Byron's Shadow Read online

  He hated driving, but reaching The Rodings was impossible by any other means. All the way his mind tried to make sense of events that seemed far more distant than the third century, with which he was intimately familiar. Embury had not been the victim of a casual mugging, as nothing had been stolen. The culprit must therefore have planned to meet Embury, possibly intending to beat him senseless even if not intending to kill him. Flint had seen enough thrillers to remember the old cliché that most murderers are known by their victims, so odds on Embury knew his killer.

  Adam Sirutis had been a fine arts undergraduate when he had worked on the Paleokastro field survey, subsequently ‘retiring’ at twenty-six when his father made him the beneficiary of a sizeable trust fund. Flint parked Vikki’s new Rover in the gravel driveway of a chocolate-box thatched cottage. Someone else, it seemed, had attained Middle-Class Nirvana. The ‘Adam S’ studio was above a converted dairy at the rear, entered by an external stair.

  Putting motives into the heads of the digging team, Flint recalled the many threats against the Director’s life. Violent, perverse and inventive forms of termination had been devised as a means of releasing tension, but all the lads had been in the bar on the night of the murder. Or had they?

  ‘Jeffrey Flint, my man, come in, how are you?’

  Adam was a tall ex-public schoolboy, once fresh-faced and still plum-voiced. After each man had exchanged a one-minute resume of their lost years, Adam waved a hand towards his workshop.

  Flint picked up a watercolour of a Rodings cottage peeking through a screen of foxgloves.

  ‘They sell well. Owners place commissions,’ the artist said. ‘It kills time, don’t you think?’

  An emptiness was audible behind his words. How does one retire at twenty-six? Flint asked about Palaeokastro. They recounted the high jinks, re-lived the space opera jokes and ended with the tragedy.

  ‘We wouldn’t have called him the Dalek if we’d known what would happen to him,’ Adam said. ‘Remember how Andy used to mimic his voice. Exterminate, exterminate!’

  ‘Excavate, excavate!’ Flint recalled the games.

  ‘That was it — I could never do the voice.’

  Now that forgotten incidents had been dragged to the fore, Flint began to explore the purpose of his visit. ‘Have you any idea what Embury was up to?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, I was only a helot, he never stooped to tell me a thing.’

  ‘I’m trying to sort things out in my own mind. If you can remember the week before he died, he suddenly seemed to turn manic. Did you notice that?’

  Adam twiddled one of his paint brushes and shook his head. ‘I hardly even remember what he looked like, but I suppose that week stuck in all our minds. I found him okay at first, but he used to abuse us more and more often towards the end.’

  Yes, the crisis had been marked by escalating tensions. Flint mentally ticked off points on his list of ingredients for murder. ‘I’ve been asking myself why Embury sent me and Andy up to the olive grove. There was nothing up there, it was a complete waste of our time and he knew it. I just wonder if he’d stumbled on something in the valley and wanted us out of the way.’

  Adam shook his head slowly.

  ‘Nothing? No structures, graves, inscriptions?’

  ‘No — I’d remember that.’

  Flint tried a different angle. ‘I met Emma last week; remember Emma?’

  ‘Darling, sweet-scented Emma with the delicate nose?’

  ‘The same. She seems to be under the illusion Embury was on the verge of discovering New Troy when he died.’

  The hair had been cropped around the neck, but allowed to grow a little higher on Adam’s crown, producing an effect similar in shape and colour to a champagne cork. The cork head nodded. ‘He was very excitable that final week. He pulled everyone down to the bottom of the site, you know, where the old mill was. We worked an extra hour each day and had to show him everything we found, but as I said, nothing came up.’

  Flint felt a surge of excitement. ‘No; he was stopped before he found it, but he must have been very close. What I can’t figure out is why, if it were so important, he didn’t bring Andy and myself down too. Dammit, we were the best surveyors he had!’

  ‘I advanced that thought, but you can guess the response.’

  ‘Rude?’

  ‘Bloody rude.’

