Gary Corby: The Marathon Conspiracy

“Yet Diotima got in?” I grinned.

“Thank you very much!” Diotima said, in mock anger. She threw a cup at me. I caught it easily, as she intended, and I set it aside.

Yet the question was genuinely asked, because although Diotima was a perfect lady in her manners and her education, and although her father had been a statesman of the highest regard, it was all too well known that her mother had also been at the top of her profession. Which was, unfortunately … prostitution. Or more accurately, until she married Pythax, Diotima’s mother had been a courtesan.

Diotima’s birth was as irregular as you could get. It meant she wasn’t even a citizen: Diotima was a metic, a resident alien, in the city of her birth.

“Diotima was something of an exception,” Doris said.

No surprise there.

Doris said, “Her father’s influence made a place for her, and though I have no knowledge of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been a significant donation to the temple treasury.”

I wouldn’t be surprised either. That’s how things were done in Athens, and her birth father was no longer around to ask.

“The girls stay with us for a year, usually when they’re fourteen. It’s the age right before their marriages are arranged. That was the situation with Ophelia.”

“Who?”

“The child who’s gone missing. Friend to Allike, the poor girl who died.” Doris wiped her brow and grimaced. “This is the worst I’ve ever known the sanctuary to be. You’ve no idea how distraught everyone is.”

“Could you start from the beginning, Doris?” Diotima said. “We need to know what happened, in the order it happened.”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, dear. I’m upset about the children. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Understandable.”

“I begin, then, with that accursed skeleton, the source of all our woes.” Doris turned to me. “You must know first of all, Nicolaos, that we allow the girls considerable freedom; well, you’d know that, wouldn’t you, Diotima dear? But not your Nicolaos, who knows nothing of daughters. We play outdoor games. The girls exercise, hold running races, sometimes cross-country runs that take them into the woods. It’s perfectly safe, I assure you-or at least, it used to be. There’s been talk of bear sightings recently-I don’t know if I believe it-and now of course there’s the murderer out there somewhere … but it used to be safe.

“Last month, two of the girls, Allike and her friend Ophelia, returned from the woods to say they’d passed by a cave. Well, Greece is hilly and there are many caves, but they poked their heads into this one, and there they saw a human skeleton.”

I interrupted. “Doris, you said this happened last month. What day, do you remember?”

“I can tell you exactly. It was hena kai nea .”

Old and new ; the last day of the month, meaning the end of the old moon, with the new moon to follow.

“Go on.”

“The girls ran home to report it, very properly, in much excitement. It’s not the first time someone’s found a body, but usually it’s a traveler who’s died on the road, or an aged farmer who’s expired on his land. There was one of those only recently; he lived alone and nobody noticed for months, poor man. But a skeleton in a cave was a new one for all of us. I’m afraid Allike and Ophelia made the most of their notoriety. Their story enlarged with every telling.”

“Weren’t they afraid?”

“Children don’t fear death. They don’t understand that one day it will happen to them.”

“Oh.”

“The priestesses assembled as a group-after Ophelia and Allike managed to convince us they weren’t making this up-and the two girls led us to the cave. It was slow going, because the High Priestess insisted on accompanying us, but we got there eventually. Sure enough, there was the skeleton. The cave was large, as caves go, but to spot it one had to round a large rock and squeeze through a gap. It was no wonder no one had discovered the place until now.”

“What did you do?”

“The first problem was the lingering psyche .”

Diotima and I both nodded. A dead person’s psyche lingers on earth until the body has been buried according to the proper rites.

“We left offerings to placate the psyche, then gathered the bones and carried them back to the temple. To give whoever it was a proper ceremony, you see. At least, that was the plan. But the next day was Noumenia, and it would have been terrible bad luck to perform any ceremony during the new moon.”

Noumenia is a particularly sacred day, when no Hellene would willingly conduct business of any importance. Little wonder that the women of the temple had recoiled at the idea of a burial.

“The day after that, two of the girls came down with high fevers-”

“Not Allike and Ophelia?”

“A different two. It’s not like we’re short of girls to fall ill. Fever in a place such as ours can spread like wildfire, and children are much more likely to die than adults. Whenever a girl in our charge is sick, we drop everything to treat her and make sure the others don’t get it. The girls survived, I’m happy to say, but days passed before anyone thought of the bones.

“That was when we discovered that Sabina had gotten it into her head to tell the Basileus. She’d read the scrolls in the case-I think she was the only one to do so-and sent him the material.”

“Sabina is?”

“One of the priestesses, and an interfering little busybody, if you ask me. The High Priestess was furious. She felt that whatever this was, whoever it was, it was all in the past, and the publicity would do no one any good, and I must say I agree. But what was done was done.”

“Did you bury the bones?”

“We planned a cremation, but there was no point until the skull was restored, or we’d only have had to do a second ceremony.”

“I have the skull. Would you like it?”

“No, thank you very much! You can bring it with you when you visit Brauron. You are coming to Brauron, aren’t you?”

“Of course. We have a murder to investigate.”

“I’m very sorry about Allike,” Diotima said. “How did she die?”

Doris hesitated. “She was … badly hurt. I don’t like to think about it.”

“Beaten?” I asked. “Stabbed?”

Doris hid her head in her hands and wept deeply. Hellenes like to declare their grief with lavish display, but it was clear that Doris’s was from the heart.

Diotima left my side, to put her arm around Doris. “I’m so sorry,” she said once more.

I said, “But Doris, we need to know what happened. Can you tell it now?”

“Yes.” Doris used the hem of her chiton to wipe her face. “The girls take it in turns to do the after-dinner chores. We insist they do it themselves and not rely on the temple’s slaves, because when they’re grown and mistresses of their own households, they’ll need to know everything about running a house, or how will they manage their own slaves? That night, Allike carried the bucket of scraps out to the compost, and she never returned.”

Which probably meant that the killer had been stalking the sanctuary grounds.

“When did you notice she was missing?”

“When we sent the girls to bed. It’s hard to keep track of who’s where in the evenings, but an empty bed in the dorm rooms is obvious. Someone said, ‘Where’s Allike?’ We searched, we walked all about with bright torches and called her name, but she never appeared.”

“Go on.”

“We mounted a major search the next day. Every adult, even the slaves. We found her body that afternoon, some distance away, beyond several hills.”

“Then whoever took her knew the area.”