The Tomb of Zeus Page 19

  An astonished silence stretched endlessly between them. Olivia broke it with a whimper and she reached into her bag for a handkerchief.

  Harry, seemingly mesmerised by the keen stare of the inspector, could only struggle to hold his eye and swallow nervously. Finally he took a deep breath, unhooked his gaze, and murmured: “Pregnant? Did I hear you rightly? Well, at no moment. I'm sorry, Inspector, I was not aware. This comes as a considerable shock to me. I hope you can understand that.”

  “You were her general practitioner, were you not? Surely the first to hear of the suspicion of the condition?”

  “She never confided in me…perhaps she hadn't realised herself…Of course! That must be the reason. She was losing weight, not gaining…it wouldn't have occurred to her…”

  “I'm no expert, and you will correct me if I have this wrong, but there are other more obvious signs of pregnancy, I believe,” said Mariani delicately. It was clear he rather wished Mrs. Stoddart had not insisted on being present at the interview.

  “The cessation of her monthly, er, ladies' problems? That can happen if a woman loses weight—through stress perhaps. It's called ‘amenorrhea.’”

  “That pathologist's mad,” said Olivia firmly. “She wasn't pregnant. She'd have told me.”

  Without a word, Mariani passed a photograph over. Olivia looked hastily, passed it to Harry, and buried her head in her handkerchief.

  “How many months are they saying?” Stoddart asked, studying the photograph.

  “Three months. No less, perhaps a little more. Difficult to be precise,” Mariani summarised. “Could the weight loss have affected the development of the foetus? I put the question, Doctor, because it occurs to me that the coroner, as a layman, may well require a professional opinion in the matter.”

  Stoddart nodded his understanding. He would be prepared.

  Olivia came snuffling up from her handkerchief. “Well, that proves that this is indeed the nonsense I've just remarked on! Three months? That takes us back to the last half of December. There! I told you! Phoebe was in Europe! For the whole of that month. At her father's funeral. Theodore did not accompany her. He was here on Crete.”

  The two men exchanged glances, teetering dangerously on the edge of hysterical laughter, each willing the other to explain.

  Finally Mariani said softly, “Forgive me, Mrs. Stoddart, I know we are speaking of your friend but believe me—a husband is not always…not entirely an essential element of the equation.”

  “You wilfully misunderstand! This is Phoebe we're talking about! Let me explain! You should know that my husband and I were together with her—travelling companions—in the role of chaperone almost—except that she didn't need one!—for most of the time she was in Europe. On the ship she stayed in her cabin suffering from seasickness. As did I! It was a particularly bad voyage, wasn't it, Harry?”

  “It was indeed, Olivia. You suffered terribly, I know.”

  “And when we got to Paris we stayed in the same hotel. When she was not with us she was with her family. Phoebe was—oh, how would you describe it, Harry?—devastated by the death of her father, whom she loved very much, and a little uncertain being by herself. She's—she was—a woman who had always been surrounded by a crowd of loving people, family and friends, and she was uneasy when she was left alone. Am I getting this right, Harry?”

  Harry agreed, still in a state of shock to equal his wife's. It occurred to him that when all this got out—and it soon would in this small city of chatterboxes and sensation-seekers—it wouldn't do him a great deal of credit professionally. He could imagine the remarks behind cupped hands: “Couldn't spot a three-month pregnancy! What sort of doctor is that!”

  “You see, Inspector, if Phoebe had been…involved…with someone in that way, we would have been the first to suspect. Wouldn't we, Harry?”

  “I don't think it would have escaped your notice, Olivia.” He hurried to add: “I'm certain she would have confided in you, my dear.”

  If he had had doubts, the inspector kept them to himself. “At all events, let us accept for the moment the recorded evidence of the pathologist, shall we? I was wondering, Doctor, how her loss of appetite and weight may be connected with her condition? Do you have a theory?”

