The Taint of Midas Read online

  Gabrilis’s journey-time had not decreased. He cycled carefully, straining to keep the gearless tricycle moving on the uphill gradients, squeezing on the brakes to prevent his heavy cargo from carrying him away on the downhill stretches. He kept close to the road’s edge, though on the town-bound journey the drop down to the sea was treacherously close. And, siren-like, the sea drew him; the lure of cool, blue water was strong, and if his eyes strayed there, he found his wheels directed to the steep, rocky slopes down to the bay.

  The landmarks of his route had changed. These days, he measured his progress by the building sites, counting off the barely begun, never-to-be-finished ruins: grey-rendered, prison-block walls, empty window openings and the iron spikes ready for the upper storeys bent and rusty. The builders were long gone, but their rubble and their rubbish was still here, in roadside mounds of beer bottles and empty cans, of hardened cement and cigarette packets, of hamburger cartons and the paper wraps of sandwiches.

  At the two-mile mark, opposite a Vespa with deflated, perished tyres, the wires from its electrics dangling loose, its saddle ripped with yellow foam exposed, there was a chapel. Gabrilis made the triple cross over his heart, and cycled on. A car swerved round him, its driver showing a hand out of the window, maybe a greeting, maybe a curse. Another car passed, and another. A motorbike roared by. He wiped away the sweat that stung his eyes and pedalled on.

  A navy-blue liveried taxi was travelling towards him, airport-bound, and a the taxi drew close, the blast of a horn came from behind, and a coach pulled out wide to overtake the tricycle, encroaching on the taxi’s share of the carriageway. The taxi-driver hit his horn; the coach moved back towards Gabrilis, so close its great flank blocked out the light as it slid by him, and as it pulled away its slipstream carried off his precious cap, dropping it in the caper bushes at the roadside.

  Gabrilis cycled slowly to where his hat lay, and stopped. The road was, for the moment, quiet; as he climbed off his tricycle, there was just a single vehicle coming over the hill’s brow. He took his cap from the caper bush, and with the backs of his fingers knocked the dust from it. Far below, the heat had laid its calming hand on the sea, so the limpid water seemed still and soothing, and he thought of home, of his bed and sleep.

  The approaching vehicle was growing close. There was dust on his shoes too, and he bent to wipe it off. When the vehicle changed course, he was busy with his shoes, and didn’t see it.

  It hit him hard, and took the tricycle and trailer with him. The melons bounced down the hillside until they burst, spattering their red flesh on the sharp stones. The tricycle rolled twice, and then was caught and held amongst the largest rocks.

  Gabrilis himself didn’t go far: just far enough to be unseen by passing traffic. He was on his back, his broken arm bent painfully beneath him. A little blood trickled from his nose.

  Time passed; the pain diminished. Above him on the road, a refuse truck was followed by a moped, whilst, down amongst the thorny capers and thyme bushes, Gabrilis lay unmoving, his eyes staring blindly at the brilliant sun.

  Two

  The evening was slipping into twilight, the day’s heat was mellowing into the humidity of a breezeless summer night. As they sped down the coast road, Sergeant Thanos Gazis watched the sunset’s red fanfare in sideways glances; scarlet and orange lit the black of the still-warm asphalt, its chemical miasma obscuring the scent of herbs he remembered on this road as a boy.

  Traffic was light, but PC Petridis switched on the blue lights and the siren anyway; he claimed it was a good way to impress the girls. Gazis rested his arm on the sill of his open window, but there was no coolness in the through-draught, and inevitably the starched crispness of his pale-blue uniform shirt was softening into creases.

  ‘For God’s sake, Petridis,’ he said. ‘Put the air con on.’

  ‘I’d rather not, sir, if you don’t mind,’ said Petridis. His accent was from the islands: dropped syllables, incorrect vowels. ‘My grandmother says air conditioning gives you dry spots on your lungs. That’s what causes TB. And pneumonia.’

  Gazis slowed for a light that was against them. Petridis reached for the soundbox and switched the siren to double time, halting the traffic. Gazis manoeuvred them through the junction, and Petridis switched the siren back to its normal wail.

