James Barrington - Pandemic

Nico stopped at the end of the street and considered for a few moments. It might be best to handle the steel case and its contents the same way he treated most of the other prizes that Spiros had wrested from the Mediterranean over the years. Taking it back to his home might be asking for trouble. On the other hand, it was late and he was tired. He could hide it somewhere else in the morning.

Yes, he nodded, and turned right. Three minutes later he opened the door to his apartment and stepped inside, placed the steel case in the bottom of the free-standing wardrobe in his bedroom, and walked straight through into the bathroom.

Spiros Aristides put down the toolbox just inside the kitchen door, walked back into his sitting room and looked sourly at the three fingers still remaining in the bottom of his bottle of Scotch. What the hell, he thought. He’d be in no fit state to dive tomorrow, but he hadn’t planned to go anywhere. He settled down at the table and poured himself another glass. He’d finish the bottle and then call it a night.

Twenty minutes later, as he drained the last remnant of Scotch from his glass, and lay down fully clothed on his unmade bed, Spiros Aristides sneezed. Forty-five minutes after that, sitting on the edge of his own bed in the upstairs apartment on the northern edge of Kandíra, Nico Aristides sneezed as well.

Tuesday

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Christina Polessos was seventy-eight years of age, and had lived in Kandíra most of her life. Burnt brown by the sun, she invariably wore black – almost the Cretan national colour – in memory of her husband, dead some forty years. And that, coupled with her stooped posture, noticeably hooked nose, large dark eyes and thin and somewhat mean mouth, gave her a quizzical, crow-like appearance. Everyone knew her, but few really liked her. She knew everyone, and returned the favour by liking almost no one.

She especially didn’t approve of Spiros Aristides. He was a mainland Greek for openers, and had never married, which were two strikes against him right away. He drank far too much, as she made sure everyone knew, and she was quite convinced that he was involved in something illegal every time he went out in his boat. In this, of course, she was perfectly correct, although her oft-repeated tales of gun-running and drug-smuggling bore no relation to the truth.

And his house! In contrast to most of the whitewashed houses in the narrow street, it looked a disgrace. The paint on the shutters was faded and peeling, the tiny garden overgrown and weed-strewn, and even the roof tiles looked scruffy and ill cared-for. She deliberately averted her eyes every time she passed it, muttering imprecations under her breath.

But even if on principle she didn’t look, she could certainly still listen as she trudged down the street, hoping maybe to hear some spoken titbit from within its walls that she could embellish and re-tell later to her few cronies in the square.

And that morning she was rewarded: not by a snatch of incriminating conversation but by a long, pain-racked moan seeming to emanate from one of the upstairs rooms. This was so unexpected that she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up, listening intently. The sound was shortly repeated, then followed by a sobbing, bubbling noise that might almost have been an attempt at speech.

She shook her head grimly, lowered her eyes and walked on. She was almost a hundred yards further down the street, and had nearly reached the square, when she stopped again, turned and looked round. Her brain had been niggling away at what she’d just heard, and some part of it had decoded the final sounds. It could, she suddenly realized, have been the single Greek word – ‘ voíthya ’ – ‘help me’.

She looked back up the street. Nobody else had passed the elderly mainlander’s house since she’d walked by, and possibly nobody would – few of the villagers living beyond his property – at least not until later in the day. Had that been a cry for help or just the moaning of a man after far too much to drink the previous evening? No, there had been a peculiar choking sound about that utterance. Whatever was wrong with the old man, it was more than just simple drunkenness.

And this was, she realized, a golden opportunity to establish for herself that the inside of Aristides’s property was just as disgusting as the outside. But to find out what was wrong with him, she would have to actually go into the Greek’s house, and she couldn’t do that alone, as a widowed woman. That would be highly improper and would set tongues wagging, something she couldn’t tolerate.

She pursed her thin lips, walked on into the tiny square, and looked around her. Maria and Luisa were usually to be found there at this time of the morning, chatting outside one of the small handful of shops before heading home to prepare lunch. Luisa, she saw, wasn’t anywhere in sight, but then Maria Coulouris appeared around the corner, shopping basket in hand, and almost bumped into her.

‘Good. Come with me.’ Christina grabbed the younger woman by the arm.

‘Where to?’

‘That old Greek’s house. I think he may be dying,’ Christina said with some relish.

‘What?’

Christina explained to her the sounds she had heard minutes earlier.

‘He’s probably just drunk again,’ Maria hazarded.

Christina shook her head. ‘He may well be, but the sounds I heard were strange. I’m sure there’s something else wrong with him, something much more serious.’

They walked back up the street together, Maria still protesting ineffectually. Outside the tiny house they paused and listened, but no sounds floated down now from the upstairs windows.

‘We’ll shout out,’ Christina announced, and yelled ‘Aristides!’ in a surprisingly loud voice.

There was no response, no sound at all.

‘Perhaps he’s gone out.’

‘No. I walked past here no more than five minutes ago. He was in one of the upstairs rooms then. We’ll just have to go inside and look.’

‘Must we, Christina? I have so many things to do.’

The older woman ignored her half-hearted protest and seized the handle of the street door. Like just about every property in Kandíra, it was unlocked. Some of the other doors in the village didn’t even possess locks. She pushed the door open and both women peered inside. The narrow hall was empty, the house silent as the grave. Maria suddenly sneezed and Christina frowned at her.

‘Sorry. It’s the dust.’

‘Aristides!’ Christina called again, with the same lack of response.

‘I don’t like this at all.’

‘We have to go upstairs,’ Christina said firmly, and the two women began slowly and quietly to ascend the wooden staircase.

At the top, Maria halted suddenly. ‘What’s that smell?’ she muttered.

Christina sniffed suspiciously, then shook her head. ‘I can smell it too, but I don’t know what it is.’

There were only two doors leading off the tiny landing. One stood open and they could see clearly that it was a spare bedroom, with a wooden-slatted steel-frame bed pushed against the far wall, a small chest of drawers opposite it. No mattress or bedding was visible. The other door was closed, and the two women approached it.

Christina knocked firmly twice on the wooden panel, again calling out the old Greek’s name, but still without apparent result. She looked questioningly at Maria, who nodded, then she turned the worn brass handle and pushed against the door.

They both stepped into the doorway and stared. Then Maria began to scream.

Aeroporto di Brindisi, Papola-Casale, Puglia, Italy

Richter and Simpson had spent the night in a hotel in Brindisi as the guest of the SISDE, but early the following morning Simpson had been whisked off in a chauffeur-driven car to attend some kind of briefing or liaison meeting – he had seemed somewhat evasive when questioned – leaving Richter to cool his heels.