  “If she had reason to believe that she had conceived and that the child was not her husband's and, further, that it would become very evident—in three months' time—that he was not involved because he was thousands of miles away at the crucial time, she might have been deliberately starving herself to put off the moment when the pregnancy would show. She may have thought that, if she could by this means skew the appearance of the bulge by—shall we say a month?—she was home and dry. And when the child appeared a month prematurely—some first babies are notoriously laggardly—she could present it as her husband's.” He looked down thoughtfully at his fingers for a moment. “With the collusion of her luckless physician, which I have no doubt she would have sought eventually…in her own good time. Poor Phoebe!”

  “But who, Harry? It's madness! Who? You must have some idea!”

  Harry, crimson in the face, turned to his wife and said in glacial tones, “Olivia! Be silent or leave the room! You can only make matters worse by your fervid speculation!”

  He waited for her resentment to subside, then, “Is that all, Inspector?” he asked, firmly. “You're satisfied? You have nothing more for us?”

  Mariani studied him before replying. The doctor was sitting on the edge of his seat, poised to flee from the room as soon as he could politely do so. The inspector's instinct was telling him that Stoddart had been expecting more. Mariani paused for a moment, taking his time, reviewing the sheets, unwilling to release the couple until he was satisfied, thinking furiously. He was not aware that anything had escaped his attention. With only a trace of reluctance he told them he'd finished. The coroner's enquiry would be taking place on Friday afternoon, and would they please hold themselves ready to attend?

  “This report leaves us, or leaves the coroner rather, with the usual five choices. I think we can discount the first two: natural causes and accident. He will have to examine the evidence and hear testimony from witnesses to decide between: suicide, murder, and undecided.”

  Harry Stoddart wasn't really listening. They'd missed it!

  If there was any relief at all to be derived from this appalling scene it was that Phoebe's secret—the first of her two secrets, he now acknowledged—remained still that, as far as the authorities were concerned.

  He'd wondered whether to attempt to persuade, even coerce, his colleague Benson into turning a blind eye. But Harry had often thought that if you just let things alone, they found their own level. The less you meddled, the better. And now he was relieved to hear that no action from him had been necessary in the end. Benson had, in all good faith, missed it! And the awful knowledge would go to the grave with her. The doctor knew how to keep his mouth closed.

  But he saw clearly why Phoebe had had to die.

  The sun was warm on her back as Laetitia stood facing her site. She started out once more to walk her way across it, eyes on the ground for the most part, but constantly her gaze was tugged upwards and out to sea.

  With a sigh of impatience, Gunning followed after her.

  “Who exactly are we worshipping here, William?” she asked. “A god of the earth or a god of the sea? Zeus or Poseidon?”

  “Zeus Enalius? Or Poseidon Cthonius? Interchangeable roles? They seem here, dizzyingly, to come together. And perhaps with a third element? Their descendant Hyakinthos?” He waved an arm over the countryside. “The young god of green vegetation…fertility. Yes, all three, I'd say. They exist together—as far as they exist at all, of course.”

  “And you realise, William, that this splendid site may have been no more than an open-air place of worship. A peak sanctuary. A holy place, but not necessarily one where you would have put up a building. We may find an altar or some such at best.”

  “Cold feet,
Letty? I can understand why you might hesitate…But, look here—are you ever going to say the word? The men are straining at the leash—why have you sent them away to the sheds?”

  “An hour's reconnaissance, carefully done, is worth a week's badly directed digging,” she reminded him crisply. “There'll be more than an altar here. I've noted remnants of a Minoan roadway (now a goat path) linking this site and the sanctuary temple that Arthur Evans excavated last year right up on the topmost peak. They wouldn't have bothered with a road link up if this weren't also a site of some importance. And digging? We don't need to plunge straight in. No one digs until the snakes have been removed. I risk no man's safety. There's plenty to be done in the sheds, and we'll be glad of it once we get under way.”

  His disapproving silence made her smile. “Oh, all right! I'm aware that morale must be kept up as well as hands kept busy. This team knows what it's doing and the men are keen. We'll start on a small sondage pit just to keep everyone happy. And I've decided where to put it.”

  She beckoned Aristidis and asked for two diggers to be sent for.

