Paul Johnston - The Silver Stain

Mavros and Niki got in the front with him. They jolted down the track and, as it turned to the west, Mavros caught a glimpse of smoke rising from the area of Waggoner’s house. The fire engines had already left, but he didn’t intend to call them back. Let him go the way he wanted.

Niki sat up, startled. A medium-sized brown and black bird had flown up in front of the Land Rover and was flying at low altitude ahead of them, moving up and down as if it was surfing.

‘Hoopoe,’ said Haris. ‘They are beautiful.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Niki, smiling in pleasure.

The Cretan slowed as the bird swerved and perched on a wall. It wiped its long beak against an upper wing and then opened the crest on its head, the tall feathers quivering in the breeze. Its beauty was in stark contrast to the barren slopes, as well as to the horrors brought to the island by men who had jumped into the air from ugly aircraft during the war — horrors whose effects could still be felt.

Mavros felt the stain of violence that had come over him since he’d arrived in Crete finally begin to recede. His father’s face flashed before him and smiled in what he took to be encouragement. Mavros squeezed Niki’s thigh and huddled against her. Hoopoes were good and so was life.

As they wound down the mountainside, Haris Tsifakis began to sing: ‘Oh Crete, your earth is silver and your rocks diamonds. .’

Several days later, Mavros and Niki were back in his mother’s flat on the flank of Lykavitoss in central Athens. They had made love often and slept deeply, but that morning he woke early and watched the pale light of dawn spread over the city’s concrete blocks from the balcony.

The loose ends he’d had to tie up on the Great Island turned out to be few. Oskar Mesner had gone back to Germany and no one in the police seemed very interested in questioning him. Compared with the crimes of Dhrakakis and the others, his were insignificant and had been motivated by Tryfon Roufos — who was still at large — and Rudolf Kersten. It was the dead German who troubled Mavros most. He had seen Hildegard in the clinic, where she’d had surgery on her leg. She wouldn’t accept any apologies because of his failure to identify Renzo Capaldi as one of Roufos’s men. Nor would she talk about her husband, but Mavros got the impression that she’d learned the same awful truth that he had from Petros Lagoudhakis — that Kersten had secretly been faithful to his Nazi beliefs and that David Waggoner, while wrong to blackmail him, had been right about the depth of his hypocrisy.

As for the former SOE man, he died before the fire brigade could return to the village, having barricaded himself in his house and ignited the petrol that he had sluiced around. Mavros was sure he had deliberately copied the method used by Haris’s men to destroy the cannabis plants. Unlike Kersten’s death, it was a symbolic suicide.

Mikis had recovered from his head injury in every way, though he was still having checks at the clinic. He managed to charm his way into Cara Parks’ bed within twenty-four hours and sent Mavros a triumphant text message, containing several translations of ‘twin peaks’ into Greek. Cara sent him one too, rather less demonstrative. Before he and Niki had left Crete on the production’s Learjet, the actress had promised to meet them in Athens before she went back to the US. As it happened, that wouldn’t be for some time as, considering the money that had already been spent, a new production team had been put together, a new director brought on board and filming resumed with only a few days’ break. Maria Kondos had been questioned by police and released on bail. She was walking with a stick and telling everyone on the crew what they could and couldn’t do. He was sure she’d been feigning amnesia after her first visit to Kornaria, keeping her family’s business to herself, but there was no way of proving it. Luke Jannet and his sister were in prison in Athens, soon to be extradited to their home country.

The front door opened as far as the chain allowed.

‘Hey, Alex,’ said the Fat Man in a stage whisper. ‘Let me in.’

Mavros closed the bedroom door on the sleeping Niki and took off the chain.

‘What the hell is that?’ he demanded, staring at the huge package his friend was carrying.

‘Double-layer galaktoboureko ,’ Yiorgos replied. ‘I found a recipe of the old woman’s. Don’t know if I’ve cracked it, though.’

In the kitchen, they carefully removed the paper covering.

‘Christ and the Holy Mother,’ Mavros said, ‘one bite of that will bring instant death.’

‘Right,’ the Fat Man said, laying out two plates. ‘We’d better make a suicide pact.’

‘What?’ Niki said from the door, rubbing her eyes and peering at the great mound of custard-filled filo pastry. ‘Count me in.’

They ate, drank chilled water and moved on to Yiorgos’s superlative coffee. Mavros watched the pair of them, surprised that no sparks had started to fly.

Then the Fat Man went too far. ‘So, Alex, that Cara Parks? Is she really as well endowed as she looks on the screen?’

There was a brief pause and then Niki launched into a loud anti-male tirade.

Mavros laughed and left them to it. On the balcony, he looked southwards towards the light-blue Aegean, wishing for a few moments that he was back on Crete. Then he came to his senses and re-entered the domestic combat zone.