The Tomb of Zeus Read online

  “Not, sadly, if she was sedated,” he replied, heavily. “I gave her a sleeping pill before I left her. She didn't want it…If only I hadn't been so bossy…if she'd been awake, this might not have happened.” Again emotion was threatening to get the better of him.

  “Why was she still wearing her boots?” said Letty, hoping to divert him. “Her feet must have been killing her.”

  “Oh, yes, that's a point. First thing a woman does, isn't it, when she's alone in her room—kick her boots off? She was still wearing them when I left her. I escorted her up here. Eleni was buzzing about with glasses of water and so on. I examined Phoebe and checked there was no life-threatening condition, gave her a pill. We sat right there in the chairs on either side of the table and talked for, oh, about ten minutes. When I saw she was beginning to fade I rang for Eleni and left. I wasn't keeping a close eye on the time—no reason to—but it must have been about half past two. And you discovered her at?”

  “Five o'clock.”

  “I took her temperature at five-fifty, and it's always a rough measure. She's slender and so would lose heat more rapidly than the average person…and the room is of average to cool temperature. Must get the ambient temperature taken. The police will do that. Perhaps. Allowing for a loss of one point five degrees per hour, I'd say she died round about three o'clock. Bit before? Bit after? Very soon after I left her, at any rate. As though someone was waiting for the effects of the pill to kick in. Someone close at hand.”

  He looked, distraught, at the body and muttered to himself, Letty's presence almost forgotten. “I shouldn't have left her alone. I shouldn't have left her here. It wasn't safe.”

  Stoddart shuddered and glanced around him at the communicating door and the open window, and when he spoke again to Letty it was in the same stricken whisper. “I was uneasy the whole while. Can't explain why. You know the sort of feeling…chill on the back of one's neck…current of air…” He looked thoughtfully at the window. “I heard nothing suspicious. It was perfectly silent…too silent?” He frowned in an effort to give a more logical, a more scientific reason for his apprehension. “No sound of snoring from next door. Even the doves…” His voice trailed away. “The doves that normally perch in the tree outside—we heard nothing from them. Had someone scared them off? Was someone lurking, do you suppose, in or near this quiet house? Waiting for me to leave her alone and unprotected?”

  A scraping sound below the window made him fall silent. They stared at each other, hearts pounding, waiting for a repetition of the noise and hoping there would be none. “Those wretched birds back already?” Letty quietly suggested. But after a few seconds the stealthy scratching sound came again. A loose piece of masonry clattered to the paved courtyard. The scraping took up again, louder, more rhythmic, coming closer.

  “We have an intruder,” mouthed Stoddart. “Leave this to me.”

  He advanced on the window and Letty scurried after him. A head appeared and with a shout of surprise, Stoddart leaned over and hauled a panting Gunning over the sill.

  “Thanks, old man,” said the latter, collapsing in a heap on the floor. “Should have called up in case you were still here, but didn't want to alert the rest of the family…sure you'll understand.”

  Letty could contain herself no longer. She took hold of Gunning as he got to his feet, grasped him by the lapels of his jacket, and gave him a good shaking. “Idiot! You fool! What on earth are you thinking of, climbing up like that? You could have killed yourself!” Reddening, she turned to the astonished doctor and muttered, “Mr. Gunning has only one good foot—was wounded in the war-but he makes no allowances for his condition. One day he'll go too far.”

  Stoddart looked uncertainly from one to the other. “One foot? Good lord! Would never have guessed. You two know each other?”

  “Miss Talbot saved my life last year. She rightly objects to any attempt on my part casually to throw it away again,” Gunning answered, dusting off his knees. “No danger!”

  “Glad to hear it but, look here, man—what on earth are you up to, frightening the life out of us?”

  “Just showing how it would be possible to gain access to this room without passing the dragon Eleni in the hallway,” replied William. “Sneak down the alleyway off the avenue, through the coach house that George uses for a garage, if it's been left unlocked-it has!—and you can get into the courtyard. Then you encounter the ancient wisteria conveniently writhing its way upwards. As good as a staircase! It was a piece of cake! And if I can do that climb, every citizen of Herakleion—and his granny—can do it.”