  ‘Does your grandmother have a medical qualification, then?’ asked Gazis.

  ‘In what way, sir?’

  ‘If she’s such an expert on lung disease, presumably she’s a qualified medical practitioner?’

  Petridis considered.

  ‘Not an official one, sir. She delivers a lot of babies, though. We should be getting close now, shouldn’t we? That was the turn for Loutro we just passed.’

  On the seaward edge of the road, a car was angled towards the water. Gazis signalled and crossed over the carriageway to pull up in front of a red Namco Pony, nosing up close so there’d be no easy getaway.

  ‘Namco,’ said Petridis. There was respect and admiration in his voice. ‘Did you know these are the only Greek cars still in production, sir? Good cars, they are. Real workhorses, go through anything. My uncle’s got one he’s had twenty years; never had a thing wrong with it.’

  ‘Poor man’s Jeep,’ said Gazis, ‘good for nothing except export to our country cousins. Only Romanians and Bulgarians’ll buy them. Look at it. It’s a cross-breed, can’t even decide whether it’s a saloon or a pick-up.’

  Gazis switched off the siren, killed the engine and turned the rear-view mirror to check his close-cut hair. Petridis, already out of the car, approached the Pony. Of its owner, there was no sign. Executing a slow circle of the car, he peered inside and bent to inspect the tyres. By the time he reached the driver’s door, Gazis, straightening his collar, was waiting for him.

  ‘Save your pennies, one day you could have a runabout like that,’ said Gazis, sarcastically. ‘Personally, I’d rather take a bus. It’s in good nick, though. Clean. Usually these things are all goat shit and muck. Where’s it registered?’

  A slight pinkness travelled up Petridis’s cheeks.

  ‘I didn’t notice, sir,’ he said.

  Without glancing at the plates, Gazis recited the Athens licence number.

  ‘Basic rule of policing, to make a mental note of the registration. If he’d taken off when he saw us and we didn’t have the number, we might have looked pretty incompetent, don’t you think? Though God help us if we couldn’t run down this heap of junk.’

  ‘He might have shot out our tyres,’ said Petridis.

  ‘You watch too much TV, son,’ said Gazis. ‘And it’d be a poor criminal who’d use a Namco Pony to make a getaway.’

  ‘Looks like he’s made his getaway without it,’ said Petridis. ‘No sign of any driver.’

  ‘He won’t be far away,’ said Gazis. ‘We passed no pedestrians on the road. As you’ll no doubt have observed.’

  Petridis looked up and down the highway. Despite the fading light, the carriageway both towards the airport and back towards town was still visible to the horizon. As far as they could see, there was no one.

  Gazis moved to where the rubble left by the road-builders joined the rough hillside terrain. Over the water, a single seabird was silhouetted against the flaming-red sky. Below his feet, he saw what they had come to find.

  An old man lay on his back amongst the mountain shrubs. The crookedness of his limbs, the trickle of dried blood under his nose, his wide and vacant eyes left Gazis in no doubt he was looking at a corpse.

  On a rock by the old man’s head sat a second man, head bowed, hand covering his eyes. His curly hair was greying and in need of a cut; he wore a well-tailored suit in cream linen which did much to conceal his corpulence, but the effect of the elegant suit was ruined, in Gazis’s eyes, by the old-fashioned white-canvas tennis shoes on the fat man’s feet. On one broad thigh, tortoiseshell-framed glasses were straddled, reflecting the sunset in their lenses. And here and there, on the slope down to the sea, were th
e splattered green and pink remains of several watermelons, and the wreckage of what Gazis assumed to be a bicycle.

  From behind Gazis, Petridis moved forward for a better view.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ he asked. There was excitement in his voice; here was a story for his family when he got off shift. But Gazis sighed with the weariness of experience; it was clear there was going to be an awful lot of paperwork before the night was through.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t look good. Go and check what the status is on the ambulance.’

