff?’

  ‘To be an archaeologist.’ The word ‘ambition’ ranked as low as ‘profit’ in his personal philosophy of life.

  ‘So you’ve no ambition then?’

  He spread both hands, ‘It’s better than working.’

  ‘You really are an old hippy at heart, not a care in the world.’

  ‘And why not?’ he asked. ‘Someone has to be happy.’

  She pointed to his calloused palms. ‘Hippies never had to do hard labour.’

  He rotated his hands to show the knuckles scarred and scabbed from wielding a trowel. Lisa took his hands briefly to inspect the damage, playing at sympathy. The Nemea bottle clunked onto the table top.

  ‘Try this,’ she said, ‘It will take away the pain.’

  *

  A London taxi almost took Flint’s pain away for good and he skipped back onto the kerb. That night with Lisa had tainted his mind and warped his attitude to women for the intervening decade. He had put as
ide left-wing hypocrisy about sexual equality and women’s rights and focussed on rampant sex, with tender sex as a back-up option. He had been so dedicated to the pursuit of wine, woman and song that his mind had closed to the darker motives of those around him. Who was Costas and what had his angle been? Somewhere in a box of mementoes lay that crushed and rotten pen. Somewhere back in time lay a mystery that was not going to go away.

  Chapter Three

  London Underground was liberally plastered with threats aimed at fare-dodgers and the busker’s attempt at ‘Annie’s Song’ was further off-key than usual. Given good weather, Flint would have walked. Instead he stood for half an hour on the platform, waiting for a ‘passenger incident’ at Waterloo to be resolved. The vision of a sticky corpse being wiped off a subway track was difficult to avoid.

  Sticky corpses, yes. Flint the student had been gauche, inexperienced, naive, or any of the other insults the Dalek had fired in his direction. He had been keen to run at the first opportunity, save his own skin and try to forget the whole gruesome episode. If the death had occurred now, he could have handled it, he would have fought back and imposed a solution. Okay, there had been no witness, no motive, no suspect, and not even the certainty that the murder had been deliberate, but the past was always an imperfect puzzle and Flint had grown to find puzzles irresistible.

  The smartly dressed West Indian woman who sat opposite was turning the pages of a Ruth Rendell whodunnit. A good plot had a beginning, a middle and an end. Flint was aware of having witnessed one confused chapter of a mystery, but he was ignorant of how it had begun, and knew it had never been resolved. Until that moment, he had always believed his involvement had been incidental, and he had been absent from the critical scenes. Coldness crept across his skin as he realised how much he had missed in his rush to be militant and get laid.

  *

  It had been the Monday after the weekend of unparalleled lust and the young Flint was both tired and elated. Two of the students had laid out survey squares in the lower valley, and five of the team then formed a line and walked methodically across the gridded area, slightly down-slope towards the sea, picking up artefacts which lay loose on the surface. Flint watched them from his exile on the hilltop as a lightly overcast sky kept work cool.

  Sebastian Embury was deep in thought, quiet and introspective. He walked along, holding his grey-black beard down as if to keep his eyes on the ground, but his mind was elsewhere. He had once nurtured the dream to be an Evans or a Schliemann, but at fifty-eight, he had encountered a beast called The New Economic Reality. Early retirement had saved his face at College, but the promise of funding for his field work in the Argolid had been a blatant bribe. Flint supposed that his own presence was a deep irritant, tearing wounds wider with his near-completed doctorate and his fresh, Marxist interpretations of the past.

  Embury straightened up to stretch his back, a symbol of an endangered lifestyle. His pipe, his ouzo, his young followers, and a token academic standing were all he had asked. Now, suddenly, he seemed to have acquired a purpose, irrational for someone who had arrived at the cul-de-sac of life. Frenetic phone calls and hyperactive direction of site work would leave him breathless and distracted. The distant figure glanced upwards, as if wary of being watched. Flint felt deep pity for the old man, but knew the void between them was too great. One day, the generation of Old Imperialists would die away and the New Archaeologists would step into their shoes, no doubt with a further rank of itchy youngsters pressing their backs. Flint’s mind returned to Lisa, and his body to the pretence of work.

  Each day on the excavation ran into the next, with seams welded tight by the sun. In the mottled shade of the olive grove, Jeffrey Flint and Andy Ernshaw were talking nineteen-fifties sci-fi movies whilst the latter dabbed at the lens of the dumpy level with a damp tissue.

  ‘Invaders From Mars, now that was right bad.’ Andy’s Geordie accent had not yet been overridden by his education. Once an engineering student, he had dropped out and drifted into archaeology. He had already cultivated overwhelmingly bushy hair and a contiguous black beard, and one day, he threatened, he was going back to college to study the subject seriously.

  ‘Did you ever see Santa Claus Defeats the Martians?’ Flint asked idly.

  ‘No, is it worth a miss?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  Andy finished wiping the lens and stood the battered orange instrument back on its tripod. He stopped and grunted a warning. Flint saw the Dalek striding through the trees towards them.

  ‘How goes the battle?’ Embury called.

