A Darker God Page 8

  A swift skirmish with Scotland Yard seemed to be just what Maud needed to put her back in control of herself once more. Rallying, she went to take a further look at her husband and no one had the nerve to stop her. Tugging the cloak to one side, she stared down, expressionless, at the blood-slathered corpse.

  “Heart attack,” she pronounced. “You’ll find he died of a heart attack. Now—William? Where are you? You were about to run me up to the villa in the motor, I think?”

  Montacute exchanged an imperceptible nod with Gunning.

  “Military men,” thought Letty. “How easily they recognise each other.”

  Clearly on the point of collapse, Lady Merriman put a hand on Gunning’s arm to steady herself. She paused to look over her shoulder and direct one last instruction at Laetitia. She even managed a stiff smile. “Do feel free to stay on and be of any assistance you can to the inspector, Letty, my dear. I appoint you my stand-in. I’m sure you will be able to provide answers to any questions he may have about the professor. And some answers which might even be outside my own experience and knowledge.” She turned on a sweet smile and directed it at the inspector, adding: “Laetitia is an archaeologist, you know. One of her many skills. And she likes to make herself available. You’ll find her very willing, Inspector.”

  They all stood, heads bent in quiet respect, as the widow turned and tapped her way offstage, hearing her say conversationally to Gunning: “Ox blood. They brought it here in a flask, you know. I was just telling Letty …”

  The silence rolled back as they left and were lost to sight in the thick stand of trees and bushes that cut the theatre off from the Avenue of Dionysus.

  The cast looked at one another, wary and uncertain. The London policeman seemed to catch their mood and began to speak to them in a reassuring tone.

  “For those of you who don’t know me yet, let me introduce myself: Detective Chief Inspector Montacute of Scotland Yard. Criminal Investigations Department. I’m here in Athens on secondment. I and two British colleagues are working with the Athenian police force at the invitation of the Greek government to establish a certain Britishness of practice in the local force and train their detective branch in the latest forensic methods. Not for the first time—there’s a tradition of cooperation between the two forces going back half a century.”

  He paused, aware of a shuffling of feet and increasingly agonised glances drawn ever towards the bathtub. He was losing their attention. With the stage sense of an actor, he walked off to a point on the floor away from the body. They turned automatically towards him, backs now to the distraction, eyes fixed on his face. Having captured his audience, he kept them. He abandoned his lecturing style and addressed them with a change of tone and speed of delivery. “But Aeschylus? Do policemen spout Aeschylus?” he wanted to know. “Well, here’s one who does! But let me assure you, because I’m certain some of you will already have begun to wonder, that my appearance here is entirely fortuitous—”

  “Oh, yes?” drawled a wearily sceptical tenor voice from the chorus. “Is that what you’re saying? In that getup, some might well suspect there was a bit of cloak-and-dagger work going on. An extraordinary coincidence? A certain inexplicable anticipation of a tragic event, perhaps? Anything you’d like to confess, Montacute?”

  The speaker, still masked, was taking no trouble to hide a scorn, a dislike even, that Letty found ill-timed and ill-judged. Whoever this character was, she would have liked very much to rap his knuckles.

  “Masked and caped I may have been, but hardly under cover!” returned the inspector, unruffled. “You’re all free to inspect my ugly mug. May I suggest you return the compliment, Louis, and show yourself to the assembled company?”

  The young man unmasked himself and sketched a sarcastic bow.

  “Thank you. Now, as some of you will already be aware, your original chorus leader came down with a bout of malaria. Andrew was relieved to find that someone with experience of the play happened to be seconded to Athens for the weeks in question,” Montacute continued. “He gave me a copy of the script, knowing I was familiar with it, and asked if I could possibly mug it all up and perform. You’ve heard his wife mention that we knew each other. We were in the same regiment during the war, the Northumberland Fusiliers. He was a superior officer but we were drawn together by shared interests.”