  They talked around the past, distant and more recent. Adam’s failed marriage, Flint’s continuing struggle to buck the system. Half the archaeologist’s mind still toyed with his proto-evidence, believing he had almost found a motive. Next he needed a suspect.

  ‘On that last night, were all the lads at the taverna?’

  ‘I guess,’ Adam thought deeply. ‘Yes, certain, I was teaching them bridge.’

  ‘Any idea what time Emma got back from her outing?’

  ‘We were imbibing Mikos’ newt’s pee until one, as per norm. She staggered in a lot later. Andy kept us awake with some sort of stupid movie quiz and we heard the car drop her off.’

  Was the timing relevant? Flint’s mind began to whirr as he continued to talk over the old times. He wished he knew where Andy was, but he had drifted out of contact some years before. Adam was left to his stockbroker dream-cottages, with the promise of a postcard from Nauplion. As Flint walked back to the car, his mind walked slowly over the site of Palaeokastro, seeing nothing and sensing nothing he had not noticed before. Doctor Dracopoulos had been the site guardian, the man charged with monitoring the progress of the excavation on behalf of the Greek Ministry of Culture. He’d always looked sickly, was he still alive? If so, Flint ought to speak to him, or at least thank him for engaging Mr Boukaris.

  In Greek? A fatal flaw suddenly appeared in Flint’s line of enquiry. If he was to return to Nauplion, he would need a translator. His thoughts turned immediately and irresistibly to Lisa.

  Chapter Eight

  The window frames of Taverna Mikos had been painted a deeper shade of green. The taverna owner was fatter, had one less front tooth and his face folded into frown lines as the bearded Briton strode in, rucksack hooked on his arm.

  ‘Jason?’ Mikos said, a finger poised in the air.

  ‘Jeff.’

  His eyes widened, ‘Yes. Of course, now I remember. Bob Dylan?’

  ‘Do you still have that record?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I have a new record player. You like to hear it?’

  ‘Not now.’

  Over a glass of ‘Fix’ beer, Flint unrolled seven years of his life across Mikos’ counter. Mikos told him of his wife, his two sons and baby daughter, and of his new espresso machine.

  ‘Oh, Sebastian, that was such a disaster...’ Mikos shook his head, ‘For three years he came here…’

  ‘Have there been any more excavations since then?’

  Mikos shook his head. Buried secrets would still be buried, so the trip need not be futile.

  For old time’s sake, Flint took a room at the taverna. It was the one at the front, overlooking the street; the one Sebastian Embury had occupied whilst the students had spread their sleeping bags on the floor of the airless side room.

  It was another perfectly bright August morning when he walked from the taverna, through the screen of plane trees and onto the site of the silent city. He forgot the murder and was immediately drawn back twenty centuries. Even the brainless sweat of digging the bone-hard ground was forgotten as he remembered Andy’s constant use of Star Trek jargon, Adam’s laconic wit and Phil’s habit of singing Genesis songs one after another to stave off boredom. He looked around to the point where Lisa would step down from her coach, then down towards an abandoned mill at the bottom of the slope, where a stream bed lay as a ribbon of dried reeds. He gazed around at the acres of scattered stones and dried thorns. What had Embury been looking for?

  His eyes came to rest on a distant olive grove, oddly different from the picture he carried in his mind. Flint found one of the overgrown Roman thoroughfares and followed it uphill to the edge of
the trees.

  One of his trenches had never been filled in. The spur of a stone wall was still visible in what remained of the hole, overgrown and three-quarters silted by erosion of its edges. All that effort and the excavation had never even been published; the archive still lay somewhere at the British School in Athens. Embury had followed the golden rule of eminent archaeologists: die before you become obliged to write up your work.

  He walked on, to the gully at the far side of the olive grove. Here, his memory had been thoroughly trampled. A dozen olive trees had been uprooted, a concrete apron had been laid close to the point where the road crossed the gully and a breezeblock building had been partly erected. He walked onto the apron — possibly intended as a small car park, and looked inside the building — possibly a petrol station or kiosk that had never seen fulfilment of its owner’s dream. The dream had failed some years ago, evidenced by the depth of litter within the structure and the weeds in its wall.