  “Would you care to explain why it occurred to you to stage this little demonstration?” asked the doctor, who had already, Letty guessed, worked it out for himself. Perhaps Stoddart needed the reassurance of hearing his own suspicions endorsed from an independent quarter.

  Gunning did not let him down. “Because I'm quite certain that Phoebe didn't take her own life. Because I think, as I suspect you do, Doctor, that we may be looking at a case of murder.”

  With the doctor's instruction—to stay in the drawing room until summoned by the police inspector—ringing in her ears, Letty headed with determination for the front door.

  “Letty!” Gunning seized her by the shoulder. “Where are you going?”

  “Out of this house! Out! It hardly matters where. I want to get away from this gloomy place. There's malice seeping under every door, evil lurking round every corner, and there's always a rustling along those dark corridors.”

  “That'll be the draughts and the long skirts the servants wear— they rustle, you know.”

  “Well, I've had a considerable shock to the system. I want to walk in the sunshine. I want to breathe fresh air and get my thoughts in order. A less sensitive soul may not have the same need—you can wait on Inspector…Mariani, was it? If you want to.” She dismissed him with a nod and turned away.

  “You can't parade about by yourself without an escort. Not in Herakleion. The women in this town still go about wearing head scarves and veils and long black dresses, both Muslim and Orthodox Christians. Discretion is expected, even with foreigners. I'll come with you. Look—there's a hotel in a square near the seafront that's used by Cook's tourists and the like, off the boat and in transit for Egypt. We'll go there and get a pot of tea or something. You're still trembling, Letty. A cup of Assam with lots of sugar in it is what you need.” He gave a short bark of a laugh. “If we were in the trenches, I'd prescribe a half-pint of rum each to numb the pain.”

  Through her self-absorbed daze, Letty began to notice that Gunning was subdued. He was clearly wrestling with his emotions, and she was ashamed for her own insensitivity. The man had known Phoebe for months, not mere hours. His loss must be greater than any Letty could feel.

  They walked on in silence to the hotel where they settled on the tea terrace amongst a chattering crowd of Europeans. All around them they heard a swirl of French, Italian, and German, as well as braying English voices, and they sank gratefully into the camouflage of colourful summer clothes and straw hats. They sat quietly, unable to offer each other comfort, alone with their distress.

  Letty finally broke the silence. “He did it, don't you think, William?” she asked impulsively. “But how to prove it? Not sure how I can do it but I think I'm going to try!”

  “Not sure which ‘he’ you have in your sights, Letty.”

  “Theodore, of course! Lying asleep in the middle of the afternoon while your wife gets murdered right next door? Is that likely? All that yawning and huffing and puffing! I wonder if the police will be taken in? Judging by the way he asked for a certain officer to be fetched, the fellow's probably in his pay anyway.”

  “Hang on a moment! Theodore quite often did retire to his room in the afternoon. And always on a Sunday. It's a Cretan tradition. They call it mesimerianos hypnos, and so alien is it from the habits of our cold home climate we can only translate it by using another foreign word: siesta. I remember one day an urgent message came fo
r him from one of his digs. Nobody about, so I went up to deliver it myself. Deep sleeper. It took me quite a while to rouse him.”

  “Can you be sure he was alone?” Letty asked sharply, thinking of Eleni.

  “I don't think it would be quite the thing for the master of the house to conduct his clandestine affair behind a door communicating with his wife's bedroom…. But I bow to your greater experience of bohemian life.” He stirred uneasily and leaned across the table. “ I told you about the…er…arrangements over the coach house. And the lair George referred to, on the ground floor—no one's allowed to go in there except Eleni—to clean it, of course.”