  Petridis left Gazis at a run, whilst Gazis himself scrambled down to where the fat man sat, disturbing as he did so a rattling shower of stones and earth. The fat man lifted his head showing cheeks wet with tears. Seeing Gazis, he wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and put on his glasses; they gave him an owlish look, an academic innocence which in no way fitted the sophistication of his clothes.

  Gazis crouched beside the old man’s body and put two fingers on his neck. There was no pulse; he had expected none. He ran his eyes over the corpse, looking for obvious injuries. The old man’s clothes were worn and dirty; there were buttons missing on the cheap cotton shirt, stains on his trousers. There was, too, a stink about him which wasn’t the first whiff of decay; though that was present, it was only slight, and Gazis guessed the old man hadn’t been dead too long: hours rather than days. But the presence of any decay at all surprised him. He had taken this to be straightforward, a traffic collision and a remorseful culprit. Now, it seemed, if that were the case, the fat man had sat with the body for hours – two or three at least – before calling the police. And given the day’s heat, that seemed unlikely.

  Gazis addressed the fat man.

  ‘Move away from the body, please, sir,’ he said. ‘Without touching it, just step away.’

  The fat man stood. He was tall, and his height seemed to diminish his weight, so he seemed not fat, but big.

  ‘How did this happen?’ asked Gazis. ‘Are you injured at all?’

  ‘You’re making the wrong assumption,’ said the fat man. His speech was beautifully enunciated, clear and perfect as the Greek of TV newscasters. ‘I was not involved in this accident. It was I who found the body. I stopped someone on the road and asked him to call 100 on his mobile phone. I do not own a mobile phone myself. But I am in no way responsible for Gabrilis’s death.’

  ‘Gabrilis? You know this man, then?’

  ‘He is Gabrilis Kaloyeros, one of my oldest friends. He has a smallholding at the site of the ancient Temple of Apollo at Mavrovouni. He has – had – a stall selling watermelons on the harbour promenade in town.’

  Gazis looked closely at the corpse’s face. The fat man’s identification was correct. Gazis knew the old man well, by sight: on off-duty summer evenings, he had often bought his boys melon from Gabrilis’s stall, as his father had for him, in years gone by.

  ‘And you’re saying this death has nothing to do with you?’ he asked.

  ‘I found the body. That is the whole extent of my involvement,’ said the fat man.

  Petridis appeared at the hilltop.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he called, and Gazis nodded his acknowledgement.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said to the fat man. He made his way up to where Petridis was standing and spoke quietly in his ear.

  ‘Go over every inch of that car,’ he said. ‘I want to know about every scratch, every dent. If there’s an impact point, find it.’

  ‘What’s his story?’ asked Petridis.

  ‘Nothing whatsoever to do with him.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘In my considerable experience, son,’ said Gazis, ‘the obvious solution is usually the right one. He’s saying what anyone would say in his position. He knows the victim; that’s as much as he’s prepared to say at the moment. But he might soften up, with a bit of careful handling. Give him some mitigating circumstances – poor light, no lights on the bike – and there’s a good possibility he’ll admit to it. Now, go and check on the car.’

  Gazis scrambled back down to where the fat man stood patiently a few feet from Gabrilis’s body.

  ‘If you look back up towards the road, sir,’ said Gazis, ‘you’ll notice you can’t see your car from here. Which means that, conversely, you couldn’t have seen the body from the road.’

  The fat man’s expression changed from melancholic to an unmistakable astuteness.

  ‘Was that a question, Sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeed it was, sir. I’m asking how, if this accident was nothing to do with you, you came to find the body.’

  The fat man’s hand went to his pocket, and he took out an old baseball cap, faded blue with the remnants of a yellow logo, stained with sweat and pale with dust.

  ‘This,’ he said. ‘I saw this at the roadside.’

  ‘And you stop, do you, for every piece of rubbish that you pass?’

  ‘I gave Gabrilis this hat,’ said the fat man. ‘He wore it always. I saw it on the ground here, so I stopped.’

  ‘There’s more than one blue cap in town. What made you think it was his?’

  ‘I was looking for him. I know his routine. I wanted to surprise him. I expected to find him on the road.’

  ‘And the Pony up there, is it registered to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s go up, then, and I’ll take some details from you.’

