The Tomb of Zeus Page 24

  “You're wasting your time. He's a goner.” Russell turned to leave.

  “No. No. I've given him a sedative. He'll be in considerable pain. There are broken limbs—ribs and a cracked skull. I can't yet say whether there's cerebral damage. It's possible. I'm going to do what I can here and give him a chance to stabilise. He ought, perhaps, to be taken to the hospital, but I don't want to risk a further jolting through the streets. Or a change of surgeon. Really, there's nothing they can do for him that I can't do. We're well equipped here.”

  “No one is well enough equipped to bring him back. I can see that. It's a hopeless case. You don't have to wrap it up for me, Doctor. Where did it happen? Was he fleeing to the harbour? Running away from his betrayal?”

  Letty decided there were two ways of dealing with Theodore. She rejected her preferred plan to wallop him behind the ear with Stoddart's paperweight and chose the second. “As a matter of fact he wasn't fleeing, Mr. Russell,” she explained in a kindly tone. “He'd left the town and was heading towards a village on the coast…what did you say it was called, William? Mournia, that's it. He would certainly have died up there if he hadn't been spotted by some village women. Just driving away his anger, I suppose, until he ran out of road. And, yes, since you are the one who injured him, you're probably right to blame yourself. But, Theo, when you know the facts that have recently come to light, you may forgive yourself as I'm quite certain George will forgive you.”

  Gunning looked at her, sending a question and a warning. She persisted, ignoring him: “George is not guilty of the offence you ascribed to him,” she said firmly. “Doctor Stoddart has been raking through his recollections of Phoebe's time in Paris and—”

  Dr. Stoddart stiffened. “I say! Miss Talbot! Laetitia! I spoke in confidence—”

  “And it will be respected, Doctor!” She smiled reassuringly at him and carried on. “George was indeed in Paris that month with friends, but never managed to meet up with Phoebe. Their itineraries overlapped for only a day or so, and on those days she was engaged with Ollie and Harry.” She dropped her voice. “You wouldn't expect the doctor to name names even if he could remember, but he believes there is question of an old acquaintance from the war years—Phoebe's previous life—who resurfaced at the funeral,” she improvised. “We have the doctor's assurance that George was in no way responsible for poor Phoebe's condition. Just an unfortunate coincidence. Will you confirm this much for Mr. Russell, Doctor?”

  “It wasn't George,” Stoddart spoke up. “Couldn't possibly have been George. And I'll swear to that on my honour. And in a court of law, should you wish it.”

  Theodore took a moment or two to absorb this, then went to grasp his son's cold hand.

  “Speak to him,” said Stoddart surprisingly. “Say something. Anything. Sometimes they can hear you, you know. Men at death's door will occasionally come round and answer a question you've spoken over what you thought was about to become a corpse. I was once roundly ticked off for my barrack-room language by a devout young Methodist who recovered consciousness two days after my outburst. It's worth a try.”

  Awkwardly, Theodore began to mutter: “Forgive me, George. Bloody awful temper. Short fuse…act first, think later…you know what I'm like. Understand, old man, that you weren't involved in this to-do with Phoebe at all. 'Nuff said? What? Look here—I'll go to Mournia and see those you'd want me to see. Say what you'd want me to say. And I'll try to get it right this time.” He looked around almost furtively, wondering if he'd said too much.

  “Well done!” said Letty, briskly. “I'm certain he's heard that.” She took Theo's place at the bedside and kissed the unconscious man's marble cheek. “We've got you! You're safe now. It's all going to be all right. You're not to worry about a thing.”

  The cook had done well, considering, Letty thought, enjoying the scent of herbs that rose from the dish of lamb stew when the lid was lifted. With all the turbulence at the Villa Europa, she was surprised that he'd managed to put together a creditable dinner for the five remaining members of the household. Eleni had not returned after the inquest and it was clear that Theo was feeling bereft of the two female presences in the house. Every time the door opened, he looked up in hope instantly disappointed, and in spite of her dislike and mistrust, Letty felt for him.