  Sensing he was saying more than they needed to hear and repeating facts most of them already knew, he let his voice trail away to be absorbed into the dutiful silence, and he looked over with concern at the cloaked body. “I’m sorry indeed that this should have happened …”

  “On your watch, were you about to add?” jibed his heckler. “Slipped up there, I think, Montacute? Or were you looking the other way deliberately?”

  He was silenced by the crowd, who turned on him with angry hisses and threats of a walloping.

  Montacute’s eyes narrowed as he judged the gathering anxiety and turbulence. Letty was relieved to see him make a schoolmaster’s decision to regain authority by a simple means: the distraction of a routine task in hand. “Anyway, may I ask you all to remove your masks—if you haven’t already—line up, and give your names to Miss Talbot in the time-honoured way?” the inspector finished decisively.

  “Who? Me?” Letty was taken aback.

  “Yes. You, Miss Talbot. We all heard Lady Merriman’s tribute to your efficiency and dedication! She volunteered you! We count ourselves fortunate to have you among us at this stressful time. Take this notebook. And here’s a pencil. As the one of those here assembled with the least strong connexions with the cast and the play, perhaps you will allow yourself to be recruited as my aide until support arrives? I’m sure we’re all hoping that nothing untoward has happened, but we must wait for our hopes and fears to be resolved by a medic. In the meantime, I’m taking the precautions you might expect a police officer to take at the scene of a crime.”

  “Ah! You’re saying it’s murder?” The challenging voice again.

  “I say! That’s a bit hysterical, isn’t it?” someone else protested. “This is Athens. You’re not stirring about in the cesspits of Whitechapel now, you know. I’m betting her ladyship’s got it right! Well—is she ever wrong?” He looked for support from his fellows.

  “Oh, put a sock in it, you chaps! You never know. Could all turn nasty and then we’ll be glad we did it by the book. And we’ll all thank you to show a little respect! Henry Beecham, by the way, sir. Chorus, fourth from the left … I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I say we’ve all lost a dear friend, colleague, patron … our inspiration … You, too, Louis … And we owe it to him to do whatever we can to resolve this tragedy.” Beecham’s voice faded and then resumed awkwardly: “Well, you know what I mean …” And, more briskly: “Now, where do you want us, Percy? Or should I call you Chief Inspector for the duration of the enquiry?”

  With varying degrees of cooperation, the chorus, the leading actors, and the remaining backstage crew of two lined up to give their names to Letty. She opened up the black leather Moleskine journal she’d been offered and found a clean page. Finding a folding campaign chair, she settled down with her back to the arc lamp and required the actors to line up in alphabetical order and stand in front of her with the light shining on their faces. She’d learned a thing or two about police work in the last couple of years, she reckoned. She’d been the subject of some sneaky interrogations herself.

  There was a farcical moment when, like a herd of prep-school boys, they pushed and jostled one another.

  “J comes after G, you twerp!”

  “Hey, miss—can you do me first? I’m going on somewhere—late already, don’t you know.”

  “I simply must be at the Embassy by eight or there’ll be the devil to pay!”

  Letty, her hair an unnaturally gleaming halo of gold in the light, surveyed her flock. She remembered her nanny’s brisk way with crowds of children at parties: Start as you mean to carry on, dear—and take no little prisoners. Letty stabbed
her pencil at the anxious crowd and announced: “No excuses. No privileges. No exceptions. Alphabetical order by surname. Anthony, did you hear me?”

  Anthony Wardle shuffled disconsolately to the rear.

  Work began. She was sorry to see that the dismissive Louis had the surname of “Adams” and therefore presented himself legitimately at the front of the queue. She looked for some misdemeanour as an excuse to send him to the back but, aware of her watchful eye on him, he behaved perfectly.

  “Ah! The Recording Angel!” he said with an ingratiating smirk, smoothing down his own floppy blond hair. Blue eyes bleached and splintered to diamonds by the harsh light glittered disconcertingly. “Adams. Louis Fortescue Adams. At your service. I may be contacted at the British School. You know the address.”

  He made to leave.