  Later, Flint asked Mikos about the unfinished building.

  ‘That was Korifi; they build hotels. They wanted to put a taverna there to steal my bread, so I complained to your friend, Mr Boukaris the lawyer: he stopped it.’

  Flint remembered hearing of some odd Greek tax loophole surrounding incomplete developments, but he soon forgot breezeblocks and concrete; Mikos had secured a telephone number. Within the hour he was driving to the beach resort of Tolon.

  *

  Hotel Sun was on the main street, fifty yards back from the beach. It was a five storey concrete building of forty rooms, built in the charmless style common to innumerable resorts from Benidorm to Bodrum. In the shaded lobby, with its aquamarine mural, Lisa Canelopoulos, once Lisa Morgan, held his attention with her wholesome, nut-brown eyes.

  ‘You took your time coming back,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  She invited him into her office. Courier red had been replaced by managerial grey. Her hair was shorter, her figure possibly even more attractive to followers of Rubens. Lisa took the corner of a right-angled black couch and Flint sat opposite.

  ‘You haven’t changed at all — except for the “Doctor” bit.’ Lisa reached for a packet of Marlboro’s on the table.

  ‘You didn’t used to smoke,’ he said.

  ‘Still the same idealist out to change the world? You’re going to tell me how I’m going to get cancer...’

  ‘No, I’m going to tell you about capitalist multinationals and the crimes committed by tobacco companies in the third world.’

  Lisa stopped mid-motion. ‘I’m convinced. I’ll quit, just for you. I don’t want to be accused of murdering black babies.’

  For a moment, former lovers stared at each other, then Lisa swept the empty packet into a paper basket. ‘I’m winding you up; my friend Spyro is such a messy sod.’

  Both burst into laughter and they were on their feet, exchanging hugs. ‘You’re bloody impossible, you always were,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re still the most gorgeous woman to grace these shores since Helen launched the Trojan boat race.’

  ‘And you always were a bullshitter Doctor Flint.’

  *

  A war-weary orange Datsun pulled away from the hotel the following day, although Flint had spent the night back at the taverna after making the briefest of re-unions. He was at the wheel of his hired car, Lisa once more at his side.

  ‘So you’re here on a nostalgia trip?’

  ‘Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.’

  ‘Very funny. Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Picnic.’

  ‘When you said “lunch”, I imagined an expensive beach-front restaurant.’

  ‘I’m an impoverished archaeologist, bear with me. Call it a sense of romance.’

  A ten-minute drive between the rolling grey-green hills and the sea led to an unmade road where mimosa scraped both sides of the car. Perched on the cliffs a hundred feet above a crescent bay sat a chapel, deserted for some years. The roof had fallen and its low, whitewashed walls were sinking into decay. Flint and Lisa had once shared a picnic on that spot, the morning after their business relationship had been jettisoned for something more special.

  ‘I was right about the nostalgia,’ Lisa said.

  ‘My sanctuary, remember it?’

  ‘You saved me from a beetle crawling up my leg.’

  ‘I saved the beetle from you — one second later and you would have had it with your sandal.’

  ‘Are you still into peace and love?’

  ‘Yes. I’m one of a dying breed.’

  Leaving the car, the pair ventured into the tile-strewn interior of the ruin. Weeds and thorns had already colonised patches of wind-blown earth whilst small green lizards darted into the shadows at the first hint of human approach. Lisa knelt and retrieved a length of brass chain from the dirt, pulling it taut in an explosion of dried earth. Jerking upwards into her grasp was a bent and broken censer.

  ‘Gold!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I’ll make an archaeologist of you yet.’

  She blew off the dust and rubbed away at the tarnished brass before dropping the worthless find onto a heap of tiles. The external wall of the apse cast just enough shade for the pair to retreat from the sun. Backs against the cool stonework, each contemplated the northern end of the gulf of Argos. A white blur indicated a ferry en route for Athens, and beyond it the sweep of the far shore. Far to the north lay ancient Mycenae, whilst in the west rose the mountains of Arcadia. A mile or two to the south lay the acropolis of Asine, one of many sites known as Palaeokastro. It was a small world, ancient or modern.