  “Thank you—we'll wait on ourselves now,” he told the footman who was preparing to spoon out the stew, then waited until he'd left before continuing. “Laetitia—if you wouldn't mind?”

  “Eleni sometimes takes the weekend off,” Stewart explained with a show of exasperated eye-rolling. “Goes to stay with her mother and sister. You'd have thought that at a time like this she would have considered it her duty to stay on and make herself available.”

  He was silenced by a glare from Theodore and an icy assurance that he could safely leave domestic arrangements to the master of the house.

  This was bidding fair to be the most uncomfortable meal of her life. Theo was self-absorbed, Gunning uncommunicative, the two students baffled and awkward, and where one would have looked for the bright good humour of George and the lively, inconsequential chatter of Phoebe, there were two empty places silently reproving them.

  The shadows of the house had crept closer. What had Gunning said on her first evening? “…something alive and growing here, something malevolent.” The dark presence had not, it seemed to her, been appeased by the double sacrifice. Did George count as a sacrifice? He was still hanging on to life, after all. Fancifully, she wondered whether, once on the hunt, each of the three Furies demanded her own victim. Were the red-eyed goddesses even now savouring the prospect of a third? “Whom will you choose, Tisiphone? Eeny, meeny, miney, mo…Catch a sinner by his toe…” Or her toe. Letty glanced around the table. She decided that, of the group, Dickie was most probably the only one who might be immune to their malice.

  Theo, she suspected, was capable of the blackest of misdemeanours; Gunning had confessed to her last year that he was in very bad standing with any divine authority minded to roust out sinners, hinting at transgressions too dire to mention; she blushed at the memory of her own bad behaviour, which she had thought forgiven by Magdalene, the saint she had adopted in France; and Stewart—well, no one could reach Stewart's pitch of cynical nasti-ness without having annoyed a divinity or two.

  She shivered and began to dole out the stifado. “Mmm…smells delicious! Garlic and mushrooms in there, with thyme and rosemary, I think. Help yourselves to pasta, will you?”

  Theodore recovered himself for a moment and, remembering the reason for her presence in his house, stirred himself to ask: “You are eating well chez Aristidis, I trust? His mother has the reputation of being an excellent cook. I understand she makes the most delicious mulberry raki on the island.”

  “The most wonderful food, Mr. Russell! And I do notice that the islanders are the healthiest and most long-lived people I have ever come across. I was overtaken the other day on the steep slope up to Maria's house by an old goat of a man who, I was to discover when I enquired, is ninety next birthday.”

  “And, tell me, how goes it with your dig?” He went on to ask sensible, uncritical questions about the progress and managed to listen to most of their answers. Gunning and Letty both replied happily, skating lightly, in deference to his shaken state, over his attempt to hoodwink them by the misleading mapping of the site. Instead of the “You double-dealing fiend!” Gunning might have hurled at Theo, Letty heard him say, almost teasingly: “I say—you'll never guess what those twerps in the planning office did! Reversed the map! Did you ever hear the like? No—no harm done. Aristidis twigged in no time. He put us back on track.”

  “We sank a sondage pit right where you put your cross, Mr. Russell,” said Letty. “And it gave up wonders! Two more, north and south—the same result. Goodness knows what lies between them! Holy site, quite obviously. Temple? Burial of huge importance? We should know by the end of next week. It's all terribly exciting!” Hating her tone of false jollity,
she had to admit that it seemed the only way to lull Theodore into a state of mind where he could just about function in a civilised way. A trick Letty had learned from her nanny. When overexcitement or tears threatened, Nanny's response was to invoke the mundane, even the infuriatingly patronising. “Time for hopscotch, I think, dear.” The beaten track, the road most travelled, the hopscotch square was sometimes what was called for.

  A footman entered silently to light the oil lamps standing in a row on the sideboard behind Theodore. In the sudden flare, as Theo turned his head to thank him, Letty saw his silhouette cast on the wall opposite and she caught her breath. She recognised there an outline she had become familiar with: the rugged shape of Juktas. An Achaean warrior lying on his funeral pyre. The beard she had taken for a naval cut was even more of an affectation than she had supposed. She saw it clearly now for what it was—a copy of the aggressively jutting and sculpted beards worn by Greek fighting men on ancient black-figure vases.