  “A moment, Mr. Adams,” she said sharply. Tall and handsome, he had spoken to her with a languid condescension. This was exactly the kind of Englishman who raised Letty’s hackles, reminding her all too keenly of the treacherous Cambridge don who’d engineered her dismissal from the university. Determined not to let him off so easily: “The inspector will need to know exactly where you were positioned at the moment of Agamemnon’s death,” she invented, deliberately to detain and irritate him. “Perhaps you could give me the stage reference … you know … stage left, six feet from central point … I’m assuming a twenty-foot radius.”

  “What do you mean—Agamemnon’s death? It’s a work of literature, my dear,” he explained slowly and clearly, playing to the crowd. “Like Robin Hood. Or King Arthur. You’ve heard of them? The king didn’t really die. At least not here, not now, not on this occasion. We would calculate the old rogue in actuality to have slipped this mortal coil towards the end of the Bronze Age—1200 B.C. or thereabouts.”

  “The queue is waiting, Mr. Adams.”

  “Stage right. Perimeter. End of the chorus line rubbing shoulders with Dicky Crawshawe,” Louis Adams contributed briskly, then, apparently unable to pass up the chance of tormenting her a little further: “At least I think it was Dicky. Hard to tell. Could just as easily have been Count Dracula in that cloak.” He leaned towards her confidentially. “Have a care, miss, when you get to the D’s.”

  “Thank you. Next!”

  Letty noticed that Adams did not leave in spite of his affected haste. He quietly drew aside and sat down on the front row of marble seats, watching the proceedings, his blond Anglo-Saxon head flaring like a beacon in the arc lights.

  She had been kept afloat by her rush of anger with Adams and with his departure was, for a moment, almost swept away by other emotions. She found herself fixed here taking notes like a school matron at the bedtime roll call—Hands? Teeth? Bowels? Tick. Tick. Better luck tomorrow, dear—when what she wanted to do was express her shock, to share her grief with William Gunning. He too would be feeling devastated. He’d grown to admire Andrew Merriman—owed his present situation to him. Letty owed the professor that and much more. She looked wearily down the line of actors and wondered how many of these people, most of them students, were themselves trying to push their feelings to a lower level, to disguise their affection behind a stiff upper lip and clipped English formulae of regret. Warm, witty, and juggling his immense learning with a blend of skill and insouciance, Andrew became dear to everyone he met. He had launched many careers; he had sabotaged none. It seemed only his wife despised him. But then, Letty acknowledged, his wife had good cause.

  “Beecham. Henry Beecham, miss … er … stage left. Fourth from the end in the lineup. British School of Archaeology. Student digs. That’s all? Thank you. Got to dash.”

  Letty wondered whether she ought to insist on their staying. Montacute hadn’t passed such an order. In the end, she asked the two who needed to leave early to report to the inspector before they went off-site. She looked in the policeman’s direction, wishing he’d walk back over and take the reins from her hands. She caught sight of his barrel-chested figure in its khaki shirt and linen trousers apparently beating the bounds of the theatre, moving in and out of the shadows. Head bent, he was tracking over the ground in ever-widening circles. He disappeared for a few moments into the clutter of wooden buildings that stood for the skene and continued his survey of the scene of crime. The sight of his solitary effort made Letty ashamed for her lack of dedication. She had to suppose that a man of his rank was used to directing a whole squad of trained hounds back in London, spearheading the advance of forensic science, a world authority. And here he was alone for a vital half hour until reinforcements arrived, in a foreign country, in the dark, with a grotesque corpse on his hands, twenty skittish witnesses to control, and no one in support but a feeble, heartbroken English girl.

  With a sudden insight, she realised why Montacute had set her to catalogue the dramatis personae. Queuing up to supply information was something they understood. They had been doing it all their English lives and could be expected to fall in with the procedure with no demur. Even Adams had not seriously challenged the authority bestowed so surprisingly on her. They would stand quietly to one side, out of the inspector’s hair, while he roamed about unencumbered, trying to establish what he could in the important minutes after the—could she bring herself to say the word?—murder. The inspector’s professional behaviour certainly indicated that they were looking at just that. Someone had murdered Andrew.