  Lisa reached into a brown paper bag and withdrew a bottle of ‘Fix’ beer, opening it with a satisfying fizz. What more could a man desire? On reflection, thought Flint, there was one more thing many men might desire. He remembered a younger Lisa, body perspiring, honey-brown, her cleavage inadequately concealed, her proximity alluring as pheromones drifted in the still air. He had slipped an arm around the sticky shoulders from which her ‘Coca Cola’ singlet had hung.

  Cold shower, Flint, look at the view. Lisa was freshly made-up to conceal the skin destroyed by unreasonable doses of sunlight and the age lines which could be dated like tree-rings: his calculations made her thirty-six. Whilst Flint the academic had remained Flint the academic, Lisa had been married, mangled by miscarriages, then widowed. Her buoyant optimism had been repeatedly battered by the refusal of Fate to fulfil her dreams.

  ‘Remember this?’ Flint drew a glittering, if crushed, pen from a plastic zip-lock bag.

  Lisa took the pen and once more read the name. ‘You still haven’t found Byron F. Nichols?’

  Slowly, talk drifted back towards the murder.

  ‘The survey was doomed from the start,’ Flint said. ‘Six men and one woman was a recipe for disaster. When I run a dig, it’s fifty-fifty, with no virgins and no wrinklies.’

  ‘Rule me out then.’

  ‘You’re not wrinkly.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ Lisa said. ‘All that was a long time ago. Why are you here?’

  ‘I met Emma Woodfine in London last month. Remember her? Small woman, big attitude problem?’

  ‘The long-nosed bitch?’

  ‘The same. I always wondered why she helped bail me out of jail — I put it down to enjoying the power.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have trusted that woman as far as I can spit, if you pardon the ladylike expression.’

  ‘I had no choice. But it made me think, meeting her again. Someone killed Embury, probably someone he knew. Emma was the only one of our squad missing that night.’

  Lisa’s pupils dilated with surprise, even excitement. ‘You think she did it?’

  ‘It’s possible, she’d stacked up a whole heap of grudges.’ Flint broke off a hunk of bread and waved it. ‘It’s all tediously complex, but in short, my Prof. at college had a hand in funding the project and I went with the money. Emma would have been the number two if I’d not come along.’

/>   ‘That’s hardly a motive for killing someone.’

  ‘I know — it sounds silly. I thought that seven years ago; when I was released, all I wanted to do was go home. I wanted escape, not the truth. There were no clues, no suggestions of any dark motives on Emma’s behalf, but with hindsight, the more I think about things, the more I start feeling uneasy.’

  Lisa leaned over and pulled out a wad of dripping feta. ‘This is fascinating, do go on. Convince me she did it, master detective. Give me a better motive.’ She was not taking this at all seriously.

  ‘Right, let’s try sex.’

  ‘Here?’ She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘As a motive! All the lads thought they were having an affair; she and Embury had a tiff just before she went out. Sex is always the best motive for murder.’

  ‘She struck me as being sexually repressed,’ Lisa mused, ‘not a woman who feels like a woman ought to feel.’

  ‘Which is?’

  She turned away. ‘These are silly games, Jeff, why have you come to see me?’

  ‘Seven year itch. I wanted to see you for old times’ sake, if you forgive the cliché. Plus, I can’t speak more than a few words of Greek.’

  Lisa flopped her head over her shoulder, remembering the same night that he treasured so deeply. “‘Yes, beer and chicken”,’ she quoted.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve a hotel to run.’

  ‘Emma had dinner with Doctor Dracopoulos on the night of the murder, or so she says. He lives in Anatoliko, you know, the place with the church and the statue.’

  She nodded, her mouth set in a humourless line. ‘And you need a translator?’

  ‘And company.’

  Chapter Nine

  Flint was enjoying himself. If subjected to torture, he would have admitted that the long-dead mystery was little more than an excuse to see Lisa once more. She leaned on the open window of his hire car, allowing her hair to flutter in the slipstream, allowing all his bright memories to conquer the darker ones.