  With a rush of insight accompanied by pity, she saw that this man who had so disturbed and antagonised her was a man perpetually seeking acceptance. Not happy to be himself, the incomer, the English gentleman, Theodore Russell was emulating the likes of Colonel Lawrence, a man who had so admired the Arabs he had adopted their dress and customs. Her own great-uncle Hubert had vanished into tribal territory on the North West Frontier with the son of a local chieftain and had emerged years later speaking Pashtun and more Afridi than the Afridi. And he'd never been happy again, declared all the aunts, in any society.

  Here Theodore sat, looking for all the world like a Levantine pirate, involved emotionally and professionally—and, she had to think, financially—with the life of the island and yet he would never experience the same easy acceptance as his son. Penniless, foreign-looking George was welcomed and loved wherever he went.

  The students, subdued and not quite understanding the currents flowing about them, made their excuses as soon as they politely could at the end of the meal and went to their rooms.

  “Look—don't rush off, you two,” Theodore told Letty and Gunning. “I have a proposition for you. If you've nothing better to do—why don't you accompany me on a little outing tomorrow morning? Short trip out to the coast. We can take the horses. I keep a Ford in the garage but hardly ever use it. You see so much more from the back of a horse. I thought we could go and find the site of the accident—see if we can work out what pushed him— literally—over the edge.”

  Though this was probably the last thing either would have chosen to do with their Saturday morning, both replied warmly, accepting the strange invitation. They fell silent, sensing that there was more he wished to say.

  Battling his uncertainty: “But that's not all. I'd like you to come with me to the village. That's where he was heading.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Gunning. “George has friends there. They'll be wanting news of him.”

  “George has unfinished business there. You heard the promise I made him? Something I have to do on his behalf. Whether he recovers or not. I know what he would want. And it shall be done!” he said with sudden resolution. A grim smile broke through. “I have a good deal to atone for…You're to keep me up to the mark! It won't be easy and I may try to back out at the last moment.”

  Briskly, with a return of his old vigour, he rang for staff and made arrangements. Letty found herself dismissed with a jarringly cheerful: “Tomorrow morning at eight, then? In the stables?”

  “Hey, don't rush off!” Gunning called after her as she strode ahead of him down the corridor.

  Letty turned a strained and anxious face to him. He held up his oil lamp and looked at her carefully.

  “You're upset. Anything I can do?”

  “Nothing. But thank you. I've suddenly had quite enough of this grim place, William, and these grim people. I can't be easy here. Tragedy has broken over our heads, but I have a feeling I can't squash that there's more to come.” Suddenly losing all confidence, she was aware that her voice had become plaintive: “I don't want to stay on…I just want to go back to my own world, William…”

  “Back?” he asked. “Back where? Back to Cambridge or back to Athens? Where is your world, Letty?” And, gently: “I'll take you. Wherever you want to go. You know that. You only have to ask.” But, as though regretting his show of sympathy, he added lightly: “I spent a season running at your stirrup last year, playing the preux chevalier. Seems to have become a habit, you know. For here I still am, trailing about after you.”

  She was unable to reply, silenced by a dizzying sensation that she no longer knew where her place was, certain only that, wherever it might be, William Gunning was, inconveniently, at the centre of it.

  The accident site wasn't difficult to spot. Skid marks on the road and torn turf where the wheels had fought for purchase on the lip of the chasm were clear markers. They dismounted and Gunning held the uneasy horses back as, in shuddering curiosity, Letty and Theo lay on their stomachs peering through the gorse bushes and over the cliff edge. The boom of the waves was deafening, the drop vertiginous and made more sickening by the glimpse of green metal far below, hidden for a moment by the crashing surf, then tormentingly revealed.

  Theo drew back and got to his feet, muttering, “You think that's terrifying? The next hour will bring worse.” Unable to decide whether he was speaking to her or to himself, Letty stayed silent and she remounted, ready for the final half mile into the village.