  “Ah. I see. But who else would profit by Phoebe's death, William? If he depended on her for her money, and if she'd suddenly decided she'd got fed up with him and intended to do a bunk, he might have thought his best plan was to kill her and pass it off as suicide. It could have been done on the spur of the moment—perhaps he was lounging in his room and heard her come back early with the doctor……There's a keyhole in the door—he could have watched and listened.” She shivered. “Dr. Stoddart said he had a feeling he was being observed—that someone was waiting for him to leave. And taking advantage of her stupor, Theodore could easily have strung her up. Let's not forget that he's a navy man. He'd know all about knots, wouldn't he?”

  “Every man under the age of fifty—and that includes yours truly—knows about knots, Letty. Has known since he was in short trousers! Ever heard of the Boy Scouts? The hangman's noose was one of the first we learned. With ghoulish glee! It's really a wonder to me that there haven't been many more accidental and experimental hangings.”

  “I know what you're up to. You're playing devil's advocate, William.”

  “Someone has to put the brakes on when you're in full flow! You allow your instantly formed dislike of Russell to sway your judgement, which, in any case, I seem to remember, is far from infallible.”

  “I can be impartial! And just to demonstrate my flexibility, let's change roles for a minute, shall we?” She hesitated for a moment. Then: “That suicide note,” she said, “if we may call it that. Now, if Theodore is as ignorant of ancient Greek as he purports to be, how could he have been familiar enough with a text of Euripides to select the very passage where a wife makes a statement of her guilt and declares her intention to kill herself? That's what I'd want to know. Unless, of course, there was a useful translation on the opposite page. Would you have any idea?”

  “I know there wasn't one,” said Gunning, and Letty looked at him in surprise. “I recognised the page. The print and the paper. It was torn from my own book.”

  “Your book?”

  “Phoebe was interested in that sort of thing. She liked to give the impression of being a fluffy-headed flapper, but there was much more to Phoebe than that. We had long conversations about mythology, ancient literature. She expressed an interest in the play Medea, and I lent her my old school text. It contains three plays of Euripides— Medea, Hippolytus, and…what was the third…not one of my favourites—Alcestis. Pure text, I'm afraid. No crib on offer apart from my scribblings in the margins. But she would have read it. She certainly didn't return it. It's probably on her bookshelf right now. With a page missing.”

  “And your name on the flyleaf? Oh, dear! You'd better watch out, William! If they discover it and come after the only man in the household who acknowledges an acquaintance with ancient Greek, they'll slap the handcuffs on you. All the same, I'm not yet ready to cross Theodore off my list. I shall have to think my way around this.”

  “I wish you wouldn't.”

  “Well, perhaps the police inspector will be more willing to listen to my suspicions.”

  “Stop this! For a clever girl you can be remarkably foolish! Think! If Phoebe's death is indeed murder, the murderer is still at large and, one must presume, in the vicinity. He could kill again. And what more likely target than a bouncing blabbermouth waving a list of suspects in her hand? If the inspector asks for a statement, you will give him the bare facts, Letty, unadorned by any of your baroque flourishes. Antagonise no one.”

  “Then I'll reserve my flourishes for you. Tell me—what sort of man may we expect the Guardian of the Law to be in this city?”

  “Well, don't expect a crack Scotland Yard sleuth. There's not much crime on Crete. Knifings amongst sailors in the waterside taverns, sheep rustling, revenge killings in the course of family feuds. Cretans have a strict sense of honour, and anyone infringing on it is likely to meet his Nemesis sooner or later. And Nemesis will probably have a face he's familiar with, will clasp him warmly with one hand while the other sticks a knife between his ribs. But that's about it. The perpetrators are usually well known, instantly denounced, quite often summarily dealt with before the affair even comes to the ears of the authorities.

  “You'll observe that most of the Cretan men, especially in the country, go about armed to the teeth. At the very least they'll have a silver-hilted dagger stuck into their cummerbund. Often side by side with a pistol of some ancient design and dubious state of reliability.” He winced. “Not the sort of thing you'd want in proximity to your vitals! The shepherds out in the hills are not the curly-haired cherubs of myth—they're hard, moustached men apparently made of the same limestone as the crags they leap about on, and they sit on guard with a blunderbuss across their knees. They revere weaponry and don't hesitate to use it at every conceivable opportunity. The women as well have been known to take up arms in the defence of their homes.”