  Gazis allowed the fat man to go ahead, expecting a man of his bulk to struggle on the incline; but the fat man moved swiftly, reaching the road much faster than Gazis himself. From the direction of town, the ambulance siren’s wail was coming into earshot; Petridis had forgotten to tell them it was a morgue job only, no need for the blue lights after all.

  Petridis waited by the Pony, feet apart and hands behind his back in the ‘at ease’ stance they’d taught him at police college. When he saw Gazis, he gave a small shrug, signalling he’d found no damage on the car.

  Gazis took out his notebook and, ignoring the fat man, clicked on his pen and began, slowly, to write. He wrote down the date, time and location; he noted the nature of the incident as ‘road-traffic fatality’, and the deceased’s name the fat man had given. He wrote down the details of the fat man’s car – make, model, colour, registration – and the weather and road conditions.

  Patiently, the fat man waited.

  When he could think of nothing more to write, Gazis looked the fat man in the eye.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Name.’

  ‘Diaktoros. Hermes Diaktoros.’

  The ambulance siren was very close. Gazis took down the addresses the fat man gave – one local, one in Athens – and a date of birth.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I want to see your licence and insurance papers. Find them, please, and wait for me in your car.’

  The fat man left them, and Gazis turned to Petridis.

  ‘What did you find?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s not a scratch on the car. Clean as a whistle.’

  Gazis frowned.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t actually hit the old man,’ said Petridis. ‘Maybe he just ran him off the road. Has he said any more?’

  Gazis told Petridis about the cap. Petridis looked sceptical.

  ‘Doesn’t sound very likely to me,’ he said.

  ‘It sounds so unlikely it might even be true,’ said Gazis. ‘We’ll let him go for now, tell him to come in and make a statement tomorrow, after they’ve done the autopsy. Put a call in for CID, tell them we need them to take a look. Then we’ll have facts to throw at him. And tell the ambulance crew not to touch anything until CID have had a good look round. There’ll be something to nail someone with, for sure.’

  ‘Won’t CID want to look at his car?’

  ‘You’ve already looked, haven’t you?’

  ‘And if he absconds tonight?’

  ‘If he absconds, we’ll know he’s guilty, and we’ll fetch him back.’

  Petridis seemed uncertain. The ambulance pu
lled up behind the police car, lights flashing, the siren slowly dying. Petridis asked the crew to wait, and they, indifferent, climbed down from their cab, opened up the back doors and sat on the wheelchair ramp, lighting cigarettes.

  Over Gazis’s shoulder, Petridis watched a small, white car approaching fast; on its roof a long antenna flailed. A short distance from the ambulance, it braked hard and crossed the carriageway without signalling, cutting across a moped carrying two Scandinavian tourists in visored helmets. The moped swerved and wobbled; the blonde girl riding pillion clutched the driver tighter around the waist.

  The white car pulled up behind the ambulance, skidding on loose stones, parking at an angle to the road to show off the pink logo painted on its side: FM107. When the driver cut the engine, it silenced the thudding beat of American rock music.

  A young man in cut-offs and a white T-shirt stepped from the car. His long hair was gathered in a ponytail down his back, the leather sandals on his feet were stained with seawater, and Gazis, noticing the young man’s unshaved stubble, rubbed at his own smooth jaw with satisfaction.

  Approaching the policemen, the young man held out his hand; drawing close, he caught his foot in a hole in the tarmac, and stumbled. As he looked back to see what had tripped him, Gazis gave a small, slow smile.

  ‘Watch your step there, Dinos,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, Sergeant Gazis.’ Gazis didn’t take the proffered hand, but the young man, unperturbed, slipped it casually into his shorts pocket.

  ‘Ambulance-chasing again, Dinos?’

  ‘Picked it up on the airwaves, Sergeant. Sounds like there might be a story here for me.’

  ‘You bet.’ Gazis’s smile broadened. ‘Call the press office tomorrow morning; they’ll let you have the details.’

  ‘But since I’m here, now, in person,’ said the young man, ‘how about you giving them to me? Who died?’