This time there was a longer silence. ‘I don’t know. Maybe when we were preparing for the Galatsi battle scenes.’

‘Any raised voices?’

‘I. . I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

‘All right.’

‘Alex, you will find Maria, won’t you? You will finish the case?’

He said he would try and hung up. It looked like all roads led to Kornaria, where the locals would shoot him before saying ‘ Kali mera’.

SIXTEEN

Before going any further, Mavros called Niki. She sounded tired.

‘What is it, my love?’

‘The job, of course,’ she said sharply, then, ‘I’m sorry, Alex. Sometimes it’s too much, the endless stream of people coming to Greece, thinking their lives will improve overnight. There’s a limit to the jobs I can find them.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, when are you coming home?’

He’d been expecting the question. ‘You’re not going to believe this — the woman I found has disappeared again.’

‘And there I was thinking you’d got yourself involved in the Rudolf Kersten death. Some of the news bulletins are hinting there was foul play.’

Mavros had been hoping Niki wouldn’t have seen the news — she didn’t always watch it as she thought most journalists were liars.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The cops here are saying it was probably suicide.’

‘So you areinvolved?’

‘Well, the widow has asked me to help find the killer — if there was one.’

There was a pause as she filled her lungs. ‘Get back here, Alex Mavro. You know how these cases end — with you facing death and your bill unpaid. Come back tomorrow. Tonight, if they’ll give you their stupid Learjet.’

‘That’s not going to happen, Niki,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ve got to let me do my job.’

‘Oh, fine. And what am I supposed to do? Sit here waiting to hear that some lunatic Cretan villagers have chopped you to pieces?’

He gave a weak laugh. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not like that down here on the coastal strip.’

‘Alex, please. Come back home. I miss you.’

‘I’ll get back as soon as I can. Promise. I’ve got to run now. Love you.’ He cut the connection, disturbed by how close Niki’s imagination was to reality. All he’d done was buy himself some time — she’d be back on his case tomorrow.

He rang the Fat Man.

‘I see the German’s dead,’ Yiorgos said, after they’d exchanged unpleasantries. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be involved in that case too, would you?’

Mavros filled him in.

‘Sounds to me like you’ve got too much on your plate. Maybe I should come down.’

The idea of the Fat Man stomping around antagonizing people in the luxury resort wasn’t appealing, though he might have been useful in Kornaria.

‘No, thanks.’ He told him about Michael ‘the Bat’ Kondoyannis. ‘See if you can dig up anything about him and Crete. His family came from Kornaria.’

‘He was a drug dealer and he came from Afghanistan, Crete? It wouldn’t take a genius to work out where he got his supplies.’

‘Some of them, at least. But I want more than deductions, Fat Man. See if you can dig up something concrete about him.’

‘Concrete, as in the stuff the mob puts on people’s feet before chucking them overboard?’

‘Very funny. I found out something else.’ He told Yiorgos what Mikis had told him about his father when he had been known as Kanellos, and the lie told by Waggoner.

‘So an agent of the imperial power sets up a Communist. How unusual. I take it you’ll be having words with the shit-head.’

‘Soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve got a rendezvous with a Hollywood starlet.’

‘Screw you,’ the Fat Man said harshly. ‘Then again, if shedoes that, Niki will hang your intestines from your mother’s balcony.’

‘Over and out,’ Mavros said, heading for the door.

The man on the other side was wearing black clothes and a matching balaclava. Only the long knife in his right hand provided any contrast. Its point pierced Mavros’s T-shirt before he walked rapidly backwards into his room.

From The Descent of Icarus:

I came round in another field hospital, this one in the grounds of a Cretan prison. The inmates were all gone, most of them, I learned, killed when they joined the locals in the battles against the mountain troops who had flooded the west of the island from Maleme. My head was pounding and every movement provoked worse pain. I slid my hand up slowly and felt a bandage swathing my skull.

‘Ah, the brave paratrooper has woken up,’ said a sardonic voice.

I looked up at the doctor who was standing by my bed. His white hair was cut short at the sides and he wore a moustache like Himmler’s — clearly the kind of martinet who wished he was in the SS but had been deemed too old. The army was less choosy.

‘How long have I been out?’ My voice sounded tinny, as if it came from outside my body.

‘Your three-day coma has apparently rendered you unable to use the customary terms of address.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I mumbled, my interest in military discipline long gone.

‘Your captain — what’s his name?’

I didn’t know if it was a test, but I found that my memory was working adequately.

‘Blatter.’

‘Indeed. Captain Blatter, who, you’ll be pleased to learn, has been awarded the Iron Cross Class One by General Student, thinks you’re a coward and a malingerer.’ The doctor gave me a tight smile. ‘I have no opinion about the former, but I seriously doubt you’ve been faking the comas you’ve been in. Here’s my difficulty. We are unable to treat head injuries such as yours on Crete. We therefore will have to send you to Athens, from where I would hazard that you’ll be returned to the Fatherland and discharged from the parachute division — meaning you’ll spend the rest of the war stamping papers or fire-watching. Meanwhile, your unit has been ordered to leave the island tomorrow to take part in a major operation elsewhere.’ He glanced at my chart. ‘So how do you feel today, Private?’

I didn’t know what he was trying to do — maybe he felt a trained paratrooper shouldn’t be wasted even if he had a potentially catastrophic head injury, or maybe he wanted to see if Blatter was right about me being a coward. In any case, after what I’d seen at Makrymari, I had a single imperative — I was going to prove myself to the captain and then I was going to kill him. For myself? For the executed woman? I’ve never been able to decide. Maybe it was for both of us, victims of the war in our different ways.

Blatter welcomed me back to the unit with an ironic smile and a sarcastic remark, but he had more important things to think about. A month later we were storming into the Soviet Union, but as ground forces. After the Pyrrhic victory on Crete, Hitler had decreed there would be no more airborne assaults, so we fought alongside the ordinary army troops and the cold-eyed bastards of the Waffen-SS. Blatter’s zeal began to waver after two months of the winter, but I bided my time. I wanted him to be in full disarray before I ended his life.

That happened in early spring, when the birds on the great Ukrainian plain had started to sing again and the first shoots of grass had begun to appear under our ragged boots. We were ordered to attack a Red Army stronghold by a small river, and Blatter’s nerve finally went. I stepped up and said to his second-in-command, a Bavarian lieutenant named Wanner, that I’d look after the captain, taking my Luger from its holster and putting the muzzle against Blatter’s back.

We moved forward in an extended line, taking heavy machine-gun fire at several points. We had artillery support and that eventually pounded the enemy into disarray, not that they surrendered. After the last of them had been mopped up, I pushed the captain into a command post filled with shattered bodies and took out my service bayonet.

‘This is for the woman in Crete,’ I said. ‘And for me.’