  “Good gracious! Is there no official force to keep order on the island?”

  “Keep order? Over Cretans? I can as easily imagine Agamemnon being chased over the hills by the Keystone Kops!” Gunning shrugged. “But there is a gendarmerie force that attempts to keep order in the country areas, and a smarter sort of police judiciaire that swaggers about town liaising with the embassies. Their main duties are checking that the luggage of departing Europeans doesn't contain the valuable contents of some ancient grave or other. And that's a heinous crime out here—smuggling artefacts out of the country. The authorities are much more vigilant than they used to be. Scandalous to-do last year at the port! A distinguished archaeologist was attempting to make off on the ferry with a rucksack containing a particularly delectable piece of ancient pottery. When challenged and threatened with a search, his outraged response was to defy the officers and chuck the bag and contents into the harbour!”

  “What a villain! My sympathies are entirely with the authorities! Did they let him get away with it?”

  “He comes and goes and we don't hear the clank of manacles. But their control is increasingly effective, I have to say. So, if you're thinking of picking up a seal stone and having it made into a hat pin, watch out! They'll be on to you!”

  “I'll bear it in mind. But what about a murder? How will they deal with a murderer?”

  “You must expect them to parade a portly, epauletted, gold-braided servant of the Law, such as it is in this remote outpost of the Greek State. Rather out of his depth and grumbling that his Sunday's been disrupted.”

  “So, the town's hardly a hotbed of crime and intrigue, then?”

  “This is a peaceful time but these huge walls have, at least four times in the last hundred years, enclosed a killing ground; they have witnessed ethnic massacres, burnings, lynchings—horrors I won't attempt to convey over a Sunday cup of tea.”

  He glanced around at the bristling Venetian fortification. “A shelter or a trap, depending on the blood that flowed in your veins, the shape of your head, and the length of your nose. The Turks used to have a curfew. They closed all the gates every night, shutting everyone in. And then, one day they went on the rampage. They shut the gates at noon and by the end of that day more than a thousand Christians were dead. The branches of the plane tree above our heads were heavy with the hanged corpses of young men. The basin of the fountain over there where that little girl is paddling was running red with blood. Most of the Turkish population fl
ed back to their homeland when the Great Powers— that's us plus Italy, France, and Russia—came stamping in saying: ‘Enough's enough! This land belongs to the Cretans. You Turks are to hand it back.’

  “But some Mohammedans remain living where they ever did. And some families in the long centuries of peace had intermarried and, awkwardly, have both Muslim and Christian antecedents. The flames may have been doused, but the embers glow still. And in addition, drifting about on the surface, you have the European community, mostly diplomatic, commercial, or academic. Not many incidences of violent crime there! Inspector Mariani is going to find himself challenged.”

  “Mariani? An Italian name?”

  “After the bloody turmoil of 1898, with Turks and Cretans still growling at each other like fighting bull terriers on a lead, they imported with great success a crack corps of carabinieri from Italy to keep the peace. This Mariani may be a son or even grandson of one of these. The orderly thing to do would be to bury the evidence quickly, without undue fuss, I suppose. I'm not sure how important the suicide of a foreign woman would be to the police inspector.”

  “And that's exactly what I was expecting to hear you say!” said Letty. “I know it's all going to be swept under the carpet or under six feet of earth, but I won't leave it there, William! Phoebe was a mystery to me and I can't begin to grasp her essence any more than I can grasp a ray of sunshine through the leaves, but I liked what I saw in the brief glimpse I had. She was warm and bright.”

  “True enough…the light and the colour have gone from that house now she's dead. She struggled against the shadows.”

  “And she wasn't expecting to die! Just before she left, she said to me: ‘Get Ollie to show you the House of the Axes. I'll be sure to test you on it when you get back.’ She was holding on to my hand…” Letty stumbled and her lips began to tremble. She reached out her hand blindly and Gunning's handkerchief was instantly thrust into it. With a growl of sympathy he moved to the chair by her side and put an arm around her shoulders, murmuring remembered priestly words of consolation.