  When they turned around the shoulder of the cliff, the road gave out and the track way took on its ancient aspect. It wound its way down into a cluster of houses snugly occupying a valley bottom.

  “A fishing village?” said Letty uncertainly. “But I can't see any access to the sea…”

  “No, not fishing. Not much farming goes on, either. It's a village of craftsmen. Has been for generations. Basketwork, smithing, potting, leather work—you name it—the men and women of Mournia can turn it out.”

  He reined in his horse to contemplate the pleasing arrangement of white two-storied houses, the central square of the village clearly marked out by its cluster of Cretan plane trees. The sheltering brown slopes, which a half mile farther on would rear up as aggressive cliffs, splintered into the shapes of a Braque painting.

  Letty had a feeling he was wasting time, loitering, beginning to regret bringing them along with him on this strange mission. It was at just this point he might have refused the challenge he had set himself, turned his horse, and made off back to Herakleion. “When I was in Egypt,” she started to say, ignoring Gunning's histrionically slumping shoulders, “I saw a wonderful frieze showing representatives of different races bringing tribute to the Pharaoh— you know the sort of thing, Persians bearing perfume, Sudanese pulling along giraffes— Well, the hieroglyph for one of the races of men was deciphered as the ‘Keftiu.’ Andrew Merriman believes these men were the ancient Cretans and we ought properly to call them not Minoans, but Keftiu. And do you know what they were carrying as presents to the King of Egypt? Luxury craft goods! Pottery, jewellery, and baggy leather boots! I wonder if they were made here?”

  “Good lord!” said Gunning, amused. “This is where I have my boots made. There's a man in the High Street who can accommodate my left foot to perfection. To think the Pharaoh and I share a bootmaker!”

  They rode through the surprisingly noisy streets. Theodore seemed to know his way about, Letty noticed, as he led them with no hesitation through the warren of narrow cobbled alleyways, loud with clanging of metal, shouts, and laughter. Smoke reeked from chimneys and sparks flew from dark interiors of forges; men and women sat at the open doors of their workshops or houses, all busily engaged in producing something lovely or useful. Blankets and swathes of woven cloth hung from poles over house fronts—a different range of colours in use here, Letty noticed. In this village all was green and blue and brown, the colours of the sea and hillsides, whereas in Kastelli they burned a fierce red and orange and purple. Several of the villagers looked up and gree
ted Theodore shyly with a nod and a smile. One old black-clad lady raised her gnarled fingers from her embroidery to make the sign of the cross as he passed.

  Having tethered their horses, they continued more easily on foot. They settled down at a café table by the Byzantine church and Theodore ordered coffee and cold water for the men and a glass of lemonade for Letty. As they sipped their drinks, one or two men going by exclaimed and came over to pat Theo's shoulder in a gesture of sympathy, murmuring a few soft words before moving on. Letty didn't doubt that George's story had gone the rounds of the village in no time.

  After a while, Theo pointed to a house that had already claimed Letty's attention. Larger than the others fronting the square, it had an air of faded elegance. The style was Turkish, she thought. Sheltering walls offered a welcome privacy from the rest of the village, their austere intent softened by a curtain of tumbling bougainvil-lea; stout gates, standing open, led into a courtyard. Letty could just make out the start of a line of huge pots overflowing with bright flowers and could imagine a fountain splashing in the unseen centre.

  “A lovely house,” she said. “Do you know the owner?”

  He nodded and sipped his coffee, on edge, uncomfortable with their presence.

  Somewhere close by a cracked bell struck nine and suddenly, with shouts of encouragement and instruction from several female voices from the interior of the house opposite, two small boys dashed out carrying shopping bags. An elderly woman in long black skirts hurried to the gate to call after them: “Make that two kilos of tomatoes and don't forget to check that they're ripe, Andreos! If there's any change you can spend it at the cake shop, but don't tell your mother!”

  Letty found the comfortable domestic scene strangely moving and reassuring after the high drama she had lived through under the Russells' roof in the past nine days.