  “Trial pit? Over there where I've set a marker. Just a whisker off the centre of the site. And far enough from the slope behind us to be out of the course of boulders crashing down in the winter. You can make out the southerly limit of the safe area if you look. Halve the distance between that point and the cliff edge and we may have something. I thought we'd begin the excavation proper in squares. It's not a vast site.” She consulted the plan Gunning had drawn up. “A hundred yards or so? By about fifty? We can start from the middle and work our way outwards without tripping over ourselves coming in, if you see what I mean, and be guided as to direction by the significance of whatever we turn up. We'll use ten-foot squares with a two-foot barrow balk.” She glanced up at the slope behind them. “Impossible to know how deep we'll have to go. I'm guessing there's been quite a buildup of soil washing down over the centuries. Unlike our first site, which was wind-scoured and bare. It may be patchy. And we shall have to be prepared for evidence of earthquake disruption in the strata. Control pits along the site will be essential.”

  Eagerly, Gunning checked his camera and his drawing pad.

  Tuning in to the Cretans' love of occasion, and much enjoying their sense of fun, Letty called the men to be assembled. She ceremonially removed the first spit of earth herself and, to enthusiastic applause, handed her spade to one of the men. “I declare the excavation begun,” she said, wagging a minatory finger, “but let's not expect too much, shall we? I don't want to see tears before bedtime.”

  Before bedtime, the first piece of elegant kamares pottery was being tenderly placed in her outstretched hand by a digger whose eyes shone with mischief and triumph.

  “Thank you, Demetrios,” she said. “We'll get the rest of this out tomorrow, now we know it's down there. Too dark to do careful work at the bottom of a six-foot shaft! This seems as good a moment as any to call a halt for the day. We're losing the sun. Aristidis! Can you shut the site down now, and if anyone's interested to see how far we've come I'll be at the sheds looking over the finds.”

  An hour earlier, the last canvas bag, writhing ominously, had been carted off site by a team of men from the village who had worked silently and attentively over the ground. They'd promised to return the next day for the stragglers at a time when the serpents would be out and about.

  All the men came back to hear Aristidis talk about the day's production and watch him demonstrate and explain the finds. They crowded into the goat sheds, noisy with question, remark, disagreement, and debate. “For every two Cretans, you'll hear three opinions,” Gunning had warned her, and the opinions of eight of them were being aired at top volume. At last, leaving a night guard of two behind, they began to walk off to their homes.

  Gunning drew Letty to one side and for a moment his expression was almost indulgent. “Had a good day?” he asked simply, confident of her reply.

  She nodded. “And it'll be better tomorrow. Six seal stones, twenty clay animals, the remains of about a dozen vases all in sherds, and, best of all, this gentleman!” Laughing, she held up a six-inch-high bronze figurine. Carefully cleaned, the rough natural texture left by the bronze-smithing spoke reassuringly of Minoan workmanship; the portrayal of the human figure was simple and natural, the work of an artist. She held in her hand a neat-waisted Cretan standing to attention, adoring his goddess, left arm by his side, right hand raised to his forehead. “You must have been standing almost above him, William, when you struck this pose! How could you have known?”

  “My party trick,” he said lightly. “These are ten a penny in Crete. Strike the ground and one pops up. He's lovely, but I'd say the most significant things we've got are the body parts.”

  Letty went to look at a tray labelled in English and Greek— limbs. Nestled in sawdust were a dozen or so small and rather roughly modelled clay representations of arms, legs, and feet. “No torsos,” she commented. “Or heads. What do you suppose these are doing up here?” Carefully, she began to pick them up one at a time to examine them.

  “I think we've hit on a shrine of some sort. You've seen Celtic or Roman offerings at holy springs and so on? Engaging the goddess's attention in the matter of health problems? ‘Having awful twinges in my arthritic old legs, Lady. How about a spot of help in this department? And just so you know what I'm on about, I'm offering up a model of the parts in question.’”

  “This one's a puzzle, William. Look! It's a miniature pillar with a rounded bit at the top like those at the palace. Help with architectural problems being sought, do you suppose? Some poor chap's structure threatened with collapse?”