  He seemed cheerful, even friendly, so Flint was instantly wary. Embury came up close and glanced at the plan in Flint’s hand. ‘Are we finished?’

  ‘No, it will take another day,’ Flint said cautiously.

  ‘So, what have we found?’

  ‘Zero.’

  The Dalek scoffed, so Flint began mechanically to list his non-discoveries. ‘The road embankment at the top messes up the readings so there’s no joy in that direction. Over towards the gully, there’s just made ground and modern junk. Elsewhere, too many trees and old root-holes to gain any sort of sensible results.’

  ‘We’re very close,’ Embury said, shaking his head.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Yesterday you thought you detected walls lower down the hill.’

  ‘Yes, but it won’t be anything exciting.’

  The Dalek clicked his fingers. ‘Excavate, we’ll excavate tomorrow.’

  ‘Excavate?’ Flint felt his hackles rise and his hopes fall. ‘Sebastian, we can’t...’

  His protest was ignored, Embury was already strolling away from him, sweeping his hands. ‘Yes, just here I think, over your wall line. A two metre trench should be just about right.’

  ‘A six foot hole would be just about right,’ Flint muttered to Andy. The bearded radical was taking over from the silent pacifist. Andy smirked.

  ‘Yes, that should verify our findings’. Embury continued to act like the native of another planet.

  ‘What findings?’ Flint protested, ‘There’s nothing here, Sebastian; just trees and rocks and ants and rabbit holes.’

  ‘Pardon? You’re questioning me again.’ The friendly tone was suddenly replaced by hostility.

  ‘We’re wasting our time up here. There’s acres still to survey down there...’

  ‘Look Flint, this is my excavation.’ The Dalek snapped, pointing a spiteful finger. ‘I don’t like other people interfering and telling me where to dig.’

  ‘You have this whole new plan to survey the valley bottom.’

  ‘I need you here,’ Embury snapped, then spelled out detailed, patronising, instructions for a new sondage, which was greeted by insolent silence.

  Flint watched the Dalek march away, ears burning, trying to recall a few words of songs preaching love, peace and non-violence. Andy stuck out both hands, robot-like, and began to march stiffly around squawking ‘Excavate! Excavate!’

  *

  The joke had ceased to be funny. Flint’s ego had once persuaded him that Embury exiled him for daring to be radical. As the tube train rocked its way towards Goodge Street, an idea slowly forced its way through the dust of ages.

  ‘The silly old duffer.’

  Dark eyes left Ruth Rendell and met with his.

  ‘It explains the murder,’ Flint said to the West Indian woman.

  ‘Don’t tell me how it ends!’ she implored angrily.

  Flint shook his head with an excess of nonchalance. ‘Different plot. Embury was onto something and wanted to make damn sure I had nothing to do with it.’

  Chapter Four

  Of course, Emma Woodfine was at the reception. A degree in Classics, an MA in Greek archaeology and twenty years playing second fiddle to a variety of menopausal male academics bought her a place at all such gatherings. Turning slightly grey now, she was dressed smartly in charcoal grey waistcoat over floral blouse and blue skirt. He’d heard she had married that fool Hubert Yarm; t
hey deserved each other. Emma had her back turned, yet Flint could hear her shrill voice across the room, using the word ‘naturally’ far too often. He noticed she’d given up smoking and drank only mineral water. Hubert Yarm had always been a desperate prig.

  ‘It’s Doctor Flint, is it not?’ asked a voice from behind his shoulder. ‘Didn’t you once know…?’

  Of course he did, and everyone in the room knew he did.

  *

  His mind sought a familiar retreat. Green-framed plate glass windows ran all along the side of Taverna Mikos and gave ample views out into the street, and off down towards the Roman town, although the first thirty yards of slope were chiefly strewn with builder’s rubble, Evian bottles and oil cans.

  Mikos furnished the room sparsely. One long counter followed the internal wall, facing an airy space, across which a mere six square tables were scattered. The team of English excavators had pushed three together by the far windows and were sipping beer, awaiting the day’s gastronomic delight.

  Sebastian Embury sat in his chair, pipe in hand, passing around some of the dullest sherds of pottery imaginable for discussion or delight. Emma Woodfine sat by his left elbow, fascinated by every word the would-be great man had to say. The pair shared a man-and-wife resemblance. On him, black hair mixed equally with grey on both head and chin, and merged with the thick rims of his glasses, masking the subtlety of his expressions. She was slight and plain beyond description, large tortoiseshell glasses straddling the unfortunate nose and matching her hair of indeterminate brown. Action and reaction matched perfectly; Emma tried so hard to be indispensable.

  Anthropological observations ceased at the sound of a car drawing up. Lisa was coming. Lisa would lift the evening above pottery typologies and anecdotes about Sir Arthur Evans. The courier strode in, scarlet uniform drawing all eyes her way. Flint was on his feet to meet her, conduct introductions and find a chair. Mikos came over and made a show of hospitality.

  ‘I shall cook you my special moussaka,’ he said with a flourish, then retreated towards the kitchen.