  Shuddering as the suspicion belatedly struck her, Letty looked along the queue of actors, standing passively waiting for her attention. Someone had killed Andrew and could be at that very moment waiting patiently in line, ready to tell her his name.

  Chapter 9

  She beckoned the next actor forward.

  One by one they chose, on leaving her, to go and sit down with Louis Adams, huddled together, waiting on events. Although not generally liked—Letty noticed—Adams seemed to attract a following. People listened when he spoke and had no objection to keeping him company on the stone benches.

  The stage manager, Hugh Lattimore, presented himself, perplexed and defensive. He risked becoming garrulous, Letty thought, as he launched into a self-justifying account of his evening: He wouldn’t be held responsible … Couldn’t possibly be everywhere … He’d no idea what villainy had been going on backstage—his eyes had been trained on the performance from the wings and the front side of the audience benches, judging the effect of the torches and timing the advance of the twilight. Oh, there was so much more to stage management than people realised! Surely she’d noticed him? He’d been no more than twenty yards away, to her right? Letty admitted the truth of this and steered him back to the vital moments.

  “Ah! When my cue came—that is, Melton’s screeching—I did my duty backstage. I made my way to the bathtub, whisked off the length of muslin covering the king … someone had already poured the blood over him … and pushed it forward just as we’d practised. I didn’t notice anything untoward, but then neither did Clytemnestra at first and she had much closer and longer contact with the body than I could have done. Speak to her!”

  Letty, irritated and unsympathetic, heard him out. “Thank you, Mr. Lattimore, that’s all … If you will just tell me where you’re staying in Athens?”

  She was poised to write him down as yet another British School student but he gave an address in the exclusive new northern suburb of Kifissia. He acknowledged her surprise with a deprecating smirk. “A rather splendid situation, I’m sure you’ll agree! Cool, green, and elegant. And hoi polloi nowhere in evidence. Do you know it?”

  “I visited once, last spring. General Konstantinou was throwing a tennis party at his villa.”

  He began to thaw at once. “You know the General! Small world, indeed, the city of Athens! I’m staying with his family. Tutor to the children—his grandchildren mainly. But also to the household. We practise at mealtimes. The General is very concerned that every member of the family should be able to converse in English. But all that leaves my evenings free for cultural activities of this natur
e.”

  Was it the fear and suspicion swirling all about that was making Letty see all her interviewees in such a bad light? She couldn’t wait to get rid of this self-serving and snobbish little twerp. She felt a twinge of pity for the General’s grandchildren. But then, looking over his shoulder at the next in line, she saw that things were going to get worse.

  “Next, please. Ah, yes, Mr. Melton.”

  She hoped her voice had not betrayed the dread she had been feeling at the thought of facing the figure of Aegisthus in his spreading black and gold regalia. To her surprise, he made her brief interview unremarkable. He waited for her questions, answered them smoothly, and immediately fell silent. Though not appearing evasive, all he revealed about himself was that he could be contacted at the British Embassy. His eyes, she noticed, never engaged with hers, remaining trained over her shoulder into the bushes beyond. She dismissed him and watched him glide away with the same relief she might have felt on seeing a king cobra decide she was not worthy of his royal attention.

  “And you are …?”

  “Patterson, Miss Talbot. Zoë Patterson. I know who you are, Laetitia—I may call you Laetitia?—and I’ve seen you from a distance but no one’s had the time to introduce us yet. I work with Sarah. She’s at the back of the queue under W for Williams. She’s a student at the American School of Classics and I’m next door at the British. We do the wardrobe together—you know, repairs and that sort of thing—and we help the double-ups out of their costumes and into their new ones.”

  “Tell me about Geoffrey Melton, Zoë.” She looked about her to check that he hadn’t stayed in earshot. “He walked off the orchestra as Agamemnon, to have his bath backstage—we saw all that from out front—but he was supposed to get ready to come onstage again almost at once as Aegisthus, wasn’t he?”