  “Um. Problems of elevation and support of a kind, I should say.” He paused, trying to decide whether a comment on the piece she had picked up and was studying closely would be appropriate. “The object you've got in your hand right now is a male member. Very rare.”

  “A what?…Oh, yes, of course.” Letty didn't give him the satisfaction of a blush but continued to examine the artefact for a calculated moment before replacing it and selecting a pair of clay legs. Four inches long, they were slim and carefully modelled and quite obviously female. From the knees to the feet they were pockmarked, she was sure quite deliberately, to indicate the nature of the ancient disease.

  “Gangrene? Snakebite? Varicose veins?” Gunning offered. “We should ask Stoddart to take a look at these. He might be able to diagnose some Minoan ailments. Why not? I've no reason to suppose they've changed vastly over the centuries…Mmm…an interesting study, there. One could—Letty? Letty! What on earth's the matter?”

  Blinded by tears, she could no longer fight down the response of grief, triggered by the sight of the pathetic little legs. She thrust the votive offering into Gunning's hand. “It's Phoebe's legs, William,” she whispered. “Oh, gosh! It brings it all back! And I thought I was being so tough and efficient, playing the nurse…You didn't see…She walked all over the site with me at Knossos that morning…her boots were new—not broken in—but she never whimpered or complained. She stumbled a bit and I had to help her over a wall or two, but I thought it was because she was feeling a bit feeble. But when the doc and I took her boots off and the silk stockings she was wearing under them, like a cavalryman, her feet and ankles were so terribly sore. I feel quite dreadful that her last hours were spent trying to hide the pain—pain she was putting up with to entertain me!”

  Gunning was turning the clay legs this way and that, lost in thought. “Tell me again, Letty, if you can bear it, exactly what you saw. The marks on Phoebe's body. All the marks.”

  Strangely, the obvious thing to do, it seemed, was to take back the Minoan model and use it to demonstrate and describe. Letty pointed to the three-thousand-year-old clay ankles, talking of blisters and blood flow and the purple tidemarks of hypostasis— all she could remember of Dr. Stoddart's twentieth-century vocabulary—and she heard Phoebe's laughter. Phoebe would have been charmed by the resonance. She would have
been the first to hear the click that linked the present indissolubly with the past. “They're still here, Laetitia!” she'd said in the Palace, her imagination conjuring up spirits unseen by Letty. And here, in this bleak spot on the shoulder of a mountain, perhaps they were beginning to reveal themselves.

  Letty shuddered. It had been a long day. “What's wrong, William?” she asked, concerned to see he was still holding the votive piece. “What are you thinking?”

  “Something impossible.” His words were disjointed and slow in coming, as he struggled to order his thoughts. “But, with your permission, I'll take this object to show to Dr. Stoddart. His remarks may well be interesting. No—don't ask. I shall have to think about this. I've had a notion so disturbing…Look, I'd rather not discuss it. Not yet.”

  The coroner's court was declared open at ten o'clock on Friday morning and Gunning and Laetitia slipped into their places, still breathless from their dash down to the city from Kastelli. Summoned by runner the day before, they had preferred to make an early start that morning rather than give up precious digging time the previous day to travel back, and Letty was having some difficulty in pulling the two sides of her life together. Her head and her heart were still on the breezy promontory on the slopes of Juktas.

  She looked with misgiving at the coroner. If this scene were being played by English rules, she was contemplating a gentleman combining the decisive authority of a judge and the opportunities for curiosity of a policeman. A layman, but a man charged with a duty to weigh evidence and make a decision that would, at the end of this day, either close the lid on Phoebe's suicide or unleash whatever hounds Inspector Mariani chose to whistle up in pursuit of her murderer.

  To her surprise, the elderly Cretan chosen for the job, Professor Sokratis Perakis, addressed the assembled company in English. In a few words he had made plain his scholarship, outlined his task, set out a timetable, stated his objectives, and taken account of every person in the room. From the way he consulted his pocket watch, Letty guessed he was not a man who planned to be late for his lunch. The morning session would close at one and proceedings would restart, he announced, at three o'clock precisely.