‘I don’t know enough about the Letter-Men.’

‘Believe me, they were assholes. Most of them were wiped out in a gun battle with a Mexican outfit last year.’

Mavros poured himself a glass of wine from the bottle in a silver stand.

‘I’m sorry,’ Cara said, ‘I should have offered.’

‘I’m sorry, I should have asked.’

She laughed. ‘I like your style, mister.’ Her expression grew serious again. ‘OK, here’s what happened. Confidentially.’ He nodded. ‘I was going to see this guy up on the Drive — a producer I’d got entangled with. Thing was, there was another man I was seeing, an actor. He used to get real jealous, would drive past my house and check if my car was at the front.’

‘I thought you people lived on estates with high walls.’

She smiled. ‘High railings and thorny plants in my case. You can see through if you try hard enough and I’d told the security guys to leave him alone. So Maria was driving the Merc back. She’d left her car at my place so she could get home. It had worked before. I’d given her a wig so she looked like me from a distance.’

The lives of the rich and famous, Mavros thought — just a scuzzy as anyone else’s.

‘Then that kid came out of nowhere, stumbled straight into the car. Maria wasn’t even going fast, but he flew through the air and hit the road head first.’

Mavros was still watching her closely. ‘I don’t know much about the Californian legal system. Was it an easy case to defend?’

‘The best lawyers can do anything,’ Cara said.

‘So you paid?’

‘Of course,’ she said, looking shocked. ‘It was my fault that Maria was driving back so late.’

He nodded. ‘Imagine the scandal if it had been you at the wheel.’

Cara Parks looked away, her face suddenly pale. ‘Yeah,’ she said softly.

Mavros left a few minutes later. He hadn’t learned much about Maria Kondos, but he knew more about the star. Cara Parks was convincing on the big screen, there was no doubt of that. Close up, on the sofa, things were harder to hide. He was almost certain shehad been driving her Mercedes when it hit and killed Michael ‘Zee-Boy’ Timmins.

SIX

From The Descent of Icarus:

The sky was still full of our aircraft when we reached clear ground about three hundred yards from the Tavronitis bridge. There was sporadic fire from the trees on the other side of the river-bed and heavier weapons loosing off from the hill, but our scouts had done a good job. It seemed there was a gap between a pair of defensive positions. Captain Blatter arranged for covering fire at both, while the rest of us picked our way back across the stony watercourse and, to our amazement, reached the other side unscathed.

By now the sun was high in the sky and we were sweating like packhorses in our jumpsuits, the flies hovering around as if we were already dead. I was still carrying the MG34, with Wachter as my loader. He had seen something in my expression and was keeping behind me — or, more likely, he was using me as a shield against enemy fire. Lieutenant Horsmann moved from unit to unit, outlining the plan of attack on the RAF camp south of the airfield. It was unclear how many men were arrayed against us, so maximum force was to be used.

‘Including killing prisoners?’ I asked.

The lieutenant, a young man with little more than peach fuzz on his chin, avoided my eyes. ‘You heard Captain Blatter’s orders. We are the spearhead of the Wehrmacht. We cut through the enemy without mercy.’

I was going to raise the commandments, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath. My comrades were ready for action, their brows furrowed and their breath coming fast. They’d seen the dead men floating down under their parachutes and the planes taking flak. Now was their chance to blood themselves. Most of them were no older than Horsmann and hadn’t experienced the assaults in Belgium and Norway early in the war.

The idea was to probe the camp to see how well it was guarded. Several MGs were set up to cover the first wave, though I was told to go forward with the lighter-armed men.

I caught sight of Blatter at the head of a group to my right. He was still wearing his cap, something which would earn him a stern reprimand from his senior officers if he survived. It was then I understood how his mind worked. He didn’t expect to survive and he instilled this in his men. That made them an almost invincible fighting unit, caring nothing for personal survival. I was thankful that my own lieutenant, now rotting in the spring flowers, had never been so harsh.

Rifle shots rang out from the camp boundary, immediately answered by machine-gun fire from our men. I saw enemy soldiers drop down, while others remained in their slit trenches. Blatter’s unit was already at the edge of the camp and we were urged forward by Lieutenant Horsmann. I held the MG34 levelled in both hands, but I didn’t intend to fire it at another man. I had decided that my part in the war was over. My so-called comrades were savages and our invasion of foreign territory made us no better than the Mongol hordes that piled high the severed heads of the enemies they defeated.

‘Shoot them!’ I heard Captain Blatter scream, watching as men in Allied helmets with their arms high in surrender clambered out of the trenches. They collapsed as the paratroopers opened up on them.

‘Look out!’ Peter Wachter yelled.

I turned to my right and saw a group of huge men in tattered battledress charging us. Maoris. Although some of them fell as machine-pistols and rifles were directed at them, plenty more came on. I shivered when I saw that they had fixed bayonets. High-pitched screams came from those of our men who received the cold steel.

‘Fire, damn you, Rudi!’ Wachter screamed from the ground, where he was struggling to fit a new magazine to his MP40. ‘Fire!’

The New Zealanders were only a few yards away. I blasted away over their heads, making some of them dive to the earth. Others kept up the charge and I leapt to my right to avoid a bayonet that was directed at my chest. Then Wachter got his weapon going and the big men tumbled like children at play, though none of them got up again.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Wachter shouted, ducking his head as a grenade thrown by the next wave of Maoris exploded some yards in front of us.

I was still standing upright, gripping the MG34 loosely. I was smashed to the ground by a weight I realized was my loader.

‘Give me that, you fucking lunatic!’ He tugged the machine gun away and was soon emptying a drum of ammunition into the advancing foe. Then there was a diversion as some RAF men made a dash from Blatter’s murderers, the New Zealanders kneeling down to give them covering fire. A few of them made it to the the treeline at the base of the hill.

‘Come on,’ Wachter said, getting to his feet. ‘Horsmann’s waving us towards the airfield. What’s the matter with you? Take these drums.’

I loped after him, as careless as the killers about my own safety. I knew I wasn’t going to die that day, not because I had some crazed notion of Aryan supremacy but because I had been chosen as a witness by some higher power. No matter what I did, I would survive while my comrades would not. I knew even then that I would die old, and only after I recorded my part in the events of the battle for Crete.

Because I had spared the woman, because I had shown mercy, I was no longer a proper paratrooper. I was the scribe, the sole recorder of my comrades’ butchery.

The stench of cordite, aircraft fuel, shit and rapidly decomposing flesh washed over me as I looked out to the heavenly blue of the sea. Above it was the sky’s darker and less pure blue, discoloured with the blotches of anti-aircraft bursts and smoke from doomed Auntie Jus.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire as a line of trembling aircraftmen were flung backwards into the dust by the men I had seen as brothers only a few hours ago.